Change to search behaviour for Due Date in last few days

I really rely on a search for one of my projects that shows me all overdue tasks and anything due today or tomorrow.

I previously set this up as a simple filter set as “Due Date within the Next 1 Days”. This used to work perfectly. However a change seems to now have broken this and it now will not show any overdue items

If this has been deliberately changed how can I now make it work the way it used to?

Thanks for any suggestions

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@Brett_Gerhardi, thanks for writing in! As you’ve noticed, we did make a change to our Advanced Search functionality. It’s actually unintended behavior that “Due Date within the next 1 days” would show overdue Tasks, as it should just show Tasks due in the next 1 day, so the change was fixing a persistent bug in the product.

If you’re looking for a search that will show overdue Tasks, try Due Date within the Last X days (which can be up to 100 months). Since it sounds like you’re working out of a single Project, you could also sort the Project by Due Date, which will show you the Tasks in your Project chronologically (with Overdue Tasks at the top). Let me know what you think!

Hi Sara, thanks for confirming that the behaviour had changed… although I struggle to see why anyone found the old behaviour a problem, as surely if you are interested in tasks with due dates, you would be interested in all tasks with due dates past a certain point. Why would anyone ever want to exclude tasks where due dates are in the past in a task management system? If a task is overdue… why would one ever want to hide it from a filter?

Quite honestly I think whoever decided it was a long standing bug got too caught up with the exact wording on the search screen and didn’t think about the actual use cases involved, unless I am missing something?

it would be good if when making a breaking change like this that you provide a way to do what it was doing before first so you don’t force your users into a situation where the tool no longer can do what they were happy with. Due Date within the last 100 months nearly does what I want but it does not provide a forward view. So now I have to have two lists instead of one which is frustrating.

Please, if you really think that the previous behaviour was a bug (which I suggest should be seriously thought again about) could you request the ability to be able to perform the previous behaviour in the filters somehow? I’m sure I am not alone in finding this capability useful. I can think of many ways of allowing this, perhaps the simplest is allowing negative numbers in the current Due Date filters e.g. Due Date within the last -1 days. Alternatively allow applying multiple due dates or between relative dates.

Regards
Brett

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I agree, I heavily rely on multiple custom searches to prepare every day reports, it was very helpful bug which returned task overdue and due within x days in one search result. Now i have to go through double the number reports everyday.

Please share a workround whereby we can search for task overdue and due within x days in one string.

Allowing multiple due dates fields or between relative dates will be very helpful

eg.

Due within last (X) days & Due within next (x) days

or

Between Today-x and today+x

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Hi folks. We do understand where you’re coming from and please know we keep in mind user experiences when we make such product changes. As Sara mentioned, the original functionality was due to a bug in the product. We’re very sorry to hear you’re frustrated about this change, but we hope that the solutions provided here will suit your needs. Thank you again for your feedback.

Hi Alexis, I’m sorry but just saying something was “a bug” without explaining what problems it caused doesn’t’ help us be any less frustrated…

You can see the problems that the change causes for a number of your customers. I can’t find any complaints on how the old functionality worked. Could you point me to them?

There are no solutions that have been provided that help me see all overdue tasks and tomorrows in the same view as I used to be able to. This was a very useful use case where I have a project where not all tasks were assigned to me, to get a view of what we have missed and what is on the near term future. Especially useful for projects with lots of recurring tasks in.

It would be great, considering the frustration that Asana has caused its own users with this change if you let us know how and when you will provide replacement functionality for “the bug” or better and I think more appropriately, undo the change and realise that actually it wasn’t really a bug at all!

Thanks for listening and helping us understand how we can get what we need out of Asana and when.

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@Alexis

It would be great if you share some solutions to help us see all overdue tasks and due in next few days in the same view.

Thanks

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Hi all! You can see solutions for viewing overdue tasks in Sara’s post quoted below, which you can view in this thread by scrolling up.

While these solutions do not mimic the exact behavior you experienced before the bug was reversed, they do provide the data you’re looking for, both in terms of viewing only overdue tasks and overdue with due in next few days in the same view. Because the platform currently allows users to search for overdue tasks, we cannot speak to specific plans to reverse the bug fix. We’re sorry to hear you’re frustrated, but hope that the existing solutions for viewing overdue tasks will help you.

Our team is aware of your frustration and will reflect on this experience when we work on reversing bugs in the future. Thanks again for your feedback!

Sorry, but that’s simply not true.

