The Actual time field has historically been directly bound to the Estimated time field in the task pane. They were always at the top. This made sense to me because it’s reasonable that they should be next to one another and Actual time is something a user will likely want quick access to if their organization tracks time.
But now it appears in this “Disconnected fields” area for subtasks whenever that subtask does not live anywhere as a parent task.
Someone reviewed that ↑ and said, “Yeah. Looks good. Let’s ship it.”
Moreover, if it does live somewhere as a parent task, only the project dropdown where it exists as a parent will show an Actual time field.
The changes made the the way custom fields are displayed in the task pane were bad enough and I’m pretty sure this is a byproduct of the design decisions made there. Of which the overwhelming majority of feedback is negative:
I’ve long been an advocate of subtasks inheriting their parent task’s project. But the solution here is missing the mark.
Like others have suggested, I think what’s missing here is the concept of a “primary/main project” but in order for that to work, it would need to be something an individual user can set for themselves.
And this is largely because Asana does not have a way to display tasks across different projects in a single view that has the same functionality as we’re used to in projects with respect to list view, board view, etc. including filters, group by, sorts, field order arrangement, field width customization, etc. Something I touched on here with respect to the board view:
I preferred a world where I saw all of the fields I wanted to see in a given context without having to click a bunch of stuff to figure out where it is first.