We have some exciting news that @Marie announced earlier that I wanted to specifically share with you all here!
Asana launched our newest feature called “Rules”- a feature that allows you to automate some of the more manual administrative work and upkeep needed to keep your projects manicured, current & up date.
Our Use Case
Our team has been using rules in tandem with forms, where new form submissions come in as a Task. We’ve set up a rule that automatically assigns the new task to the project’s owner. This has made my work instantly actionable with just one click into my “My Tasks”.
I’d love to learn how you think (or have seen) Asana’s rules help you in your nonprofit work.
-Michael
PS: Check out this great article below for more insight on what this launch means in our fight to curb time wasted on “work about work”
Premium user here… I was REALLY hoping to be able to use Rules to be able to Auto-Assign tasks to a pre-defined user based on the Action of when a Template was used. That would sure be a dream come true! Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be an option. Maybe in a later release…?
Hi @Angie_Gilbert
I can understand your frustration here, though I am excited that our team decided to ensure Premium users are able to make use of Rules and that it’s not a feature that is strictly available to Asana Business.
On that note, what workflows would auto-assign especially help you in your role and how would you use it? Are there ways you can leverage rules based on the 6 abilities you have access to now as a premium user?
To review, you’re currently able to perform the following predefined triggers and action pairs listed below:
• Task moved to a certain column / section → mark complete
• Marked complete → move task to a certain column / section
• {CF} changed → mark complete
• Marked complete → Set {CF}
• {CF} changed → move task to a certain column / section
• Task moved to a certain column / section → set {CF}
Dovetailing on Michael’s questions, can you describe in a bit more detail the scenario that you’re referencing here? Do you mean “when a new project is created from a template”, or “when a task is updated in a project that derived from a template”, or something else entirely?
Hi @Michael_A,
I have not yet been able to see how these particular Rules available to Premium will help our productivity as Premium subscribers. Completing the tasks is the least of our worries. It’s routing them to the correct people & projects based on the request that’s needed. We have established workflows within our area that we have tried to implement within our division using Asana. However, ensuring that every PERSON knows how to properly route their request through the myriad teams and projects is the part we’d most like to automate using rules. If the response to a custom field (or form field) is Value X–> then we’d like a rule to fire where we can define that “Person A” handles the request and the due date should be 7 days from today, for example.
We are not necessarily using sections in a way where I have been able figure out how to make the available rules work for us. I do appreciate the effort by Asana to offer some rules for Premium-- but I was hoping for some ability to customize and a bit more robust offering. Thanks.
Hi @Phil_Seeman, thanks for your inquiry. I was hoping to be able to have Rule-based assignment of tasks “when a new project is created from a template.” The catch being that we don’t want that template to already have assignees filled-in at the task level-- because of the issue where template tasks appear in people’s My Tasks as if they are ready for completion. We need to be able to keep the tasks within the templates UNASSIGNED. I was hoping to solve this issue using rules.
This limitation to using Asana templates continues to come up in meetings here and really limits user buy-in for us for some of the projects we have built. It remains a source of frustration at my org. I’m hopeful one day a resolution will be forthcoming. Thanks, Angie
Hi - old topic but wanted to add some thought here. I’ve used the rule to trigger the start date on the dependent task. Unfortunately, rules are project based and not task based so the rule was created to set the date to 1 day after and applies across the project. What would be nice is the ability to apply a rule such as this across the project but have the ability to apply a duration to the successor task’s date.
I also agree a rule would be nice to create a value lookup to reference the assignee. For example if I want to assign to team “Legal” to tasks make the assignee Elmer Fudd. This way when the project is created from the template it will assign Elmer to all legal related tasks. The key here is to be able to change the assignee value at the template level before copying to a project.
