Relative due dates in custom project templates

[Hannah_Lee]

Hi Asana Community!

My name is Hannah Lee, and I’m on the product marketing team here at Asana. We’re ecstatic to share that you can now set relative due dates in custom project templates to any number of days before or after the project start date, or any number of days before or after the project due date.

You can now unlock greater efficiency and clarity as you plan for important company events, launches, key milestones, etc. Automatically set the relevant due dates for tasks so that important deadlines don’t get missed, ensuring that work leading up to and following the project start date or project due date are all aligned.

This update is available to customers on Premium and Starter plans.

Please share any ideas, examples, or even screenshots of how you’ll be using project templates and the templatized dates in the comments below.

[Peta_Williams]

This is amazing news. I think everyone has been waiting a long time for this! I’m off to consolidate two onboarding projects (one for before start date and one for after start date) down to a single project template!

[Rashad_Issa]

Hey @Hannah_Lee this is amazing news and a very much welcomed feature.

Hopefully this means that we can cascade the ‘before’ feature to task templates in workflows of projects that are already active.

[Barbara_Ramirez]

This is such a great update I’m already testing it and so far it solves some issues I had for a few clients that needed this in their templates.

[lpb]

Great update!

But, just to be extra clear …

This does not address the need for a project template to allow relative dates some of which are based on project start date and others based on the project due date; you still are limited to selecting one or the other.

What this change does is:

• For a template based on project start date, you can now specify a relative date before the project start date (until now you could only specify a date after the project start date), and
• For a template based on project due date, you can now specify a relative date after the project due date (until now you could only specify a date before the project due date).

Thanks,

Larry

[Alex_Arslan]

This is a very exciting addition!

Apologies if this is obvious, but how is project start date determined? Is it the date that the board is created based on the template? My organization creates boards as part of the planning process, before a project actually starts, to facilitate things like capacity planning. Is there a way to facilitate that use case using this feature?

[lpb]

@Alex_Arslan

how is project start date determined?

It’s part of creating the project from the template:

Thanks,

Larry

[Alex_Arslan]

Thank you, Larry! If the start date is unknown at the time the board is created based on the template, can the start date be left blank then set after the fact, at which point the relative dates will be populated using this feature?

[lpb]

You’re welcome!

If the start date isn’t known then, you still might want to pick a near date because that’s the only way to get those relative dates populated.

Then you can adjust them all by mutiselect in Timeline or Gantt and preserve their relative values.

[Jonathan_Stern]

I’ve been looking forward to this, this is aewsome!

[Jan-Rienk]

Hi @Hannah_Lee,

Great update! To me it really is a step in the right direction.

A next step would be to use both project start and project end date in this way simultaneously.

For full context see this request:

Relative project template dates (other than after start or before end)

We use Asana projects to run advertising campaigns from templates. I that we can plan relative to date_project_start and date_project_end, but to us date_campaign_live and date_campaign_end are more important. It would be really convenient if we could plan relative to (before, on, and after) these dates. For example to set deadlines for preparing to go live and financial administration the campaign ends. We’d have Campaign Live and Campaign Ended as milestones on these dates, and pla…

[Robin_Brix]

Is this already rolled out to all users? We have a premium plan, but when checking the templates, we can’t use this new feature.

[Emily_Roman]

Hi @Robin_Brix, this update is already available to all customers on our old tiers Premium, Business, legacy Enterprise as well as Starter, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise+. If you still can’t see the option, please contact our support team so we can investigate further: How to contact our Support Team ✉

[Scott_Renken]

Will this feature be available to projects that are already in use, or can it only be utilised when setting up new custom project templates?

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Scott_Renken , it can be applied to existing project templates.

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Robin_Brix , try refreshing your browser or restarting your desktop app - that usually allows for feature updates to kick in.

[Ben_Brown_Bentley]

@Phil_Seeman any implications for Flowsana? Potentially using positive lag time for tasks post-due date to create post-launch type activities?

[Phil_Seeman]

Hi @Ben_Brown_Bentley!

Now that Asana has launched that feature, yes, we’re feeling the heat. And studying the best way to implement something similar.

[Anne-Sophie_Drouin]

Am I correct to assume that the days include weekends (not only working days)?

[lpb]

@Anne-Sophie_Drouin, When you choose to use either Project Start or Due date, you can decide whether to respect weekends or not:

Thanks,

Larry