Agreed - I consistently hear from my organization that they wish there was a way to highlight certain comments as high priority. We are trying to communicate more in Asana than email when possible, but it is hard to do that when we canât mark things are urgent or high importance.
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Just adding my support here. Inbox chaos is the number one complaint I get from my team members. Please for the love of all that is good, let us filter just comments at least!
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This.
this doesnât do you much good with you have a lot of people moving and managing things on their own. You need to know when important things shift. Itâs not useful for me to spend my time manually reviewing every project each week. Some initiatives can sit for weeks with no movement due to other priorities, I need to know when they come back to life⊠amongst other scenarios.
Watch Asanaâs twitter. They are fully committed to participate to events, market their product, and raise funds. And when they do something new, they create to upsell it to you. Asana is no more an innovative company, itâs a just an old profit margin raise company. They donât listen to users and they donât care at all, about suggestions and requestsâŠ
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The Inbox can be a little overwhelming sometimes because of all the tasks that are being followed. Not all of them are top priority - some are just to keep an eye on, while some need active engagement from me or other team members.
It would be really, really convenient to have a filter by activity type - as the main example, being able to show only comments mentioning me (and/or only comments in tasks that I am following) would make communication in Asana much more streamlined. As it is, my Inbox is flooded with new tasks, files being uploaded, completed tasks, etc. And it is sometimes hard to decipher what I need to respond to and what is just noise.
Another use case would be for Completed Tasks only, to be able to see what youâre following that has been completed recently.
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That is a very neat idea!
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Great idea!
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Thanks for sharing this great idea @Matt_Werner; really appreciate it!
We already have a thread on this topic, with some very similar ideas More filtering options to filter Inbox notifications - #57 by MichaelHarvey so if you donât mind, can I merge your post with this main thread to consolidate our case on this topic?
Thanks again for taking the time to share your precious feedback with us!
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Sure. And btw, I appreciate that you guys are active with the community - but it seems like after years of posts, none of the suggestions actually get implemented, no matter how obvious or simple they are. Why should I keep sharing feedback?
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This is a huge issue, and I donât even have that big of a team. I end up avoiding even starting to look at the inbox as I canât possibly be sure I see all the important things. So inevitably my team and I learn we have to chase each other outside of asana⊠defeating the purpose. Paying for the business tier or even using asana is becoming a real question. If I canât stay in sync with my team on the status of things, and giving them the feedback they require when they need it easily, all the other functionality in the world is useless. Creating a simple filtered view query for this should not be hard nor require some crazy technical overhaul. Heck make it easy for me to export my inbox to excel, I 'll create my own filters. This data is clearly stored in a structured format it is pulled from already.
As @Matt_Werner says above⊠not sure the point of engaging here. This is mostly cathartic release for me right now. Good community engagement doesnât solve the functional failings unfortunately.
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- 1 - I would love to only see when someone @ mentions me in a comment or comments on a task that is assigned to me. As someone who set up almost all of the projects in my organization, and who uses Zapier (so tons of automated tasks are created by âmeâ) I am by default notified on pretty much every activity in Asana. Untenable. I use a gmail filter and look at my actual email inbox to find comments but even then itâs not perfect and I get a lot of âso and so completed this taskâ emails.
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YES! This is exactly what we need.
+1, the inbox is pretty ridiculous if you have a large team or use a lot of subtasks
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I just made my own post about this not realizing that people have been requesting this feature in many threads for years. So my only question now is how many votes does it take for a suggestion to actually be considered worth researching by the Asana team?
Hello, Asana Team
I love your product and have used it for years. But there is but one big glaring limitation I have found with it that I would like to express. Perhaps others here in the community can see where I am coming from and may also appreciate it if this was a feature.
For me and the way I and my company use Asana, my inbox is far too cluttered and difficult to sort through. I often do not see important things because they are buried under more mundane notifications that I cannot sort, filter, or turn off beyond manually archiving all of them but the ones I need to see. For the scale at which we use Asana, that is a major time sink and is rarely sustainable.
Recently the sorting and filtering functions for the usual Project List view and the Advanced Search have seen great improvements that I really appreciate, but those sort of improvements have not yet moved to the Inbox.
I am aware that currently you can opt in or out of receiving email notifications for Daily Summaries, Weekly Reports, and Activity Updates. You can uncheck all of those boxes to not receive emails (which I prefer since I would rather do everything in the Asana Inbox anyway) but no matter what all Activity Updates for tasks you are following will go to your inbox.
