Delay for Asana rules

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.

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I would report this in the bugs section @Martin_Brandenburg so they get it fixed instead of having to develop a workaround.

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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.

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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!

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+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.

We would also love a ‘delay’ or ‘wait’ action in our workflow.

Our use case is: we want to show at-a-glance where there has been recent change in a custom field.

I have created a new field called ‘recent change’ with the options ‘up’ and down’ which fires when a change in the ‘priority’ label is made.

This would be far more useful if the labels then cleared after a wait of 2 days once the task has settled into its new position in the priority queue.

+1 from me too!

+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

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note, of course the rule would need to check if the condition if STILL true after that delay before activating, else it’s just a useless delay

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Please implement a “Delay/Wait” block that could be inserted between Trigger and Condition and/or Condition and Action.
It would look like this:

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