🤔 Should the description be used as a conversation starter?

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Hi community,

I need your input on this weird topic. In the latest Asana conference, they create a task about a situation that needs to be resolved. I don’t remember the task title, but the description was along those lines “I saw XYZ, can we do ABC?”.

And I cringed. Using the description as a conversation starter in my opinion is a bad practice for 3 reasons:

  1. it is really hard to know who is talking, after a while the “I” requires to dive into the audit trail to understand who it is
  2. that might encourage people to answer in the description (yes I have seen it)
  3. if the conversation continues in the comment, you have the start in description and the rest below…

What do you think, dear community? :heart:

My behavior is always the same: create the task, assigned to myself, then post a comment mentioning the person and then assigning. I agree it requires more clicks…

:fr: Version française

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Wouldn’t one place to do this be the messages tab on a particular project? If it is a one-off type conversation that doesn’t relate to a specific project then I agree using the comments may be more appropriate for long conversations as opposed to starting it in the description. Perhaps the best case is to frame the question correctly in the description by providing the proper context and background and then posting your own thoughts in the comment box. I’ll be curious to see what everyone else thinks on this!

Cheers,
Matt

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I more or less agree with @Bastien_Siebman and @Matt_Dickinson.

You could use a Message (at whatever level appropriate: Team, Project, arbitrary set of people) or a Task.

If using a Task for this specific purpose, I think you’d only want to use the Description for a summary, overview, general contextual info, instructions (“Add your input as a Comment please!”), etc.; not for simply the first in the series of comments for the reasons Bastien cites.

Larry

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Agree with @lpb here.

We always use the task description for the summary or infos or links to sheets and folders that are required and not to communicate.

Messages to tag the person that needs to work on it the task go into the comment section

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Looks like we all agree :slight_smile: I wasn’t talking about a discussion (that would go in Messages) but really a task, for which someone would start explaining in the description.

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Not surprising all the great folks on here have similar approaches to this! You know what they say about great minds…

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