Subtasks in "My tasks" show in a "No project" project

@Kaitie, @Michael_A, @Marie, we are a lot of people that need at least an answer… Are there any updates on this?

2 Likes

I’m trying to sell my company on using Asana, but this has come up multiple times. Essentially, until it’s fixed, the team won’t move ahead.

Really is a no-brainer, and adding the subtask as a regular task is not an option as we need them embedded.

Such a shame that such a good product has such a glaring flaw.

2 Likes

Hi @Simeon_Petrov and @David_Gerrard! I see where you’re coming from and I can ensure you that we’re aware about this pain point. While it seems like a simple thing to fix, it would actually involve (among other things) a whole restructure of how subtasks work in our system’s back end. This is certainly something we’re planning to tackle in the future, but I don’t have any precise timeline to share at the moment. That said I’ll make sure to post an update on this thread as soon as I have an update!

3 Likes

+1 vote to encourage amazing Asana team to fix this, we are seriously thinking to switch from another vendor to Asana, but given some basic gaps in the logic don’t allow us to use Asana for a large scale projects. But we suggest that Asana should be able to scale along with our business. There are too many simplifications being made in the business logic and this is one of them.

Good luck to Asana team and hope this features is being prioritized and scrum master is currently breaking his head how to deliver this :slight_smile:

3 Likes

It’s at the point now where this is a little bit ridiculous.

Subtasks…:

  • should automatically inherit the parent project
  • shouldn’t have to be manually assigned to a project
  • shouldn’t require going into the subtask itself via a small icon to change settings like this
  • shouldn’t take up space in the project task list when the user actually does assign to a project
  • should be expandable/collapsible from the parent task within a project list
15 Likes

Is it possible that when searching for tasks assigned to me subtasks are properly assigned to their projects?
See screenshot attached.
I just tried creating an advanced search and saving it, and it looks like my subtasks are properly sorted into their projects?

5 Likes

HI @Liohn_Sherer! In both your screenshot it seems that “Update SK…” is the task associated with your subtask as opposed to the project?

  • Homedepot.com is the subtask.
  • Update SK… is the parent task
  • Updates (BOARD) is the project
  • Marketing is the team

In the first screenshot, the subtask appears under No Project
In the second, the subtask appears under the correct project.
Both screenshots show all of my tasks, one with the built-in My Tasks page and one with an advanced search.

2 Likes

OMG, you are right! So the system “knows” who the real parent of the subtasks is, why it should not be implemented in the My Task section as well @Marie?

1 Like

@Liohn_Sherer and @Simeon_Petrov, let me dig into this; I’ll get back to you asap!

Thanks for your patience @Liohn_Sherer and @Simeon_Petrov! I just did a little more digging into this and you’re completely right here; we recently implemented this change in the Advanced Search as we work toward improving the relationship between tasks and subtasks.

It will still take quite a lot of work to implement this relationship more globally, but we’re one step closer! I’ll make sure to update this thread as soon as I have more updates on this topic!

1 Like

If you want these capabilities including expandable/collapsible subtask outlining to all levels of subtasks, you can check out my Desksana solution (now in development on Windows and Mac) which gives you this functionality with your Asana data.

Just throwing my support behind this. We are doing our yearly cleanup of misc stuff in Asana for our agency and seeing how many subtasks got lost in ‘No Project’ was just too much. This is a major piece of functionality that we use with Instagantt and makes it really difficult to expand upon our Asana usage as we would like.

6 Likes

I literally just reported this as a bug – this functionality is so obvious to me i never could have thought it’s actually a wider issue. @Marie could you post an update for this topic please? Thank you so much.

7 Likes

I’m afraid I don’t have any update at the moment @Pia_Rawlins, but I’ll make sure to update this thread as soon as I do!

1 Like

Likewise, I was just about to flag this as a bug. You create a subtask for a task (whether or not you think that’s a good workflow) and it gets put into a ‘no project’ project. Seems illogical, and to be frank it doesn’t reflect brilliantly on the Asana team that people have been asking for a fix since early 2018. It would be great to get an update. Many thanks.

6 Likes

Hope this bug is fixed soon also! We just signed up for Asana and this seems like common sense.

2 Likes

Having been an Asana user for a number of years including the privilege of being an Asana Champion and now Certified Pro it is important to keep in mind that @Marie is advocating constantly to the Asana developers what are major stumbling blocks for users through great feedback from this forum. Believe me, Marie and her predecessor Alexis are aware, maybe painfully aware that sub-tasks, a feature that many users look for in Asana and its competition are a basic when choosing software. Sub-tasks in Asana are causing many problems and ironically when additional searching was added to Advanced Search it was both a great addition and in some cases eye-opening how sub-tasks as currently supported are a potential significant black hole. Even assigning manually a Project to a subtask that causes the subtask to show up in the middle pane with Tasks is very unusual in the hierarchical structure other than for the occasion you want a few to be more visible instead of down the structure. I am currently consulting with a Professional Services firm and just cannot recommend the use of subtask for workflow as I believe it will lead to lots of confusion in reporting, dependencies, custom fields, etc. So lets hope that @Marie our advocate is heard loud and clear by her developers because as it stands now there are a lot of users that are significantly inhibited and potential users that may not even give Asana a chance because they need the robust structure to the lowest level. Per today’s blog entry, Top 5 reasons to join Team Asana in 2019, Asana is to be congratulated. Let’s hope they are able to expand resources to solve problems such as these as they continue to walk down the path of excellence in their product. In the meantime thank you @Marie for being the messenger and let them know you do a lot to hold Asana revenues together and they would be wise to listen. :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Hello all, I read a lot about the issues, any news on the solution (more than a year ago started…).

Thanks Dev. Team!
F.

1 Like

Ditto… This makes subtasks so much less powerful. I was really excited about switching to Asana from Trello but this is causing a major headache. I’d say clearly the development team doesn’t intend on changing it since this has been an issue for so long and no updates?

5 Likes