Short ID for tasks

Many customers of mine ask to me if ASANA can show an ID for every task, as JIRA does.
Thanks.

Human-readable Task IDs are desperately needed.

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When referring to a task among a team, it is helpful to say ā€œlook at #34,ā€ or ā€œSee 2/5/2020 (#34).ā€ We add these numbers manually to some of our task lists. It would be nice to have a unique identifier that is added automatically when a task is created, that we could use for reference and communication.,

There are already a couple things that might help.

You can directly link a task by opening the task details, and clicking the link icon as shown below:

image

You can also display row numbers by adjusting your settings:

Will look like:

Note: each user would have to do this for it to be a quick way to reference a task. Also notice the numbering starts over within each section.

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This is really useful for using Asana in Agile, for reading the boards. And it would be great if in the links to tasks that populate with @mentions you could see this info, too.

I am fearful of ending up with hosts of tasks called ā€œrefactor the codeā€ as my Asana gets months and years old. How do you keep track of those without loads of effort to come up with some artificial way to name them otherwise?

I have just come back to this thread today because this need is coming up more and more as I work through my trial and decide on Asana. This, and a few other such threads, have me concerned about the development priorities of Asana:

The other tool I am considering is Wrike, similar problem - a ton of old requests of relative simplicity, including this same one in fact!, and little activity. I wonder if these two apps, essentially like Coke and Pepsi as they are very frequently compared to each other (as opposed to an array of related, but somewhat different stuff like Monday, Hive, ClickUp, etc.), have deep tech debt that they basically try to hide by ignoring users in public forums basically begging for simple fixes.

Asana and Wrike are both at this point over a decade old.

Hopefully somebody is reading these ā€œprotestsā€ here in the community and there will be a movement to address this stuff. But for now one of the big red flags for me with Asana is the proliferation of these requests, and how much they are ignored. So at least in my case, if I donā€™t go forward with Asana, it will be partly because I am worried from what I read in the forums about their lack of addressing customer needs!

So could not agree with you more Ivan!

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Not to nullify your comment - I totally get it and sometimes Iā€™m also frustrated by things that donā€™t get done which I think should - but just wanting to point out that it can be misleading relying too much on the forum. Itā€™s one of MANY inputs that Asana uses to determine what to work on. They have tens of thousands of paying organizational customers and well over a million users (just stop and think about those numbers for a sec and servicing that many people and trying to keep them all happy!); the forum represents a vocal but ultimately small portion of that total. Their sales and service people get LOTS of input that we never see here. Honestly as a software developer and entrepreneur, I donā€™t envy them having to make the decisions they do as to priorities!

Just my $.02 USDā€¦

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Phil, agreed, and I am not trying to be obnoxious. But I am doing a thorough analysis of Asana, and I intend to be discerning as there is a ton of investment and opportunity cost when you commit a team to a Work Management tool. I too am an entrepreneur and software creator, and it goes against all Agile/Lean and general best practices Iā€™m aware of to ignore customers to this extent. There really should be no threads in this forum - which is heavily promoted by the Asana Product Team themselves - that are ignored. At the very least I think there should be enough staff assigned to the forum to provide transparent communication, so the frequent voices of ā€œstop ignoring usā€ disappear. We are talking about an organization with massive means: pre-IPO, large engineering team, etc. They are at the top of its industry:

https://www.g2.com/categories/project-management#grid

So I am coming in with high expectations. And facing $30/month for a license (I canā€™t do yearly, and need the business features), plus probably double that for plugins that offer basic functionality absent, like time tracking, Gantt, your excellent tool, and adding Custom IDā€™s (!), this is all the more reason my expectations are high.

If you look at that chart and the mass of tools coming up on Asana, many of which Iā€™ve extensively tested, none have:

  • any issue with whether you can view your project in a list or board - took forever to get that fixed here
  • the notion of a ā€œstart dateā€ on a task - also took forever to implement
  • Negligible Custom Fields that donā€™t even include date!
  • No markdown in task description:

Asana is fairly brilliantly conceived with itā€™s structure and flexibility. But this is not stuff thatā€™s particular genius, and many of the tools on that chart mirror the basic functionality of Multi-homing tasks. On the other hand, more of the basics that are missing in Asana around the great structure, like this list above, are coming along slowly in my opinion, compared to the other guys who are more agile as I observe the way the listen to user requests.

