How do I sync which section a task is in across projects

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#1

Hey

I am trying to set up my Asana a bit more streamlined, so having a portfolio with several projects. The problem with this is I now don’t have a central board to use during standup,

so to fix this I have made it so that when a task is added to any of the projects the standup project is added to the task as well,

The problem is when I move the task to a different section, the 2 projects that the task is in don’t both update. Is it possible to keep these in sync?

Thanks

Jonathan

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#2

I tried using a custom field, that one project would change the value of and the other project should listen to that value but that didnt work

#3

Wierdly if you edit the custom field inside the task then it reflects the change in the section, but changing this value automatically on section change does not trigger the rule

#4

That is exactly the way to do it!

Can you explain this a bit more? I’m not following what you’re saying, sorry. As I say, using a custom field along with rules is the correct approach. (Make sure it’s an organizational custom field that lives in your custom fields library so that the same field is shared between the two projects; otherwise you’ll end up with two custom fields, one in each project, that have identical names but are completely unrelated to each other, and the rules won’t work.)

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#5

@Jonathan_Fielding, I don’t think you’ll be able to get that to work because Asana rules have only Add to project (not remove/move). See and vote here: Add "Removed from Project" Trigger

Phil’s Flowsana has move to project which might work for you; not sure.

Larry

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#6

Hmm, @lpb maybe I’m misunderstanding, I thought the only outstanding issue was that @Jonathan_Fielding just needed to keep the task’s section synchronized between two projects, not move it or remove it from one project?

#7

@Phil_Seeman, Right, but I was supposing that Project + Section go together, like with the Add to Project action wherein you can select a Section too. If there was a single Move to Project(/Section) then I think that rule would work in this case.

#8

@Jonathan_Fielding, I think we need some clarity on exactly what you’re wanting to do and what about the rule-and-custom field solution didn’t work.

#9

Hey,

Thank you for the kind replies,

So I just want to keep 2 boards completely in sync, so far I have it working that if I manually update a the Task Status custom field value it moves it to the correct columns on all boards BUT if I move it between columns I can’t get the same behaviour, even if the custom field is updated when you move it between columns

#10

Did you create two rules? You’ll need both “If custom field changes, move to section” and “If section changes, update custom field”. It sounds like you have the first one but not the second one?

#11

And you need that pair of rules defined separately in each project.

(Sorry about my earlier reply; I had forgotten about the Move to section/column rule.)

Larry

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#12

Asana this is why we need to Link board column and section names to user selected field or custom field ! It would dispense with the myriad of rules that need to be created every single time a new project is created.

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