  1. You decided arbitrarily this was a bug without any feedback from the user’s side, but I understand that you simply didn’t anticipate that people RELAY HEAVILY on this feature (for me that’s the top place to look: today’s tasks + overdue).
  2. You “fixed the bug” without noticing users - no notification, no pop-up, no information, just one day something works, the next day it doesn’t (that doesn’t sound as fixing bugs, rather like introducing them). You didn’t anticipate that’s important enough, another mistake on your part.
  3. There are no obvious solutions for lost feature (yes, this was a feature!), at least not ones that we can see quickly - thus, Asana became less functional and less intuitive.
  4. Although users hated the change, we still are unsure that things will improve and we simply want a functionality back, not a new fancy feature.

Yes, you gave us an alternative solution but:

  • that’s not 100% the same (within last 99999999999 days) because it also shows overdue tasks without an expiration date, but it’s close enough, so I can live with it,
  • it’s not intuitive to figure it out on your own, so if someone won’t spend time looking for a solution, usually won’t get it, that’s just really bad and points rather for completely missing “we keep in mind user experience”. We missed a lot of deadlines through those days until I decided to actively look what is going on. Fiddling with options didn’t make us find the solution, although now that I know of it, it seems obvious, in reality, it isn’t.

Because we use Asana, we like Asana and Asana is important to us, it’s hard not to react emotionally on such a big mistake. In short, you screw it… and it hurts. However, Asana is having a good support and it feels like you are listening to us, so we hope that this is just a temporal issue.

I am writing this, so you could not rest calmly with the feeling “yeap, we fixed the bug, great, forget it and move to the next thing”. You didn’t fixed the bug. You had a great feature, maybe unintentionally but you did. Changing all of that should have been combined with moving this feature elsewhere rather then deleting it, so we could easily see it and use it, despite the change.

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it does give you the desired result but the issue is I cannot use a favourite search as the data ranges wont be dynamic and has to be changed everytime.

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Yes! This is my exact need.

I’m certainly not going to disparage Asana for fixing an obvious bug, I will say we NEED searches with dynamic values (last year, last quarter, last month, last week, yesterday, today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this quarter, this year). This is #1 on my usecases

Hello all,

We have an update that we hope will lift your spirits. The bug fix has been reversed! After seeing your feedback about how much you relied on the overdue search functionality, our product team decided to bring it back while we determine the future of search filters and views. You’ll now be able to search for overdue tasks just as you used to.

For future reference, there were a lot of people involved in this decision. We heard you loud and clear when we made the original fix and we want to give you a productive experience with our product, so we were happy to reverse the bug fix to make your workflows easier. That said, unfortunately we can’t guarantee if and when fixes like this will be made in the future. We have to make these decisions on a case by case basis and balance customer feedback on all ends of the spectrum with our product vision and the market.

We hope you’ll be happy to use this functionality once again and we thank you for your feedback and patience moving forward.

Update on 6/21 - I was mistaken about the timing here. Sorry for the confusion, folks! This hasn’t yet been deployed but we’ll be seeing it shortly. Thanks!

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Hi @alexis… Thank you so much. This makes life a lot easier.

Thanks once again

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Am still not getting the overdue tasks after the bug has been reversed. Do i have to do something at my end.

Thanks, that was perfect answer and solution :smiley:

However, like others here, I don’t see the change. Old search (tasks for today) is still not bringing overdue tasks:

Assigned to: given user
Incomplete
Within next 0 days

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Hmm that’s odd. Thanks for letting me know! I’ll look into it and get back to you when I have more information.

That is fantastic news thank you for taking this decision.

As in all service industries customer perception is more about how you deal with issues rather than if the issue existed at all.

You guys have delighted me as many software companies would not have listened and acted so quickly and most importantly had the humility to consider that perhaps they got it wrong and they should put it back. You should feel very proud of yourselves on this, really. I work with a lot of cloud service providers and you have just lept far ahead of all of them with this action.

That said, I’ve just checked (and refreshed/Ctrl-F5 my browser) and I am still seeing the new behaviour that doesn’t show any overdue tasks, so hoping it is just a timing thing?

Yup! This is just a timing thing. I was mistaken about this being deployed already, but it’s on its way. Sorry for the confusion folks! We’ll be seeing this shortly.

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It has just appeared for me.

Massive thank you Alexis please pass on our thanks to all the team involved in returning this functionality!

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I was very happy to help!

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