Removing Assignees from Assignee dropdown menu in task

[Jgong]

I would like to remove Assignees from the Assignee dropdown menu in each task. These people also appear in the ‘People’ widget on my Asana Home page. My workspaces don’t have an Organization and I don’t currently use any Teams. I have searched so many forum posts and never found any instructions that work…

[lpb]

Welcome, @Jgong,

My recollection is that you can’t directly influence the names that appear yourself, unless you choose to deprovision those people; then they will be removed from your workspace and from the lists.

See more here on how/when they appear in the lists:

Delete old ASSIGNEE names from drop down menus

Hi @djgoncalves. The names that appear in the assignee drop down list are automatically added based on recency and people who are associated with the task or project. If there is someone remaining in your org, but you don’t assign tasks to them anymore, they’ll drop off eventually. Alternatively, if you completely remove them from the org they will no longer appear on the list. Note that if a deprovisioned member still shows up in the typeahead when a current Member is assigning tasks, you’ll n…

See here for how to deprovision users in a workspace:

Understanding workspaces

See here for some potential things to do beforehand:

Remove/Offboard/Deprovision a User from an Organization, and what to do beforehand

Before you remove a user from your organization it’s good to take several steps to avoid possibly losing some item access (which could require Asana Support to restore). I couldn’t find this information in one place, and since it’s hard to remember when only periodically needed, I decided to create this as a reference. Before removing the user, consider carrying out these steps for any items you care about: Note: These steps are easiest to carry out if you log in with the credentials of the…

Thanks,

Larry

[Tiffany_Terry]

Over the years I’ve removed people as they’ve left the department. I’m getting tired of seeing their names in the dropdown list when I’m assigning new tasks. They’ve all already been removed from the Team, so how can I remove them from the dropdown list at this point if they can’t be added back to the Team? (And even if they COULD be added back, I wouldn’t want to do this for people who have been gone for years!)

[lpb]

Welcome, @Tiffany_Terry,

See the link in the prior post above because seeing those folks in the autocomplete means they have not yet been deprovisioned, I believe. If you’re ok to do that, then that will take care of the issue.

Thanks,

Larry

[Tiffany_Terry]

This doesn’t actually help because you have to take some of these actions BEFORE removing the person from your team. Also, I don’t want to necessarily deprovision the person from the entire organization because many of them are still employees - they’re just no longer working in our department - so I don’t want them to lose access to anything they have set up with another department (which I’d have no way of knowing about) or any personal projects they’ve created for themselves outside of a specific team. There are SOME people who have left the organization completely. Either way, I don’t want to (or can’t) invite them back to the team just to remove/deprovision them, and I don’t think it’s my place to deprovision them since I’m the admin for just one department, not the entire organization.

Is there no way to remove them from the assignee drop-down list for our team without deprovisioning someone completely? The majority of the positions in our department are filled on a rotating basis, so we constantly have people coming and going. If my only option is to deprovision them, which I don’t think is right or the way to go at all, then my drop-down list is going to get MUCH MUCH longer as time goes on.

If I’m misunderstanding how this works, clarification would be much appreciated!

[lpb]

Sorry I misunderstood some of it, @Tiffany_Terry,

For those no longer part of the org, you should have your Asana admin deprovision them or contact Asana Support to help if needed.

For those still part of your org but in other teams now, see here for how the names will appear in the autocomplete, which you can’t otherwise influence:

Delete old ASSIGNEE names from drop down menus

Hi @djgoncalves. The names that appear in the assignee drop down list are automatically added based on recency and people who are associated with the task or project. If there is someone remaining in your org, but you don’t assign tasks to them anymore, they’ll drop off eventually. Alternatively, if you completely remove them from the org they will no longer appear on the list. Note that if a deprovisioned member still shows up in the typeahead when a current Member is assigning tasks, you’ll n…

You can vote with the purple vote button at the top of this thread to cast your vote for this:

Assignee field should only show members of a project or team

I have one main implementation team and several projects within this team. Each project contains it’s own set of individual users from their respective groups. Both projects are private and when I’m in either project and I go to assign a user in a task, as soon as I start typing the suggestive list displays users and their email addresses from other projects. This is a big security concern since we’re not to keen on having our clients know that we also work with their competitors. Please address…

Thanks,

Larry

[Tiffany_Terry]

Thanks. We don’t have an Asana admin since each department that’s using it has done so on their own, but I can contact Asana Support for that.

I’m wondering how long it takes for someone to “drop off eventually” considering some of the people showing up have been gone for 2+ years. I also just noticed that there are people who appear in the drop-down who aren’t part of my team, that just happen to work here. Not sure why they’re showing up considering I didn’t type anything, just clicked into the field.

Seems to me like I’ll see everyone who has ever been on my team, in addition to other employees who happen to use Asana, whenever I go to assign something to someone, forever and ever…

[lpb]

Yes, I’m afraid that’s basically how it works.