It’s possible to create a task with no project, then remove oneself as both assignee and collaborator—at which point the task becomes inaccessible:
The question is, where does the task go? I can’t get back to it, and it won’t come up in any search (even a search for tasks with no assignee, no collaborators, and no project), likely because I no longer have access to it. Requesting access does nothing, as there is seemingly no owner.
I suspect that somewhere there are a bunch of personless, projectless tasks floating through the ether, taking up space in the database but never to be seen again—kind of like the socks you lose in the dryer that go to some mysterious location nobody knows.
Is this a bug in Asana?
Asana support ought to be able to access them for you…but it’s a lot of effort to have to reach out to support every time you want to tidy up your instance.
I tried this but could not reproduce the “You need access to the task”.
I created a task, removed myself as assignee and collaborator. The task disappeared from my tasks, but I was still able to search for it (and find it). I could stil modify, comment, etc.
Did you also remove the project? Try creating a task within a project, then removing that project, all collaborators, and yourself as assignee. I’ve repeated it several times, and the same thing happens each time—poof!—it’s gone. I’m sure the task still exists somewhere, but it’s inaccessible to me from search or by any other method. If you’re still unable to reproduce after removing the project, I can make a screen recording to show it happening.
@Doug_Stanley - I can reproduce this behavior in my environment. As far as I can tell, those tasks persist but are private with no one having access (other than enterprise service accounts, which is how I figured this out). I think this applies specifically to tasks that originate as private (either in private projects or created directly for a user via My Tasks or the Create button).
That said, is there a reason you would ever have a task with no assignee, collaborators, or associated projects?
I tried again within a project and it produced the same result.
I can not imagine why you would do it, exept perhaps as an accidental removal.
@Stephen_Li What happened originally was I had a task within a project that I wanted to duplicate and repurpose as something completely different, i.e., I wanted to keep the bones of the task, but use it with all new people in a completely different project. I intended to strip those elements off the duplicate task, then home it to the other project and put the appropriate people on it, but I never got that far because it vanished midway through. The disappearing part was an accident, but what I was trying to do at first was on purpose.
@Herve_Buisset Now that I know about the behavior, I can avoid it, of course—but it seems like some sort of referential integrity bug, so our Asana consultant suggested that I mention it here to see what the forum had to say.
@Doug_Stanley - ah ok, that makes sense. There are a few options for that going forward if it’s a repeated part of your workflow (task template in a bundle, duplicating a section across different projects, making the task public prior to making edits, etc.) but they do all require some foresight and clicks.
I don’t think this is a “bug”, per se, but the expected behavior is a little confusing and unforgiving.
@Stephen_Li Okay. Well, thank you for taking the time to think through it with me. I’d still call it a bug, personally. I think Asana should “fail gracefully” in such a scenario, rather than zapping the task off to Neverland—but it is what it is, I guess, and I can certainly avoid it now that I know it’s there.
Thanks again.
