Hi all,
I have a general question on what areas of asana I should look into, to best suite my needs. I am a Mechanical Airconditioning and refrigeration Technician, I work for a company that does not use asana, I am simply trying to use asana to make my own life simpler. I have a lot of sites in the field where I go and do what we call a preventative maintenance. I essentially go to each site once a month for an entire day and inspect the mechanical and electrical equipment on all the A/C and refrigeration. This is RECURRING, Every Month, Once a month indefinitely. I currently have my asana page setup so that each site is its own project. lets say I number the sites from 1 - 20 as an example. If you can imagine Each site has hundreds of specific items that I will check at different intervals, some things I will check every month, others maybe bi-monthly , some quarterly and so on you get the idea. I have currently got sections for this in each project: items awaiting approval, Items to be checked this month, items to be checked next month and so on. Is there an easier way to set this up through rules so that I don’t have so many sections ? so far I haven’t been able to achieve my desired result through rules.
Thanks in advance 
Hi @Bradley_Smith3 ,
Welcome to the forum!
As there are so many possibilities I won’t say I can advise you the best way.
Project per site - like you have now - seems great as you’ll only have site relevant tasks open when you open the project belonging to the site.
A couple of questions:
- Are you using recurring tasks?
- What exactly is your desired result?
- Why are you not happy with how you’ve organised this now?
So i havent been able to setup recurring tasks within my projects,
As an example i have a project named Site 1, this particular month is a big one for this site, lets say i have 6 open tasks, all under the 1 section which is called due this month, out of these 6 tasks, 3 of them will reoccur next month when i check them as complete i want them to move to a different section called due next month 1 of them will occur again in 3 months and when i check it as complete i want it tomve to a section called due in 3 months,one taskwill be due again in 6 months so i want it to move to a section called due in 6 months and theni thelast one is due again in a year, so i want it to move to a section called due in 1 year
But why? What’s the added value in that?
Why not ditch the sections, hide all complete tasks, and sort by due date?
The completed tasks are not necessarily completed haha, they are completed for that month, but will reoccur again the next month or in 3 months or in 6 months, and when my boss says, when did you complete that task, I can say I completed it in May of this year, and its due to be checked again in August. At this stage I currently have 13 sites. Each site has hundreds of individual pieces of equipment that I will check, each piece of equipment has its own individual components that make it function, there is a lot of information to track and although I can store it in my head, I would rather not. We’ve been extremely busy lately and I’ve found myself losing track of a couple of things which just isn’t like me.
The added value of the sections is being able to track and schedule the preventative maintenance for the next month, I may notice something I don’t need/have time to check on that particular day I was on site. I can immediately create a new task and add it to the section called tasks due next month. That item may be 1 individual task that doesn’t require checking again the following month, and in that case yes I would just complete that task and hide it, I may even decide to store it in a new section called recent tasks completed. just so if I want to I can refer back to individual recent tasks I’ve completed for any reason.
Let me use July and august as an example because this is the current month changeover we are in. 2 weeks ago I did a fire integration test on 1 of my sites, and as I’m typing this I’m currently here today to do the preventative maintenance, on the fire test I found 2 toggle switches on a switchboard that were not switching, this is something I would have added to items due on next maintenance, As id already performed the preventative maintenance for July at the time of the fire test. Now ideally as soon as it goes from being the 31st of July, to being the 1st of august, the items listed in items due next month would automatically move to the section called items due this month. This is so when I get on site, there is no thinking required, I pull up asana and everything that is requiring inspection for that month is there in items due this month, no thinking required. I don’t need to store the information in my head because asana is doing it for me, This allows me to go home at the end of the day without having enormous amounts of random info bouncing around in my head, I have a lot of trouble switching my brain off and its been getting worse recently haha…
I hope this makes sense haha, I have a vision for exactly what I want to do, I just don’t know how to do it.
Ok, so I want you to let go of the sections for a bit and think about the following workflow:
- Every task gets a recurrance. You can set it to Weekly, Monthly, Yearly,
<x> days after completionor eveevery <x> Weeksorevery <x> Years
– There are also some advanced options here:
– When you complete it, you will have logged when you did it last, and a copy of that task will appear on the next date.
- Filter the project by incomplete and save that view not to be distracted by the work not done
- Sort the project by due date, so you can see what is overdue the longest. Just keep in mind that when you complete an overdue task (and it isn’t set to recur
<x> days after completion) you might want to change the due date to the current date just before you complete it, so that the next task doesn’t occur too soon.
Does that sound worth giving a shot?
I’m assuming all of this is possible in the free plan. I’m not 100% sure though.
Hello @Bradley_Smith3 .
It’s difficult to comment without a bit more detail.
Basic questions:
-What Asana plan are you using?
-Do you use rules?
-Do you use multi-homing?