Locking due dates for multiple tasks and milestones?

English Forum Tips and Tricks
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Hi there! I’m getting up to speed on working with my team through Asana and have a specific question about timeline functionality.

Our team has several processes in which the time in between a specific task and milestone does not change. For example, submit a document for publication on a Wednesday; document is published the following Monday. Sometimes there is a long string of time-dependent tasks like this. Here is my question: is there a way to “lock” the duration of time between tasks and/or milestones so that moving the date of one moves all of the other dates accordingly?

This functionality would be very useful for us to do longer-range planning and for creating project templates. Otherwise, if our timeline changes (as can inevitably happen) it creates a lot of manual work to move all of tasks and milestones that are dependent on each other. If this functionality is not available:

  1. Please consider adding it!
  2. Does anyone have any suggested workarounds?
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Hi @Nathaniel_Fink welcome to the community…

At present this is not something that can be done natively within Asana. The is a third party Flowsana which has been developed by @Phil_Seeman which I believe might be able to help with this.

Jason.

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Hi @Nathaniel_Fink!

As @Jason_Woods mentioned, Flowsana’s Dynamic Duration workflow type handles just this type of situation: you can build a template where each task specifies its required Duration, and also optionally a required Lag Time between it and its predecessor (i.e. from Wed to the following Mon in your example). You then use this template to create new projects and Flowsana fills in all of the task dates for you; and if you subsequently adjust tasks, it changes all of the appropriate dependent task dates for you.

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Hi there! But are those dates still moveable? you can’t like lock in a due date of July 15 if that is a hard deadline for a court filing or something?

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No, not currently. It’s something I think about adding, but it would really complicate matters in terms of adjusting related dependencies (which can already be a complex process!).