Historically, when you had a task assigned to yourself, if you set a due date on the task, it would automatically move to the “Today” section on that date. This was my entire workflow in Asana. I would assign dates to everything, and each day the “Today” section would show me what I needed to get done that day. This no longer works, the tasks don’t move to Today and I have no way of finding them easily.
Steps to reproduce:
Create Task and assign to yourself
Add due date of tomorrow
Wait until tomorrow
Task doesn’t appear in “Today” section of my tasks.
This is actually not a bug; Asana recently updated My Tasks. Instead of the previous auto-promote that you mention, one now builds rules in My Tasks to have tasks move the way you want them to.
See the details of this change here:
For more info, including how to build rules so that tasks move pretty much the way they moved before with auto-promote, see:
Why do I need to create new workflows now? The default before worked fine, is there an easy way to just auto-create the necessary workflows to make it work the same as before?
The previous auto-promote worked because the My Tasks list was a unique element in Asana - it was wholly different under the hood from a regular project. The upside to that was they could have unique things like auto-promote, but the downside was that they were stuck in that as they added new features to projects - things like Board view, rules, custom fields (coming), etc. - they couldn’t easily add those to My Tasks.
By switching the underlying architecture of My Tasks to be essentially like a regular project, they were able to add those features (and will be able to more easily have My Tasks keep pace as they continue to enhance projects).
That’s why rules have taken the place of the previous auto-promote functionality.
Alas, there is not. A number of users, myself included, thought it would indeed have been good if they could have auto-created rules to match the previous behavior, but for various reasons they didn’t do that. So you’ll have to build your own rules. The article I linked to above details how to create rules to mostly match what was there with auto-promote.
This is a net negative IMO. I understand that a unified architecture is great for those working on the code base, but in this case, it’s at the expense of your users. I’ve been using this workflow for 6+ years and now the UX is significantly worse.
Just to be clear, I don’t work for Asana - they aren’t mine.
In the short term, I happen to agree. I surmise that Asana decided to take the long view and figured that the short-term pain was worth the long-term gain. And to be clear, a unified architecture is better for Asana’s users as well, not just the developers, because users will reap the benefits of getting features (like custom fields) into My Tasks that they otherwise probably wouldn’t (or would have to wait even longer for).
The other frustrating thing is that the “Rules” capability is part of the Premium pricing tier. So the previous solution worked for the free tier, now they have no option as far as I can tell.
Good news: that’s actually not the case - Asana was intentional about making sure to provide free users with the rule needed to replicate the previous auto-promote capability. Take a look at your My Tasks “Customize” menu - even at the free tier, you’ll find a rule there so you can build what’s described here:
