Hey Team,
I have seen this question posed in the past, but I do not see a true resolution to the problem. The last post I ran across was in the 2022 timeframe. Given a fair amount of time has passed since then, I would imagine someone at Asana has determined a fix for this issue. But I’m not seeing it. So thank you for your advice!
Basically I have created 2 rules in a Project Template. I am not the Template owner, nor will I be. But I do have the permission and the ability to edit it and create rules, which I have done. When I create a project using the template, the rules are created normally. But when a team member creates a project using this template, my rules are paused by default; I must manually turn them to active after the project has been created.
I do not see a fix for this on my end. Can anyone shed any light on this? Again, this issue seems to date back to roughly the 2022 timeframe.
Thanks!
-Justin
I looked at our internal knowledge base and I marked this fixed back in June… @Joanna_Colgan should we report as bug?
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Hello @Justin_Jenkins , sorry to hear about the issue.
That’s reported now as a bug. I’ll be in touch when any updates are available.
@Bastien_Siebman thanks a million for flagging that!
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Has this been fixed? Are the rules now turned “on” when a project template with rules is used for a new project?
This is a critical need for workflows to flow 
When will this issue finally be resolved? It affects critical use cases within our organization and is causing major time losses across the entire group of companies. A fix is absolutely necessary, especially since the Asana community has been requesting this for four years
@Joanna_Colgan
@Bastien_Siebman
Statement on the automatic pausing of rules in project templates
From a pure security standpoint, the decision to pause rules when a project is created from a template is understandable at first glance. The idea that rules should not run uncontrolled under another user’s permissions is a reasonable protective measure in principle.
However, from a management and organizational perspective, this behavior makes absolutely no sense. Asana already provides granular permission settings – both at the project and template level. It is possible to precisely control which users are allowed to create templates, edit them, or create projects from them. These permission structures exist specifically to mitigate security risks without blocking productive work.
Yet that is exactly what the blanket pausing of rules does: it completely stops productive work – the very thing Asana stands for at its core. Collaborative work, Asana’s central value proposition, is severely undermined. Automations that have been deliberately configured with full authorization within templates simply do not function when another team member creates a project from that template. No warning, no notification, no confirmation dialog. This leads to silent process failures, missed deadlines, and significant manual rework.
It is unacceptable that rules are paused solely because the original rule creator is referenced as the permission holder when the rule is executed by other users. This is precisely why Asana has intentionally designed settings that define who may create, edit, and use templates. When an organization has properly configured these permissions, there is no security risk – and Asana must not unilaterally deactivate the automation.
This issue must be urgently escalated from the development team to a higher, strategic level within Asana. This is not an isolated technical bug – it is a fundamental design decision that directly impacts collaborative work in and with Asana. For organizations that seriously manage their workflows through Asana, this behavior is a critical blocker.
Text created by Asana AI Teammate - AI StrategyPlanner - Stephan
@Joanna_Colgan
@Bastien_Siebman
I want to highlight how disruptive this behavior is in real-world usage.
We’ve invested a lot of time into building standardized workflows using project templates and rules. The whole idea is to reduce manual effort and ensure consistency. But the fact that rules default to paused depending on who creates the project completely undermines that.
What makes this particularly problematic is that it’s not immediately visible. Teams assume automation is running — but in reality, nothing happens. We’ve had multiple cases where processes broke simply because rules were silently inactive.
This creates a situation where:
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You cannot rely on templates
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You have to double-check every project manually
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Automation becomes a liability instead of a benefit
At that point, you start questioning whether templates are usable at scale at all.
I really hope this gets addressed properly. For advanced workflow setups, this is not just an inconvenience — it’s a structural issue.
Just to be clear, there’s no need to tag me as I don’t work for Asana and like Joanna.
Hi @Stephan_Merk , @Daniel_Moreno ,
Thank you both for your insights. Completely understandable, and I can see that our Customer Care team has also bumped the bug up in the hierarchy, so along with my escalation, that should make a bigger impact. As of this moment, I do not have any updates from the engineering team, but rest assured, I will be back here the moment any information or timeline is confirmed.
Thank you for your efforts and your patience!
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Hey team,
Thank you so much for flagging this as an issue and working to resolve it. The only way that I was able to get around turning on my rules one by one every time a project was created was by requesting to be made the template owner. Now that I am the template owner, the rules run automatically, but before I was the template owner, they did not.
I’m glad to see that others have also noticed this is a major workflow issue, and the Asana team is working to resolve it. Thank you all for your help.
This is quite a devastating bug. I just trained an entire team two weeks ago on how to set up their projects using a template we built that had the exact right rules. They’ve now built dozens of projects and we couldn’t figure out why downstream processes were not working. Today we discovered that all of the projects created from the template have their rules paused and this post confirms that the pause issue is a bug with no work around (project templates can only have one owner so Justin’s work around will not work for us). The team I trained are all Asana beginners, not power users, and telling them to go turn on rules manually for all their projects and for their future projects is going to be such a point of frustration.
@Joanna_Colgan thank you for supporting this issue. Please keep pressing for it to be promoted out of the backlog. Templates and automations are the two selling points I used to convince our team to use Asana over Jira. If this does not get solved we will get pressure to revert back to Jira.
Hey!
Just a bump for the bug fix, as this did cause some confusion on our end also. +1 to rather having the granular permission scheme to dictate the automation rules active-state rather than project admins not getting their automation to run.
Editor upwards should have the automation run from templates, or if that’s too risky, project admins should at the very least have that ON by default.
Awaiting on resolution for this old issue
Hey team,
I need to report that the fix I reported previously working for our team, is no longer working. I am officially the template owner, but when anyone uses the template to create a project, the rules I personally created are back to defaulting as paused.
I haven’t seen or heard any updates on this one in a while. It would be great to get this fixed.
Thanks!
-Justin
@Joanna_Colgan thanks for all your hard work helping sort through this one. Are there any updates by any chance? Thanks!
Hey Asana Team,
Will this recent behavior change in automations (linked below) help solve the problem here in this thread? Or is this a totally unrelated fix meant to address security concerns, but not the workflow issue we are discussing here?
-Justin
@Joanna_Colgan are you able to confirm if the adjustments to the Automation workflow, which I linked above, is related to the topic at hand regarding rules permissions? Or is this a separate security only fix the Asana team is rolling out?
-Justin