Task priority replaced by rules is horrible

I’ve just been refreshed with yet more horrible changes.
I used to be able to TAB+Y to allocate a task to today, TAB+U to allocate to upcoming and TAB+L for later.
Now, not only do I have to create rules (and I still can’t work out how to allocate to later for tasks not due for > 1 week) but unless I am prepared to wait until midnight, it seems, I have to manually drag the taks to the right section anyway - pointless in setting up the task if it’s not going to have an immediate effect.

Over recent months, there have been a raft of awful changes that are making Asana less and less easier to use.

I would list them here but my past experience with this forum is that any dissenting voices are mearly flagged as inappropriate and removed.

I suspect that this post will be no different.

Hi @Chris_Sylvester,

Personally, I totally understand your feedback and frustration. I hope they do restore keyboard shortcuts to My Tasks, and agree about the timing of rule evaluation.

I only want to take issue with your comment:

As a volunteer who’s been participating heavily in the forum for over 3 years, I know this not to be true. I can count on one hand the number of posts that I’ve seen be removed by moderators, and those don’t stem from people expressing dissenting views, which are allowed, bur rather from uncivil or rude discourse, which violates the forum’s rules.

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Hi Phil
Thanks for your reply and I’m glad to hear that my comment may no longer be true.
However, I stopped participating in this forum years after some very tame posts were arbitrarily removed simply because they were critical and were in no way offensive or rude.
At the time, one of my posts had received the most number of votes and was, at the time, the second most popular post in the forum’s history.

It was a topic/change of interface that was the cause of much frustration among users and there was an astonishing refusal by the Asana moderators to accept that the change needed to be reversed or rethought.
There were a number of posts/comments (not just by me) that were removed, simply because they didn’t align with the thinking of the devlopers/moderators. There was, at the time, an attempt to silence users in the forum.

I truly hope that’s changed but I lost interest in this forum years ago, when I realised that the views of people like myself who have been using Asana for the best part of a decade were no longer considered of any value. The developers are always right, is the clear message that I understood at that time.

As I said, I truly hope that’s changed in recent years.

Hi @Chris_Sylvester, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us, we really do appreciate it. Community members are welcome to express frustration, give us constructive criticism, and share their honest views in this forum, and we ask all members to frame their communication nice and respectful. For more details, you can read our Community Guidelines here: Asana Community Forum Guidelines.

Rest ensured that we closely monitor all feedback on the Community as well as other channels. As you can imagine, we receive hundreds of feedback on daily basis; and while we’d love to satisfy everyone, realistically we have to make some strategic choices, and prioritise request. We truly appreciate your feedback, and I can ensure you we will take it on board as we revisit updates for My Tasks and keyboard shortcuts.

We do have solutions that can help with this transition and would encourage you to have a look at this comment in our announcement with more details.

If you have any follow-up questions, please let me know! :slight_smile:

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Many of us have used Asana for ages, and we don’t hesitate to tell Asana when we disagree :slight_smile:
Me too I’ll be missing the shortcuts you mentioned!

Thanks for your reply Emily.
I agree, frustration should never boil over into disrespect or abuse and there’s no place for those things in a public forum like this. Or any forum for that matter.
But frustrated is what I and my team are each time Asana rolls out these kinds of updates.
It just seems like your UI devs are determined to add additional steps to processes each time they do an update.
For example, I used to be able to click on on the project label of a task to go straight into that project. Now I have to click it twice - but not too quickly or I’ll delete the label because it jumps to the left on the first click and my cursor is instantly hovering over the X after the first click. So click once, move mouse, click a second time. A little thing but it’s one of a hundred things that have frustrated me over the last few years.

This latest decision to remove shortcuts for prioritys is possibly the most frustrating of them all. So much more manual dragging of tasks now. I used to be able to multi select a bunch of tasks in "my tasks and CMD + U to move them out of today to upcoming. Now I have to go into each one individually and select their proirity from the dropdown list in the side panel.

I understand that interfaces change all the time but usually, and with every other system we use, these changes make things easier. With Asana, we’re always dumfounded by how the updates always add extra steps, extra clicks and remove useful functionality - only to be replaced with more complexed functionality that takes more time.

We used to love Asana. We’ve been using it for the best part of a decade and, over the years, have introduced a ton of clients to the system but I have to be honest, we’re not big fans of it anymore.

@Chris_Sylvester,

If you’re still around, you may appreciate having a look at a comprehensive My Tasks article I published today which offers helpful clarifications and alternative approaches. Here’s my Forum post that introduces it:

Thanks,

Larry

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Hi Larry

Thanks for posting that, making it availabe and for the work you put into preparing the article. It’s well thought out and well written. Many thanks.

What it describes is pretty much how I’ve always used My Tasks and it’s always made sense to me.

What I don’t like about the recent changes is that there appears to be less automation, more clicks and more manually moving stuff around.

For example, when I check of a recurring task that reocurrs every month, what used to happen is that it would disappear from my “Today” section and automatically reappear in the “Later” section ready for next month. Now, I check it off, it disappears from “Today” but reappears in the “New” section. Why would I want it there? It’s done and I don’t need to see it until next month. I now have to manually drag it to “Later” where it belongs.

The triage shortcut keys of CMD+Y (today), CMD+U (upcoming) and CMD+L (later) were useful. I don’t see any reason to remove these. If I had a bunch of task in NEW, for example, that I wanted to move to later, I could just multi-select them and with two keys, one hand and a single key stroke I could banish them to “Later”. Now, it’s three keys, two hands and three key strokes. Plus, I’ve been using CMD+L for years so it’s going to take me forever to change the habit.

I know these may seem like small things but it’s these kinds of uneccessary and irritating changes that are really putting me off Asana.

When Asana talks about rolling out “improvements” they should be just that. Adding more key strokes and and removing useful automation (like having a checked off recurring task reappear in the right section) aren’t improvements - these are significant backward steps and ill thought out modifications to a useful interface.

Cheers
Chris

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@Chris_Sylvester,

Asana has already committed to some improvements in the areas you mention.

And, to be clear, one of their goals was flexibility and reducing confusion from the original My Tasks, so the consequence of that is Upcoming and Later are flexible to be removed, so the shortcuts associated with them need to be much smarter in order to be implemented, if they will go that route.

There’s a lot of nuance in the solution I wrote about. For example, the ordering of sections enables me to move to Upcoming or Later with just one or two repeated shortcuts which hardly take longer than doing a single shortcut.

I agree it’s frustrating that Asana rolled out a partial solution though. This is becoming a pattern with Asana product management that I hope will change. I hope we don’t have to wait very long for this to be rectified but I just ran into another case of lack of follow through today and wrote a comment about it here–that feature is still waiting proper completion:

https://forum.asana.com/t/search-for-approval-tasks-only/72826/4?u=lpb

Thanks,

Larry

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