Making Templates More Functional

Is there a way, or can there be a way to improve the functionality of templates in Asana?

We use Asana religiously at my company but upon transitioning to a larger premium account have realized that it’s not all we were hoping it would be. Our primary reason for transitioning was to begin deploying templates in an intelligent way. I’ve noticed several shortcomings with the templating functionality specifically around due dates and task assignees.

Due dates are extrapolated from the task due dates held in the template at templatization. This is unintuitive and unfunctional as it stands because it doesn’t allow for future adaptability of the template. A functional approach would allowing for the programming of a duration for each task, “X days from start” etc. this could be intuitively updated as needed over the life of the template. As it stands now revising a date would require modifying an arbitrary date in the past to be a certain amount longer or shorter from an invisible start date.

Tasks also cannot have assignees within a template without there being a permanent and incompletable todo assigned to the work flow. If closed it will strike from the template. the solution to the as of now is to not assign anyone to the task until the new project is created but that in and of itself defeats the purpose of a template.

Id very much like to see Asana make the most of its extremely valuable technology and create a better templatization process. While not a coder these changes would seem to be a relatively low lift with a huge functionality and user interface gain.

You’ll need to explore alternative options to get these basic features. I believe ClickUp, Wrike, and Monday all offer these solutions. We’ve been requesting Asana to add relative dates to project templates and stop having tasks users are assigned to within templates for years.

They either don’t care or simply lack the engineering resources to address basic functionality their customers need (both of which are not mutually exclusive).

Thanks for providing this feedback, @Zach_Gohl.

Making improvements to project templates is a priority for our Product team and we hope to have lots of exciting new features coming in the near future.

For now, you can add your votes to these existing requests and you’ll be notified there of any updates:

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