Don’t be a copy cat. Merge duplicate tasks instead.
When your entire team starts capturing tasks and communication in Asana, work becomes less scattered and coordination becomes more effortless. Adding tasks, figuring out what needs to be done next, sharing ideas, and communicating with your team can all happen pretty fast, and with all of this activity, it’s only a matter of time before someone adds a task that’s already in Asana. Maybe that someone will even be you – a month or a year later. To keep those copy cat tasks from sticking around, we’ve added the ability to “Merge Duplicate Tasks”, a new feature that locates and combines duplicate tasks.
This feature marks the end of having the same information in two places in Asana. Email doesn’t alert you if you forget about a thread from a few months back, documents don’t let you know that you are recreating information, and chat doesn’t tell you that other teammates have already answered the same question. But Asana does.
How do I merge duplicate tasks?
Asana now automatically detects when you add a task that already exists, like magic. When you create a new task with a similar name to another task in the project we’ll show you the name of the original task, in real-time. Just click the original task name to merge the two tasks.
You can also merge tasks after they’ve been created. Choose “Merge Duplicate Tasks” from the dropdown menu in the right “Task” pane. Either choose from one of the suggested matches, search for the task, or just paste in a link to the task.
When you merge two tasks, the tags, followers, and hearts from the duplicate task will be copied over to the original task and a link to the merged task will be added to the duplicate. Best of all, the people who were following the duplicate task will now get notifications about the merged task, so nothing gets lost.
And if you love keyboard shortcuts, you can merge duplicates without touching a mouse. Just Press Tab+Shift+D.
When is merging duplicate tasks most useful?
When multiple people brainstorm creative ideas:
Creating a project to record creative ideas is a great way to get everyone on your team involved. But, more than likely, the same ideas will come up multiple times. Now, everyone will know if they are entering an idea that already exists. In this case, just “heart” the original Task to show your support for the idea.
When teammates add referrals for an open position:
If you create a Project for “Marketing Candidate Referrals” that everyone can contribute to, two employees might recommend the same person. Luckily, Asana will now suggest the task containing an already referred applicant, so information like resumes and Linkedin profile links are not repeated.
When Engineering and Support teams manage Bug Tracking in Asana:
If there’s a bug, many people will likely notice and report it. Now, when you add duplicate bugs to a Project, Asana will detect that it already exists. Just add a heart to the original bug task to show that you also are reporting the same bug, rather than enter it twice.
Asana keeps your information and conversations organized and easy to find, and features like this help make Asana the best place to track all of your work. We’d love to hear how merging duplicate tasks might help your team – let us know in the comments!
Image credit: Copy Cat via The Next Web.
