Request for my tasks section called "waiting for"

I would like to request a section in “my tasks” called “waiting for” that is like recently assigned/today/upcoming/later because I wish to keep track of critical “open loops” I need to be mindful for other co-workers who do not (and cannot be forced to) use asana.

Outline your use case. How do you and your team use Asana? Be specific.**
I work for a 20-person philanthropic environmental foundation. We give small-dollar grants away to nonprofits working to protect the environment through public education and advocacy.

10 people who report up through me use Asana daily/weekly to keep meeting agendas and follow-up tasks, because I have the power to require them to do that. For 3 years.

The same 10 still use asana as an occasional group project/tasks management system when big, complex projects are on a short-time frame and also really important. At those times, we use it like air-traffic-control and to answer the essential question, “who will do what by when on this important complex project?” That happens perhaps 1-2 times quarterly.

The other 10 may or may not use Asana, I am not sure. They have accounts, sometimes I see their work, sometimes I do not.

As a power-user and senior-level manager (half of the staff report up through me), I use asana as my personal task management system. Every day. It is “I cannot function in this job without it” good. That has been true for me for at least 5-7 years, even before taking this job with this group.

Frame the feature request in context of how your team is using Asana . The better we can understand how the feature request/bug fits into the workflow, the more streamlined it is for us to help sort and prioritize in our Voice of Customer process.

I would like this feature because not everyone uses Asana at work, and I cannot force them to based on my role and our office culture. I cannot even require my team to use asana for management of all of our group projects, because doing so is in conflict with someone else higher on the org chart who has control over what every team must do (including mine) to create their strategic plans/projects and report progress on them upward.

And yet, I am called upon each day to keep track of certain really, important critical tasks for others that I observe during meetings, from emails, and such, that I need to follow and mark off as complete when they are complete. These are not tasks assigned to me. There are perhaps a half dozen to 10 tasks at any given time. They are constantly being created and marked complete (by me) as I get updated on them during calls, via emails, and such.

  • Help us understand the impact this is having on your team. We want to know – is this having a critical workflow impact that’s affecting your team’s ability to use Asana? Is this driving work outside of Asana, or causing roadblocks in adoption? Or, does this feel like more of a nice-to-have?

This is a nice-to-have, but it is certainly driving us to use slack more and more often as the place/tool we use most for work, because more than just my 10 people have found slack convenient, easy to understand, and easy to “figure out” as a convenient mental framework to think about work.

More of us might use Asana more often if there was a way for us to track the tasks of others that are important to us personally as users, even those others do not use asana.

  • List any workarounds you may have employed . We’re interested in what you may have already tried in lieu of seeing a product change, and to what degree this is solving for the issue.

I have created section headers in “upcoming” and I write tasks there when I observe them and wish to track them. This is not ideal because “upcoming” is for tasks I am working on this week, and not all of the tasks I want to track feel like something I need to have on my screen at all times when I am looking at my tasks.

I have tried creating a project (or not) and moving these tasks to “later,” which I can collapse, and make “go away” until I wish to check-in on them. But then, it gets caught in the trap of “is it in a project or not?,” and the trap of how the “later” section is organized. It does not appear that I can change how “later” is organized, and that it is by project and those projects are organized alphabetically.

It occurs to me that I have relied on Asana as long as I have relied on the David Allen “getting things done” methodology for managing my personal work. One of those core concepts in GTD is the context of “waiting for” in terms of managing one person’s “open loops.” Perhaps there is another way to create this work-around for me using asana as a personal task management system, but I have not yet discovered it.

To the extent asana is used by some as a personal task management solution, and to the extent you wish to lean-in to GTD concepts, and to the extent some of your customers cannot force user adoption or have much power to influence it, and to the extent some of those customers are not high-tech/silicon valley-types with mucho tech-savvy people on staff, it occurs to me that a feature such as “waiting for” in my tasks which I can collapse and move above or below “later” as I choose to might be pretty helpful for me and for others, and so I post it here.

Hi @aaronwb599,

While there has not been a formal announcement yet, Asana has provided some initial info to developers that the My Tasks view is going to be changing in the near future, such that the existing Today/Upcoming/Later sections are going away and will be replaced by the ability for you to create any sections structure you like, just as you can do now in a regular project. So I think that will meet your need!

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