Custom Task Templates

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83

That promise to be one hell of a development challenge. What if someone removed a task that changed, do you add it again? What if someone was fine with the original task name and you change it in the template? What if you remove a task in the template, donā€™t you think people would get angry to have tasks disappearing? I am not sure miroring the template is a good idea. Warning any template user on the other hand why notā€¦

What do you think?

84

I have created a custom project template and now I am using this template with a few projects. If I want to update something in the template itself, how do I get it to update the projects that are using that template?

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85

You donā€™t, that is not possible. I thought about it and this is hard to wrap your head around the concept because you might not always want to have the changes propagate. This is a tough one, my guess is that Asana will probably never go this wayā€¦

Bastien
Asana Certified Pro, consultant, author and developer

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86

Hi guys, Iā€™m merging this thread with Push project template updates to existing projects to gather feedback, feel free to add your vote on this main thread!

87

My team has created a project template that we copy for each new project that follows the same exact steps (we have MANY projects that follow the same steps). Over time, the template changes, so we have to go into each individual project and manually update, which takes a lot of time and creates a lot of issues since our teams have so many contributors. We might have anywhere from 10-30 projects open at one time, and they each contain several dozen tasks. Outdated projects has become a real problem.

Would it be possible (if this already exists, please smack me) to be able to push project updates from one project (used as a template) to another (live)? The way I see it working is this:
When a templateā€™s taskā€™s description is changed (or subtasks are added, etc.), the UI gives an option to push changes to other projects (which I can select from).
When I push, the live project is changed to include the updates.
Iā€™d have the option to view each affected taskā€™s description pre-change, just like I can do now.

Thoughts?

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88

Thank you so much for your feedback @Josh_A! We already have a thread on this topic in the Forum, so I have gone ahead and merged your post to consolidate feedback on this topic. Feel free to add your vote to this main thread by hitting the ā€œVoteā€ button at the top of the thread. :slight_smile:

89

I too wish this were a possibility. While I understand the complexity of this type of functionality, it would save an immense amount of time for me and my team. We have over 100 projects separated into different teams that all follow a set of 6 complex templates. Itā€™s extremely time consuming that once we make a change in our process (which happens frequently) that I have to spend weeks manually updating each project.

Hereā€™s some suggestions for possible workarounds that I see people mentioning as to why this would be near impossible:

  • Have overwrite settings in the template. i.e: Set which fields/attributes are to be overwritten/replaced for tasks with existing info
  • Have a note in the that any existing information or tasks in the existing projects will not be removed

Basically check if fields or attributes exist. If they donā€™t, add them; if they do, overwrite or skip them based on selected preferences. Again, I understand this functionality is more complex than it sounds, but it would literally chop days of work off my plate every month. Iā€™m sure it would for many others as well, this is a feature that doesnā€™t exist in many PM tools and would be a HUGE differentiator as far as I can tell.

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90

I know this has not been talked about for a year, but hereā€™s a spin. We have existing projects for customers and they would like now do a new website. Is there a way to take a template and the associated tasks and have them appear in an existing project? Iā€™d prefer to not open a new project, and keep all of the tasks under the same client project - if possible.

Thank you!
Eric

91

Hi @Eric_Cook, the quickest way to achieve this would be to create a new (temporary) Project from your template and multi-home all tasks from this new project in your existing one. Once added to your new project, you can remove these tasks from the new (temporary) Project you created and delete this project. I know this is not ideal, but I believe it is the best and quickest way to achieve what youā€™re looking for at the moment!

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92

I donā€™t underestimate that this is a difficult thing to implement. I know itā€™s something I already need like the others. If itā€™s any help, I know this is something that I could do with Manifest.ly checklists. It would be great if it could be done with templates and projects too.

93

+1 for this features as well. We use Process Street (https://www.process.st/) for this one feature. When weā€™re doing a new process, we donā€™t always know what all the tasks should be until we go through it 5 or 10 times. Updating existing cards gets very tedious and error prone. Process Street has a good UI for when you make changes to the template, they ask if you want to update active cards based on that template. If Asana had this type UI, it would be amazing. Its so close already.

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94

+1 from me as well. I came here looking for this exact feature, only to learn it doesnā€™t exist.

95

Usually it take a few passes to complete the build-out of a project template. When tasks come up to add to the template, would be great to have a quick way to copy any new tasks added to a template project to all the projects that have been created from that template ā€“ that way, if youā€™ve got a template and 2-3 live projects derived from that template, you donā€™t have to duplicate the task 2-3 times in order to capture it in all iterations of the project.

