Custom Date Field Needs Start / End Date Range Support

[Maricar_Dela_Cruz]

@notify waiting for updates for date range column options.

[Anand_Perala]

I’ll give you our example. I work in the PR department of an organization and would like to create an Asana project for tracking various awards & conferences we apply to attend. I’d like it to include dates for submissions for award nominations (Which has a date they are open, and hard deadline), but also a separate date field for registration deadlines to actually attend the conference (there are usually discount fees depending on how early you register), timelines for booking hotels & transportation, as well as the date range of the actual conference, which is usually more than one date. I can’t do that with the current limitations.

[Melanie_Matthews]

>> We need a custom date field that mirrors the default Due Date field functionality to set a Start Date and an End Date to create durations/timeframes relevant to a task/project<<

Our team uses Asana for several project and workload management purposes, however one of the main reasons we use it is for managing communications projects/marketing plans.

In many cases, there are a more than one set of relevant time frames and ‘due dates’, including firm dates, flex dates (those with slack), and timeframes. We’ve noticed and raised with Asana support that there is no function to create a custom date field that mirrors the functionality of the default Due Date field, whereby you can select a start and end date, as well as set a due time, and set it to reoccur at a set frequency following task completion.

With even a basic communications plan promoting a public consultation and an event, for example, we would have a series of relevant dates that would be useful to capture for our project oversight:

Note: We include a task in every Comms Plan to appear in a project entitled Comms Plans Overview so that we can see them all captured with more fields and details than are currently available in a Portfolio.

Example:
Task: Comms Plan (CP) - Have Your Say - Township traffic flow in Morningside

Project(s):

• Have Your Say - Township traffic flow in Morningside
• Comms Plans Overview

Relevant date fields (* custom date fields) to appear in the task & for Comms Plans Overview Project List View:

• Created date: [When the CP was requested and the Asana task created]
• Completed date: [When the CP was completed in full and the Asana task was marked as complete]
• Due date: [GO LIVE date - when the first major comms tool is due to be delivered]
• *Consultation period: [Start and end dates for public consultation being open]
• *Promotional period: [Start and end dates for when internal and external comms tools are delivered]
• *Comms approach approval due: [Latest date comms approach can be actioned by required approvers]
• *First event date: [Date of the earliest event for public consultation]

We have recently set up a formula custom field to calculate the duration of the delivery of a project (i.e., a CP task in the Comms Plan Overview project), which calculates for us the time it took to complete the project from start to finish, but this is only useful for our reporting and future workload and business planning purposes, not for the actual work and delivery within a Comms project.

[Phil_Seeman]

Hi @Melanie_Matthews,

FYI I merged your post with an existing thread on the same topic. (The votes have also been transferred.)

[Ka_Nishiyama]

It’s a shame that this feature isn’t available.
Setting a period, which is different from setting a start date and due date, is essential as a PM tool.

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[Lauren_Vasu]

Hello we are running into the same issue . We would like to see a new date range custom field for activity dates in our global marketing calendar. We will use the due date field for now

[Kevin_Clark]

I completely agree that custom date fields need start / end date range support. Just as important, I will argue is for us to be able to view custom dates in Calendar View (vote for this feature here if you haven’t already).

[Marcos_Santiago1]

This would be extremely helpful for us as well. Hoping enough people see this and upvote!

[Neal_Davis]

Also voting for this feature.

[Thomas_Henry_Duthie]

Also need this! Many marketing teams could use this. Otherwise might as well use monday.com

[Jan-Rienk]

I’ve come across this a couple of times.

Asking for a date range in a form is a handy feature, but it loses almost all of its usefulness once you realise you can’t connect it to a custom field.

To facilitate for sorting the project would need sorting on both start- and enddate of the date range, so this feature might be a bit more work than people realise, but I’m still hoping this feature gets some attention.

[Matthew_Willcock]

Agree, we’re using Asana for some WIP reporting and we’d like the task to have a custom reporting period field and a date range would fit perfectly for this use case. Start date and end date is cumbersome.

[Marc_Thompson]

+1 voted.
Really need this. Here’s my use case for this:

We have long term leases on a number of poster sites and we use Asana both to plan in what we’ll put on the boards each month, and also brief the creative in to our Design Team.

We use one project to track each poster site using calendar view, but the design jobs themselves need to sit in the designers’ main design stack so they can be prioritised correctly amongst all the designers’ other work.

Currently it’s not possible to do this efficiently. We have to create two tasks: when planning the poster rotation for each site we put in tasks called “[job name]” with a date range (using start and due dates) so we can see the advert duration in the calendar view. We then create another task called “Creative: [job name]” in the Design Team work stack with a due date for when we need the artwork. The third step is to manually copy the links to the poster [job name] task and leave it in the description of the Creative: [job name] so the two halves are linked in some way.

Phew! I’m exhausted just typing all that process out!

The ideal situation would be for us to plan in the poster sites with a custom date range field that shows when they are live (and be able to use this in the calendar view), leaving the “due date” free to be used as it is intended – as a deadline for the designers to have the artwork ready by. That way each poster can be one task that is multi-homed in the poster site’s calendar project AND sits in the designer’s work stack.

PLEASE help my sanity and implement this!