Sort Due Date within Section: Tasks With No Date Sorted To Top

[Sam]

At the moment, when sorting tasks within a section by due date, the ones without a due date get sorted to the bottom.

This feels very counterintuitive to me as, more than anything, I need visibility of tasks without a due date.

I appreciate this may break others expectations of the functionality. Perhaps there is an arguement that no date == no deadline vs no date == date has not be set.

But, I don’t see why this couldn’t be introduced in the “Hacks” section to allow users to opt in.

[Bastien_Siebman]

I believe the Asana philosophy, and some of the best practices we teach to client, is that all tasks need a due date, and tasks without a due date will be done last.

So I don’t believe Asana would ever do such a thing, even in the hacks. Also because that would create differences between what two users would see on the same Asana account.

[Sam]

Hey Bastien, thanks for your reply.

I feel that this sort of leans into what I am saying though… would it not be fair to say that tasks without a date on them are the tasks that need to be tackled immediately, before any other task, as the first action should be to set them a date? Instead, in the current implementation, these are lost below a see of tasks that have been assigned a date.

In my opinion, it’s important to design software for how the user will experience things rather than how you think they should use the app to best effect. Doing the latter makes things harder to use as you building in an expectation that people need to be very well informed and unlikely to make mistakes.

You could go down the route of making the due date a required field on the task, but the extra rigidity would break a lot of ease of use. So, if you aren’t going to do that, should you not to try to account for tasks that don’t have dates as well as tasks that do?

Instead, again in my opinion, you end up in a much better place by designing things to work effectively when used optimally but also support users when things aren’t going so well. For me, one of the real benefits of Asana is to help catch things that are falling through the cracks

[Sam]

I think what’s really driving this for me is that I want a way for my tasks to be added at the bottom of a section when the rule is applied. But, when sorting by due date, I lose track of the tasks which don’t have a date yet.

This is another thing that I feel is broken about the new My Tasks…

Anyway, I created that as another feedback item

Tasks move due to rule should be inserted into the bottom of the section

Creating rules that move tasks around is helpful in rebuilding some of the funtionality that was lost from the old My Tasks, but I’m finding there’s a big flaw. When tasks are moved they are put into the top of the section they are being moved to. This messes up my workflow as I don’t want them to hide outstanding work that is even higher priority. I did try sorting by date within sections, but then this pushes tasks with no date to the bottom of the section, which is even worse IMO! Please c…

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Sam

I feel that this sort of leans into what I am saying though… would it not be fair to say that tasks without a date on them are the tasks that need to be tackled immediately, before any other task, as the first action should be to set them a date? Instead, in the current implementation, these are lost below a see of tasks that have been assigned a date.

Indeed makes sense!