I tried this but this only works one way, meaning only when a task is unblocked. But if another dependency (when I say dependency I am referring to the preceding tasks that this task is dependent on) is added to this task later or if one of its existing dependencies is marked Incomplete (which was marked complete before) than the custom field still remains “Open” which does not work.
I think this is a basic requirement that goes a long way in organizing our priorities especially when you have complex, inter project dependencies driven by multiple teams. I can understand and appreciate the rationale for enabling the “when task is not blocked” trigger but this is only helpful in one direction. When multiple teams are working on the same project together with extensive inter-dependency then it is also crucial for me to know when my task is blocked by someone in a different team creating a blocker. I mean how difficult would this be? you already have the not-blocked trigger where I am sure you are checking dependencies every time a task completion status changes. This is just the other way around. I am really surprised to see that folks have been asking for 3-4 years and no one is looking at this…
3 years with no update… As a fellow dev one can only wonder how hard it can be to add blocked detection for workflow…
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Unfortunately this seems to be a standard in the Asana community. There are MULTIPLE relatively simple workflow improvement requests that go 3 Years + without any attention. It’s unfortunate because it would really improve the tool to do some of this rather simple dev work!
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How do we still not have this?
Pretty wild to see this clearly asked for in 2021 and it still not be something that is live.
Just give us “When blocked status is changed” → “Check if task = is blocked OR is not blocked”
This cannot be more than a few lines of code and pushed to live after a single afternoon of work.
It seems kind of silly that this isn’t a trigger for rules that is live.
Simply add “When blocked status is changed” → “check if task = is blocked OR is not blocked”
Context: I am currently using the “task is no longer blocked” trigger to update the status of a review task when it’s corresponding draft task is marked as completed. This way, when the drafter has marked their task as done, the pre-assigned reviewer will have their task be unblocked and the status on their review task marked as “ready for review”.
However, if the drafting person accidentally hits the complete button on their on draft task and then unmarks it as complete, the corresponding review task will flip back to being blocked, but still have it’s “ready for review” tag applied.
There is currently no way to apply a trigger to a task based on if it becomes blocked, and that is a very easy update for the asana devs to implement, please add this.
Let’s play a game, shall we? It is called “show me in one sentence you never built an app used by millions of user”. Oh wait, you won already 
Joke aside, I’ll write an entire post about this, but not a single feature is “easy to develop” and “just takes a few minutes”. It has to go through design, implementation, test, localisation, deployment, documentation update, API… This feature alone would definitely cost a few thousands of dollars to do, how crazy that might sound.
I do agree this doesn’t seem like a technically difficult feature and I wish they would prioritise it asap. I just upvoted!
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Not quite sure where you’re pulling the quote of “just takes a few minutes from” but perhaps both of our posts are suffering from being a bit hyperbolic?
While I was certainly unrealistic with this being pushed live in a single day, I was not unrealistic in this being a small amount of actual code to write.
If you were maybe to put on your critical thinking cap you might notice that they already have several rules in place that operate almost identically to what I am suggesting that could certainly be used as a starting point. Your tone comes off as though this thread is requesting something totally brand new totally unmapped, and that is just not the case.
Not sure what your familiarity is with the current options they have for rules, but they absolutely would not have to even write any code from scratch to implement this, they could simply adapt existing logic between the check completion status trigger and the check if task is no longer blocked trigger.
With that I acknowledge that there are several steps and layers of updating, testing, and approval to move through, but I think it’s funny how contradictory your post comes off with you cutting so much slack due to it “not being easy to develop” and then coming around to “not technically difficult” feature.
Let’s play another game using some information and logic from your response shall we?
You claim this would cost a few thousand dollars to implement, which I agree with, lets take a look at this thread,
2.1k views on a thread that is 3 years old, lets assume half of those viewers are interested in this as a feature, lets say half of that chunk are all sitting in a seat being paid for on a subscription to Asana.
That’s 525 people, who are paying $11-$30 a month.
Using some napkin math, that means Asana will receive, on the low end, $6,000 this month from users interested in this feature.
If you want to extrapolate that over the course of 3 years, we are looking at around 200k in revenue from users who are interested in this feature.
I think the essence of my post boils down that 3 years is a kind of ridiculous amount of time to have this feature not be implemented.
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Please add the ability to set a condition in Asana Rules that checks if a task is currently blocked.
Current State: Currently, Asana only allows conditions that check whether a task is no longer blocked. However, there is no option to set rules based on a task being actively blocked.
Requested Change: Add a “Task is Blocked” condition option to the rule builder, enabling actions to trigger for tasks in a blocked state.
I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the purple Vote button.
Thanks,
Larry
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Echoing this being a useful feature! My org maintains a cross-team board of tasks, some of which are blocked by a big firm-wide effort. We have noted this dependency using the dependencies feature, but want to update other fields based on this as well, but cannot. Thanks!
Yes, we need it too! With larger project plans there is too much assigned tasks and “my tasks” section looks like hell. We need the ability to unassign task which become to blocked (we assign them by “when tasks is unblocked” what is present yet). Please let us breathe 