With the recent update to dependency auto-shifting, with maintain buffer selected, you can only auto-shift dates downstream from a task. For example, if you have a chain A → B → C, if you shift the date of either B or C, you won’t impact the date for A.
There are some workflows (e.g., deadline-bound processes where the most important date is the final one in the chain) where you’d need to have the entire chain (including upstream tasks) auto-shift to understand current impacts of future schedule changes. I think a good option would be a toggle at the project level to auto-shift either the entire chain (upstream-inclusive) or only downstream tasks.
Just to underscore this request. Asana becomes significantly less useful to us, by this change (removal of moving ‘C’ maintaining the buffer to ‘B’ & ‘A’ and moving them accordingly) in behavior. Our entire company and all of our work/projects are built on pull planning, or as Stephen_Li mentions ‘deadline-bound’ processes. I would not know how we continue to successfully use Asana without this being reinstated in some meaningful way. -thank you
Same issue here. Have struggled with this since the change rolled out last week, and it’s a big hassle that we can no longer shift a date and have upstream subtask dates shift. Major step backwards on usability.
I appreciate that it prompts for dependent task date shifts automatically—that’s a win.
But this has been a nightmare for my team in planning marketing deliverables.
In addition, it would be better if this would be activated regardless of where the date change is being initiated. As it is, if I change a date in the subtask listing in the detail pane, it does NOT initiate the dependent task date shift. It only works when I initiate from the list view, or click through to the subtask and open the subtask in the detail pane.
Broadly: I’d like to see more effort put into better base functionality, and less spent on AI functionality.
Reposting a comment from a separate thread here:
I have a client struggling with this right now. I can understand why most people (not all) wouldn’t want upstream tasks to move when a downstream task is shifted to a later date. However, when downstream tasks are moved earlier, ESPECIALLY if that shift moves a downstream task earlier enough that it conflicts with an earlier dependency, the upstream tasks should still move.
Weirdly, it DOES work that way with “Consume Buffer” selected, but not with “Maintain Buffer”. This seems like a very poor (and I’m guessing unintentional) design change.
My request: If we move a downstream task to an earlier date, and it conflicts with an upstream dependency, the earlier tasks should shift earlier. I can’t think of any use cases where a user would not want that.
I will agree with everyone here. “Maintain buffer” leaves no room for interpretation: buffer should be maintained, before and after, otherwise you don’t maintain buffer am I missing something
We’ve been using dependencies for years — upgraded to Premium and pushed for our company to roll out Enterprise not in small part because of how functional that feature made timelines. We’ve always been able to drag timelines around by any task, with both blocked and blocking tasks, in order to change their dates (for example, if we had a June project and duplicated it for July, we could just go to timeline and drag the final due date task to the new July date). We like the autoshifting option in Lists but it’s typically easier to flow our projects to new dates via Timelines.
Well, as of this week, we are only able to drag timelines if we use the FIRST task in a dependency flow, rather than any task. I reached out to Asana with a video of the issue and received a response that made it sound like they’d never had any other autoshifting method available (essentially: I’m doing it wrong and should be using the first task only, but good idea that we’ll submit to Product Development), when literally we’ve been using it for years in the way that’s now not working.
Does anyone else use this feature? Anyone else having problems? Any tips?
Welcome to the forum, @AD1! Asana recently released updates to dependency auto-shifting that only shifts downstream dependencies when using “maintain buffer”. I’ve moved your post to a feedback thread about this; you can use the vote button near the thread title to support upstream shifting with that buffer option.
Apparently in a current experiment being run by Asana, they have removed Maintain Buffer dependency functionality for auto-shifting predecessor tasks based on a downstream dependent task date change. This essentially means that all tasks with dependencies relative to an overall project due date task are not shifted based on that due date shifting out or up.
This is a huge issue for my company since we have set up our project templates relying on this previously available functionality to automatically shift ~25 tasks per project with varying relative timings. This change pretty much renders dependencies useless for us, a major blow considering schedule creation and management in Asana is already fairly restricted since it does not have the concept of task duration or relative date setting outside of initial Project Template setup.
Anyone else encountering this and equally impacted? Please upvote and share you feedback if so.
Wanted to also add my dissatisfaction to the pool regarding this recent ‘maintain buffer’ change, seems like this hit us about a month ago and it is impacting our ability to set up project effectively. We were excited when the maintain buffer feature was introduced in its previous fashion sometime late 2024. The maintain buffer setting was pretty much a holy grail for us and made Asana more useful to us (prior it had only marginal benefits over something like Monday). We built up our 2025 project templates around this great new feature. Now just a few months later and the functionality is nerfed and setting up projects is now cumbersome. There is now not a good way to maintain relative dates between dependent tasks when there are also preceeding tasks that need to stay X number of days behind a given task but aren’t linked to or dependent on upstream tasks. Initial project set up now takes significantly longer (previously I could set two anchor dates and just slide the length/duration of a couple key tasks to set up whole project), and there is more opportunity for error during set up (slide something forward and it pushes things one way but sliding it back doesn’t bring things back with it).
I would like ‘maintain buffer’ to go back to its previous functionality from before this recent (~last month) update where it began no longer maintains the buffer of preceeding tasks.
I am extremely unhappy with this change as it has decreased our efficiency. I may have to look at rebuilding our project templates again, but I am not confident those would be safe from future unwanted updates. At a minimum there should be an option to choose to keep existing functionality.
I had already shared how this update disrupted our existing workflows when it was announced. I was disappointed to see how they proceeded with it without offering the ability to maintain the existing capabilities. Hopefully, they will address this issue sooner rather than later.
The last official answer we received Tom was that this was the new behaviour, and they heard the feedback but no change is planned. In other words, “nothing to fix”.
am I missing something 