Multiple Assignee workaround

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Hi everyone, I already posted this on the years long conversation about multiple Assignee, but didn’t receive much attention.
I try to create a new topic, since I really would like someone to talk about this!

Our goal is to make sure two people are fully aware of a task they both need to work on. We don’t really like the idea of assigning a task to multiple people, because it ends up duplicating the task, making it really difficult to share messages, files, and events. We decided not to go down that road.

So, here is what we are doing instead:

  1. We created a personal project for everyone, named Firstname-Lastname’s Activities.

  2. We created a custom project template that we use for every new project. Inside, we set up a custom rule for each person in the organization (we are 30 people, so setting it up is a bit slow, but totally doable). If someone is added as a collaborator, the rule automatically houses that task in that specific colleague’s Firstname-Lastname project. This way, any task where someone is a collaborator goes into their personal project.

  3. Now, we set up a rule on My Tasks so that every time a task is added there, it automatically moves to the new project.

If needed, you can use sections in the new project: one section for tasks coming from My Tasks, and another for tasks from all other projects. This helps filter out unnecessary tasks from your main view. It can also be useful to create a People custom field in the project template to add team members who just need to stay in the loop but won’t actually work on the task. This helps recover that distinction between Assignee and Collaborator that we lost with this workaround.

We also set up a rule in the Firstname-Lastname project that triggers when a custom field called Calendar is changed:

  • If it’s changed to Personal Calendar, it creates an event on their personal calendar.

  • If it’s changed to Org Calendar, it creates an event on the company calendar.

Thanks to this, the new project has become our new bible to follow. We don’t even look at My Tasks anymore; we can clearly see everything we need in a single calendar view right from the new project.

I hope this explanation makes sense! I’m really curious to know if anyone else has tried something similar, or if this sounds like a good approach to you.

Looking forward to your feedback! I really hope this helps someone.

Best, Eugenio

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Thanks for posting, @Eugenio_Baroncelli. It’s great that this is working for your organization, and others may benefit too.

I usually recommend a different route for most clients, both to keep things simpler and to avoid duplicating or replacing My Tasks, so as to keep more in line with default Asana usage. But if needed, as in your case, the flexibility is nice to support your needs.

For multiple assignees, I usually recommend a subtask for each person sharing in the work, or a follow-up task for each person, but insisting on single-sourcing the details of task there.

For seeing all tasks where you’re a collaborator, usually a starred advanced search is enough, though if a project is needed, then your solution is good.

Thanks,

Larry

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We thought about using multiple subtask for multiple assignees, but that would make harder to share the details of the tasks.
I knew we could use the starred advanced search, but that view really isn’t as flexible as the one on a project. Also, the way we are using the collaborators is collaborator=assignee (after the first one). So it’s a must to be able to see every task at the same time, the “single owned” and the “multiple owned”.