Recommendation on what to do with information rather than a task?

Often in projects there’ll be reference information that isn’t actually a task that can or should be ‘completed’. Whether it’s a brief, project manual, profile manual, or similar.

How do you recommend that is tackled and incorporated into projects?

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Hi @Aaron, If the project is already crowded with actionable tasks I add a second project and name the projects similarly, like:

  • Launch Tasks
  • Launch Reference

and put all the reference items in the second one, within sections as appropriate.

If neither the actionable tasks nor reference items are expected to become too voluminous, I keep them in the same project (“Launch”) with the actionable tasks appearing first, then after those, sections and tasks like:

R E F R E N C E:
Objectives/Measures:
Increase x by y
Reduce a by b
Project Documentation:
Brief
Manual

In both cases, you just avoid clicking the completion checkmark for reference items and be sure to make yourself a project member and watch your Inbox for errant task completion of reference tasks by others so you can mark them incomplete again to restore them!

Hope that helps,

Larry Berger
Asana2Go & Asana Certified Pro consultant at Trilogi

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Hi, thanks for the reply. There’s definitely issues with both of those methods, though they may work for some other people’s use cases.

Each team for us is a different client/customer, and each project is self-contained, so additional extraneous projects for resources wouldn’t work for us.

In the case of reference items being actual tasks and not marking them as complete, that’s partially what we’ve been doing, depending on circumstance. What that does though is leaves a bunch of tasks that are probably unassigned and probably have no date cluttering up the project, and if they’re assigned/have dates then they’re in task lists despite not being actionable - It goes against the concept, if y’get me, so I’m still searching on better solutions.

Is it possible to reference entries from the ‘Conversations’ tab from within a task?

Yes, just copy the URL after navigated to the conversation topic, then paste it into the Project Description field and it will become a link and convert to the title of the conversation automatically, which is nice.

You can also enter information directly into the Project Description and use rich text too, if that helps.

Or keep the info in a Google Doc file and paste in the link; another approach.

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@Aaron - yes, you can “at” a conversation! If you dedicate a single conversation to a single subject/reference topic, that could be a great solution. You can also “at” things in the project description - so you could theoretically list all of the reference conversations in your project descriptions, making it easy to find reference material without cluttering up your task list.

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Yep, this is what I’m thinking I might work with. It’s not exactly intuitive for others to do but I think I’ll be able to make use of this myself.

Would definitely prefer something more akin to a ‘Resources & Documents’ tab than this workaround, though.

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What if you had a Dropbox folder link with information (brief, manual) regarding that task?

We have started to use Paper instead of Dropbox. Paper is also great for these kind of tasks. https://paper.dropbox.com