To Subtask or not to Subtask

I would upvote the heck out of this suggestion.

Subtasks work beautifully on Trello board cards. I had high hopes for the same in Asana once they launched boards but was left disappointed. A sub task on a card is often assigned to a different person than the owner of the parent task. The limitation in Asana is that the card face only shows the owner of the parent task. Please Asana, show ALL assignees on the card face to make triaging of work across teams more efficient.

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Hi @Stephanie_Connolly you can add the Sub Task to the board by adding the Parent Project to the sub task using tab+p then adding the parent project.
Hope that helps.

Jason.

I’m a project manager at an ad agency, introducing Asana to my team… and subtasks has definitely been the most confusing thing. However, I do find them necessary for certain aspects of our work.

Specifically, when we are routing items for review through different people, we use subtasks. The parent task of “internal review” is assigned to the PM, and all the information & background about the piece being reviewed is set up in that parent task’s description. Then the routing to copy, art, proofreading, etc, is done as subtasks.

By clicking on the parent task, everyone can see the status of the route, and the PM maintains responsibility for making sure it’s completed.

There are definitely pros/cons to subtasks, but I think a few tweaks would improve them greatly:

First, I would like to see an indication in the project list view that a task has subtasks. Even better, would be a toggle to show those subtasks indented and below parent – as is done in the print view.

Second, I would like to be able to add the project’s custom fields to subtasks. I don’t really understand why this isn’t part of the functionality right now – it really hobbles the usefulness of custom fields for us.

Third, the UI should be improved for showing the relationship between subtask and its parent. Not as critical, because over time we’ve just learned where the parent task link is, but for new users it’s very confusing, especially when landing on a task directly from an email or a My Tasks link.

Great discussion – I hope to see more here.

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Thanks for the response @Jason_Woods. My comment here re: subtasks may have have been unclear, so let me try again.

In the context of managing an Asana Board project, each card on the board represents a parent task. Let’s say that I have a parent task assigned to Person A, then subtasks on that parent task that are assigned to Person B and C. The issue is that the card face on the Board shows ONLY Person A as an assignee. This is misleading and hard to manage, particularly when you have multiple parent task cards with multiple subtasks across a team of 3 or more on the same Board. All cards “appear” to have only 1 assignee, when in fact, there are multiple assignees.

Trello shows ALL assignees on the card face to facilitate triaging at a glance. Otherwise, with Asana, you have to drill into each card to get a holistic view of ALL assignees involved. I’m hopeful Asana will rectify this because I feel their recently released Board project view is far more useful than task lists. But this particular issue is a real limitation for my organization.

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Hopping on a super old thread here but I’ve found a subtask feature not mentioned here helpful so I thought I would share.

If you create a Task Template with subtasks that are have been added to additional projects (some with headers) it will automatically keep those projects when copied and sort them by header. I’ve set this up to have a client project view with the master task, a single project with an overview of master and subtasks for all clients, as well as projects for each platform we use with just the relevant subtasks from each client. I’ve included some screenshots in the below comment to show what I mean. For reoccurring tasks I think creating a task template has helped a lot on cutting down how much info needs to be entered - getting it set up took a minute but now everything happens automatically. I still have some subtask challenges but I found that solved quite a few of my problems.

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Hi there,
In favor of sub-tasks.

Our company is dealing mainly as a public sector supplier. We are attending several public tenders every week.
We have a Project called tenders and we put each tender as a task and every process for the the tender as a sub-task. 90% of the tenders have the same processes/sub-tasks. So we have a Template Task that we copy every time we have a new tender.
We do not use Projects for tenders because we have more than 30 tenders running and they get lost in “More projects…”

It would be nice though to be able to use features of tasks on sub-tasks like:

  • Dependencies
  • Custom fields
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That’s great, @Giorgos_Noulikas. And I agree 100% that’s a perfect use of subtasks, just like the original post said:

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I’ve read this thread a few times but I still can’t wrap my head around why one would or would not use subtasks. Given the limitation (feature?) of subtasks not inheriting things from its parent task, I’m not sure why anyone would use subtasks. Does anyone have a guide on how to use subtasks in a meaningful way?

