Honestly, the workarounds are ok in my opinion and should not prevent you from gaining so much more by transitioning to Asana.
I find it difficult to weigh. I love a lot of what Asana does, and I applied the workaround that is suggested (moving everything into the âlaterâ category). However, I also received an email on Friday at 4:55am entitled âYour Friday updateâ that included a bunch of template tasks that were overdue. Itâs a mess, and they shouldnât exist.
When would you ever want a task in a template to be listed in your âMy Tasksâ? Itâs a template. If you mark the tasks as completed in the template, then they stay completed when you utilize the template for a new project â requiring you to uncomplete all the tasks in the new project. Why would you ever have a template and need to complete the tasks? I canât think of a single use-case where I would want to create a template and still have to mark the tasks off as complete to keep them from my open task list. I keep trying to analyze this from different perspectives, and Iâm failing to come up with how this is supposed to feasibly work.
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The workaround is not feasible and doesnât work in a big enough organization, as far as I can tell. Weâve lost multiple such templates when the individuals misunderstood the point of those tasks and modified the template. It wouldnât be much of the problem if we could read-only the entire thing, but that doesnât appear to be an option either. Itâs been years now, and I find it bewildering that a very simple feature, to either completely restrict the editing of template tasks from members, or hide the template tasks from people theyâre assigned to, hasnât been baked in. We have a weekly process that splits up over 100 tasks among 10 people. Duplicating, renaming and assigning them every time is a nightmare.
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Did you try to have comment only permission on the template itself?
Does anyone have any other workarounds besides moving tasks to later, which isnât working well for us? I tried to skim through this long thread but didnât see anything else. As a new Asana user, Iâm really disappointed that there has really been no solution to this, besides the fairly ineffective work-around of moving tasks to later, for THREE YEARS. 
I actually have 5 workarounds, see F4 on đ„ Hottest feature requests and their workarounds
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Thank you! Helpful, but still would love for Asana to actually fix this.
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Seriously, how has this request not been implemented yet? The first message was back in 2017 and yet here we are in 2021 and nothing has been done to resolve the issueâŠeven with over 800 votes! Whatâs up, Asana team? It really doesnât seem like you are actually hearing and implementing feature requests.
This here is a critical issue because templates are a key piece of the software for being able to create reusable flow charts. The entire reason we started using this software was because we have multiple tasks to manage, with multiple members involved, for each new client. We were hoping to increase our efficiency and avoid missing tasks by using these templates and having them automatically trigger the next action in the flow chart. But this issue with the templates screws everything up.
None of the workarounds work wellâŠit either completely clutters everyoneâs inbox with overdue template tasks, or if you mark them complete, you have no option to select a start date when you go to use the template. If you created the template months ago, youâre screwed and have to go in and individually change the date for each and every task because now you canât even drag the flow chart over. The recommendation to just âTrain your staff to ignore these tasksâ is ridiculousâŠif you start ignoring overdue tasks, there is a good chance you will miss something important. And when you have multiple templates with multiple tasks, the todo list can end up looking very messy and inducing a lot of stress.
So PLEASE, Asana, we are begging you to actually resolve this!!
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I found another work around, which is not the answer we are looking for, BUT it is easier than the others and it takes them off of the task list. In the template check all of the items as completed. Create the template
(there is something funky with the dates, I just created a bunch until I figured out how many days before the actual date I wanted was correctâŠnot sure if that makes sense, basically the dates were lined up but my start date was weeks before what I was putting in for my start date so I backed it up a few weeks and it lined up.)
After the template is created and the dates are lined up, the click on âAll Taskâ and uncheck them all. It is much faster than reassigning the dates and reassigning the people (especially if that does not change frequently).
Hope that helps, however Asana, we would all love for the Template task to not show up on active task!!
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@Natalie_Parkin big congrats on spotting that workaround, it was really hard to find! You can it, and the others, on đ„ Hottest feature requests and their workarounds
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I donât understand how to âvoteâ for this feature request, but, uh, I vote yes, please fix this.
My workaround: in the template I scooched all the dates to way before we started using asana, like a couple years before. that way no one will accidentally come across them in their calendar views.
Adding my name to the list here. Asanaâs best quality is its fantastic UI, so ugly hacks and workarounds dramatically impact the whole value prop here. Using tags? What a joke! Pushing template projects to the later section? Those tasks will still be included in late task emails! Marking all tasks as complete in the template and then manually entering dates at project creation for ~ 100 tasks? No thank you! These workarounds simply donât get the job done so please prioritize this feature request. Our employees keep breaking our templates by editing their content I do not want our new hire onboarding programs to become so focused on addressing Asana quirks.
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Iâm kind of shocked this has been a thing for almost four years. I just spent a couple hours creating the ideal project template only to find it completely bogging down My Tasks. Super disappointed that I had to make this project (rather than each project be a main task) for everything to be included in other projects for different departments - and then have it do this to My Tasks.
Hopefully I find a workaround I can queue in that wont negatively impact my teamâs ability to properly focus on whatâs needed.
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Iâve got the same problem. Template task showing in daily workflow. That needs to be fixed ASANA. Employees are programed to complete all task in their workflow, but then we have these task that when they complete it messes up the use of the template. Its been a 4 year issue⊠when are you going to fix this?
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Upvote - this seems really obvious, going to have a hard time convincing the customer team to use this instead of Wrike now, tbh.
New user to Asana here, and iâve spent literally days creating templates for all of our key projects, only to find hundreds of erroneous tasks cluttering up the team lists, and only workarounds and hacks on offer for an issue that seems to have been around for 4 years! Defeats the object of having a project and task management tool.
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But as soon as youâre done creating the template, itâs nothing but chaos for folks who see new tasks showing up in their todo lists. Templates should exist as separate entities or Asana should own up and say itâs not their intention to create this feature.
I also fell into this trap this morning. Have been using Asana now for 3 months and created a Template from a project this morning and CHAOS! My team is now completely confused and I have to manually wade through the tasks of 26 team members to clean up the mess. I do love Asana - but this is very frustrating!
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This was suggested back in 2017 and still not implemented. It seems like such an obvious and simple feature and is highly upvoted Hope it gets more attention soon as trying to explain to every employee how to âwork aroundâ this feature that should simply not be there is starting to get frustrating as we grow.
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Please fix this Asana, my team actively have outstanding tasks that cannot be complete as they are from a template, this seems more like a bug of the system than anything.
1 Like