Project Template assigned tasks show up in My Tasks automatically

What weā€™re getting at is that we donā€™t want the tasks that exist within a TEMPLATE to appear in peopleā€™s ā€œMy Tasks.ā€ When the template gets used, of course the tasks should get assigned-- but it would be much clearer to the users if the tasks were not assigned just because they were part of a template.

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Hello,

Mee too, I would even say that it is mandatory for a template that its tasks do not appear in anyones tasklist.
The template is the model, the project is the instance of that model.
Please fix asap.

Marco

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I would love it if template tasks were excluded from ā€œMy Tasksā€, a template is not an active project, and this creates confusion across my team.

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@Angie_Gilbert, @Marco1, @Colleen_Pickford - I hear ya. What I do is simply move template tasks into the Later section of my My Tasks. That way they can stay assigned to me, but theyā€™re filed away in storage. I use Later for things that I wonā€™t action but I do want to reference and tasks that are assigned to me that donā€™t have a due date or action item (such as template tasks). I hope that helps!

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Iā€™m going to add my vote to fixing this. When youā€™re trying to get a bunch of office workers to adopt a new product that theyā€™re unfamiliar with, telling them to move their template-assigned task to the ā€œLaterā€ section isnā€™t a good option.

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I see a bit of confusion, possibly caused by the use of the ambiguous term ā€œtemplate taskā€. Let me see if I can clarify.

To be clear about what people are asking for, we all agree that once a template (letā€™s call it ā€œMarketing Kickoff Templateā€) is used to create a new project (say, ā€œPandaā€), we want all the tasks in Panda to behave exactly the same as any other task - i.e. show up in My Tasks for each assignee, etc.

However, NOBODY wants to see the as yet-unactivated tasks resident IN a template to appear anywhere. A template and a project should have 2 different behaviors. Projects (and included tasks) are live; templates should not be. Templates and their defined tasks should stay waiting in the wings, behind the scenes. The process of creating a project from a template should be the magic wand that activates the tasks in that project.

Furthermore, template creators may or may NOT want to be added as, and notified as, collaborators on every task in every project spawned from every template they have created. In general, I would NOT want thisā€¦it dilutes the meaning of the term ā€œcollaboratorā€, especially if I create really useful templates and deploy them for a large org. Yet this addition and non-stop notification now occurs automatically.

Yet Asana currently provides no different behavior. A ā€œtemplateā€ is just another project that happens to (maybe) have the name ā€œTemplateā€. I want to keep my ā€œMarketing Kickoff Templateā€ inactive. Thatā€™s why I made it a template (instead of just copying a live project).

31 Likes

Heartily agree with everyone on this post and have upvoted Todd Cavanaughā€™s related post. I appreciate the idea from Asana Alexis and a couple others about the band-aid of asking staff to ā€œjust move tasks from the template to Laterā€, but as many have already pointed out, that is a weak solution at best. Why?

  • Hard to explain, especially for new Asana adopters.
  • Sounds (and is) clunky to implement for the end user (user: ā€œWhy do ā€˜weā€™ need to do this when ā€˜youā€™ created this project template thing?ā€).
  • Easy to break. If a user completes or deletes any of the tasks in the project template, the template is now effectively ā€˜brokenā€™.

Iā€™m not saying anything that others havenā€™t, Iā€™m just stating it again so it is crystal clear what this issue is and that ā€˜move to Laterā€™ is a weak workaround. So weak in fact, that it prohibits me from implementing what could be a very powerful feature of Asana, a feature that our managers are actually looking forā€¦ ā€œis there any way that we could pre-load these more complicated, yet recurring project types?ā€.

Wellā€¦

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Alexis, while I appreciate the suggestions to make this temporarily manageable, please understand that this is only a workaround and not a solution. Can you please confirm that our request has been forwarded to Development for consideration?

To clarify:

  • In templates, we should be able to assign tasks
  • Those assigned tasks should not show up in My Tasks until the template has been turned into an active project.

Thank you so much.

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Hi @Christina_Dunn_Singh - We appreciate your and the groupā€™s feedback here. This thread has been moved to the #productfeedback thread here in the Community and the request is being taken into consideration. Thanks!

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Work aroundā€™s are not a solution. Pretty sure in all software programs the term ā€œtemplateā€ is just that. Somewhere to start a project from but not an actual project itself. The template tool was the main reason we upgraded but after loosing hours of work cleaning up duplicated tasks we have abandoned them and like Asana a little less. I really see no benefit in Asanaā€™s version of a template.

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The hack sort of defeats the purpose of having a template. The ā€œtemplateā€ functionality doesnā€™t seem to do anything that couldnā€™t be done by saving a project with the name ā€œTemplateā€, which we used to do. I was very excited to see Template functionality added as I (wrongfully) assumed this was just the problem it was intended to solve! I canā€™t tell that there is any difference between a template and a project. :frowning:

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Please do consider it. A template is only useful if, as @Antony_OBrien and @Jan_Hanson mentioned, it does something different than just copying an older project. The word ā€œtemplateā€ should involve ā€œbeing ready to be used to create tasks but not actually existing as tasks to be done until you use itā€, otherwise it is not a template, it is just a project you leave there to be copied when you need. Having everlasting incomplete tasks on ā€œmy tasksā€, even if they are collapsed, defeat the purpose. Project templates are important, we need them, but this problem does not let us use them.

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Hello there, is there any update on this issue? I have same problem and now i want to create some templates, but i have same issue.

Thanks.

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The workaround of moving ā€˜template tasksā€™ to ā€œlaterā€ to avoid the problem of people having My Tasks cluttered with non-tasks from templates doesnā€™t work well for us because

  1. we need to group our My Tasks lists by project names, not by Now, Later, or other time-bound instances, and 2) inevitably, even if you know that someting is a template task, you click it complete to get it off your list. (Thereā€™s nothing so satisfying as having a shorter task list!) But then that task is set to complete in the template and gets created as such the next time the template is used to create a task.
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A year later and still not being addressed or acknowledged. Disappointing.

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Agreed Daniel - we use templates extensively and having them clutter our tasks makes Asana difficult. Weā€™re using duct tape solutions to get around it.

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Has there been any update on this? Iā€™m trying to advocate for using Asana exclusively; however, being assigned a templated task in our my tasks before they are real actionable items makes the template feature completely useless to us. What update can you give us?

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Im using Instagantt to create timelines on templates in my account. The templates show in the project list as well. With that said, since the template has preassigned people attached to certain tasks, the template timeline and responsibilities show up in the ā€œdaily task listā€ even tho they are for a template, and not a real project.

Is there a way to omit template timelines from Task view?

Hi,

This is something people have been complaining a lot in the community. @Marie will be able to merge your thread with the existing one so you can vote on it!

Bastien

1 Like

Thanks @Bastien_Siebman! @Greg_George we already have a thread on this topic, so Iā€™ve gone ahead and merged your post with Project Template assigned tasks show up in My Tasks automatically. Feel free to had your vote at the top of this main thread! :slight_smile: