My assumption for “Archive” is that the task would no longer show up in my list of things to do (My Tasks). Archived projects should no longer show up in search or in tasks as the project is not active, but archived.
As an example, I work with clients on a monthly basis. We plan tasks for next month, two months out, three months out, etc. If a client cancels after the first month I want to archive their project so it doesn’t show that it needs to be done.
Deleting the project isn’t an option because if the client returns we want to start where we left off and Unarchive the project.
Agreed. I was searching for something and kept getting results for tasks of archived projects. They were incomplete subtasks of completed tasks. As I was filtering on incomplete tasks it was pretty frustrating looking through archived data.
Thanks for the feedback- I’ll capture this for the team for the future when we work on archive improvements.
In the meantime, I would recommend cleaning up projects a touch before archiving them.
For your case @Brandon_Hopkins, before archiving I would recommend multi-selecting the tasks in the project and bulk-un-assigning them to make sure they don’t appear on your task list.
For your case @Geoff_Manning, I would recommend multi-selecting the tasks in the project and completing them all so they won’t appear in searches for incomplete tasks. You could also add another search criteria such as “Creation Date” if the tasks you are looking for are more recent and to help filter out old archived tasks. Also, if you notice tasks in one or two archived projects that are cluttering your view, you could filter these out by using the “Not in projects” section and noting those projects.
I know these aren’t perfect solutions, but hopefully they can ease some pain if you clean up the projects before archiving. Let me know your thoughts.
@Kaitie that’s exactly what I did. Remove myself and remove the due date.
It’s not perfect because if a client renews then someone has to go in and
assign the tasks and sub-tasks for a few months worth of work.
As an additional remark, when archived projects show up in any search, they should be visibly marked by asana in the list somehow such that I can directly determine whether the search result matches my intent.
When I go to do my regular planning, I pull up search results showing all incomplete tasks for a specific team–regardless of how they’re assigned. My problem is that I’m getting a bunch of hits for incomplete, unassigned tasks in archived projects. We can’t delete archived projects for the reason that Brandon mentioned. There should really be a way to exclude archived projects from search results. Otherwise it’s not much of an archive.
Agree on that,
Having a selection in search to not search for archived project would be an alternate option, instead of having to select all archived projects.
For us, we sometimes planned for huge projects with a lot of tasks and when the project is put on hold or cancelled, we archive it, but we don’t want to delete it, as we need to keep the work done (and can’t export it in CSV, as the importer does not support the sub-tasks for now). But when we do have late tasks in these archived projects, we see them during our weekly review (saved search for incomplete tasks).
The best solution would be to not see these tasks by default in search and “My tasks” section of all users. If we want to see them, we woudl unarchive the projects.
Adding to the chorus here! One feature request that seems achievable that would at least help me would be adding an option to advanced search where you could specify whether to include all projects, only active projects, or only archived projects.
I always clean up the projects I archive prior to flipping the switch, but that’s not the case with many team members and it’s not really practical to enforce that best practice outside of asking them nicely. As Director of Ops I run company-wide searches intermittently for tasks that were created over 90 days ago so I can follow up with all of our teams to see if they are overdue, pushed back, or just something that is no longer relevant and should be cleaned up. Having everyone else’s incomplete tasks from their archived projects adds an hour-long ‘weed through an export’ to the process so I don’t waste their time following up on things they’ve already archived.
Ran into this today myself. Seems like this could (at least) be mitigated with a little pop up confirmation dialog:
“You are about to archive a project that still contains tasks. The tasks will still be visible to assignees and through search.”
Better:
“What would you like to do with the remaining incomplete tasks?:
Mark them as complete
Unassign them
Delete them”
Best:
Have a hidden “archived” flag on tasks. Add the flag to each task and subtask that belongs to a project when the project is archived (if and only if the task does not belong to any other project). Hide tasks that are archived from search and from “My tasks”.
Adding myself to the list of people saying “What gives”?
This, combined with several other annoying “features” of Asana (subtasks don’t appear in the project they were created, no way to control views of projects/hide items) may be the straw that drives us back to Basecamp.
Cant understand why this isn’t fixed yet. Please Asana this has become the most irritating ‘flaw’ in an otherwise attractive product. My suggestion is that archived projects are eliminated from any search or display by default. If a user wants to access archived content they must explicitly indicate.
Adding to the chorus, Archive as exists is basically useless. Huge hole in Asana workflow that, by the sound of it here, could really elevate the user experience + provide much needed value around project management.
It’s a particularly frustrating experience assigning a task to projects when there are a lot of archived projects. Even if the archived projects are shown at the bottom of the list, this would be an improvement!