Automatic Reminder for Overdue Tasks

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Hi all - was wondering if anyone had a workaround for creating auto-reminders for Team Members that have an overdue task.

User case: Team Member has not clicked Complete on a task and therefore it is overdue. I want them to get an automatic notification that this task is past its due date - instead of me having to do it :slight_smile:

Any help appreciated!

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Hi @Jessica_Birenz! Are your team members using My Tasks? When a task is overdue the date appears in red at the top of their My Tasks list. This acts as a notification that the task is overdue. I suggest that if your team isn’t already in a habit of using My Tasks, they begin doing so. My Tasks lets us see all our work in one easy place :slight_smile:

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I’d like to second this suggestion. In an ideal world, everyone would check their “My tasks” routinely as Alexis suggestions. But, two things:

  1. We have guest users who own tasks but are only casual Asana users. I’d like them to be reminded via email and directed back to Asana.
  2. If you have your “My Tasks” sorted by “None” (as I do) rather than “Due Date”, your overdue tasks do not appear at the top of the list unless they are flagged to be worked on “Today”. I have to do a check every so often to re-sort my tasks by Due Date to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks, but not everyone on the team is as diligent. I prefer “None” as my default view so that I can re-organize my daily tasks in priority order, which is not possible when sorted by Due Date.

In the meantime, we have written a simple Python script to extract overdue scripts and email the list to the owner. The downside (aside from the additional time to write and maintain the script) is that it runs under my user account so only notifies people on projects I’m also on, and doesn’t “see” tasks they haven’t tagged to a project.

Anything that can help keep casual users on task (and avoiding my clunky Python workaround) would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Chris

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cc @paulminors for his advice :slight_smile:

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Hm, I tried to see if you could automate something with Zapier, but I don’t think this would be possible.

My only other thoughts are to create a report, but I suspect people wouldn’t check this either.

Or you could set up a daily task to repeat reminding people to check for overdue tasks.

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I’ll +1 the reminders for overdue tasks. I’d even go as far as wanting a daily email reminder for this.

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+1 I also need email reminders for this.

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+1. Also this should be converted to a feature request so we can have the Vote button instead of +1-ing.

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Done, @Jacob_Dick. Vote away!

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+1 to the automation emails

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Hello Chris. Would you be able to share the Python script

TIA

Srivatsan

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@Srivatsan_Padmanabha - I took a look at the script and it is pretty terrible :). It was written for internal use and is littered with hardcoded things like customer email domains (to prevent accidentally emailing guest users and harassing them with their overdue list). So, it would take some work to even make it shareable to remove customer info. I don’t think I’ll have the time to do that in the foreseeable future, but let me know if you would still find this useful in the next month or so and I’ll see what I can do.

Thanks,
Chris

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Thanks Chris

Appreciate the response. Yes, its a valuable tool for not just me but for many people. I could see so many people with the same requirement :slight_smile:

Whenever possible and it would be a great help.

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So did this request make it onto a features list somewhere?? Any update?

Being able to remind a user is fundamental…and not just visually. An email reminder is exactly what i’m looking for as a new user to Asana.

Cheers,
Andrew.

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Would love this as well please

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I would love to have this feature added to the “rules feature” you could have a the trigger be past due task and the action create a comment

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Hey team,

I believe a ton of people (especially PMs / Account Managers / Leads / Founders / etc.) would benefit tremendously if you enable a feature where we can get a mail notification if someone’s task deadline is missed. I understand you can go and do that person by person and see their tasks and thus understand if something is late but… that’s not productive at all.

Let me know if I can add something more to help in here.

Boris

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Hi @Boris_Hrsitov welcome to community.

I personally wouldn’t like an email, as that would mean I would need to go from Asana to email and back.

As a workaround have you looked at doing an advanced search based on Team/Project and using DueDate. You could then save that report and create a reoccurring task with that report.

Regards

Jason.

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Wait so… (first - thanks for writing)

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image799Ă—670 26.4 KB

On a team level I see this - so if I do incomplete but then put a specific date and I get if there are some tasks but how do you push it so that it can regenerate that report for each and every new day? I think I am missing the automation bit here (if it’s possible at all?)

Boris

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Hi @Boris_Hrsitov, welcome to the Community Forum and thanks for reaching out!

We have an existing product feedback category about this topic. I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the main thread: Automatic Reminder for Overdue Tasks. I also recommend you checking all the information shared in the thread!