Subtasks Cheat Sheet: What you need to know

Over the years, Asana has made a number of subtasks-related improvements throughout the app (e.g., in projects, advanced search, reporting/dashboards, and rules), and perhaps more will come. But as of right now, here’s what I think you need to know to be successful–a cheat sheet for subtasks.

Recommended Uses for Subtasks

• Break down tasks into component parts and optionally assign and home to other projects

• Simplify and declutter the main Tasks List by subordinating work to subtasks where appropriate

• Reduce the number of projects by using a task with subtasks instead of a project with tasks; a good example is to use a single project for a recurring staff meeting housing each meeting recurrence as a task with subtasks for action items, agenda, or both
  

• Group related subtasks in Subsections, an additional level of hierarchy (see Subsections below)
  

• Approval-type tasks (Business/Enterprise plans) work best as subtasks (because they narrowly represent solely the act of approval, not the underlying task itself) and thus also enable multiple approvers using approval subtasks for each
  

• The Assign Duplicates feature works best using subtasks for the multiple people assignments allowing the parent task to contain the single-sourced information; see also Assign multiple assignees on one task - #198 by lpb

• Complex workflows often require the use of subtasks (with metadata); many organizations of all stripes, including Asana, make wide use of subtasks

• Use subtasks wherever appropriate, but see caveats below; Reject advice like “Never use subtasks” or “Never more than n subtasks”

Did You Know?

• Add to project (Tab+P), which is unfortunately hidden except for the subtask’s “. . .” menu, allows you to home/multi-home a subtask into one or more project(s) where it appears as a top-level task

  • An often-used workaround (see Caveats below re features that don’t work with subtasks) is to use this tactic to home a subtask back into the parent task’s project, specifically in a Hidden Subtasks section which is kept collapsed and out of the way as the last section

• Subsections (Tab+N while your mouse cursor is anywhere in the Task Detail pane), which are unfortunately completely undiscoverable in the user interface, permit grouping subtasks visually, perhaps by a task’s workflow phases, like Draft, Finalize, and Publish

• A rule (Business/Enterprise plans) can mark a parent task complete (or many other actions) once all its subtasks are complete

• You can easily navigate subtasks in unsorted List Views (using expand/collapse arrows to the left of the task title)
  

• You can even easily see sub-subtasks titles, completion state, assignee, and due date (scroll down in the right-side Task Detail pane)
  

Caveats

• A subtask is not automatically a member of the parent task’s project; e.g., a subtask assigned to you will appear in your My Tasks not showing a project name; also, Calendar, Timeline, and Workload only work with top-level tasks (Enterprise plan Universal Workload is ok)
  • Consider using the Hidden Subtasks workaround above
  • Since both the subtask and its parent task names appear (as Subtask name < Parent task name), include contextual info in the parent task name to disambiguate otherwise similar subtasks like Draft outline < 2024 Year-End Report
• Expand/collapse arrows in List View Main tasks list are unavailable if sorted and for certain filters
• Prototype your workflow design against all use cases to make sure you’ve understood these caveats before implementation
• Generally limit hierarchy to Top-level task > Subtask > Sub-subtask, and for Sub-subtasks only utilize you can easily see in the Subtask’s Task Detail pane: Title, assignee, due date, and completion state, and thus avoid having to “pogo stick” into and out of subtasks
  • Consider only using Top-level task > Subtask (eliminate use of Sub-subtasks) if you’re not using List View or if it is sorted/filtered in a way that won’t offer expand/collapse arrows

I hope this subtasks solution summary is helpful. What did I leave out that can enable others be successful with subtasks?

Thanks,

Larry

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