Removing sections from tasks

Hi, I am just starting to learn Asana. I have done something weird and now I have sections on tasks that just makes everything messy. Is there a way to remove sections?! 35|436x336

I am duplicating the main task and using it as a template, so this just makes millions of the same task.

Thanks

Are you talking about sections in Projects and your My Tasks? They’re basically normal tasks that have a colon on the end. You can delete them just like any other task by selecting them, clicking the … icon and selecting delete (or TAB+BKSP as a keyboard shortcut) or get rid of the colon at the end of the task’s name to convert them back to normal tasks.

35 No, I’m talking about… sections and projects I think. I tried attaching a screen shot. It is at the top to the left. I think i have multiple projects listed, and i don’t want it like that as it is multiplying whenever I duplicate it…

Attaching another screen shot to show how it is multiplying. I want to get rid of where it says client in pink :slight_smile:

From your tast screenshot, what I can tell is:

  • the task is hosted inside the “Wedding client workflow” project
  • it is also hosted inside the “Photo blog post” project
  • and it is under the “client workflow” section

Does it help?

Bastien
Asana consultant, author and developer

It looks to me like subtasks and copying tasks might be the source of confusion.

Adding a project to a subtask will make that subtask show up as its own task in the project view instead of limiting its visibility to only within the parent task. If you then copy a parent task (I see “duplicated task from …” messages in the task history) the copied tasks and subtasks will have the projects assigned in the same way (the copy screen lets you change this behavior). This means you end up with a bunch of copies of the same task up at the project level and no easy way to tell them apart.

So in your screenshot, on the right-hand pane, the “Skrive blogposten - 3x3 - nevne vendors” is a subtask of the “Photo blog post” task which is the subtask of the “Wedding client workflow” parent task. In the left pane all the subtasks are the ones that have gray text to the right of the task name and this means all the subtasks must have been assigned the “Clients” project as well to show up there.

Typically I prefer to not add subtasks to projects just for this reason. If I do, I tend to go through and put info in the subtask’s name to differentiates it from other subtasks with the exact same name.

Here’s an example of mine:
I think I have a project that does something similar. I have a template project called “Templates” where I have a set of tasks with subtasks:

When I copy this task, I always rename it (hence the [insert view name] in the title). I also include instructions on how to handle the template tasks in each one so people know what to do when they get one of these.

There’s a lot of built in subtasks that have subtasks of their own. In this one the main task is two tasks deep (subtask of “create doc…” and “TEMPLATE: Create query…”):

I do tend to add these subtasks to a project, but only as I assign them to individuals and they become “workable” otherwise they clutter up the overall project and I only want to see work that needs to get done, not work that’s nowhere ready to show up. When I do assign these subtasks, I also add details to them that makes it so I can differentiate between them in the project view:

Hopefully this gives you some info on why you’re seeing so many tasks in your project and also how to manage them.

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Bravo! I stared at the original screenshot for ages trying to figure out what was happening and I couldn’t get my head around it.

Nicely done. :clap:

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Thank you! It does kinda make sense, but at the same time I don’t understand why I ended up with 12 duplicates when I only copied it three or four times… Anyway - I deleted it all, and am starting over. Still working on finding a good way to make my template into each new client. I think I will try using tags to separate them. Although it looks like I manually have to add tags to each subtask - which sucks.

Thanks again. i will probably have to refer to your reply many times before I completely understand it :slight_smile:

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I find subtasks useful, but they tend to complicate things and I often end up in a state where I want to constantly rework them as I gain clarity towards the end of a parent task and realise my initial impressions of what I’d need to do evolves. For repeated tasks that need a process they’re very helpful and I can update them when things change.

I’ve also seen quite a few people post about setting things up based on clients on the community here. If you haven’t searched yet, there might be some good info, I found the following:

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I have a similar problem in the sense that I would like to be able to hide subtasks from the main list of tasks. It become really cluttered. Is there a way to do this? If not it should really be implemented.

Hi @Hugo_Wurtele, I think the easiest way to make subtasks disappear depends on where the clutter is. If it’s in a project, you can choose not to add them to the project. If they’re just a mess in general, then it begs the question of if they need to exist at all.

I find subtasks useful, but would like to have the option to display them in the main list or not. As it is now, for some projects I have subtasks appearing in the main list of tasks, but for others, I have to click the task in the main list to get to them. I’m don’t understand why some projects behave differently in terms of displaying subtasks. Any hints?

In any case, it would be useful to have “foldable” main tasks where you can easily toggle the display of their subtasks. A good example is bulleted lists, with indent and a different bullet color or shape for sub-items.

In their current form, I find their behavior confusing. But again, for me it is mostly a matter of display as I find the concept of subtask quite important for our projects.

By main list, do you mean the project or your “My Tasks”?

As for your ideas on improvements, you can always post them to the Product Feedback forum for people to vote on.

I meant the list for each projects.

Gotcha. So basically the only thing that controls whether a subtask shows up in a project list or not is based on whether the subtask has been added to the project.

By default, if you add a subtask to a task in a project, it won’t be part of the project. The only place it exists is in that task and in the My Tasks list of whoever it’s assigned to. I find this behavior awkward in some cases and helpful in others.

Some examples would be how we do project planning. We create a list project for each overall project and then create some main milestones as high level tasks. We then create subtasks in those milestone tasks for the work that’ll need to be done to reach the milestone. The work for those subtasks could still be quite large and require further breakdown, in which case that breakdown is done as more subtasks within the subtasks. This is modeled mostly on Agile methodologies of epics, stories, and tasks if you’re familiar. But essentially, the real individual work is being done at the bottom level of tasks and the upper levels are more about tracking progress of overall milestones and deliverables.

Here is a project we’re nearly done with, almost all the stories are done except for the final task waiting to be completed:
image
You can see above in the breadcrumbs next to each story and task that the one remaining “Task” is actually a sub task of one of the “Stories” and each story is basically a part of the overall “Epic”. Technically all the stories could be completed that don’t have tasks left, but the project manager has left them incomplete for now.

In this case, the default behavior of subtasks not being added to the project leads to a lot of work for use to add each one back into the project. If we don’t, we will only see it as we open the tasks and look at the subtasks. There’s no way around this behavior that I’m aware of and am fairly confident I haven’t missed it.

So I’ll use this Advanced Search sometimes to search and make sure I haven’t missed any as we wrap up planning:

This same behavior has cases where it’s nice though in that sometimes I’ll be working on a task and just want to put a bunch of reminders to myself to check off as I complete a task. Basically just little things for myself that my team won’t care about and that don’t really affect the project. I can add the subtasks and not worry about filling up my team’s inbox with notifications that I’ve created new tasks in the project. And in reality, this is nice for the first project planning scenario I talked about first because I can finish writing up the tasks before adding them to the project. As a team I’ve occasionally asked team members to only add their tasks to a project only when they’re done writing them up. Because otherwise, I’ll see a notification for a new task that often involves me and go look at it only to see updates in realtime as my team member continues to type and I have to remember to come back later and check again.

I kind of went all over on you, but maybe there’s some stuff in here that’ll help you understand how subtasks work a bit more within projects. If you have more questions though, feel free to ask. I’ll keep trying to help as I can.

Great, now I get it! Thanks a lot for your help.