Notifications without having a due date

I have projects that are more flexible in deliverable dates and I am more interested in having my team members notified when a dependent task is complete, and then give them X days to complete their task before creating another alert message. Is it possible in Asana to create notifications with variable timelines instead of strictly doing date-driven alerts?

Hi @Rob_Stringer ! If you’re solely going for having your team members notified when a dependent task is complete, then you’re in luck (!) because that is the current configuration of dependencies. As you’ll see in the linked Guide article, “With task dependencies, you can mark a task as waiting on another task…When the first task is completed, it will notify the assignee of the next task that they can start on their task.”

Regarding “and then give them X days to complete their task before creating another alert message” – At this time you wouldn’t be able to set a timed alert in Asana, but here are some ideas that might work for you.

a) Use the date as an alert function rather than a strict due date. I do this sometimes when, for instance, I want to remember to get to something on a certain day, but it isn’t due until a week after. In that case I’ll set the due date as a reminder so I get the alert and I might have the actual due date in the description. When I get the alert, I just change the due date to the actual due date.

b) Create standard Asana behaviors/systems on your team to accommodate your needs. Maybe John is alerted when a dependent task is complete. Then, John goes into his Google calendar and sets a reminder 5 days out to get to his corresponding task.

Does that help, Rob?

Curious to see if others have any thoughts on this, too.

That is a workaround @Alexis, yes, but shouldn’t “due date” mean that a task is actually due on that date? Why not incorporate a reminder feature that brings a task into view as a reminder, without requiring the workaround you described?

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Fair point! We’ve noted your feedback and will take it back to our product team.