This in itself is not a bad thing, but the major issue my team is facing is that âActivity Updatesâ is too broad of a category and you cannot sort your status updates by any more specific subcategories.
Currently, things that fall under âActivity Updatesâ include:
- A task is assigned to you
- A task is unassigned from you
- A task assigned to you is approaching its due date
- A task assigned to you has past its due date
- A task assigned to you has its due date changed
- A task you are following has new attachments uploaded to it
- A task you are following has new comments posted to it
- A task you are following is marked complete
- A subtask within a task you are following is marked complete
- A task you are following receives a Like
- A task you are following is merged with another task
- You have been added as a Collaborator to a task
- Your comment receives a Like
- Your attachment receives a Like
- Your task completion receives a Like
- Youâre @ mentioned in a task comment
- Youâre @ mentioned in the task description
- A Conversation is started in a Team youâre a Member of
- A comment is posted in a Team or project Conversation youâre following
- A project you are a member of has new tasks added to it (though this can be turned off in project member notification settings)
- A Conversation is started in a project youâre a Member of
- The status of a project youâre a member of has been updated
- The status of a task youâve been waiting on has been changed
I am not saying that any of those things should be removed from in the inbox, but I am saying that seeing Comments and @ Mentions of my name are a TOP priority for me. I need to be aware of those first and foremost as soon as possible to when they happen. Often because no one in my orginization comments on a task unless they have a problem, a question, new information, or are giving feedback. So as one of the managers, I need to see those right away. But often I donât notice them until much later because there is a pile of âthis subtask is completeâ notifications (among others) burying the comments. For a long time I have been scrolling through the inbox manually to find comments and address those first, but with the amount of notifications we have it is beyond inconvenient. It is difficult and leaves a wider margin for oversight/human error.
I know different people use Asana in different ways, and other companies may prioritize different kinds of notifications than I would. So my proposal: why not develop a function to SORT your inbox in the same way that you can for the Project List View and Advanced Search? Or why not allow Advanced Search to have an option to search only âwithin my inboxâ? Whichever of those is easiest to develop.
I have seen several community posts over the years asking for a way to view âonly @ mentionsâ or to have more control over what sort of things you get notifications for. Most of these are posts from people who use Asana on a large scale and MUST follow a lot of tasks at all times for one reason or another. So clearly there is some demand there, even if smaller scale users donât mind archiving notifications manually.
Many of the responses to those posts mearly explain how to change your email notification settings, your project member notification settings, and recommend âfollowing less tasksâ and archiving more often. (Side note, being able to select multiple inbox notifications at once and archive all of the seleced notifs in one click but not archive the entire inbox would be AMAZING)
While I too would love to have more options on what I do and do not get notifications for as well, it may be more practical for Asanaâs team to simply use the functions they already have (Filtering, Sorting, and/or Advanced Searching) and apply that to the inbox. That also could help a wider variety of users and their situations as well I think.
So yes, try to find a way to sort or filter the inbox by all or most of those categories listed above individually. If that is possible. I know it isnât as easy to code as it sounds but I would love it if the idea was at least considered. Asana has seen great improvements to sorting the past few years and to me this seems like a logical next step to give users more control and more power to find what they need efficiently.
Other Asana community members: if a function like this existed, would you use it? What would you use it for?
Thank you all for your time!
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Thank you so much for taking time to share this great feedback with us @Regan_Carriere!
This is a popular request in the Forum and there is an existing thread about it, so Iâve gone ahead and merged your post with this main thread to gather all feedback and votes.
Have a great day!
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Hi Asana, Iâd like to stop the email notification and to use only the ASANAâs INBOX page.
Today INBOX contains all tags with some ânewsâ (change assigner, new comments, âŠ).
But I think it really needs some tool to filter the INBOX messagges:
- by team
- by project
- by tag
I think it needs also some task status value, for example:
- you donât reply to this task
- you reply to this task
- âŠ
Please Asana, listen to your customers.
Thanks.
Hi @Riccardo_Mares and thanks for sharing this feedback with us!
We already have a thread on this topic, so Iâve merged your post with the existing conversation to gather all feedback in one place. Iâm hoping to have some updates to share soon regarding Inbox, so keep an eye out for an update on this thread 
We are talking about a task of June 2017 and weâre still talking about it?
The suggestions we wrote may solved in a few programmers hours?
Do you want to emprove this product (we paid to use it) or what?
Thanks