Never complete a task without doing it!

[Bastien_Siebman]

As weird as it might seem, there are people in asana who completes tasks without doing them. Why?!

When you are assigned a task, you might not agree. But the work assigned probably still needs to get done. Feel free to comment back, delegate, or assign back, but please don’t complete without doing the work!

[Paul_Grobler]

One of my clients have the workflow of using a custom field “Task accepted” with Yes/No and then the assignee should accept the task after being assigned. This way there is a strong signal to the task created that the task was assigned and accepted. It also helps with a report to find all tasks assign and not accepted in order to follow up or to reassigned.

[Bastien_Siebman]

Oh interesting! But ideally you wouldn’t have to go through this and people would naturally reject something they don’t want to/can’t do isn’t it?

[Tim_Rueb]

@Bastien_Siebman I have two instances in which we mark task completed because the only other option seems to be to delete the task. (marking a task as cancelled would be preferable, but I think we would still use a task stop code to help clarify why)

1. The task had a shelf life that now makes it non-valuable to complete. We want to record the task was created but since we can only delete or complete we use a custom field to the show the Task Stop Code and then mark the task complete.
2. A list of tasks were created from a brainstorming session and these task are deemed not needed or no longer valuable enough to work on. We don’t want to delete the tasks, so again we use a task stop code and mark it completed.

[Bastien_Siebman]

Understood! Right now when I need to cancel a task I turn it into an Approval and reject it myself.

[lpb]

I was about to mention that too, @Bastien_Siebman, as an option for @Tim_Rueb and because it generally relates to this topic and mentions other approaches too. Here’s my related tip:

Completed Tasks that Aren't Exactly Completed

When you “Mark Complete” a task it usually signifies that you carried it out. What if you didn’t actually carry it out, but you still want to get it out of your hair–no longer have it appear as Incomplete (active)? A simple approach that works even with Asana’s free version is to go ahead and mark it complete but also add a tag, perhaps one of #NotDone, #NotNeeded, #Canceled. Since you might want to later locate these, Tag View (click the tag) would allow you to see a list of…

Thanks,

Larry

[Tim_Rueb]

OK, I didn’t think the approval process was a good one for us because when I created this work around I couldn’t see a way to filter on approvals. But now I see if I dig enough I get to approvals. I guess that would be a viable option also. Being able to search for these cancelled (completed) task and generating a list based on the (custom field) task stop codes was key when we were trying to solve this problem.

[Bastien_Siebman]

I think @paulminors has another trick when not doing a task, a tag I believe?

[paulminors]

Yes, this is just personal use (not within a team) but if I don’t do a task for whatever reason, I mark it as complete and tag it with ‘DNC’ which stands for ‘Did not complete’.

[Andre_Lung]

@Bastien_Siebman you once had an illustration just about this fact. I can’t find it, but I’d love to mention it to a colleague. Can you hint me where it is?

[Bastien_Siebman]

I removed them from my website, here they are.

[Jan_Go]

I was actually looking for ways to manage tasks that need to be closed or archived, but were actually discontinued. I find using the complete feature inappropriate. As much as possible, I dont want to delete so I can keep track of them.

But as it turns out, marking a task as approval only can be done in Asana Business.

[Bastien_Siebman]

I have a post in the making listing ways to cancel a task, here’s the draft:

1. delete
2. mark cancel in the name and complete
3. add a tag
4. move to a project “cancelled tasks”
5. use a custom field
6. cancel a task by marking as approval and then rejecting

[lpb]

@Jan_Go and @Bastien_Siebman, I already mentioned my Forum Leaders tips post on this topic that may be of interest:

Completed Tasks that Aren't Exactly Completed

When you “Mark Complete” a task it usually signifies that you carried it out. What if you didn’t actually carry it out, but you still want to get it out of your hair–no longer have it appear as Incomplete (active)? A simple approach that works even with Asana’s free version is to go ahead and mark it complete but also add a tag, perhaps one of #NotDone, #NotNeeded, #Canceled. Since you might want to later locate these, Tag View (click the tag) would allow you to see a list of…

Larry

[Andre_Lung]

@Jan_Go

I was actually looking for ways to manage tasks that need to be closed or archived, but were actually discontinued. I find using the complete feature inappropriate. As much as possible, I dont want to delete so I can keep track of them.

Thank you very much! I missed your answer, but this is great!