Now rolling out to Asana users—schedule projects with custom templates

Hey @StephanieC sorry for the trouble here, this feature should be available to all users that have access to Custom Templates as it has been fully rolled out! So this means you should absolutely be able to see it in your Business space also.

Could possibly help me troubleshoot this to see why you cannot see this?

If you could simply access a Custom Template Project in your Business space, then copy it and let me know what happens I will be able to assist you further! Just as a reference, this is what you should be seeing!

Sorry for the trouble again, I am looking forward to your answer!

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Thanks so much Edda! I see it now! The problem was that in our templates we do not have due dates. It may be hard for us to leverage this feature for that reason, but we will play around with it and see what we can do.

Thanks again for your assistance!

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This is great! Is this feature going to be modified so you can bulk update task dates based on the end date as well? For us, that’s one of the biggest obstacles is changing dates when one small thing changes.

Hi @kbuchanio,

We’re hoping to implement more automation in the future; as soon as I have more info, I’ll make sure to keep you posted! :slight_smile:

@Marie - LOVE this feature. It is a life-saver when it comes to our bi-weekly video releases that have over 100 tasks. There is only one problem I’m having. I assign these out to the assignee in the template so that when I create a project everything is done for me…the problem with that is then the template task is showing in “My Tasks” and people are completing them when really its a task that will never be done. Is there a way to remove tasks from the “My Task” view without completing it?

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Not at the moment, but this is something people “complain” a lot about. The current solution is to make it very clear the task is part of a template (by adding “TEMPLATE” in the project name, maybe a couple of emojis as well :rotating_light:) and instruct people to push these tasks to Later so they don’t see them.

I would not be surprised to see Asana do something about it.

Hi @Karl_Koch and welcome to the Forum!

Our Team is aware of this pain point and is hoping to improve in the future how templates behave when their tasks are assigned. In the meantime, as @Bastien_Siebman mentioned, I would recommend moving them to the Later Section, so they don’t cluster your My Tasks view!

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Good God help me!

I just signed up for the Premium thinking that I would be able to create templates to do this exact thing, only to find out that the templates flooded “My Tasks” and that it cannot have custom dates, and I now have to pay for additional software, called Instagantt or Flowsana.

This is madness. The number of hours put into Asana so far just to figure out the damn thing

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If you push the template Tasks to Later you won’t see them anymore.

What do you mean?

I eventually saw that workaround of pushing tasks to Later, but it took me a long time trying to figure out what the heck was happening and visiting the forum. To me, it seems logical that if someone creates a template that the tasks don’t show up in My Tasks. I just never thought that would have happened because a template doesn’t behave like this in other software. It was just weird and a design flaw IMHO.

Templates cannot have custom dates
I am not sure the technical term, but if I create a template that has a specific date, let’s call it
Date A
Then every task that has a due date based on Date A should be shifted accordingly

I don’t know if there is a way to do this in Asana but I can’t figure it out

There actually is a long thread about template tasks appearing in my tasks, you’ll find it easily. One of thème is Template tasks showing for users

About the dates that is actually the subject of the current thread :grin: did you read the first post?

I’ve tested custom dates and creating a project from a template with a start date or end date. The problem I uncovered in this test is that if the template contains for example, five due dates that are in the past, when I create a project from that template, it results is all those due dates occurring on the same day as the creation of the project.

So for example, let’s say I created a template project in January, and I had five due dates of Jan 5, 10, 13, 25, 30 for five tasks.

I now decide to create a project on April 1st from that template. Those five tasks now show that April 1st is their due date. So it’s still a fundamentally flawed software. It’s a good thing I’m on the trial version because I didn’t know this date issue had such bad implementation in Asana.

Is that what you’re referring to?

If you can reproduce this behavior, I would definitely recommend filing a bug report on it.

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Quite easily. I’ve spent almost 12 hours trying to figure out work arounds to my template issue and then keep running into issues. Getting quite frustrated with Asana and almost wish I didn’t bother start with it. I didn’t expect it to be so complicated and frustrating to deploy. Genuinely thought it was going to be easy and instead, I’m spending so much time back and forth just trying to get a template to work how I want it.

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Due dates of a project created from Template do not automatically shift based on Project Start/due date

That is exciting! We have a frequently recurring template used for new website projects, and it will be very helpful to have an auto-schedule feature. We have been manually scheduling out due dates throughout each project. We definitely saved a lot of time by applying due dates to multiple tasks at once, but it still was cumbersome. Can’t wait to try this out!

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Did you ever figure out a fix for this? I am having the same problem.

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how do you maintain due dates in a template while preventing users to completing the tasks in the template?

Look for a thread in the forum about template tasks showing up in people My Tasks and you’ll see tips on the subject!