Hi all,
I’m going to train my team on using Asana and I’d like to come up with some kind of a system for sending gentle reminders if people miss deadlines. I know that Asana does it for you, and I will stress in the training that it’s your responsibility of an assignee to inform people about delays, but what if the person doesn’t do it? Is it polite/good practice to comment on the task saying “Any news?” etc?
Will appreciate any advice 
Cheers, Sofia
Welcome to the Community Forum @Sofia!
First we advise making task names specific and action-based. For example, instead of “Blog post,” create a task called “Write [title] blog post” and one called “Publish [title] blog post”, so there’s no question about what needs to get done. We also recommend always adding due dates.
I personally like to ask for updates on a task comment, I believe is good to keep the communication clear and as long as the message is “polite/good” as you mentioned I don’t see any problem
It’s also good to set task dependencies so the assignee knows they need to complete an action for their colleague to continue with the next step.
I recommend you checking this section of our Asana Guide with resources for your Team Onboarding.
I hope this helps and I’m curious to see what others can share here!
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I agree Emily. As an example, I recommend asking for updates in a more detailed, specific way. I find it’s more likely to get a response if I post a comment like “Is this getting close to being ready? Do you have everything you need from Ramon?” or “Did the X team ever confirm when they need to ship this?” or even “Should we downgrade this one given the Tuesday discussion on armadillo nutrition?” as opposed to a sea of “Any update?”, “Any update?”, “Any update?”.
The former method requires me to think about what might be slowing completion, and the other aspects of context for the task. I often find that there’s something that I or someone else should be doing to enable progress. It also gives the task owner something more specific and hence more compelling to respond to.
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Hi there, I am new here. Interesting thread, thanks for the information.
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Welcome to the Community Forum @johnmorgan! I’m glad you found this thread helpful, do not hesiate to add your insights in the Forum or ask questions on new threads 
You coud also have some fancy setup with custom fields and rules. A custom field “actions” would contain “Ask for status update” option, and a rule would say “when the field changes to that option, then comment “Please share a status update” on the task”.
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Wow this is an amazing tip Stephanie! Thanks so much. Will use this in my training
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This is the next level Bastien! Thanks a lot for suggesting, will have a go!
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