Automating Daily Reporting Task

I’m hoping someone can advise on the best integration to do the following…

Every Sunday morning create a task for each weekday with the date at the beginning of the task title. For instance:
Task 1: Jan 7 - Example Task
Task 2: Jan 8 - Example Task
Task 3: Jan 9 - Example Task
Task 4: Jan 10 - Example Task
Task 5: Jan 11 - Example Task

I will also need to create subtasks for each task but those don’t need to be dynamic. In fact, these tasks will be identical other than the date.

How do I do this in Zapier? Or is there a better integration for this example?

Zapier would be pretty handy indeed but I don’t know how to trigger Zapier on a given date. @paulminors any idea?

Yes, I this should be possible.

I’d start with the “Schedule” trigger to run the zap every Sunday.

Then, in the action step where you create the task, you’ll need to use a date formatted field to calculate today’s date + 1d (+1 day) to calculate the Monday date. e.g. {{zap_meta_human_now}} +1d Then you’d use +2d for Tuesday and so on. You can read more about Zapier dates here.

You can then add subtasks later as a additional actions and add to the previously created tasks by referencing the task ID’s.

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Thanks @paulminors! This sounds like the right solution. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about Zapier. Can you recommend any training/etc to help me implement this?

Sorry, I don’t know of any specific training per se. Although I’m sure there will be plenty of advice on YouTube. Zapier is the kind of tool that I find is best learned by experimenting with it. The good news is that Zapier is relatively easy to use once you wrap your head around the basics. It works on a trigger/action system. So in your case, the trigger is a schedule that will initiate the Zap every Sunday. You’ll then need to set up multiple actions for the tasks that you want to create. This will require the “Starter” plan ($20/months) at the very least as you’ll need multi-step zaps (i.e. Zaps with multiple actions). Hope this helps! :slight_smile:

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I found this to be pretty helpful for learning Zapier.

@paulminors, it turns out date modifiers only work if you are inserting the time into a date/time field. So that doesn’t solve my problem of inserting the date into the task title for the coming week ahead. I’m working on a couple workarounds to that but if you have any other ideas I’d love to hear them! :slightly_smiling_face:

Perhaps try adding a “Formatter” step and you can do a date modification. So you would take today’s date, and add X days. Then you can use the output from this step in your task name.

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Thanks a bunch @paulminors! I’m getting closer :slight_smile:

For anyone else who might be interested in setting up something like this here’s what I’ve got so far…

  1. For the trigger use “Schedule by Zapier” and set it to run weekly on Sunday.
  2. Use the “Formatter” action step to “+1” from Sunday to Monday. More info here.
  3. Use an Asana action step to create a task. More info here

Now I just need to figure out how to add subtasks in Zapier and I should be good to go. Can anyone provide a little more detail on how to do that?

There is a “Create subtask” option. When you select the parent task you need to choose “Custom value” and specify the ID of the parent task you created in your previous step.