My Workaround for Custom Fields in Subtasks

Hi folks, just wanted to share my quick workaround on how to get subtasks to have Custom Fields. It’s a bit hacky but I think it works out pretty well.

I currently have a “Fitness” project with each task representing a day of my workout. Each task has subtasks representing different exercises. For example, “Monday” has the subtasks “Bench Press”, “Chest Fly”, and “Pushups”. I want my exercises to have the Custom Fields for “Sets”, “Reps”, and “Weight”. It doesn’t make much sense for the parent task “Monday” to have these fields, but I do want to keep track of these on my exercises.

This is what I do:

  1. Create a new project
  2. Add Custom Fields to this project
  3. Perform an Advanced Search on my current project for subtasks only. This will give me all subtasks for every day in my parent project.
  4. Multiselect (Task actions: create, move, duplicate, and more | Product guide • Asana Product Guide) the results
  5. Multi-home (How to Complete Task Fields in Asana | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide) the results into my new project I created earlier.

Now I can easily add values to each subtask! I’ve carried this workaround to various other personal projects to great success.

I hope this helps!

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@jerrinml This sounds like a really helpful workaround! I can see how Asana users would benefit from using custom fields in subtasks in a few different scenarios. For example:

A free user could use custom fields in subtasks when they’ve maxed out on the number of projects they’re able to use - subtasks with custom fields are a workaround for creating detailed workflow without lots of projects.

Any user could find value in using subtasks when they have work that requires lots of steps with lots of different people. Perhaps you’re planning an event and you’ve delegated event setup to 5 different people. All 5 of those people can use a custom field for “status” to tell the group how they’re progressing.

Really interesting @jerrin uggestion, but when I go back to my project, I see all of the tasks and the sub-task too, with the indication of the parent task. So, my view is not like I’ve set it up earlier… any workaround to have the custom field to subtasks but still view only parent tasks in the project?

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@Sebastien_Levesque we’ll be happy to help! Could you clarify what you saw before, what you’re seeing now, and what you’d like to see? Any screenshots you can provide would be helpful.

Thank you Alexis for your support, but finally, I went through other strategy (i.e: creating another project with custom fields and have added all of my subtasks to this project) then my original project remains unchanged.

I’ve also set up an savec search to get all of my subtask within my team search, but only the one not associated with this new created project. Then I can assign easily all of the new subtasks to the new project and get the custom fields on my subtasks.

Tx

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We too would love to see custom fields in subtasks. We create a project called Sprint Dashboard (dates) where dates is a two week Sprint. All tasks in projects are tagged into this main project for our 2 week marketing sprints. We have a custom field called points estimate where we put points in 1 point increments. Each point represents 1/2 day. Each team member can realistically do 20 points in two weeks. Some projects have subtasks assigned to people and they can’t put the custom field points into that task which sucks when that task is in our Sprint dashboard as I can’t get a realistic point count for the team with this field not showing up…thoughts/comments/feedback??

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The whole way the hierarchy works seems like a huge oversight IMO. I honestly don’t understand how people are dealing with it. In many cases a “subtask” is actually a feature under a high-level parent that has subtasks - it should really be a “child task” that is only related but isn’t fully governed by the parent. If building a website, the parent may be a “page” for instance, with many features that show up in that page under that assigned to different people with various DRIs depending on what’s involved.

As far as I can tell projects are the only way to approximate a “sprint”/milestone so using projects as a parent container for some set of tasks is out of the question.

On the other hand maybe I’m missing some way to deal with this workflow.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Custom Fields in subtasks

Hi, this doesn’t work for me. I have many sub-tasks in multiple tasks in a project. I need to be able to use progress custom fields on the sub-tasks as well as the task and the suggestion didn’t help me to do that.

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