We have a rule (in several projects) which sets a status field equal to “done” as soon as a task is finished. This works fine, but there is a sort of bug when this is a reoccuring task: since the Asana rule applies and then the next task in the series is created, it inherits the “done” property. This is not correct, since we have just created a new task which is not done.
A possible workaround for this is to be able to set delays for the action of Asana rules. In this case, a delay of one minute should be sufficient. Namely, the new task is created (this takes usually less than a minute) and then the old finished task gets “done” as its status, but not the new one.
A delay could be also useful for other situations.
Thanks for sharing your feedback with us, @Martin_Brandenburg! Just to make sure I understand the issue, could you confirm what happen to the complete task? Is the new task created added to the Done section? Thanks!
Hi Emily. I was refering to custom fields, not to sections. The completed task gets the status field option “done”, which is the expected behavior. Since only after this the new task is created, it inherits this option. It is in the same section, but has “done” as its status.
EDIT: I was just trying to recreate this issue in a small test project, and it did not happen … The status field for the new task was empty.
Upvoting: I came looking for a way to delay rule processing in the case where someone s adding a task to a section and still needs to add other details. I get Asana notifications with half filled in details, and it is a nuisance. If the rule could be designed with a delay or waiting period, it would help a lot in reducing the noise of notifications.
I think this is a pretty simple problem that is making task creation difficult. If you have a rule in place that say, moves a task to a certain section, project, upon creation, that rule fires as soon as you stop typing. Assuming you are creating the task in the task list-view. It moves the ticket and you lose focus on the input.
If rules could be applied at any time that is not immediately when the task is created then the User Experience would be improved greatly. Thanks!
+1 on this. We just connected Asana to Slack, and the triggers happen too fast. It should be some to add a delay, as they do for instance in Zapier. You choose to wait one minute after task creation, and only then it triggers the rest of the process.
+1 on this! A simple delay on the activation of rules would be awesome, we have a bunch of rules that triggers comments tagging different people based on the value of a custom field.
Problem is, when someone misclick and choose the wrong value, and then immediately changes it to the value they actually wanted, both the rule for the incorrect value AND the rule for the correct value triggers, tagging the wrong people for no reason.
It’s not a huge issue, but being able to set an activation delay on the rules would be nice.
Ideally I’d like to be able to set my rules to only trigger if a specific condition is true for more than a specific amount of time. setting that delay to something like 5 seconds for example, would ensure that if someone misclick and then immediately choose another value, we don’t have multiple rules triggering, potentially affecting each other
Currently, rules in Asana are triggered as soon as a task is added to a project, which can lead to unintended rule executions. For example, when a user accidentally creates a new task by clicking on an empty row at the end of a section, it immediately triggers rules—even though the task was not intended. These triggers also count toward the rule limit for the workspace.
It would be highly beneficial to have an option to delay rule triggers until one of the following conditions is met:
The task has been edited (e.g., assigned, description added, etc.).
A few seconds have passed since the task was created, allowing users to quickly undo or delete tasks created by mistake before any rules are executed.
This feature would help prevent unnecessary rule executions and keep rule quotas more manageable.
I would find it helpful if there were an option for rule triggers to be delayed by say 10-30 seconds.
There are times where I accidentally do something that will trigger a rule and I don’t want that to happen.
For example, marking a task complete by accident when trying to drag it to a new due date on Timeline or Calendar mode is my top culprit. I have a LOT of projects where there’s a rule that removes a task from a project when it’s marked complete.
So, the real problem here is my butter fingers, but I think many of us would find it helpful if we had an option to delay a rule from executing unless the trigger remains intact for say 10-30 seconds.
Having that wonderful little popup that says “Asana is running rule XYZ” is fantastic, it could give us a brief countdown timer and an “Undo trigger” button as a possibility.
I just tried to create a rule to sync milestones to a shared team Outlook calendar, however the rule starts running as soon as the milestone is created, before I can add a date to the milestone in Asana. Therefore the Outlook event never gets created. This renders the Outlook/Asana integration completely useless and explains why there are so many reports of it being so buggy.
