I’ve been using Asana for a while now, and there’s one feature that consistently frustrates me: the inconsistent way it handles date formatting. As many of you might have noticed, Asana automatically adjusts dates based on the format of your browser settings (whether it’s dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy). On top of that, it changes dates to “Today,” “Tomorrow,” or specific days like “Thursday” if the date is nearby.
While this might sound helpful for organizing short-term tasks, it’s actually quite problematic in practice. Imagine working with multiple custom date fields and seeing one say “Thursday” while another reads “13 Sep.” Now you’re stuck having to mentally interpret and cross-reference these two different ways of displaying dates. It’s particularly confusing when you’ve set a date as, say, 12/09/2024, and Asana changes it to just “Thursday.”
This kind of date simplification is fine if you’re using Asana purely as a to-do list for organizing the current week’s tasks, but it quickly breaks down when you’re trying to plan for the long term or handle complex project timelines. In such cases, having all dates displayed uniformly is far more helpful and reduces the cognitive load of constantly switching between formats.
The most frustrating part is that Asana is used by a diverse group of people, and while some might prefer the current settings, many of us want to see ALL dates in the same format. A consistent date format, without automatically turning them into vague terms like “Today” or “Thursday,” would go a long way in making Asana more user-friendly. After all, this isn’t a new issue—it’s been brought up repeatedly by users, yet nothing has changed.
I’m not a programmer, but it doesn’t seem like this kind of fine-tuning would require a massive technical overhaul. However, it would significantly improve the user experience, especially when you need to print a task list. Seeing “Today” or “Thursday” on a printed list just becomes meaningless when you’re reviewing it later.