"Tab+N" our new shortcut to create Sections

I’m having problems with marking Sections complete. Our team has a weekly meeting where we review the sections and mark things complete if the discussion of whether we need additional tasks or subtasks leads us to determine we are finished with that Section. We saw this week that we don’t appear to have the ability to mark a Section complete and have it disappear from a list. This is going to leave us with a bunch of Sections with no incomplete tasks under them, just cluttering up our list. How do we get rid of Sections without deleting our record of work if we can’t mark them Complete? We have also noticed the Section name has a duplicate Task name under it. Has the structure of task levels changed? Was an extra level added while we were too busy to learn about it?

7 Likes

What the heck is going on! I can’t create subtasks in sections any more and I can’t assign sections to other projects. This basically just broke my whole workflow! It basically makes sections POINTLESS for me. I’m really disappointed in this. Switching back and forth from list to board view is not something that really needs to be done in the first place! Grrrr. So frustrated. I now have to move everything around so that Asana actually works like it did a couple of weeks ago. This is such a waste of my time! Please, just leave it alone!

5 Likes

Hi @Casey_Choate and welcome to the forum,

Not intending to at all minimize your frustration…

It’s true that you can’t assign sections to other projects, but the part about creating subtasks in sections doesn’t sound right, although I’m not 100% sure what you’re meaning by that. If you want to elaborate on that one a bit more, it might be that it’s possible but needs to be done a little differently.

I completely agree! My entire team has now lost the ability to Complete a section and deleting the section (and potentially losing all tasks within) is simply not an option. Neither is moving out all of the tasks before deleting as some Sections can run into 1000+ tasks! A very poor update in our opinion and would strongly urge the ASANA team to rethink.

1 Like

I must admit, I’m finding this quite funny. Asana were well aware of the problems this was causing back in January, but have continued regardless… It’s my understanding you have no chance of them ‘re thinking’ this.

However, I will say. that if you use the ‘milestones’ feature, then what you can do is put another task at the bottom of the section (call it Completed and Done '. then it’s up to the person to just tick that rather than the section.

This gives better visibility of the status overall i think.

As for moving and deleting tasks, again, it requires us to re-think. Each task should be an atomic thing, not something that gets moved from section to section (unless that’s your workflow, e.g. TODO, DOING).

Rather than long lived tasks, again, it helps with the overall understanding of the project.

and then finally, actually having projects that are exactly that, projects with a defined start and end objectives.

This seems to be the way it’s going.

1 Like

I have used Asana since the very beginning. I don’t know what’s happened over the past year or so.

First, the TAB-N change. Apparently this was “necessary” to implement switching between boards/lists. I still can’t believe that they would change such a fundamental part of the system.

And, now…I don’t even know how to describe what has happened with the latest big update. Everything is just weird. Where I used to be able to use keyboard shortcuts before and just starting typing (TAB-D, TAB-A), now I’ve got to click fields with my mouse and select dates from a calendar (if the right pane is closed). The layout looks like a spreadsheet now—the eye doesn’t know where it wants to go. You have to click in much more specific locations to take action. Adding sections and even tasks is more time consuming.

They’re coming out with all these new features at a rapid-fire rate, but it just feels like they’re breaking the fundamentals. I can’t understand why they are doing this. Maybe I have simpler needs and Asana is now just overkill for me now.

11 Likes

That duplicate Task with the same name as your Section is just a 1-time Asana creation, to aid your transition by saving any data you may have had attached to the old, tasklike Section. You can delete each such Task occurrence once you’re sure you don’t have any data in it, and it will never recur.

3 Likes

Stephanie, your answer addresses my first question - thank you! Any thoughts on how to mark a Section complete? I see some other folks are having that problem, too; we need the whole section to move to completed items instead of having the section name hang out there with nothing under it. Ideas?

3 Likes

My understanding is that a Section can no longer be marked Complete. All one can do is Rename it or Delete it.

For coping methods and/or workaround, what I’ve done is made sure that every task within a project still makes sense even if it is not associated with a Section. Therefore, when all the Tasks are marked Complete, the Section can safely be deleted without (much) information loss.

If it was impossible for me to encode all necessary info solely within tasks, I’d probably create a Tag corresponding to each Section that would eventually have to be deleted, and bulk Apply that tag to all tasks within a Section.

This all fits within the theme I have been posting on, whereby the lack of control over views of our data means that we have to create workarounds to keep views usable. Most people don’t want to see a long list of Sections wherein all the Tasks were closed months ago. Some do, however. I would prefer a system where we all had full controls including filtering and sorting over all entities in each view, plus the possibility to save multiple views and assign various views to various groups. That’s just not the system we are all using.

5 Likes

Actually, I really don’t think you want to do that. I’m pretty sure that deletes ALL record of each of those completed tasks in that section if you delete the section (Asana actually warns you of this before you delete the section). You would need to adjust the project filters to see the completed tasks and move them to a new section first.

Asana has pretty much made Sections unusable for temporary things as you need to keep an empty section just sitting in the project forever. It’s definitely annoying if you know you don’t want to add new tasks into that section.

5 Likes

Sure, you’re right Todd. Try it this way: Therefore, when all the Tasks are marked Complete, they can be moved to a parking lot location and the Section can safely be deleted without (much) information loss.

1 Like

Hi folks, just a friendly reminder that this post has to do with the Shortcut to create Sections. Please make sure to use relevant feedback threads to share your feedback (I’ve listed a few below) and create a new #tipsandtricks if you have specific questions related to Sections.

Thank you :slight_smile:

1 Like

Here’s the thread to vote for being able to mark Sections Complete: Mark Sections as Complete (in new spreadsheet List view)

2 Likes

Thanks! Voted!

Despite this not being about Tab-N and a specific request above to use relevant threads … , Marie asked me to put it in this topic, and closed the place I posted it :frowning: so not much choice to put it here …
.
Reposting:
I love subheadings, create and destroy them all the time, but the change today has made them substantially less useful.

Up until today, you could select a heading, hit the delete key combo and its gone, no longer, instead you have to select, click the drop down, delete, confirm and then oops - just deleted all the tasks in the heading.

Also previously you could drag a heading around, but no longer - now it takes all the tasks with it.

Please look at the different ways people use Asana before making massive changes like this - I use headings as markers - specifically what I’m going to get to do when - I drag them up and down a list for example “By lunch”, then delete it after lunch and so on. Now I have to go back to using character combos like ‘========’ to indicate a heading, which is one step backwards from when adding a “:” at the end would turn it into a heading.

3 Likes

What the…TAB-N is working again! Thank you Asana!

Agreed Mitra. I know Asana has the best of intentions but I think in this case they copied all the other clunky “3 clicks to create something” models used by most softwares and forgot what made asana great, I could be typing this and simply add “:” and BOOM, on the fly this is a section, a sexy divider, a title for some thoughts. I think Asana should simply leave the new tab N feature in tack with the drop downs, AND put back the old “Sections” but call them “headers” with the colon funcionality.

Also the drop downs is just useless without them auto collapsing by default. terrible thought on Asana’s part

4 Likes

Is there a way to bring back separator lines for section headings?

Thank you.

Wow! I had no idea we could create sections for subtasks as well and I’ve been using Asana on and off for almost 6 months now! I’ve only just learnt about it today via this thread. That goes to show how un-intuitive some of the functionalities In Asana can be. Unbelievable!