Asana wish list: Rules

I’d really like to see options in rules. It seems like everytime I go to create a rule, it doesn’t have the functionality. Some things I’ve tried to do, but cant, that I’m hoping you’ll either tell me I actually can or that the feature is coming soon:

-Trigger an action based on the due date approaching for a SUBtask
-Have rules apply to more than just the first layer of subtasks
-Have an action trigger when a task is assigned to anybody (not just a specific person), like when it gets assigned at all, create a task in another project
-When a task gets ‘moved’ to another project by a rule in this project, give me the option to assign attributes for task that are columns in the project it’s being moved to, not just this project.
-When a task gets added to this project, depending on the project it came from, set one of the attributes to a certain value based on that
-Allow some rules to apply to subtasks when due date is approaching (don’t grey it out when a rule is for tasks and subtasks
-Allow triggering of a task based on any value assigned to one of the columns (e.g. a due date set) rather than just being able to trigger on a certain value or approaching due date.
-If statements in rules (or at least being able to have the rules trigger in an order that allows this)
-Have a button that triggers the rules in the project, not just when some status changes. Have the option to have rules apply to a task that IS overdue, for example, not just when it BECOMES overdue.

A few other things I really, really want Asana to do to make it much more user-friendly:
-Allow expansion to see any subtasks at any of the levels in list view, calendar, timeline, etc
-Have the option for a task or subtask to inherit values or calculate values based on its corresponding task or subtask. For example, a quantitative field in the subtasks could be summed for the overall task or some other calculation. That would make the charts much more useful, as right now, I either have to manually assign a task a value (cost, for example) manually calculated from its subtasks (which then doubles it in the SUM), or else only have values in the subtasks which makes them invisible when not expanded or in many of the charts. Another example is due dates. The due date for a task should have the option to update automatically based on the earliest start date of its subtasks and the latest due date of its subtasks.

Those are the headaches I’m having in Asana, currently. I’m trying to move all 30 of my projects into it and convince my team to use it, but with these limitations, many of them find it more cumbersome and not worth the extra effort. These features would really, really help.

Thanks,
Scott

Hi Scott and welcome to the forum,

I moved your post to a new topic as it contains a much broader set of subjects than just variables in rules.

We like to try and keep any given forum topic to one subject, otherwise it makes it harder to have substantive discussions and keep things straight. Your post has I think 11 bullet points, and each one deserves its own discussion!

Having said that, I will try to cover the ground here. If you want further discussion on any of these, please start a separate topic for it - thanks!

Not currently possible; rules can’t be triggered by changes to other tasks (well, aside from the “No longer blocked” trigger, which I guess is an exception).

Not possible in Asana natively. Possible via the rules in our Flowsana integration which work at any subtask level.

Not possible in Asana natively. Possible via our Flowsana integration which has a “Task is assigned to anyone” rule trigger condition.

Rules are strictly project-specific so you would have to create a rule in that other project to set attributes on the task once it lands there.

Not currently possible. A cool idea IMO, I haven’t seen this request before that I can recall.

Requested here; you can add your vote!

Not sure I follow here - there’s already a “due date set” trigger. Perhaps you mean a trigger that would fire if any date is set in a custom date field? That’s not currently possible. if that’s what you’re asking about/wanting.

Not sure what this means, sorry. (I can make some guesses but that’s not very useful…)

Requested here; you can add your vote!

Requested here and here; you can add your vote!

That’s a broad topic. There are some calculations currently available in parts of Asana, and there are some forum threads requesting other types of calculations.

One final comment…

Asana doesn’t publish a public roadmap or comment on unreleased features, so it’s not possible to know if something is coming until it’s announced.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: The ability to hide Custom Fields applied to a task that don’t belong to the project in which the task is being viewed