Currnetly the monthly and weekly recurring tasks have quite a bit of customizability - ex. you can set a monthly task to recur on a specific day (i.e. the 15th) or a specific day of the week (ex. 1st Tuesday). But for yearly, you are limited only to a set day. I want to be able to set yearly recurrances to be on a certain day (ex. the first saturday of each January)
Also in the rule building for “when scheduled time occurs” the functionality for monthly and yearly is limited. You cannot do yearly (more than 25 weeks even) and monthly can only be based on a day (ex. 10th of each month) it would be useful to increase the customization options as noted above. Example rule: “When schedueld time occurs: repeats yearly on January 1st” or “When scheduled time occurs: repeats monthly on the 2nd tuesday”
You could something close using Script Actions I believe. Or create a small script to create all necessary tasks once and for all. For that we created iDO Tools - Improve Asana with our tools and automations but I am not sure it has the pattern you are looking for
The problem:
Weekly recurring tasks anchor to chosen weekdays, and monthly tasks can anchor to a specific calendar date (or nth weekday), so a one-off reschedule doesn’t disturb the series. Yearly recurrence has no such anchor: the next occurrence is simply computed from the task’s current due date when completed. Consequently, a one-time reschedule permanently re-anchors the entire series.
Example:
A task recurs yearly on January 1. In 2026 I push that occurrence to January 5 and complete it. The 2027 occurrence is now due January 5, and every future year inherits the drift, unless I remember to hand-correct the date each time. Annual obligations (renewals, filings, anniversaries) have a true fixed date that shouldn’t change because one year’s occurrence slipped.
Real-world impact:
This isn’t hypothetical: I’ve moved a whole category of my recurring work tasks out of Asana into another task manager specifically because of this. For date-critical annual items, I need to trust that the date I set is the date the task recurs; today only Weekly and Monthly recurrence earn that trust. I’d gladly bring those tasks back into Asana if Yearly recurrence held its anchor the same way.
Suggested solution:
Give Yearly the same treatment Weekly and Monthly received: let users pin the recurrence to a specific date (e.g. “every year on January 1”) stored in the rule, independent of any single occurrence’s due date. Rescheduling an occurrence would then defer only that occurrence, with the series snapping back to its anchored date, which matches the behavior users already get from the other recurrence types.
Thanks @Richard_Sather! Consolidating the votes makes sense to me.
One thing I’d like to keep visible through the merge: my post is a slightly different angle from this one. Julian’s is mainly about richer yearly patterns (like “first Saturday of January”). Mine is about anchoring and drift: a yearly task’s next occurrence is calculated from its current due date, so if I push one year’s occurrence by a few days and complete it, the whole series permanently shifts off its date. Weekly and Monthly don’t have this problem because they anchor to a stored rule (a weekday, or a day of the month). Yearly has no equivalent.
So I see them as complementary parts of the same gap: “more yearly pattern options,” and “let Yearly hold a fixed date the way Weekly and Monthly already do.” I’m glad to see them combined as long as that anchoring point doesn’t get lost. Thanks!