Awesome creativity!
Asana, strange that someone has to jump through that many hoops to get a feature that seems foundational.
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Erik,
I find that the best way to review a bunch of task in a meeting is to create a project about that meeting. You link in all the tasks you want to discuss ahead of time and put them in a section called Agenda.
Before the meeting, you invite your team members and they can link in any tasks they would like to discuss. You can leave conversations, etc., just like any project.
Throughout the meeting, if any new tasks are created, you can add them to a section called Action Items.
Before the meeting is over, you can make sure that all tasks are assigned to someone so they donât fall through the cracks.
After the meeting is over, you can go through those tasks and put them in the relevant projects, assign custom field values, etc.
This is an old thread, so hopefully you got something figured out, but your use case example seemed perfect for a Meeting project.
Another way to do this would be to create a âMeetingâ tag. You could then go through all the tasks you want to discuss in your meeting and tag them. Then, when the meeting starts, everyone can run a report on the tag âMeetingâ and they will have the exact list of tasks to discuss.
I think each use case depends on the scope of the meeting.
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I think the main issue here is that people are thinking about Asana all wrong. They are bringing ideas with them from old paradigms. Iâm not saying they are wrong, Iâm just saying this different direction that Asana has chosen has caused frustration. But there are different ways of thinking when using Asana that can get you what you want if you step back and look at the problem you are really trying to solve.
In Erik_Grahamâs case it was reviewing tasks in a meeting. Creating a meeting project and linking in the tasks to discuss is a very easy and well-supported way to discuss a subset of tasks. Thatâs one of the main reasons I love Asana (linking a task to more than one project).
Neil_Kesslerâs example is a bit different. But sometimes Asana just isnât the right tool for the job.
Iâm not sure why some here chose Asana as a help desk software when there are a lot of other options that have unique IDs, but in my case, I wanted the entire company to be able to use one tool and I felt like Asana was more generic and easier to use in other departments of the company. But to do that, I understood I was giving up some things (that really werenât that important day-to-day).
As a developer myself, I donât want to expose my unique IDs to customers because it locks me into whatever system was generating those IDs (often itâs a database). If I want to change it later, I canât without breaking a million external integrations that my customers created on their own. Imagine how upset youâd be if you spent a bunch of time building a system based off the Asana unique ID and then they changed it. (I would guess thatâs one driving force in not making the change.)
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Hi team,
I also want to use a unique ID to refer to tasks, especially when talking to team mates in Slack, I hate that the task appears automatically with Asana - Slack integration, what I would like is say I have a ticket #123456, well I would love that by typing =123456 or €123456 or [123456] or whatever, Asana integration in Slack recognizes it and creates a link or maybe adds the task title, but no preview please, as it f* up conversations.
Thx
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I canât believe Asana doesnât feel the need to have task numbers easily configurable and displayed. Have you not worked on a task tracking system before?
Take Jira for example, they have a task number compromised of the project code, and a number. So as per Erik_Grahamâs, and other examples above, an example task number would be BC-213.
I could say in a meeting âEveryone look at BC-213â, or I could ask a client whoâs not explaining it to me properly, âPlease give me the task number, youâll see it in the email subject, and it will start with âBC-â.â
Or I could search my emails for âBC-213â, and quickly find all discussions pertaining to this task.
I could ask my clients and staff to include âBC-213â in all correspondence, so as to avoid future confusion.
Why some some people would feel that a task id is not necessary, is beyond me. Unfortunately, this is a deal-breaker for me.
Unfortunately, further. For each of the the tracking systems Iâve tried recently (Asana, Jira, Trello), there is always some kind of silly way of doing things, or lack of a basic feature, making me not want to use the system.
Iâm probably just going to create my own one on Gravity Forms, or maybe just stick to Google Sheets. Or maybe I should invest in a rival to Asana, listen to what people need, and make myself an overnight millionaire.
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Hi David,
Thanks for the support on this topic. The fight continues to get our task numbers!!
We are too far invested into Asana with thousands of tasks to go elsewhere now. Good luck in your quest!
Cheers,
Erik
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Our use case goes as follows:
Asana is being used to manage development tasks. When they pick up a task from Asana they need some unique id to use as an identifier when they start making code changes based on the ticket. Task Titles tend to be too long and often contain characters that cannot be used in code branch names. The Task ID is great, except that you cannot come back to Asana and search against it.
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Hi James, that is exactly the issue for us also. We are using it to track enhancements to our software between us (support) and the developers and it is a bit of a quagmire without reference numbers.
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itâs also good for code checkins. Devs can create a git branch with the ticket no, check in and comment re: # and then the the code change reference is in the ticket. Plus whatâs been said above about referencing ticket nos.
Please also note this thread: Can a Task have an automatic assigned ID number? - #10 by Zdenek_Sladek
This is to Asana Support, as this string has been going on for a long time. You now allow Custom Fields with numbers. Thank you. We are now using that for our ticket numbers that correspond to our support ticketing system.
Here is the issue. If I search for one of these numbers in the Search box on top, I get no result. The ticket number has to be in part of the ticket. Please have the search also search the Field Numbers.
Thanks,
Erik
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Sorry, to clarify, I mean the number has to be in the Task for the search to work.
Agreed, totally. I did not realize this shortcoming of custom fields and it is really disturbing.
Mods, this type of request really needs to be elevated. It seems your software & data architects do not realize that when an Asana user goes to the trouble to create a custom field and populate it with DATA, it is because they care a lot about those pieces of info. If we care about data, we want to be able to find it, hence we want to search.
TBH, I have been working with databases for more than three decades (and Asana is a database with a friendly UI and a bit of workflow), and I cannot recall ever seeing a database where data in user-created fields is unsearchable. It is stunning. 
I would be interested to hear from Asana if there is any method to retrieve or view data in a custom field other than just find the task it is associated with through some other means, then open the Task and view the contents of the field.
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Go here to vote for the ability to have custom field data be searchable!
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Thanks Stephanie for the support on this!
Thanks Phil, I voted for it!
Erm pasting a URL every time you talk to your team to discuss a task is not practical. You tell your developers, designers and testers the id number
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Hi Jonathan,
We started using ASANA recently and one of the ways to enter tasks quickly was via forms.
The tool that we used to create these forms was JOTFORM. When you create the form you have the option to add a number field that would increment when you apply the form.
For example in our case we have MR-14, MR16, etc.
So every time someone applies that form a new number is generated.
However, since this is populating fields (which by the looks of it are not searchable, please correct me if I am wrongâŠ) it may not be of use to you unless you link the form field to populate your body text which is searchable. Just an ideaâŠ
Hope it helps.
George