I appreciate that Asana is now at scale and no work is easy. But that comes with being successful. Itā€™s a very competitive space, and some of these features have to be added, no matter how challenging, or users will look elsewhere.

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Unfortunately this is not useful as those numbers show the order and are not related to the task. So if you change their places task that was number 2 will become 1, etc. You cannot reference to those numbers as unique identifiers.

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Amen to that!

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Right, I understand that row numbers can change with the addition of tasks and reordering. I offered that workaround thinking of a real time phone conversation where both people have the project open and someone might say ā€œTask number 12 under Planning.ā€ Beyond that, I agree it is not particularly useful. Thatā€™s why I also referenced the copy task link.

I completely agree tasks should have visible Unique IDsā€¦really everything should for ease of reference.

Hi there,

Currently, when viewing a list of Projects, the Project List shows the Team Name in smaller text underneath the Project Title. It would be great if this could show the number of tasks within the Project.
Example:

Project A 6
Project B 2
Project C 1
Project D 12

Thanks!

Nathan

Welcome to the Forum @Nathan_Goss and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

This is a popular request in the forum and we currently have a thread regarding this topic so Iā€™ve gone ahead and merged your post with it for consolidation purposes. I hope itā€™s OK :slight_smile:

Thank you again for your feedback! Have a great weekend! :wave:t5:

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@Natalia - Iā€™ve read SO many requests for this feature. Is this on the product roadmap? Is there a public Asana roadmap? Iā€™m sure youā€™d have tons of people whoā€™d be glad to give you feedback in an Early Access Program if you wanted : )

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I agree with Mark (and MANY, MANY more). This topic/feature request has been around for a LONG time, but there is no feedback from Asana. Is this even a consideration for Asana?

I just got an invitation to an ā€œAsk us anythingā€ event from the EMEA Customer Success Team. I presume a few others here did too. I might try and join so I can ask them about this.

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The issue @Nathan_Goss has is not the same as the one being discussed in this thread. However, while we have you, could you try to get some answers for the customers who have been asking questions on this thread for a long time?

@Liam_Ward: thanks!

Hi @Liam_Ward and apologies for the confusion! I understood it was the same request as discussed here. Can you kindly confirm or clarify @Nathan_Goss?

Unfortunately I donā€™t have any information to share at the moment but rest ensure that we will keep you posted here as soon as we have any update!

Thank you Liam! Have a nice week!

I was reading through the topic again, as my only real concern before going paid with Asana was this misfeature. Years passed, we are paying, but I still donā€™t see understanding or will to change from the Asana team. Iā€™d like to see they understand the issue.

Let me describe 2 scenarios:

  1. Developers has to refer a bug or feature ID in their git commit messages. Word and character count really do matter in commit messages, writing ā€˜PROJ1#123ā€™ is much shorter than copy-pasted urls. Before Asana we had a strict system requiring to prefix commit messages with task IDs.
    Donā€™t come again with the task numbering, that would mean we canā€™t insert new lines into task lists, only append to the bottom, but there is no such limitation in Asana UI so thatā€™s not a real solution, and Asana team is bringing this up to silence people on the forum about this.

  2. Linking tasks for client project reporting. URLs are super ugly, seriously. No chance we put those into an email or official document. On Asanaā€™s UI itā€™s nice that in rich text fields the URL is substituted by the task name. So copying and pasting url into a temporary field end than copying the URL from there into the report would be a solution, but the link text doesnā€™t include the project, only the task name. No joy here either.

This has impacted our internal processes, code quality, project management.

I have seen other companies stepping in and trying to solve the issue with plugins, but any tech leader will try to limit 3rd party access. Is our only option to switch to Jira?

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