Project Template assigned tasks show up in My Tasks automatically

I am agreeing to a ton of the feedback below! It would be awesome to be able to save a template and then have the tasks realize they are on a template and not auto-assign.

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I have gone ahead and created some templates that I wish to use on an ongoing basis.

I have gone through, created the templates. Put in due dates and who they should be assigned to.
But My staff are complaining that the Tasks from the Templates are turning up in their ā€œMy Tasksā€ queue.

This makes it very difficult for them to get an idea of what is actually outstanding as opposed to a template.

Is there a way to overcome this without having to remove the assignee from the template?

Hi @heath.friend and welcome to the forum!

This is a current function of the way Asana works, Iā€™m afraid.

You can read about it and vote for a change here: Project Template assigned tasks show up in My Tasks automatically

And you can find some workarounds for it here - see item F4: šŸ”„ Hottest feature requests and their workarounds

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COPIED AND PASTED FROM ABOVE USER HEATH WITH THE EXACT SAME FRUSTRATION;

I have gone ahead and created some templates that I wish to use on an ongoing basis.

I have gone through, created the templates. Put in due dates and who they should be assigned to.
But My staff are complaining that the Tasks from the Templates are turning up in their ā€œMy Tasksā€ queue.

This makes it very difficult for them to get an idea of what is actually outstanding as opposed to a template.

Is there a way to overcome this without having to remove the assignee from the template?

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Yes, there are workaroundsā€¦see Philā€™s post above. Every user feels the same as youā€¦template tasks should not be actively assigned when a template is still waiting for a live project to be created. Asana justā€¦disagrees.

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That could come from the fact that your template project is not named properly. Make sure you include the word template, or a specific emoji, in the template name.

Yes, but that doesnā€™t really solve the issue. The problem here is trying to avoid confusion across a deployment with dozens of users. They may comment or delete or mark complete a task that is in a template and so when that template is used to spin up a new project, you may no longer have that task in there.

Iā€™d be incredibly simple, I would think, to just not have tasks in a template appear in a users ā€˜My Tasksā€™ feed through a simple logic filter. Either that, or make it so that template tasks are comment-only by default?

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Given the volume of requests for this change, I would bet they are working on it.

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Just chiming in that I came to Asana mainly for this use of Templates and am disappointed with this issue. Being on a trial right now it will be a major roadblock as to whether we proceed as paid subscribers. My hope is that it would be addressed to make Templates truly functional, but seeing that this issue dates back 4+ years it seems it is unlikely to be addressed.

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Not sure how useful it is beyond adding my vote - but Iā€™m also adding my voice to the chorus who would like template tasks to be hidden from the My Tasks view :slight_smile: Thank you!

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We use templates a lot, and it is a huge problem to have ā€œtemplateā€ tasks in our My Tasks view. Confusing.

Agree, would love to see this feature fixed!

Agree, this problem needs to be fixed!

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+1 agree. This is a huge pain for templates. A template should be a separate format that does not actually create the tasks until a project is created from the template. Pre-assigning the tasks in the template is a very important aspect of it, yet this bug makes it unworkable.

Very annoying.

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Four years and no solution? I have a hard time convincing my team to use Asana when things such as this come up. People are either completing these tasks to get them out of their My Tasks or just not bothering to complete any of their tasks. Please come up with a solution to this problem.

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I would also love this option. I would expand upon it further to not have the template tasks show up anywhere after the template is created (except of course in the template). We have attached some of the template tasks to other projects in order to have the ability to view content calendars and the template tasks take up a large amount of space in the list view. This adds confusion to a personā€™s overall workload and makes the content calendars appear heavier within the list view.

Hi All!

So we keep running into this issue. We have multiple project templates with deadlines and assignees. Because they have assignees and dates, they show up in current tasks under the ā€œMy Tasksā€ view. This is an issue since they clutter the inbox, as well as this task view for each assignee.

Canā€™t Asana have them not show up in the inbox and My Task view by designating it as a template? And exclude templates from this until they are converted to a real project?

@Ashley_Durrer I completely agree with you. We have created a custom field called ā€œroleā€. We donā€™t fill out assignee on any templates, but filter the newly created project from a template on the custom field and update the assingee. Not the greatest solution, but it solves the problem until a first class citizen solution is created by Asana.

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This is a much-discussed shortcoming of templates. See Project Template assigned tasks show up in My Tasks automatically - #16 by Todd_Cavanaugh

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Any update on this very old and very much needed and very often requested functionality change?

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