Is it possible for Asana to automatically decline tasks that get assigned to a person during their out of office time? It seems like having an out of office feature without the ability to auto-decline tasks is a little pointless.
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Hi @Kelsey_Harms1 ,
Welcome to the forum! I’ve consolidated your request with a similar feedback request. Please use the purple “Vote” button near the title to lend your support to this request.
As a short-term workaround, you could consider having people set a rule on their My tasks to un-assign tasks and add a comment. This is very much a band-aid solution, as every individual would need to set this up on their own My tasks and then manage turning this rule on/off when they take time off.
Would love to see this!! It looks like it has been heavily requested for a few years, it would be a great feature and would be instrumental in organizing workloads!
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Hi folks,
I’m thrilled to announce a game-changing update to your work management experience: Out of office dates are now visible in portfolio workload, universal workload and capacity plans in Asana!
This enhancement allows you to quickly see when your team is out of the office so no work is assigned to them during this time and the out of office time is also considered during the planning.
Some important notes:
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Can I manually block public holidays (based on country) in Workload?: Not at the moment, but it’s in our teams’ radar to implement more of these options in the future.
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Is it possible to show an alert when a task is assigned to a user who is out of the office?: Users will currently only see a
icon in the task when it overlaps during out of office days. However, we don’t show a pop-up alert. This is also something our team is considering for future iterations!
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Hi! New here. This doesn’t seem to solve any of the issues mentioned. This just looks like a way to view calendars. I’m still able to assign work during team member’s PTO…unless I’m missing something. Thanks!
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Any roadmap or something?
Asana doesn’t share a public roadmap. New features are announced here in the forum when they’re released.
Is it possible to create more than one out of office period? I would like to be able to look at workload further ahead and accommodate multiple periods of OOO for vacations and periods of leave (like parental leave or sabbaticals). Thanks!
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No progress at all on this request? It seems a problem for a lot of us since 2018… 6 years and still no solution? Please help
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10+ separated forum threads, 200+ posts, 6 years later, and still it looks like this basic functionality is far from being implemented.
Do you need even more people to ask you for this feature? What will it take you to finally implement it?
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Team, I’ve dug around and maybe missed it. I know I’ve asked about this before but Asana has sometimes fulfilled my feature requests and it flew right under my radar because I sometimes have the attention span of a puppy.
Anyhow, we’re working on a very serious rework of how we do things here and are at a point where we really need to build into our Project Template the ability to avoid holidays, weekends, etc.
These Project Templates are going to drop with LOTS of relative due dates and also have a lot of tasks added to them.
We really need some sort of way of avoiding tasks ever dropping on Saturdays, Sundays, and major holidays.
Is there any way at all we can build this into these Project Templates?
Also Is there any way at all of forcing a company-wide Task (ie, a calendar entry) to show up on every Project, company wide?
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Yet another vote for this. I need to be able to block dates on the calendar so we don’t assign work when we know it can not be done during those times. Yes its for PTO & Holidays on my team AND ALSO so we don’t release to another region on THEIR holidays.
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Yes, I would love if a specific project could act as a blocker for all other project tasks for the team. We have a project that holds PTO, company-observed holidays, team strategy meetings, etc - anything that’s going to keep us from working on tasks during that time.
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Any updates on this? It’s been a highly requested feature since 2018!
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I need to block specific dates on the calendar to avoid assigning tasks during holidays and PTO. Ideally, there should be a pop-up warning if someone tries to assign a task during a team member’s scheduled PTO or holiday. Users have been waiting for this feature for over six years. Any update on this?
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Our team was just having a discussion regarding capacity planning and how having our time and capacity to adjust to Out Of Office would be so helpful. Ideally if someone was out of office their capacity would either be maxed out for marked in a way to show they are unavailable and any work assigned to them in those dates would adjust.
Maybe, just maybe for the holidays this year, Asana Santa pulled by a sleigh of narwals accompanied by a rainbow trail will deliver this feature to all of children of Asana this year.
-Kyle
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Writing a last minute letter to Asana Santa 
, that way they know I would also appreciate this as a gift!
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I have been struggling with this issue too. I think I have found a work-around but it is very specific to our use case. We have a two week blackout period effecting all staff and all projects - right in the middle of a multi site deployment.
- Use Case - we have 100 identical projects each running for 8 weeks running concurrently with 10 projects launched per week (Wave) in a staggered formation with a total of 10 waves. Perfect for templates. Except that there is a 2 week break during the entire process - it is the same dates for all projects so it will affect each wave differently - essentially, we have to push all tasks due dates that happen on or after this break period by two weeks.
- our solution. Set up a “clean” project and put in tasks dates as if there was no break, then add a custom field but do not populate it (our case something useful but can be arbitrary). Add a rule - if custom field is changed, and date is greater than the first day of the break, change the start and due date of the triggered date forward by 2 weeks.
- Build a template from that project making the start dated the reference. then run the template and create a project. In that project select all tasks, then change the custom field data (in our case a key date). this should then trigger the rule through the entire project. Due Dates before the break are unaffected, due dates after get push forward by 2 weeks.
- It’s not pretty or fully automated, but it seems to work for us. I’m new to Asana so there is probably an easier way.
- We wouldn’t have to do this if A) you could run rules while a project is being built by a template or B) that there was another dependency behaviour in timeline that left tasks before a change alone but kept the buffers in future tasks or C) you could create a static date task/break in a template and the dynamic date tasks would flow around it or D) some other magic way of creating blackout dates.
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Is there a plan to have the ability to use a calendar to mark off all dates planned to be OOO within a particular user’s profile so not just this month’s OOO dates but the dates in two months and the dates in 5 months are in there?
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Former Wrike user. As a Wrike Admin I was able to
- Creative multiple team schedules to company holidays (e.g., US vs. CAN) at minimum, an entire calendar year out. This was great because at the end of December each year, I’d set the team schedules for the forthcoming year.
- Apply a team schedule to users
Wrike users are able to
- In their personal settings, select additional PTO days in addition to the holidays
Wrike would then prohibit a task from being assigned to a user who had a marked PTO day in their settings, whether it be personal or via the schedule assigned to them.
These functionalities seem pretty rudimentary for a PM tool.
If Asana can figure out how to build these for their own tool, it would go very far with users. Right now, this puts the onus on the PMs and people creating projects/assigning tasks to cross-reference PTO schedules outside of Asana when assigning tasks. This is not a scalable, long-term solution especially for large companies and orgs… and personally, it’s causing a lot of unnecessary swirl to think a project is on track only to find a X task is stuck with person Y because, low and behold, they’re on PTO.
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