Best ways to deal with an employee on PTO in Asana

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:cry: When our assistant Julie decided to take 2 weeks off, we had 2 choices: curl up on the floor and cry, or get our hands dirty and discuss how to make sure nothing falls through the cracks in her absence.

Here’s the list of things to do we came up with:

  • choose who will be monitoring Julie’s tasks in her absence, and have that person creates a daily recurring task to check her My Tasks
  • make sure Julie shared her My Tasks with this person, so we can triage things in her absence
  • have Julie create a rule in her My Tasks: New Task > Comment “I am off until XXX”
  • have Julie change her name in the settings to include the dates (she goes from “Julie” to “Julie (away until Sept 27th)”)
  • have Julie turn on the “away” mode in her settings
  • assign a task to Julie due when she is back to roll back those changes
  • have Julie check any tasks or milestones due during her absence and take appropriate actions

This is the complete list of things we did, you can decide to only do some of those.

:gift: Bonus: you can also have Julie multi-home into a specific project things we would have to check for her when she is away.

Anything I missed?

Thank God, she is back :pray:t3:

:fr: Version Française

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Good list!

Although, I don’t see why “curl up and cry” couldn’t also be one of the bullet points - I would have done that!

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Great checklist! Thank you! Wasn’t even thinking about this, but now I am! :sweat_smile:

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Love these, great idea to setup this process for those curl up and cry moments.

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Thanks for the kind words :muscle: :heart:

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Great thoughts Bastien…

One other way to approach making sure things don’t “slip through the cracks” is to setup a rule that adds the person dedicated to monitoring her tasks as a collaborator (or even comments & tags that person) every time a task is assigned to Julie.

That takes monitoring one step further; instead of the person monitoring having to use a daily task to look through Julie’s My Tasks, they can be auto-tagged (or added as a collaborator) to every task assigned to Julie while she is gone, which ensures that the person monitoring will be notified in their Inbox and have better visibility. Only downside there is that method doesn’t account for tasks/projects already in-motion. Only new tasks assigned to Julie.

But I don’t see why you could do all the things you bullet pointed PLUS the above :wink:

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