For us, currently on Basecamp but wanting to move to Asana, we use Basecamp milestones as our client deliverables and Basecamp todo lists/todo items as internal tasks to accomplish each milestone/deliverable.

I can get behind Asana’s concept of tasks only (no milestones), and when I discovered subtasks I had a clear path to how to somewhat duplicate our Basecamp structure. Now that I understand subtasks more fully, I’m back to thinking Asana cannot work for us. What I had hoped was…

Project A

  • Task 1: client deliverable with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 1: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 2: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 3: internal task with due date and assignee
  • Task 2: client deliverable with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 4: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 5: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 6: internal task with due date and assignee
    Project B
  • Task 1: client deliverable with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 1: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 2: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 3: internal task with due date and assignee
  • Task 2: client deliverable with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 4: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 5: internal task with due date and assignee
    – Subtask 6: internal task with due date and assignee

Any insight would be most appreciated!

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Hi @cfen, I’ve helped a lot of businesses switch over to Asana. There aren’t cut and dry right and wrong ways to use subtasks. I think the best use for them is with “Task Templates” that systematize smaller workflows (like creating a new blog post or marketing email, for example).

For the example you listed, I think you could use Sections for the client deliverable and tasks for the steps to make it happen.

Todd
projectmanagementpros.com

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The only reason I’m using the subtasks is for nesting, Putting everything in the main project with each line item shown is too overwhelming even with sections.
Asana please make sections collapsable but then be sure the collapsed tasks under a section will still show up on “task sort by project” ect…

But then you might say well just divide up the tasks into separate projects so you don’t have 100 line items in a project. Well good in theory, but then I have a long list of projects under a main project so would need to nest projects…

Asana please just work on adding a nesting function and stop with all the work arounds… :slight_smile:

And please don’t misunderstand me, I know it’s not so easy to just implement a feature and it takes time. All I’m asking is that you decide this should be done and consider making this a priority,
Thanks

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@Craig_Fifer do you use some sort of time tracking on subtasks? Like harvest or toggl. If so: how do you make sure time entries are associated with the correct project?

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Repeating my comment here (from the thread regarding a tree view of tasks/subtasks):

Definitely need this! My teams needs 3 levels of organization, forcing us to use subtask. I hate that subtasks don’t associate with the parent task or project. And when you do “assign” the subtask to a project (so it stays organized in your task list), it repeats the subtask by creating a new task in the project that you then have to reposition under the correct parent. I do love the Instagantt interface…just need that to be mimicked in my Asana task list!

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Exactly - those 2 simple changes will definitely increase the usefulness of subtasks - they will became priceless feature imho

This is exactly what I’ve been hoping was possible. Is there a feature request anywhere for the second point?

Don’t allow a task with incomplete subtasks to be completed, while providing a meaningful error message.

I’d like to go lay down some votes if there is…

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100% agree with this as well!

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Someone already created a Product Feedback topic that included this. It received several votes and was closed being over 6 months old.

You can already add subtasks to the project which shows up alongside regular tasks. Also, any subtask assigned to a person will show up in their my task view. This allows you to only show pertinent subtasks and not all in project views.

You could take this a step further and create a section titled the overall task and add all the subtasks to the project, then moved to that section. This would allow you to use the functionality of the main task list while keeping them subtasks, including custom fields, multi task assigning, etc

At some point though, you have to question your overall structure and see if your utilizing teams/projects/sections/tasks/subtasks appropriately. I’ve found that when I run into a wall with Asana… there is usually a better more elegant way of doing it that doesn’t involve a million subtasks…

If your main problem is that employees don’t know they have subtasks assigned to them… because they only looked at the top level task… that’s an employee training issue. To make it easier on them, you could have a pseudo “tag” for each task that has subtasks like [ST] at the start of a task name containing subtasks?

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In order for subtasks to be useful they need to “complete” when the main task is completed!!

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Yeah, I keep finding orphan subtasks that were never completed by the team and then clicking to see it was a subtask and the parent was completed. You shouldn’t be able to complete a parent task w/o subtasks completed or it should auto-mark all those sub-tasks completed. Super messy we are finding now.

Really wish more care was put into sub-tasks.

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