🎥 An action drop-down in Asana: a game changer for automation

[Bastien_Siebman]

Here’s the trick that had the biggest impact on our productivity in Asana: an action drop-down, using a custom field and rules!

An action drop-down in Asana: a game changer for automation

The « action » dropdown menu is a cool trick you can use in a lot of different situations!

What do you think?

[David_Shackelford]

Super creative, @Bastien_Siebman! Thanks for sharing this, love how you’re enabling the team to take complex actions right from the task list.

[Kelvin_Ong]

Love it!

Just created an “Action” field and set rules to snooze tasks for 1, 3 and 7 days.

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Kelvin_Ong amazing isn’t it? You should also clear the action dropdown as an 3rd action.

[Kelvin_Ong]

Good shout! How can I clear the Action dropdown though? I cannot find the rule to set it…

Edit: I found it! Just have to “Clear Action” in the same dropdown as “Set Action”. Thanks!

[JoshPalmeri]

Genius! Love automation. Thanks for sharing!

[Brenton_Oldman]

@Bastien_Siebman this is great! What level of Asana are you using? we are debating upgrading to the next level to enable this level of rules (i believe) we currently automate a lot using zapier, but this would really benefit our automation process.

[Bastien_Siebman]

We are on Business. I’ll reach out by DM to discuss your upgrade!

[Melanie_Landry]

Great video! Only problem is you need business to do it. I’m still trying to convince my VP it’s worth it…

[Eric_Crowell]

@Bastien_Siebman Thank you, thank you, thank you for this video! We are new to Asana and I have created a couple of projects that manage processes, but was struggling with how to keep everything in line. The Action drop down is ABSOLUTELY a game changer! I have updated my processes and moved the Action field into the very first column – and then wrote automation rules – Viola! Instant organization and time savings! Thank you so much for sharing this with the community!

[Bastien_Siebman]

Thanks for your kind words, it is a game changer isn’t it?
It is crazy to see you can actually “invent” stuff by just using existing features in a tool

[Liz_Edwards]

@Bastien_Siebman thanks very much for sharing this video. In the background, it appears that you have created a view for your team’s financial data. Can you use these fields to build a financial forecast for your company/team? And if so, can you advise on how you would go about doing so? Thanks in advance!

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Liz_Edwards indeed, we use Asana as a full-CRM, also managing invoices and quotes. Each invoice is a task, each quote is a task, with a bunch of custom fields, allowing us to do financial forecast. We are an Asana consulting agency so we try to go as far as possible with Asana. It requires some custom dev, but all in all it works well

[Liz_Edwards]

@Bastien_Siebman thank you for confirming. Are there any online tutorials/resources available that shows how a company/team can build such a forecast from the ground up?

[Bastien_Siebman]

Not that I know of. We have a plan to document how we use Asana across the board but this is not yet available.

[Nathan_Van_Prooyen]

@Bastien_Siebman - What a great tip. Now I’m trying to think of all the ways we could use this To date, all of our workflows are built on other triggers (like a section change), but I can see this being very, very useful. Thank you!

[Liz_Edwards]

@Bastien_Siebman thanks. Are there any SME on your team that I could reach out to/coordinate with in order to work through standing up our team’s forecast?

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Nathan_Van_Prooyen

To date, all of our workflows are built on other triggers (like a section change), but I can see this being very, very useful.

We don’t always use an action dropdown but we do very often

@Liz_Edwards

Are there any SME on your team that I could reach out to/coordinate with in order to work through standing up our team’s forecast?

I am not sure what SME stands for here but you can email me bastien@ido-clarity.com to discuss your case

[Brock_Taylor]

SME = Subject Matter Expert

[FenwayJohnny]

I really love this!! Will definitely place in my tool belt!

This prompts a question I have a lot when building out workflows in Asana… and it becomes an even more important question when you have multiple actions being triggerred automatically…

How do you revert all the actions taken if someone chooses the wrong dropdown item accidentally?

Lets use your example here.

You (the designer of the workflow) may understand all the actions happening and can manually remove comments, status updates.

But lets say you have a team member who is less Asana-inclined and only interacts with the software on a surface level. They fat finger a trigger and now your task has done all sorts of things…

Is there any way to “undo” that sequence of events?