I’m excited to announce that we’re rolling out a new feature that will adjust task dates in a custom template based on when you need to kick off work or complete your project.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making this feature available to all Asana users who have access to custom templates—so don’t worry if you don’t have access to the schedule projects feature today.
When using this feature, set a start date or an end date when creating a project from an existing custom template and Asana will schedule all of your tasks for you. The custom template must have tasks with dates. For more info on how this works, check out the Asana Guide.
Have projects or processes you repeat often? Remember you can save time and ensure important steps aren’t missed by creating custom templates. We hope the new schedule projects feature will help you spend less time setting up projects and schedules so that you can spend more time on the actual work.
As usual, we will be rolling out this new features gradually over the next couple of days, so if this feature is not available to you just yet, don’t worry, it will be very soon! And of course, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them in the comments below!
Thanks for that improvement. I needed this kind of functionality, not for projects but for tasks and subtasks. I have recuring sets of subtasks whose completion dates are relative to a main task in a single project. When I duplicate that main task all the subtasks come along, which is nice, but their dates do not follow that of the main one and I have to adjust each of the subtask completion dates one by one.
Your comment seems to indicate that this feature means Flowsana no longer has value - let me assure you that is far from the case!
This feature (which BTW I’ve known is coming due to Asana’s transparency with me, which I really appreciate) represents just a tiny fraction of Flowsana’s capabilities. What it does is just a one-shot adjustment of existing template task dates when creating a new project based on setting the project start/end dates. Just to highlight a few things Flowsana does that go above and beyond this feature:
Take task dependencies into account
Allow for defining task durations and lag times without needing to set actual calendar dates
Subsequently adjust task dates when a project start/end date needs to change after the project has already been created
Adjust subsets of a project’s tasks’ dates when a schedule change occurs only within a portion of a project’s tasks
Adjust subtask dates based on a change to their parent task’s dates
And of course it has nothing to do with Flowsana’s If-Then Rule capabilities.
The one thing this feature does which Flowsana doesn’t yet do is allow for not skipping weekends, and I’ll be rolling that same option out in Flowsana in the next few weeks.
So rest assured that Flowsana currently has a vast amount of functionality beyond this feature; and also that over time, I’ll be continuing to insure that it always provides additional project-automation value on top of Asana as both products evolve.
And for you free users that do not have the template feature or Start Dates I have you covered with the free utility Sendana Date at www.sendanatools.com that I developed and released on March 6th. So plenty of choices to support needs from simple to sophisticated between Sendana Date, Asana For Premium Users and above and the power tool Flowsana.
Will there be an easier way to SHIFT dates? I currently have a huge template with many tasks and subtasks, dependencies, etc. I have a formula sheet in Gdocs that is a mirror of the Asana project. I set the dates in the google sheet and then fill them in one by one in Asana. This takes forever, but is the only solution for actual project management. The problem is, what if we need to shift a project to a later date after working on it for two months. In the current system, I have to convert to Timeline, find that date range and move everything. The issue is, you can’t zoom in or out enough to do this with large projects. And in List View, you can’t select a bunch of tasks (limited to 50 i think?) and change date ranges by a specified range.
As of now you would be able to adjust your projects timeframe when creating a new project from a custom template, once the project has been created due dates would have to be adjusted manually. Again thank so much for taking the time to share this with us, I have made sure to pass this along to the Product Team!
Thanks Edda. Totally get it, but anyone that’s ever project managed knows how dates shift constantly. Just not seeing how this is a useful feature until it allows for shuffling of dates. Just today, I had two project get pushed back by a month.
I just don’t like that we’re already paying for 16 users and would have to pay an additional $80 per month to Instagannt to get functionality that should be in Asana already. It just feels like so many features are half finished or you have to upgrade to Enterprise to get them. We’ve been using Asana for nearly two years and have so many workaround…getting burned out on it all.
Just FYI, for 16 users, Flowsana would be considerably less expensive than $80/month. Doesn’t negate your argument about built-in features, I understand, and I’m not intending to, but wanted to at least point that out.
I just wanted to quickly confirm that this has now been rolled out for all Asana users who have access to custom templates. Please let me know if you have any questions or comment!
(I updated my comment above)
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