Support shift-click range selection in the Inbox (desktop app)

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What I’d like

In the Inbox, I’d like to click the checkbox on one notification, scroll down, then hold Shift and click another notification’s checkbox — and have everything between the two get selected in one go. From there I could archive the whole range with a single action.

This is standard “range selection” behaviour: Gmail, Outlook, Windows File Explorer, macOS Finder, Jira, and basically every desktop-oriented app implement it. Right now Asana only supports selecting notifications one at a time.

Why it matters

My Inbox regularly fills with long, uninterrupted runs of notifications that are irrelevant to me — status pings on projects I only loosely follow, and similar noise. These often arrive in batches, so they’re almost always contiguous in the list, which is exactly the case range selection is designed for. Clearing 30 of them currently means 30 individual clicks.

The current workaround, and why it’s not great

I can check the group header (e.g. “Past 7 days”) to select everything, then uncheck the handful I actually want to keep. That works, but it’s backwards: it’s more clicking, it’s error-prone. If I miss unchecking a notification and open it accidentally then ALL of the checked notifications get unchecked again.

What I’m asking for specifically

  • Click a notification’s checkbox to anchor the selection
  • Shift + click any other notification’s checkbox to select the full range between the anchor and that item
  • Bulk-archive the resulting selection
  • Ideally also Ctrl/Cmd + click to add or remove individual items from the selection

This is a small quality-of-life change, but for anyone with a busy Inbox it’s the difference between a two-second cleanup and a minute of repetitive clicking. Has anyone else run into this, or is there a keyboard shortcut I’ve missed?

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That’s an interesting post. I have a few thoughts of my own, but first, please take a look at this. You might find a clue there.

https://forum.asana.com/search?context=topic&context_id=1130760&q=inbox%20zero&skip_context=true

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Thanks - I went through those. I agree with the philosophy, and I’ve since cleaned up my project notification settings, which helped.

But I’d say notification hygiene and range selection answer different questions. Even a well-tuned Inbox produces contiguous runs of low-value notifications - ones you want to glance at and dismiss, not unsubscribe from. That’s exactly what shift-click handles.

The current bulk option makes the case stronger: as noted in the “Archive all” thread, notifications older than 7 days get deleted rather than archived. So “select the group, uncheck the keepers” is a partly destructive operation. Range selection would let me clear a specific block without touching the group control.

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