Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
I’m not sure if this is a bug or intentional by design but it seems a bit odd.
Subtasks that are in the same project as tasks are also shown lists at the task level as well.
Steps to reproduce:
Create subtasks in a task, then add them to the same project as the task.
They show up next to the parent Task as if the same level.
Browser version:
Upload screenshots below:
It’s intentional by design:
There is at least one thread (and probably more than one) in the Product Feedback area from people who wish this behavior to be changed!
Hi @Phil_Seeman,
Thanks for clarifying. It does seem a strange design decision.
I know there’s also quite a bit of talk about subtasks not inheriting their parent task’s ‘Due Date’, ‘Project’, ‘Assignee’ etc.
I think this should be an option on the task, that any subtask created in it gets the same settings by default. Obviously not all subtasks would want to have to the same ‘Assignee’ or ‘Due Date’ but surely ‘Project’ should be set to the same by default?
Hi @Alex_Bailey1 
and thank you for taking time to report this.
As @Phil_Seeman explained, this is an intentional behaviour. When the Subtask is associated to a Project, it will automatically appear in that Project’s list of task. To avoid 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.
Allowing subtasks to automatically inherit their parent task project it’s a popular request in the Forum, and this feature is definitely on our radar. And while I don’t have a precise timeframe to share yet, I’ll make sure to post any update in the following thread: Allow to automatically add subtasks to project. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to add your vote and comment.
Hope this helps! Have a great Tuesday!
Hi @Natalia,
Thanks for the confirmation and the references.
Do you know the design thinking here? It seems that by adding the project to a subtask you are effectively promoting it to a task without actually promoting it. But there’s no real parent/child relationship anyway, so it seems pointless.
I know that by adding the project, this allows the subtask to show in calendars etc but why not use a task for that if there’s no parent/child relationship anyway?
I just tested creating 3 subtasks on a task and then added those to the project. I then completed the task to see if that would automatically complete the subtasks as well. It didn’t. So that’s another design decision I don’t get - no link between the status of subtasks and tasks. Why would you want to complete a task and orphan its subtasks as uncompleted?
Lastly, I can’t imagine a scenario where subtasks would be on any other project other than their parent’s project. This also appears to be a strange feature.
At some point, your developers have chosen to keep tasks and their subtasks very loosely related (hardly at all) but I don’t get it, sorry.
… furthermore, I just found that when you delete a task, its subtasks don’t get deleted. It seems they get promoted automatically to tasks, rather than being orphaned though.
+1 to Alex - this is indeed a very strange behaviour. It is not logical to move them all to a subtasks section…then they all show up on the planning timelines as another swimlane not in the swimlane with their parent. Would request reconsider if this a good feature. would be interesting to consider what use cases support showing sub tasks twice?
+2 This is almost something that would drive me to go back to MS Planner. Or at the very least NEVER use subtasks. But that is a waste of the money that I pay for Asana.
Is this behaviour still unchanged in 2021 ?
I haven’t tested lately as the bad experience of subtasks made me avoid them ever since.
I will make a point of testing out again.
@Asana, you are very good at rolling out new features quite often, You are not so good at listening to honest feedback from customers and putting things right that have bugged people a long time,
I’m right there with you Alex. These subtasks breaking out is really frustrating. It clutters up my view. The only way I’ve learned to deal with it is to delete them and readd them manually. Not great.
Correction, I am able to hide them by deleting project from the subtask. That’s easy enough actually.
Wanted to echo this issue as well , currently we have some Projects that have a separate section titled SUBTASKS where we can nest the subtasks after it is added to the Project using the Tab+P method. It works but it would be great if there was a more streamlined method.
It is kind of a pain to have to create the Subtask under a Task that is already assigned a Project, use Tab+P to add the Subtask to the Project, and finally nest the Subtask (which is somehow duplicated into the Project home) back into the SUBTASK section. This is the only way I have found to get our custom field of “Task Hrs” to show in the project portfolio without cluttering the Project Home page. Any suggestions, or is multi-step method this the only way to do this?
+1 on the request
It is difficult to understand why
I can understand that they need to be in the project to appear in the Timeline. What I really want is for them to show in the same Section of the Timeline as their parent task, instead of in a different “Sub-Tasks” section (if we use the solution suggested by Natalia).
Has there been ANY update to this behavior in the past year? Having subtasks show up as tasks in the project is really inconvenient and a weird design choice. We need to use custom fields in our subtasks and duplicating all of them into tasks and manually moving them to subtasks section to hide them is a really poor user experience.
Unfortunately I’ve learned that Asana often make weird design decisisions and despite lots of good feedback from users that ought to be taken on board quickly after launch, not much happens for a long time, if at all. They just move on to the next set of feature releases.
As someone else once said here, the value of a software company seems to get based on the breadth of features and not necessarily the quality or usefulness of those features.
I know this sounds a bit unfair but I wish they’d address this overall issue. I still think Asana is a great product though.
It works but that’s a workaround that shouldn’t be necessary.
The subtasks do belong to that project.