Turning a project into a task

Is it possible to turn a project into a task?

If it is possible, it could be used as a workaround for turning tasks into templates. I’d like to have one project that’s home to several intricate tasks. All of these tasks would be the same format(template) but populated with different information.

If this doesn’t require a new feature it would be great to hear form the community how I do this.

Thank you

Hi @Ben_Schaefer and welcome,

I’m not sure if I understand what you’re after; could you explain the actual goal specifically?

“Turning a project into a task” to me means creating a parent task in the project, selecting it, and dragging (without changing the selection) each other task and dropping within that selected task to become, in order, a subtask of it.

“Workaround for turning tasks into templates:” Not sure what you mean. Although the approach is different than for projects (templates), you can Duplicate tasks which essentially lets any task be a sort of template task.

“I’d like to have one project that’s home to several intricate tasks:” To me, that’s what a project is, so I’m missing something!

I asked more questions than I answered, but I still hope that may help somewhat,

Larry

Hi Larry and thank you.

In our industry we have to track incidents - primarily referring to equipment damage and the safety of our employees. If an employee gets injured on the job and requires stitches, etc.

The reporting for these incidents are detailed and Asana helps us to make sure everything is looked after, followed up, and info centralized. I’ve created a project template that we use for each incident to ensure proper awareness, consistency, following regulations, etc - all the things Asana is great at.

Rather than create a project for every incident, I’d prefer to have one project that houses all the incidents we may have in a year. But, I’ve been unable to discover how we can use the project template already created and push that into a task/subtask template.

I see now from your earlier response that I can create a task and duplicate that for each new incident. Looks like you’ve solved my problem, I will need to create a new task based on my project template and I should be good to go.

Maybe you know of something else I can do to save a bit of time but you’ve already been very helpful. Thank you

Thanks, @Ben_Schaefer, for the details, and that makes good sense.

I’m glad you see a path forward, and I don’t think I’d change the recommendation having heard your added details.

But here are a couple of extras:

It’s nice having all these in one project as you’re targeting; in that event, having a good set of custom fields can help you to get different sort (actually grouping) views of your incidents because each custom fields becomes an option in the list view’s Sort menu.

Because you have several different “template tasks types” within this project, maybe these will all share some custom fields, but some task templates might add their own. For for shared ones, they’re just custom fields added to the incident project. For the non-shared ones, you could make a project for each template type and multi-home each incident to the appropriate template type project (in addition to it being a member of the incident project). This would allow you to define template-type-specific custom fields in each of these other projects; the incident will inherit shared custom fields from the incident project, and also inherit the unique template-specific custom fields from the template project. That might be desirable.

Larry