I would like to get some updates regarding this: as far as I can see, it is not reasonable to automatically add team members as a collaborators when they are being mentioned in a task comment.
The “at mention” is clearly to express a one off urgent situation. The collaborator status is a non urgent ongoing status. So the 2 are completely different.
The “trick” that was suggested 3 years ago (mention the member and then manually remove them as a collaborator) is just a trick and does not justify the faulty logic.
I would appreciate if someone from Asana could explain the reasons behind this lack of flexibility, and as far as I can see, this lack of logic.
Thanks for the reply but you misunderstood me. Of course I want that person to be notified if I mention someone.
But I don’t automatically want that person to be systematically notifified for every single comment I write after that.
And as that person that I mentioned is automatically added as a collaborator, he / she would be notified every single time. Which is nonsense to me.
But if someone can explain the logic, I will be greatful
When should they be notified then? Once every X minutes?
If everyone is using the Asana inbox, then the notification are grouped together. So either they see each notification as they arrive (so they can be reactive) or they come later and see them all at once.
3 people: X, Y and Z.
X assigns a task to Y and will need to either supervise or help with the task.
So both X and Y have a collaborator status for this particular task.
Whenever Y writes a comment to give updates on the task progress, X will receive a notification (as all collaborators should, that’s why they are collabs). whether the notifications are grouped or not is not the topic of this thread.
As the task progresses, at one point, Y needs the help from Z. This is a one-off, one-time help and Y needs an urgent answer from Z. So Y uses the “at mention” Z in the comment.
Z gets a push notification because of the “at mention”, he replies to Y. X who is a collaborator will also be notified that Z replied.
All good. Perfect.
But after giving this one-time urgent help, Z has nothing to do with this task. He should not receive any further notifications about the progress of a task that he is not involved with.
But Asana thinks differently: Because Z was mentioned 1 time in a comment, they assume X and Y want Z to be fully involved with the task and hence, Asana automatically gives a collaborator status to Z.
Z will then receive notifications for a task that he is not involved with. That is not efficient and will disturb his workflow.
Not for long: of course Z will eventually remove himself as a collaborator from this task. I am 100% sure Z does not want to receive notifications for a task that he is not involved with (except that one question that was asked to him).
I want somebody to follow the progress of my task and get notifications when I write comments: I add them as a collab.
I need a one-time urgent help from someone who is not involved with a particular task: I mention them in the comment so that they get a push notification.
Whether I want that “urgent helper” to carry on receiving notifications for that task should be up to me and not up to Asana: I should decide whether I want to add that urgent helper as a collab or not.
And at the moment, I am not given that flexibility. That’s a real shame because it’s illogical. Unless someone can prove me wrong of course.
First, I totally get what you’re saying, @JJ119 and I think you raise a valid point.
I think the decision on whether to automatically add an @mention person as a collaborator comes down to an evaluation of the frequency of the two use cases (and I’m betting that’s what Asana did in making their decision).
That is, which of the following happens more often?
@mentions are not automatically added; you @mention someone and you want them to be notified and involved so you have to take the extra step of adding them as a collaborator;
-OR-
@mentions are automatically added; you @mention someone and you don’t want them to be notified and involved so you have to take the extra step of removing them as a collaborator.
I.e. it comes down to deciding which scenario produces less “extra steps” over the long run. I’m guessing Asana evaluated the above and concluded that #2 produces overall less “extra steps”.
While I agree with your use case, I believe the current way of working is the best.
If someone doesn’t want to be notified, they leave the task. It is a “small price” to pay, compared to the complexity of creating a “second” way of notifying people.
How many people will believe they’ll receive the next comments when in fact they only received the first one and didn’t realise it? How often does a question raises a single answer and not a basic back and forth?
Thanks Phil and Bastien.
What you both say makes sense.
Before switching to Asana, I used another work software that enabled my team my myself to use the task comments as general updates, with a soft red dot notification for all the task followers. When a the message was addressed to a team member in particular, we at mentioned him/her who would get a push notification. Then it was clear for anyone involved with the task: a little red dot meant there was an update but it was not urgent to read or reply. A push notification (with number) meant a message was sent to you personally and a reply was expected.
I guess we are going to have to find a way to make Asana work for us. We don’t like excessive notifications.
Is there a way for collaborators not to get a push notification when a comment is posted on a task?
All settings are in the Notifications tab of the Profile settings, I never ever use Push so I can’t help or relate but happy to share why I operate this way.
