My company, as is I’m sure the case with many others, spends a lot of time planning projects before actually implementing them. While this is mostly a very simple task while using Asana, there is one element that always gets in the way.
When we are planning the project before implementation, we break down every element of the project into its sections, tasks, subtasks, dependencies, and dates. The issue occurs when we want to designate who the assignee will be for the task without assigning it to them before the project has begun. In its current state, the moment you assign a task to someone, it immediately gets added to their My Tasks and they will likely get a message in their inbox about the assignment, thus filling both of these areas with tasks that are not yet relevant for them.
The request that I would like to have a way to select an employee for assignment without actually assigning it to that employee yet. This could be done by giving projects the status option of being “In Development” such that actions performed within the project do not impact others until the moment that the project has formally been activated.
I understand that its possible to work around this problem by listing the employee who would be selected in the description, or creating a custom field for “Potential Assignees”. However, this requires double the work, whereas an activation feature would allow for all tasks to be assigned with the click of a button.
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This request comes up often and I am not sure why. Out of the 20+ years of PMing, I have never wanted to not assign, but assign the work. I would like to know more of the why behind this need. Either someone has onus of the work or they do not. Notifying them now or later matters not.
If a project has a charter it is approved, has budget, and has a completion date. What prevents you from putting it into the pipeline? How can you manage Workload if no one is “assigned” anything until the moment the project is fully kicked-off? ALL your other planning tools goes to nothing.
I have often created CFs for the department as the individual has not been identified as of yet.
I’m sorry that my request and its purpose were not clear to you. The reason why I would want to informally assign the tasks before activating their assignment is due to the fact that the construction of a project is dynamic and changes in the time leading up to a project. For example, right now I am working with one of our project managers on developing a project that is set to begin on January 3. We are waiting to begin the project until enough resources (employee hours, production line space, etc.) are available once several other projects have been completed. We have already gotten approval to begin working on the project, but there are still many steps until we can formally begin the project. One of those steps is designing a detailed schedule that fits into the time allotted by management for the project. The schedule, as it stands, contains all of the tasks, dates, descriptions, and dependencies necessary for project completion. Since we are not interested in beginning the project until January, we want to avoid flooding everyone’s Inbox and My Tasks with tasks that are not yet relevant for them. We would however like to be able to show to our upper management a fully planned project, including the people who will be carrying out that project. So in this case, it would be very helpful to be able to informally assign the tasks and then activate the tasks when we see fit. We likely will not wait until January to activate the assignments so that everyone can allocate their time properly, but it is unnecessary to activate it this early.
I hope that I helped clear up some of your confusion.
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Actually it did not. You want to plan hours without assigning work so your Workload can’t reflect the upcoming work. I cannot plan Q1 2022 without knowing who is assigned work during that time.
Flooding everyone’s inbox and MY Tasks will happen eventually so why cripple your planning tools by not doing so when the project is approved to move forward.
I will leave it there.
Thanks for giving the extra information. Cheers.
Hi @anon61812162, thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback!
While our Product team doesn’t have plans to implement such a feature at this time, I’ll keep you posted and let you know if this is something they plan to implement in the future 
@anon61812162 We have had a similar issue and solved it by writing a script which automatically assigns the tasks to the people whose initials are given in a separate custom field. So for example the field value JD means the task is assigned to jd@yourorganization.org. The script can be executed once the project plan is finished. If you are interested, I can share the code with you or directly there in the thread.
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Just getting a lot of feedback from my team about the flood of notifications when a new project is started. Searching forums, this seems the closest request to what I would like to see as well.
I simply want to group notifications in a single email for when a task is assigned to someone, within lets say, 5 minutes. Flexible on the timing but currently we start about 2-3 new projects a month with 100 or so tasks and the assignees are spammed with 20+ emails each in a matter of minutes. This obviously isn’t production at all and leads to Asana emails to be mostly ignored which I would rather not have happen.
Any ideas would be appreciated. (disabling email notifications overall is not a solution)