The situation: I’m setting up an “overview” project that multihomes tasks from several other projects (as well as other tasks added manually), divided into sections by what month they are due. To make that work, I’ve set up the following rules in the related projects (one rule for each project, as relevant):
By default, these rules multihome tasks to the first section of the overview project, called “Timing TBC”. To sort tasks into the right sections in the overview project I’ve set up multiple rules like this, one for each section:
Sometimes this seems to work fine, but other times when a task is added or the date changed Asana will move it to the right section but then immediately move it back to Timing TBC, e.g.:
It looks like the first time my workmate changed the date, the rules worked as expected, but the second time they messed up. All section rules are set up identially, so this isn’t an issue with the June rule vs the July rule.
Can anyone see what’s going wrong here?
Edited to add: I’ve realised the problem may be that when the date is changed, the rule designed to move the task to the right section may be being overridden by this rule (which is only meant to add the task to the work tracking project once it has a due date added):
Can anyone suggest how I could stop that happening? Is there any way to either
Make the “add to project rule” not specify a section to add to?
Specify what order the rules fire in?
Or add a condition to a rule that says “when X happens, do Y and stop checking for rules”?
In the third screen shot, do yo only have a rule for June?
I am not sure if this is because the rule is not reading Jule conditions. I have not tested that myself. But generally when this happens it could be because one rule is overriding another.
Hi @EJ_Mann, you may want to consider using the ‘Group by’ button and setting that to ‘Due date’ instead of Sections (and from the ... choose Hide empty groups). That way you don’t require ANY rules and will be maintenance-free for the months and years to come.
The ‘sections’ created by the Group by button are dynamic - you won’t get a section for every month but it may serve it’s core purpose for you.
The rule in the screenshot is for June, but I have duplicate rules for July as well as every other month of the year.
If one rule is overriding another here, then I think it has to be that when the date is changed, this rule (which is designed to add the task to the work tracking project in the first place):
Is there any way to specify what order the rules fire in, or to add a condition to a rule that says “when X happens, do Y and stop checking for rules”?
Thanks for the idea, I would love to just use Group By, except for two issues:
You can’t group by due date in the Board view, which is the team’s preferred view for this project.
Even if I got them to switch to List view, when I group the list view by due date it becomes very hard to read, moving all undated tasks to the bottom (I need them to be the first thing the team sees, so they remember to add dates to them), grouping everything due after August into a single section (the goal of this project is to show upcoming workload over the next 6-12 months, not just the next 3), and struggling with groupings for overdue tasks:
I realise you’re probably aware of that second issue since you flagged that Group by due date doesn’t create a grouop for every month, but unfortunately it does mean it won’t work for this particular project’s needs.
For the record, here’s the workaround I’ve used to solve this issue:
I created a custom field in our library called “Work tracker” with the options “yes” or blank, added it as a hidden field in each of the projects that have automations multihoming to the overview project, and updated their rules like so:
This way, if the task is already in the overview project, changing its due date won’t trigger the “add to overview” automation again and so it won’t end up back in the default column.
