Subtasks and viewing in Lists and/or Timelines

I’m wondering if there is a way to expose/show subtasks in List view or as part of a Timeline? The idea being able to see dates to those subtasks as well as how many per task.

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Hi @Paul_Gordon and welcome to the Forum!

Because subtasks don’t currently inherit their parent tasks project, they do not not show up on your timeline, unless you manually add them to the Project using the Tab+P shortcut. You can learn more about this in the following guide article: How to Use Asana subtasks | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

The best advice I can give you is to add your subtasks to their parent task project using the TAB+P shortcut > once you do this, subtasks will show on your Timeline (providing they have a due date). But by doing this, subtasks will also show in your task list; so to avoid any confusion, I’d recommend creating a Section call subtasks and nest all your subtasks under this section so they don’t bother you in your tasks list view.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Marie, the steps worked but would be great to see the connection between Tasks and Subtasks made more efficient one day, would save the extra steps and less manual. (as once associated together you then have to move the Subtask under the Task in list view and so they are together in Timeline.
Thanks again.

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I suggest to use Instagantt as it’s more capable of handling Gantt charts with Asana than the “timeline view” … :expressionless:

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I bough a subscription of Asana just to get access to “Timeline” but since it’s so brief it rarely helps. It’d be so easy if going into timeline and klick an “arrow” to get a dropdownlist to see the subtasks and dates related to them, just as you do on a task in list view.

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So to view subtasks in timeline you have to clutter your board with all the subtasks showing up? That’s terrible UX, especially given that there’s no “advance to next subtask” button or shortcut that I have found. So, using the mouse, I must manually click into each tiny subtask icon, assign it to a project and then a category, click out of the subtask, and repeat the process for 40 subtasks? (oh, and apparently dependencies only support 30 :frowning:)

If my org used Smartsheet this would be so easy.

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But by doing this, subtasks will also show in your task list; so to avoid any confusion, I’d recommend creating a Section call subtasks and nest all your subtasks under this section so they don’t bother you in your tasks list view.

This is crazy. I want the subtasks nested under their actual tasks, not separately under a “Subtasks” section. Asana’s solution means that either the Task List view or the Timeline view are broken. Please fix this issue!

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@Marie @Victor_Henning This is crazy - i’ve seen a lot of threads about this exact issue going back 2 years and makes no sense for me to create a section in my list view called ‘Sub Tasks - Calendar View’ that i need to minimise at all times in the List View. Come on product team, get it fixed!

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Agree with other users. Asana, please fix the issue and enable subtasks to show on the timeline in the user-defined structure under their parent tasks. It would also be helpful, like some users noted, to have an option to collapse or expand as needed.

Also I’m troubled by the fact that reporting (either Asana or Tableau integration) cannot work at the subtasks level(s), but it can go to a different thread.

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Has this request made it into the feature roadmap at Asana? I would definitely like my timeline to show subtasks while still nested in their parent tasks

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Mainly replying to make sure this stays on the radar of Asana. If it’s viewable in a list view, it should be viewable in a Timeline view. Adding a specific project to a task (and duplicating things this way) is not good user experience. If players like ClickUp can do it…

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Agree that this ought to be fixed.

In the meantime, there is a (somewhat kludgy) workaround, which is to essentially ignore the subtask feature, and use the “section” heading to organize tasks. Here’s how I do it:

Basically, instead of creating tasks directly in a project, I make each top line task its own section within the project. Because you can’t record any details about a section though, I create an overview task, and make it the first task in each section, which I can then use to record details about the task, just like normal. As a reminder that this is the main task, I usually call mine “Overview of [Name of Task/Section Name]”. Just like any other task, I can track the start and end date, assign responsibility, log notes related to the task, etc.

When I need to define a subtask, I just make it a top line task of its own in the same section, underneath the Overview task. Because it’s a task, I can do everything I could do in the subtask screen – assign due dates, establish dependencies, assign it someone, etc… The connection between the subtask and the task is covered by the “Projects” line in the (sub)task’s detail screen – it will show the name of the project and the section (task) name. If you click on the section name, you can move the task to another section, so this makes it easy to rearrange subtasks if you need to move them either to their own section (because the subtask has been escalated) or to another section (because it pertains to another task).

The section headings let me group the Overview task and its subtasks into a logical group, and because sections are collapsible, I can expand and collapse sections as needed to drill down on a particular task and its subtasks. Meanwhile, because Asana sees the subtasks as top line tasks, their due dates, dependencies, etc. now show up on the timeline along with their respective “Overview” task.

This helps organize the timeline as well: because each section that you created has its own section on the timeline that you can expand or close, you can expand a section on the timeline to drill down on its subtasks, or collapse it to see multiple tasks. (The only thing you can’t do is hide the “subtasks” to see a timeline view of the top line tasks, which I recognize can be inconvenient, but hasn’t gotten in my way too much.)