Hey everyone, so I felt like I had templates in a pretty good spot, where I had an individual project set up, that had 4 sections: one for each month of a given quarter, and a fourth that housed a list of tasks, each with a bunch of sub-tasks assigned to a set of people on our team. The premise was that once we had clarity on what was actually planned for a given business unit, we could copy those tasks in that fourth bucket into one of the ‘month sections’. (see example below)
The biggest issue that I’m running into is that it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to set this up to retain any sort of staggered due dates that get retained when tasks are copied. Given the volume of campaigns we’re running, there would be a significant amount of time of going in and editing these due dates again. I tried using Instagantt, but it doesn’t seem to save dates in this way with Tasks, only with Projects.
Any advice greatly appreciated to help us get this launched.
Sorry, I’m struggling to understand what you’re trying to do… So you are duplicating a task from the “Program Templates” section and adding a copy to one of the month sections? What’s the reason behind copying it instead of just moving it? Or have I misunderstood?
Hey Paul,
We have 5 different marketing managers that we support, so there isn’t a ‘standard’ set of tasks to move…some may have 5 webinars and 3 emails in a given month, some may have 6 emails and no webinars. So, my thought was to create that section at the bottom with all the possible campaigns they could request, and then the hope was that depending on what they’d requested, I’d just copy the respective task for that particular type of campaign.
Hi @Trask_Rogers,
So if I understand correctly, you have some tasks with a bunch of subtasks that are the templates of the campaings you have to do in the quarter.
As the quarter progress, you have requests to do 5 times campaign A, 10 times campaign B, one time campaign C,…
So you want to copy the main campaign so it becomes the specified campaing to meet that specific request.
Is it correct ?
Hi there,
Yes, that’s correct. My hope was that I could have all those tasks with their associated sub-tasks configured so that we can easily copy them and be ready to go. Thanks!
Hey @Trask_Rogers, so this isn’t quite what you asked for - because due date shifts with subtask dates isn’t possible the way you have it set up. So if you copy a template task that has assignees, due dates, etc. - the due dates replicate the same as the template task, and you’d have to go through each one to change them for the new campaign.
However, if you were to use projects instead of tasks/subtasks, you could do this pretty easily.
For example, you have this program planning project that lists out the campaigns per quarter. So each task would be the campaign, and in the description would be the link to that campaign’s project.
Then for each campaign template you’d have a project that lists out all the subtasks - but as full tasks instead.
Then you can set due dates that have appropriate time between each task.
Then, when you’re ready to run with a particular campaign, you can copy the project (copy it w/the due dates) and then you can shift all the dates accordingly by multi-selecting and holding Ctrl+up/down arrow to adjust all the due dates at once.
I don’t use this a lot, but it’s what you asked for - just doesn’;t work for subtasks (unless that subtask is homed in the project, which would be too cluttered for this).
Read more about the shifting multiple due dates here: How to Complete Task Fields in Asana | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide
I would actually recommend this method of using projects for the campaigns, but I understand why you wouldn’t want to do that. And you could still have a template section in the program project, just reference the campaign project in each description. =)
1 Like
