Task limit for "You're about to hit your team's 1,000 task limit"

Hi folks,

I’m merging this thread with Task limit for "You're about to hit your team's 1,000 task limit" - #6 by Bastien_Siebman. I’ve answered all your question in this reply. If you have any follow-up questions regarding your specific case, please reach out to our support team following these steps: How to contact our Support Team ✉

How can I know which Team has almost 1000 tasks ?
I have the alert only when I’m creating a new task in “my task” tab and before I select a team or a project.

@Marie thank you for clarifying. A few thoughts from an extensive user, beta tester, and fan of Asana:

  1. Having no way to tell how many tasks I actually have in a team is causing me to arbitrarily create teams and shuffle projects around to try to get under the count with no way of knowing where the count actually stands. This is the very picture of unnecessary work about work Asana was created to prevent.

  2. Asana clearly has a counting mechanism – if y’all must go this route, a counter really should be made available to the users it affects rather than again making more unnecessary work for users. Thank you @Bastien_Siebman for your efforts on the community’s behalf.

  3. The A/B test seems appropriate for studying newly created freemium accounts because they are likely to see the limit notification when dealing with the proverbial straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. Figuring out how to handle that single task and where to go from there is a much, much simpler and reasonable concern than that facing an established user who is significantly (presumably) over the limit and must shuffle large quantities of tasks. If you know it’s coming, a limit is reasonable. But having the rug pulled out from under you and then being forced to completely restructure – that’s again unnecessary work about work: A/B testing at this point is really an existential crisis of using Asana, not a next-steps dilemma.

  4. Y’all are doing this testing during a global pandemic when the people who are actually using your software need it most. At a time when I have been forced to relocate my business, lost my team, lost my childcare, and plunged heavily into debt, this is the last thing I need to be worrying about. Again: this forum post is work about work when I have a second-draw PPP to prepare for. I would add that the study, which is clearly about monetizing users, stands out for its timing when other tech companies are reducing (if even temporarily) the cost of features and using their internal resources to develop new features to help people during their hour of need.

  5. It may seem that the answer for users like me who extensively use the free version is simply to pony up and stop free riding. But a closer look reveals users who in fact are more than happy to pay for the service but do not easily fit into the established silos y’all have created. In my case, I have used teams where I could just as easily have used projects, which seems to be the answer to my problem according to your recommendation in the thread above… until you consider the fee structure. For an organization with 15 or fewer members, it really makes sense only to have a single team with multiple projects. If I segment by team (and I have nine that are really just categories: Executive, Finance, Operations, etc.), I now have to either go the absolute most expensive route – a premium organization – or have to pay for all nine of my “teams” to be upgraded to at least Premium. OK so perhaps I have an answer now: redo everything I have setup to consolidate it to one team and then make it premium. OK, but that is a ton of work about work that computers do far better than humans. Also: how do I know there won’t be some arbitrary limit placed on a premium account sometime in the future? That’s not a snarky rhetorical question. I really can see that happening given this experience, and it’s very, very concerning: all that meta work could be for nothing.

  6. If y’all are serious about keeping your user base, building tools to do the work about work (that computers do far better than humans) to help people automate restructuring of their teams/projects/tasks would go a long way toward preserving brand loyalty. I do have to say the soul of Asana when I joined was its extensibility. To the extent users have to restructure reasonably organized work to arbitrarily fit Asana’s concept of how work should be organized, Asana’s soul is being chipped away.

Two key suggestions:

  1. Restrict A/B testing to newly created accounts and immediately allow users who were already established before the A/B testing was instated to opt out – now is not the time we need to be concerning ourselves with such a huge issue (assuming, like me, you’ve leaned into Asana)

  2. Allow legacy users to continue using free accounts under the rules in place when people signed on. I have absolutely no love for Mailchimp because of their buggy product (for example, their boolean values in conditional logic evaluate incorrectly) and abysmal customer service (it took three emails before they finally passed the bug to an engineer, who to this date has not fixed it), but at least they keep their legacy user accounts consistent. For the record, I have both legacy free and paid accounts with Mailchimp and would be happy to pay a reasonable amount for Asana, too.

A final note:

I love Asana or would not be taking this much time to reply. This really is a crisis moment for established users. People like me may not yet have a paid account, but I have certainly marketed for y’all in a way money cannot buy: personal recommendations to other business owners. I am willing to pay a reasonable amount, but I really do not have a moment to spare on something that could be automated to get me there. PLEASE FIX THIS.

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HI @Catherine_Michaud, I’d recommend reaching out to our support team → How to contact our Support Team ✉

Very well said @Mike_Comer1, I completely agree with you!

I do understand this comment in and of itself is of little value, just want to +1 your concerns and hope the fine folk at Asana will re-evaluate their decision in this matter :sweat_smile:. Even though I’m using this tool personally, it has the throughput of a small company (several thousand tasks a year - not including recurring ones). (using it professionally as well, but that’s outside the scope of this thread)

As @Marie mentioned in A new upgrade Tier - “Family.” it’s not a done deal just yet. So I’m just here to let my voice be heard :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi everyone - I’m Emily, a Product Marketer here at Asana. I work on the pricing and packaging team and my team is working on the 1,000 task limit test.

First, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to provide feedback on this test. We really appreciate your insights and it is an incredibly important input into our product development process.

I’ve been reading your comments and I wanted to provide a little bit of clarity on this test. We want to continue launching new features in our Basic tier, and we were really excited about our most recent shared vision launch where we shipped Project Overview, Messages, and Project Brief in our Basic tier. While we are excited to continue shipping features in Basic, we also have to balance Asana’s business priorities, which is why we are testing this 1,000 task limit per team.

