Sorting in Asana

I’m a brand new Asana user and ended up here because I couldn’t figure out how to sort within sections. It’s a huge bummer to see that users have been requesting this feature for over 2 1/2 years with no update from Asana. Our team was getting ready to buy a premium subscription, but without this basic functionality we may need to look elsewhere.

3 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: Sorting tasks by Project

It would be incredibly useful to be able to sort by more than one field. For instance, Completed/Incomplete and then Status. Right now the only way to achieve this seems to be manually moving tasks.

HI @Jandi_Lee_Willis and thank you so much for sharing your feedback with us! This is actually a quite popular request in the Forum and we already have a thread on this topics! I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the existing thread to consolidate all feedback in one place; hope that’s ok!

1 Like

That’s great! Sorry I didn’t find it! :slight_smile:

@Jandi_Lee_Willis, and others, until Asana hopefully improves sorting, consider the free (to most users/companies) Asana2Go:

Larry

This request to sort by multiple attributes (at least by project and then due date) is over 2 years old. How do we get this to happen? What are we paying for? Sorry to be blunt, but it seems like a basic feature and it’s been a long time.

1 Like

Please vote for my sorting request aswell! :smile:

I would also really like to see this feature - specifically, I’d really like to have the ability to sort by due date within sections - not all of my sections are interrelated, so when I sort by due date it mixes up my different types of tasks I have per project.

6 Likes

Tiago_Claus - I am asking the same question. Primary Secondary sort seems like a very fundamental requirement. In the advertising it states that it is like a spreadsheet (Not). In any spreadsheet I have used you can have as many secondary sorts as you want, Asana doesn’t even have one.

Any more information on this, the silence on this request is deafening.

2 Likes

Agreed, This functionality is definitely needed asap.

It’s insane, it seems like tasks are BARELY linked to the section it’s nested in. When I do try to sort by due date, tasks are literally pulled out of my sections. This gets even messier when I show completed tasks. Asana can’t automatically separate the completed tasks from the incomplete tasks within the same section? I guess the only work around is to manually move the tasks yourself by dragging and dropping (with no sorting) which feels like a very archaic method. Please fix this soon!

Hello! Is there an update on implementing this sorting feature? Is it on the product roadmap? At Calm we also have a desperate need to be able to sort our sections by date (not the all-view which is currently on offer) and this thread has been going for over 2 years now. I’d be grateful to know what’s a priority for Asana so we can make good judgments on what best we can use Asana for. Thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

Hi @jade2,

In the last two years, we’ve already implemented a lot of features that were requested via this thread and we recently completed important work on Section that will allow us to further develop sections (ex: allow to sort within sections). I haven’t a precise timeline to share for the feature your’re interested in but I would recommend keeping an eye on the #community-forum-announcements category for the latest news :slight_smile:

1 Like

I am relatively new to Asana and really enjoy the product but It’s crazy that this thread has been going since March 2017 and still no implementation by Asana.

This seems like such a basic request. Please get it implemented.

1 Like

In agreement with the poster above me, its bonkers that such a great system is handicapped by such a simple double filter issue such as this. Even though the original thread was posted in March 2017, so surprised this still isn’t a thing.

Sadly this is pretty much the only thing stopping my team from signing up for a paid account with Asana because it’s pretty vital for us to be able view projects in this way.

There are a few “big threads” in the forum that seem to be targeting what users expect to be a “basic functionality”

Since Asana is not sharing its product road map, I would encourage Asana to at least tackle those open and highly voted threads with some real in depth, planning capable information.

Like are we going to get those, or are we not going to get those in the forseeable future. Maybe details are not necessary but some general info about where are you going will be very useful.

I for one, as also many other people, do not believe that:

  • the forum requests are being evaluated properly by management or development
  • user generated feedback has a meaningful weight in the product road map

Yes a lot of things have been fixed, but strangely enough a lot have been broken and a lot have not been addressed.

Keeping your roadmap a secret creates multiple problems:

  • a lot of manual work to find work arounds to issues that may be solved soon - instead of saving time, Asana is adding time. yes it saves my team time from some tasks and adds a huge burden on other places. So we are not saving time - we are changing where we are spending it
  • blocking other software implementations and integrations in the company - which process can we cover and will be able to cover with Asana and which we need to put into another system

Again my opinion is that Asana is run like Facebook - B2C oriented, hence UX is king and everything is a secret. I think UX should be one of the most important points but not at the expense of functionality.

1 Like

Agreed Ivan. We spend times creating workarounds - like adding subtasks to the project(s) of their parent tasks for visibility - that then become useless or worse - as in when the recent change was made, to allow easily collapsible/expandable views of subtasks under the parent task in the project List view (only List; not Board). The change is basically a step forward and a design feature that should always have been there. But once I learned about that change, I had a big backlog of REMOVING subtasks from projects - so they would not appear twice in List view. (Good thing I don’t actually need to switch into Board view, as subtasks WOULD require project homing to appear there.)

That’s why I call it one step forward, 1 step sideways, fall off the curb. I do feel for the developers and the UX/data model architects - they have a huge legacy of questionable choices, probably more than we can even guess at. And they are trying to fix them piecemeal, and most fixes seem to raise a new wave of complaints. Every few WEEKS, it seems I am editing various tasks and views to cope with the most recent round of changes.

Asana crew, please check out JIRA and consider the idea of cleaned-up data model and full SQL searching and filtering in every view. It really is the only durable/reliable way of longterm stability. If you continue to treat every view and every operation as a unique case, you may never get ahead of the curve.

3 Likes

+1 Stephanie. Creating custom views / Reports has, over time, become a serious weakness of Asana over multiple competitors, especially as more adopt a SQL-like approach (e.g. Jira’s JQL or Airtable). I find very often having to make compromises and introduce extra work in our workflows to create acceptable views for various parties who need them. A lot of this could be solved with multiple-level sorts or other SQL-like functions in the advanced search (e.g. Group By).

+1 to issues with sorting on asana. Right now there is only sort one direction on dates and custom fields. Please allow sort ascending / descending on fields … seems very basic and annoying not to have this