"Conditional Formatting" for overdue tasks? Or alternate solutions?

English Forum Tips and Tricks
1

Hello!

I am trying to look into whether Asana’s automations can support conditional formatting functionality. Specifically:

  • If a task is overdue by 6 or fewer days, indicate it as such
  • If a task is overdue by 7 or more days, indicate it as such

What I have tried so far:

  1. Status field is multi-select
  2. Standard statuses are updated as usual
  3. Automation is supposed to add a specific secondary status tag when 6 or less days overdue, and another when the task becomes 7 days overdue

yyyyytttt

My first finding is that when I test with overdue due dates, the automation does not run.

Overall though, I am wondering if there is a better way to solve this problem. Reports?

Thanks for any and all input!

2

Those rules you screenshots definitely works, but you need to realise 3 things:

  • they trigger at midnight
  • they don’t apply reactively
  • they only apply to a task with exactly 6 days overdue. If a task is overdue by 7 days, the rule doesn’t trigger

Knowing this, does it help? My 2 cents: you are on the right track, but you need to add more triggers for 8-9-10-11… until you run out of triggers. But ideally with a single “task is overdue by 1 day” you should be able to catch most, unless a task was initially dated as overdue by several days.

2 Likes
3

Thank you, Bastien!

Follow-up question: If the automation triggers every day at midnight say for 7 days, I will likely end up with a silly amount of statuses in the cell for that task, correct?

It seems like Asana does not have an automation building process like: “When a task is 2 days overdue, Remove 1 day overdue status, and add/replace with 2 days overdue.” I cannot build those steps into one automation.

So if I add the automation for, “When 1 day overdue, Add status of 1 day overdue”, do I then have to add a secondary automation of, “When 2 days overdue, Clear status” then a third automation of “When 2 days overdue, Add status of 2 days overdue”?

This is when I start to wonder if there is a more seamless way to do what I need to do, e.g. reports :grimacing: :sweat_smile:

4

I’d really welcome a way to make overdue tasks really stand out on our board where we track jobs as they go through our process. Surely this is an easy one to roll out? Thanks

1 Like
5

A product team doesn’t do things because they are easy; they take into account UI, UX, etc something you need might impact badly someone else…