This test is impacting a very small number of customers and we are not limiting the number of teams customers can create. This is strictly a test and if/when we do decide to make permanent changes to our Basic free plan we will make sure to proactively communicate those updates to the community. For now, this is just a test to learn more about task limits in the product.

If this test does impact your domain, you can either delete tasks or create a new team. If you want to get more functionality and power you can upgrade to our Premium tier. We also understand that right now you cannot see the number of tasks per team in-product. Since this is a test, we will not have this functionality, but based on your feedback we know this is a pain point we need to solve and the product team is working on a solution.

Thank you again for your feedback and insight!

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Could not agree more! You’ve totally nailed it my thoughts as well. I like Asana and understand the need to monetize, but starting today with this message has left my 4-person marketing team scrambling this morning to either find $600 or create some wonky work-around. There was no forewarning or clear messaging, we just suddenly can’t make more tasks?? Finding out we’re “part of a small test population” for a restriction – without a date for when this might change – is not the “customer-oriented response” that I think you’re trying to achieve here. :frowning:

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@Emily_Hanna might not be the right channel or place for this feedback, but if you’re listening to users here, let me give a quick/different angle on what @Mike_Comer1

We really like Asana, but the reason we don’t pay for Asana is due to a lack of trust.

The price really isn’t that high for the value it could provide, but we simply don’t trust that if were to invest in Asana (price + stronger usage), it won’t suddenly change the next day.

The constant/frequent/unannounced UX changes are a big driver of this lack of trust, and if I could pay for those to go away, I would have years ago.

This potential re-tiering of pricing isn’t surprising, it just reinforces that we can’t trust Asana.

We’ll pay if we absolutely have to. But we won’t be happy customers, and we’d probably be motivated to find a vendor/platform we trust.

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(updated with more info from earlier withdrawn post …)

So as a free user I have found a way of checking the tasks in your account - I selected all my tasks and exported to CSV (on dropdown next to “My Tasks”. Caveat: I am just a single person on my account - I don’t know how this would work for teams.

I identified that I had 876 items by this means. It also became clear where there were many repeated items (if you use recurring tasks you will likely find that too). I was then able to find them using the name in the CSV file and quickly bulk delete old “done” items. Downloading the CSV again showed a decrease in the number of tasks.

Notice the “Parent” column on the right - If you remove a number of items based on the name column and they are inside another task you remove those only, not the parent.

Additionally: you can do an advanced search on items completed between 2 dates: so can use this to delete items completed e.g. more than 2 years ago.

If this is something you want to try consider printing or keeping a copy of the CSV when you start.

Take care to look at it from your own perspective of what you need and how you use Asana!

I hope this helps!

Christina

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If I could upgrade for 1 seat I would have already paid but as I use Asana to micromanage myself and not with any other team members, paying for 2 seats is paying twice the price.

It’s frustrating seeing as I have promoted Asana in dozens of articles and used it for years only to have a 1000 task limit suddenly applied.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only active tasks but as this includes several years of completed tasks it doesn’t seem very well thought out.

I hope this test is canceled soon or you allow legacy users who have been big promoters of your tool to be grandfathered in and not be subjected to these frustrating tests.

If it remains I will probably switch to Monday or another alternative where I can just pay for 1 seat.

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And just like that my staff are saying they are locked out of Asana… with absolutely no notice?! :rage:

Yes, I completely agree with others not being happy about this restriction being added without warning also.

I have dormant team members who do work a few times per year and also some that only get 1 task assigned per month… being forced to pay for all of them is not really ideal for me. I would be forced to find another solution to manage these staff. This pricing model does not work for us.

In the meantime, thanks for killing our productivity in our first few days back after the holidays… :cry:

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Like others, the warning received in the interface did not provide any context that this was a “feature” in beta, and I’m a little frustrated that there wasn’t some communication ahead of time to let people know that some accounts might receive messaging on a new change.

I went through all of my old tasks, deleted every single completed or archived task, project, and team, and was still receiving the notification after. This led me to believe that even deleted tasks would count, and so I spent time after my work hours trying to find an alternative to Asana, which has (admittedly!) become one of my key ways to keep up my productivity and manage the minutia of my work in communications.

Before coming to this thread, I was creating a new Asana account entirely as a “fix” for the 1,000 task limit, manually re-importing each so old tasks wouldn’t get ported over by accident. It’s just frustrating. :confused:

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@Emily_Hanna some guidance (and a timeline) would be appreciated here

If Asana, Inc. will be holding our our accounts “ransom” until we pay, then so be it… it’d just be nice to know our options / path forward (try to “make the most out of free”, evaluate paid options, etc.), instead of getting vague in-software messages and “just a test that might effect you” messaging…

Thanks

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Hi all and thank you all for your feedback - we’ve taken note of every single feedback shared on this thread and shared it with our team to ensure a better user experience for future testing.

This test should run for another 4 weeks. We’re not planning to launch this limit beyond this 4 weeks testing period at the moment - and if we decide to do it in the future, we will make sure to take all your feedback on board to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Please note that in most cases, you can exit out the message you’re seeing and carry away with your work (if the message re-appear, you should still be able to exit it out).

If you’re blocked, you can also:

  • Delete old complete tasks/projects
  • Create a new team
  • Reach out to our support team for extra support

I’m closing this conversation for now to avoid any further confusion and keep this post as visible as possible. I will re-open this thread to confirm as soon as this test is over. Again sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused, we really appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us and will make sure we learn from it for future experiments.

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Hi all - thank you for your feedback and voicing your concern. Our product team has read through every single comment regarding this 1,000 task limit test and we realize that this test is confusing for our users.

We have decided to stop testing this limit in product. We have learned so much from this test and that is due to your feedback and insights. These learnings will help shape our product strategy and we know we have a responsibility to deliver a solution that is both transparent and customer centric. Thank you for your continued support.

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