I find myself constantly recreating a certain set of Rules over and over. It’d be amazing if I could turn a Rule into a Template.
For example we create Feedback/ Results notifications connected to Slack for each person. We also have delivery reminders if they haven’t moved into the next stage in X amount of time.
Hi @SamW !
It is possible to add rules to a project Template so that when you create a project from that template, all your rules will be ready to go… is that not feasible for your workflow?
Hi Richard that’s a good idea, but unfortunately we have a few primary projects and that’s where all of the new rules need to be placed. We don’t make many new projects very often.
Ah, I understand! Well let’s vote at the top of this thread that @Andrea_Mayer merged us into 
(thanks Andrea!)
I’m experimenting with rules, and - although they are quite basic - they are great.
I’m really scared of putting rules in project templates for fear of one day wanting to add, change, or remove them.
This in my case might mean having to manually update hundreds of projects. This leads me to avoid rules whenever possible.
The tricky thing to implement this, is probably the fact that sections and customisation options can vary from project to project. Perhaps being able to link or lock them to the template might provide a solution.
As for practical solutions go, even a not so subtle “bulk replace rules” option would make a world of difference.
Hi @Jan-Rienk !
The rules in Premium are fairly limited. Have you tried the custom rule builder in the Business Plan? If you are looking for more options, you can try out Flowsana.net, Make.com or Unito.io. And for some creative inspiration, check out The coolest Asana rules 😎
I understand how you feel, it can become overwhelming. But there is very elegant alternative: simply add just one rule to your templates: if task added > add task to a ‘master’ project.
To elaborate, if you are on the Business Plan, you could do the following, which I have setup for numerous clients and has proven very effective for scaling and managing hundreds of projects:
You can repeat the above for other ‘sets’ of projects, like marketing/social media posts, sales etc, and have a ‘master’ project for each of these ‘sets’ of projects or departments with their own set of rules that will apply to all their projects!
for best performance results, make sure to start all your rules in your ‘master’ project(s) with the trigger: ‘task added to this project’ followed by your trigger(s) → your action(s)
Hi @Richard_Sather ,
Thank you for your constructive reply.
We’re on the enterprise plan. I know there are other options. But I feel this should be a part of core Asana though. Like Trello has with Butler. Will take it into consideration though.
I did think of this workaround, but there are a couple of cases where this doesn’t work.
Hi @Jan-Rienk ,
Undestood, the rules I was implying to be used are usually generic such as if ‘Status’ custom field is changed to ‘Completed’ then automatically complete the task. Or if ‘Priority’ custom field is set to ‘Critical’ add the task to ‘Critical Issues’ project or add a comment @ team leader.
Such rules are easier to manage and scale later on by having them in one project rather than in numerous projects that need to be edited one-by-one if something changes later in the workflow/process. (eg the ‘@ team leader’ member changes and you need to edit their name again).
But referring to your cases where you feel this approach may not work, let me take you up on that challenge
As I mentioned, the master project can be private to you or a trusty Asana admin who will manage all the rules, so only this ‘rule admin’ would see all tasks - this person would also be the rule creator/owner. All rules will still run, even without all members or guests from other teams/projects needing to have access to them. Therefore these members would have to request a change to a rule from the ‘rule admin’ (this part may indeed not works for all cases) who would have a holistic view and understand the effect of any changes across all projects.
Whether you use collapsable sections, or custom fields for creating ‘sorted’ sections (by disabling the sort by section feature) you can create a single rule for each section to multi-home the task to the relevant section in the ‘master’ project. Then in the ‘master’ project you could create a set of rules that trigger only for tasks within that relevant section. Thus the actions would apply to the relevant section in all of your ‘client’ projects.
The above setup clearly requires conventions to be in place, meaning each member is ‘educated’ to use such a ‘client’ template-generated project consistently in the same manner. i.e. if someone wrongly renames a section to use if for something else instead, then the rules may result in unwanted actions. This is another benefit of using sorted sections based on a custom field’s options which produce ‘fixed’ section-titles (the custom field can be set to be editable only by the owner or admins) and thus provides overall consistency.
Yes, this is my setup. I even have a dedicated separate admin account for this purpose (mainly to prevent employee turnover to break stuff). Compliance requirements are quite strict though, so I will have to check if this will be sufficient. My point is that if it was just the rules being centrally maintained I wouldn’t even have to check because there is a clean break between content and automation.
Since there are no if statements in core Asana I don’t see how you could do with anything less than three rules per section in the “slave” projects:
(added_to_project AND in_specific_section) --> add_to_project(project_x, specific_section) // to catch newly added taskssection_changed_to_x --> change_field_value_to_x // for when section changesfield_value_changed_to_x --> move_to_section_x // for when field value changesEven if they could be handled with IF statements, changing the workflow/sections in any meaningful way would result in having to update every project or accept a mismatch. Or am I missing something?
