I recently ran our first project with Asana and I want to reuse its structure in future projects.
So I followed the instructions here:
where it describes how to copy the project, clean it up, turn it into a template and then create the new project, all good.
My question is what to do with the cleaned up ‘Template’ project after? I don’t want its activities appearing in users’ Inbox. Can I delete it? Or will that mean the Template won’t work in future?
Archiving doesn’t seem to do much, same with taking it private.
Is there an undocumented trick?
Hi @Matthew_Pritchard, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re asking what to do with the Project you worked on before clicking on “Save As A Template”, correct?
Unfortunately, if you delete that Project, you’ll also delete the Template. The benefit, however, is that you can continue to make changes or additions to that Project, and all future Template-created Projects will automatically inherit those additions.
For example, every time we have a new item to add to our Employee Onboarding Template, we’ll make changes to that Project, which ensures that every future Onboarding Project is up-to-date with those additions.
As you pointed out, however, tasks that are assigned to a user in the Template Project will show up in that user’s Inbox and My Tasks, even though it’s the Template and not an actual project. This is admittedly one of my biggest frustrations with Asana’s Template feature, but there are a few workarounds that can work:
Keep all Template Tasks unassigned.
Pros - You won’t clog up a user’s My Tasks with tasks they’re not actually expected to complete.
Cons - each time you create a new Project from the Template, you’ll have to assign each task, which in some ways defeats the purpose of a Template.
Educate users that Template tasks are not “real” tasks, and that they therefor don’t need to complete them. In My Tasks, users can mark a task as “Later”, which will move it to the bottom of My Tasks and out of the way.
Pros - When you create a new Project from the Template, each task will automatically already be assigned to the right user.
Cons - If you’re anything like me, you’ll still have some users confused about these tasks and/or you’ll get notifications that the Template tasks have been completed.
Thanks, @Drew_Shannon, you understood my question correctly.
Your answer was pretty much the conclusion I came to trawling through the message boards - so annoying.
Until Asana has some sensible archiving functionality or can screen out tasks from Templates, it would be helpful to add these steps to the Template creation guide.
I would advise you to add your votes to this other thread from our #productfeedback category. On my end, I’ll make sure to keep you posted as soon as I have some updates!
We have taken to using a custom field drop-down to show which team members are responsible for each task in the template project. When a project is built using the template, it only takes a few minutes to assign each task since you can see at a glance who is responsible for what.