1 Like
96

Hi @Tyler_Burr, thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us! We already have a thread related to this topic so Iā€™ve gone ahead and merged your post with Push project template updates to existing projects to centralize feedback. Donā€™t forget to upvote!

97

I would imagine the best course of action is to do what Clickup did when they added this feature; they made it optional to turn on or off.

The philosophy being that each individual organization can decide how they want to handle this process (including the potential problems you brought up) as they see fit.

That being said, Clickup has task templates as well, so that mitigates a majority of the problems associated with pushing updates from a project template across a whole project.

Hopefully Asana will add this sort of feature in the next couple of years.

98

It would be incredibly useful to have Task templates as well as Project templates. My team has endless tasks within our projects which all have the same few subtasks, and being able to automate this process instead of creating them manually over and over again would save us a lot of time!

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99

It would be incredibly useful to have Task templates as well as Project templates. My team has endless tasks within our projects which all have the same few subtasks, and being able to automate this process instead of creating them manually over and over again would save us a lot of time!

4 Likes
100

This still doesnā€™t exist?

We are looking to create a standardized task template with subtasks.

For example:

Case study:
Customer quote
Review
Layout
Review
Post internal
Post external
etc.
etc.

The only workaround I can think of would be to create a project and create these tasks as templates and then to copy them over to our current project.

101

Yes, we badly need this too! Creating template tasks is a workaround that might work for ordinarily tech proficient teams, but with non techy folk itā€™s too much of an ask. We need it to be much simpler, and available within a new task.

102

We do this in a number of ways depending on the need.

  1. If you all have not done so yet - you should try Flowsana by @Phil_Seeman
    You can create a Pre populated task and use it as a template.

  2. Using Zapier you can create Subtasks. The Zap will be New Task in Project > Subtask 1 > Subtask 2 > Description.
    It works but kills Zapier actions like crazy, so makes sense only if you are on a very high tier.

  3. Using Zapier you can create different task templates.

  • you create a project, where your work will be
  • you create hidden (we call them buffer projects) project for each task template
  • Zapier watches each of those buffer projects. So if you add the task to one of them it will create one set of subtasks, description, attachments, etc, if added to the second project it will be a different set, etc
    You can add the task in the buffer projects in many ways:
  • manual - you create the work task in the work project > Tab+P > add it to the right buffer project > Zapier picks it up > adds the data. This way you can use templates only for the tasks you want.
  • via custom fields and Rules - you create a custom field with drop downs [template 1], [template 2], etc. You create Rules which state that when the custom field has Value [template 1] > add to buffer project 1 > Zapier watches and does the job.
  • via tags - when you add a tag it is added to the buffer project > Zapier watches and does the job

In all cases above you create the work task and then you update the same task. So you just save the manual work.

  1. There is a more interesting way, that needs Rules in which case you have only one task which will be the ā€œgeneratorā€ but this requires a lot of manual work.
  • You have a work project
  • you have one task which is the Generator
  • you have a separate project with all task templates (best to be one project with all templates in one place)
  • you create a Zap where for each time something happens to the Generator, another task is copied

So here you can copy a set of tasks, or you can copy one by one.

The manual part is in two places:

  • you need to create a Zap for each new project, unlike the one above, where the Zaps are fixes for the buffer projects
  • you will need to redo some actions on the generator project if you want to do two times the same thing.

For example

  • via tags - each time you add a tag to the generator task > copy a predefined task. This way you will add all you want as tags, like Tag 1, Tag 2, Tag 3, etc. and each tag will make you a template task. If however you want to add template task 1 two times, you need to add Tag 1 > you wait for the automation > you delete Tag 1 > you add it again, etc

  • via adding it to a buffer project (either manual, via custom field or a tag) - again if you want to repeat the action of making a template task twice you will need to add the task to the buffer project > wait for the automation > remove it > add it again

  1. Final option I know of is via Zapier and webhooks, where you shoot a request for a task to be copied when something happens (anything like explained above)

Frankly:

  • try with template projects
  • try Flowsana first (I think there is a trial, @Phil_Seeman can add)
  • only then try some of the automations above - they are not complex, but when they become many it is very hard to maintain them.

Note - you will most likely need a paid Zapier plan and most likely premium or business Asana