Also, there is the related issue that upon creation first the tasks get populated, then the rules. So there is always a manual action required for multi homing after setting up a project through a template.
You are right, it is not very Poka Yoke, so I feel this should be avoided whenever possible.
Reiterating how useful this would be when managing multiple different projects. Is this on the roadmap?
I’d really like for Asana to create global rules that can be modified/updated across all projects using that rule.
In my use case, my client created a custom template and built rules into that template. They have 20 projects created using that same template. Their workflow has changed and they want to update some of the rules and apply them to their 20 other projects that use that same template. Currently, there is no way to do this (that I’m aware of) without going into each already created project and manually updating each rule.
This is really inefficient and creates a lot of manual work. It doesn’t allow users to scale as new features are rolled out. Please build a solution for this.
Welcome, @Steph_McGwire,
There’s an earlier, similar thread, so I’ve merged your newer post into that one.
Please vote by going to the top of this thread.
Thanks,
Larry
I’m curious to see how much of this will get solved by the Bundle Feature, announced at Asana Forward: https://asana.com/guide/help/premium/bundles
Bundles are definitely intended to solve this issue. 
(Note they are Enterprise-only, though.)
Enterprise only… That’s a shame. I had expected it to be a Business feature.
It seems a great tool for automation efficienado’s, regardless of company scale.
Agree so much with this. I’d really like to see a lot more options in rules. It seems like every time I go to create a rule, it doesn’t have the functionality. Some things I’ve tried to do, but cant, that I’m hoping you’ll either tell me I actually can or that the feature is coming soon:
-Trigger an action based on the due date approaching for a SUBtask
-Have rules apply to more than just the first layer of subtasks
-Have an action trigger when a task is assigned to anybody (not just a specific person), like when it gets assigned at all, create a task in another project
-When a task gets ‘moved’ to another project by a rule in this project, give me the option to assign attributes for task that are columns in the project it’s being moved to, not just this project.
-When a task gets added to this project, depending on the project it came from, set one of the attributes to a certain value based on that
-Allow some rules to apply to subtasks when due date is approaching (don’t grey it out when a rule is for tasks and subtasks
-Allow triggering of a task based on any value assigned to one of the columns (e.g. a due date set) rather than just being able to trigger on a certain value or approaching due date.
-If statements in rules (or at least being able to have the rules trigger in an order that allows this)
-Have a an optional button to trigger all rules in the project, not just when some status changes or at midnight. Have the option to have rules apply to a task that IS overdue, for example, not just when it BECOMES overdue.
A few other things I really, really want Asana to do to make it much more user-friendly:
-Allow expansion to see any subtasks at any of the levels in list view, calendar, timeline, etc
-Have the option for a task to inherit values or calculate values based on its corresponding subtasks. For example, a quantitative field in the subtasks could be summed for the overall task or some other calculation. That would make the charts much more useful, as right now, I either have to manually assign a task a value (cost, for example) manually calculated from its subtasks (which then doubles it in the SUM), or else only have values in the subtasks which makes them invisible when not expanded or in many of the charts. Another example is due dates. The due date for a task should have the option to update automatically based on the earliest start date of its subtasks and the latest due date of its subtasks.
Those are the headaches I’m having in Asana, currently. I’m trying to move all 30 of my projects into it and convince my team to use it, but with these limitations, many of them find it more cumbersome and not worth the extra effort. These features would really, really help.
Thanks,
Scott
@Scott_Mansell
Although I’m a fan of Asana, I’m wondering if it is the right tool for the Job for you.
Are these projects with a clear start & end or are they more like a continuous process?
Did you check out Flowsana? I hear they have expanded rule functionality that might help.
Also, I’m guessing a tool like Zapier could could help.
From scanning your list I had a couple of ideas for solving this in Asana. Probably not the clean solutions you’d ideally want, but I’m hoping it helps you take a step in the right direction.
Workaround: You can create a list of “when any of these triggers happen” and add everyone. With a limited no of possible assignees this might be worth exploring.
The only way I know a.t.m. to carry over fields to other projects is to add fields to your library.
Same idea as for "assigned to anybody’’ might apply.
I’m so disappointed that having discovered Rules, there is no way to use Rules with Apps in Templates. Templates are my life…
I am creating a project from scratch and I am having rules that when tasks move to certain sections, one custom field value changes.
I would like the ability to duplicate the rule as I am b building it.
Here is an image on the rule I created as an example. It would be good to click on the 3 dots and get duplicate options and then change the value of the trigger / action with couple of clicks.
Where the 3 dots are on the top right corner, add an option ‘duplicate rule’
Here is the feedback for this feature for those who wish to upvote it: Duplicate a rule while building project
Thoughts?
