Too many notifications on Android

My team are complaining that they get too many notifications from Asana on Tasks they own. One user complained that I made 10 modifications in a row to a task assigned to them (eg changing tags, description, moving to another project etc) and they received 10x notifications, I assume they meant on their phone not the inbox. I thought Asana would be smart enough notify the phone once on the first change and then to amalgamate the notices in the Inbox and only notify again after a sensible delay or after acknowledgement of the first notification.? What can be done about notification overload ?

@Marty_Potter has your team updated their notification settings on Android? Notifications are turned on by default, but they’re very easily customizable. I suggest that you share this article with your team and advise them to update their notification settings Getting Started with the Asana Android App | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

I think the settings are ok, but the frequency of notifications for “Receive updates on items you are following” is their issue.

To quote the user: yesterday i recieved 10 notifications in row, because you altered my visability on task, 10x in a row and Asana notified me for all of them

I remember making adjustments to the same few tasks, like adding tags, formatting titles and descriptions etc but not on 10 distinct tasks. I will definitely try and get more info though.

From my experience, people comment on my assigned task, then immediately make another comment with something they forgot. I’ll get a notification each time and it’s not necessary so close together for the same person.

I would prefer to have just 1 Android notification to let me know my attention is needed. Subsequent Asana notifications become “inbox only” until the Android notification is acknowledged, then Android notification is allowed again. In other words, notification just gets my attention. I’ll jump into the inbox for more as the notification has little info anyway.

On a side issue, I would love to see Android notifications have “Quiet Times” setting. Often I have been woken in the middle of the night by a flood of notifications. I am on call so I can’t turn the phone to silent. I’ve resulted in having to turn off the Asana sound and vibrate setting permanently as I don’t need the urgency.

Anyway, just my 2 cents :slight_smile:

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I completely understand, Marty. I’ll send your feedback along and link specifically to your comments here. :slight_smile:

I think you’ll enjoy reading this thread where we discuss Asana’s philosophy behind our notification settings. Why add task creation notifications to all project members by default? - #5 by Nicola

Thanks for forwarding my feedback. I’ve had a chat to my user and it seems they were actually referring to Email Notifications and not Android. My own feedback comments still stand though :wink:

Their issue was with the inclusion of the Task’s Audit Trail (or at least that’s what I call it since the Guides don’t seem to refer to it). They were getting an email Notification, then reading every line of the Audit Trail on the assumption it was all relevant to the reason of the Notification! It included around 10 events in one Notification and the user felt this was excessive for them to be notified of.

I assured them they weren’t expected to analyze every line of the Audit, just the notification itself, and the Audit is there for reference only and are available in the Task.

However I can certainly understand why a non-tech savvy user would make this connection. My thoughts are that maybe email Notifications should either:

  • Not include the Audit, or make it much more distinct from the Notification text (ie, smaller, or more grey or more separate)
  • Have an option to include or exclude the Audits in email Notifications as part of the user’s global preferences
  • Only include Audit in Notifications for full members, not guests
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This is why I turned off the notification email. I receive so much mails. So, I just check them directly in my Asana inbox.

Also, I think they are called Stories :slight_smile: Or at least based on the API guide:
Build an app with Asana.

In the Asana guide, I saw this: Adding comments & attachments to tasks | Product guide • Asana Product Guide.

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Thanks @LenSantos, couldn’t find that no matter how hard I searched! I’m an IT guy, grew up calling it an Audit Log :smiley:

I agree, first thing I did was turn off email Notifications since I log on daily and have the Android app. I’ve tried to encourage new users to do the same.

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Haha. I do understand why you call it Audit Log. :smile: We do annual audits, and having a log to show the transition from creation to completion really helps!

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+1! I turned off my email notifications after one week. If we’re all going to be hearting, commenting, and creating things in Asana anyway, we may as well keep to our Asana inbox rather than going back and forth between email and Asana. I hardly ever look at my email now, actually!

Noting your feedback about email threads, Marty.

Hi everyone! I’m using the tasks feature to get prospective clients involved with completing the tasks we assign to them. Of course I don’t want to send them a deluge of emails when they are still a prospect and we are still trying to win their business. Does anyone know if I as an administrator of a team / project can set the notification settings for my team members?

@Benjamin_Sherry While you won’t be able to impersonate a user and change their settings, you can certainly update notification settings for users in projects. You can learn more about member notification settings in the Guide article here.

I suggest that you start by changing member notification settings at the project level. I’d also empower your teammates and clients to do the same for any projects they belong to. :slight_smile:

Thank you! Editing the member notifications is exactly the fix I needed!

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Happy to help, @Benjamin_Sherry ! :smiley:

I am in favor of adding a “Quiet Times” feature to Asana as well.

Specifically, I would like to see the ability to set working hours, per user, where notifications are sent via email and/or push notification. Outside of those hours, notifications go to the Inbox only.

Many of our users (myself included) shy away from using Asana at night or on weekends for fear of unnecessarily bothering their teammates with notifications. Adding “Quiet times” would eliminate this and make us more productive Asana users.

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