Feature Request: Dynamic Due Dates

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Our team heavily uses Asana project templates to keep track of deliverable dates, which means that many tasks have clear cadences between them. This often looks like the following:

  • task A is due this Friday.

  • task B is due exactly one week after task A,

  • task C is due two weeks after task A.

This led me to thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice to set one due date (task A) and have the remainder automatically populate?”

The idea is this: One can “link” due dates of a task to other tasks, similar to how task dependencies already work. A user could create a list of tasks within a template and link due dates to occur a number of days before or after a given task.

Due to the high volume of projects (with short timelines) my team manages, this little trick would help us keep track of our work and save us a ton of time over the long run. If you think of the above example but with 30+ tasks, you can quickly see how tedious this can get.

Other Asana users, is this a common problem for you as well? How much time could such a feature save you? I’d love to see how common or uncommon our use case is.

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Hi @anon5271100, welcome to the Asana Community Forum! :wave:t2:

You can schedule relative due dates using custom project templates! :slight_smile: Take a look at our Guide for more info on how to achieve this!

I hope this helps :slight_smile:

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I am in the same boat as @anon5271100 and the Solution I don’t think will work, unfortunately.

For example, if we have a task at the top with ‘Date of Event’ with a Due Date itself of 25th May or if we could make a rule to run off the ‘Project Due Date’ within tasks.

Then task:

Set Up Email Invitation

  • Due Date = - 3 days before Due Date of ‘Date of Event’ task

Send Email Invitation

  • Due Date = - 2 days before Due Date of ‘Date of Event’ task

This would mean we would only ever have to change one due date and the rest of the tasks would populate with the new dates.

Thanks :slight_smile:

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Hey @Evan_Millais & @Rebecca_McGrath,

Thanks for your responses!

Rebecca, I created a test template to check out the ability to set relative due dates. This would solve our problem, but only partially.

Rather than having due dates populate when a project is created, we would need to have the template itself possess tasks with +/- dated due dates (referencing Evan’s example).

The reason for this is because the most crucial portions of our projects actually happen within the middle of our timelines. These tasks wedged in the middle of a usual project end up impacting the front and back half of our timelines, so we really can’t only leverage start/end dates.

Also should individual tasks possess the ability to have due dates relatively linked (again using @Evan_Millais’s example), any changes to timelines would be extremely easy. Changing one date would simply update the entire project, and we wouldn’t have to go create a new project.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

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Hi @anon5271100 and @Evan_Millais,

You might want to take a look at the Dynamic Duration workflow type in our Flowsana integration, which can do the type of thing you’re asking for.

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Hi @Phil_Seeman - I think the Auto-Adjust DueDate-Based Workflow is exactly what I’m referring to.

I’m curious as to why this is not considered a constructive addition to default functionality? @Rebecca_McGrath - What would it look like to have such functionality included in the main application without need for an integration?

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