Does the concept of "age" exist in Asana?

Hi. I’m pretty new to Asana but have used tons of other things (smartsheet, airtable, ms project, excel, back of napkins, etc.)

I’m a little lost in that I can’t seem to determine the age of a task. We are using a VERY basic template to manage marketing projects. One row on the sheet represents a project (web page, display ad, case study, etc.).

Upon submission, the requestor can select a due date. There’s no date of submission. There’s no date associated with the stage of the project. There’s no notion of age. So it’s seemingly impossible to identify bottlenecks or make improvements in our, you know, process.

I have seen the Timeline view but it seems to get this to function properly (e.g. like a GANT) we’d need to break every tiny project into multiple line items? Yikes. Some of these projects can be completed in a number of hours. I would take longer to manage the project than just do it.

From what I can tell, there are no calculated fields in Asana and no formulas. So even if we have more date functionality, it would be impossible to calculate age. I’m a little bit in disbelief about how limited this software seems to be for pretty basic project management capabilities.

Am I just using it wrong? Are there third-party apps that fill these gaps? Do we need to hire developers to get this basic functionality? Is there a fancier edition we can subscribe to that fixes this? Or should I just abandon Asana and use a spreadsheet?

Thanks in advance. I promise this is not snark. It’s desperation. :slight_smile:

*gantt…

Also, if there’s a training class that provides insight into this mystery, we’re up for that too.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a third-party solution is this thing, which seems like overkill:

(Really a simple custom field formula for “days since submission” would likely solve the problem.)

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You’re not using it wrong. There is only 1 defined field of type “date”, and no possibility to create any other fields of the type “date”. See DATE - Custom Field Type - #165 by Melissa_Borup. There are partial workarounds.

There is no native calculated field (just column SUM, etc.). See calculated fields for projects - #8 by Adam_Finn There are 3rd party apps.

Compared to other software of all types I have used over the last 30-40 years, Asana requires 20x the workarounds and 3rd party apps to achieve essential functions.

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Bummer. Thanks for sharing the links.

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Hi all, the TODAY input is now available for formulas and I’ve put together a list of formulas that use the new TODAY input that you can easily copy/paste into the Advanced formula editor, to use in your projects: