Schedule updates with start date, duration and dependencies

Hello,

After reading a lot in this forum, I still feel the need to ask this. Can tasks be scheduled based on dependencies and durations and not fixed dates?

Up until this point I was loving Asana, very intuitive and after a couple of 5 min tutorials I was up and running. I have now been stuck for hours trying to use it to schedule a project. The ten page tutorial full of “ifs”, exceptions and rule creation is not an option. Nor is extra software like Flowsana. Scheduling has to be seamless in a PM software.

I tried a brute force approach trying to fetch errors and overall reliability and this happened.

Process was to create the tasks and make them dependent in sequence A-B-C-D, then go to Gantt
view and add durations. End result makes no sense and I was not prompted with any error or conflict messages. How is this even possible after so many requests and issues raised?

A PM software that can’t deal with scheduling isn’t very appealing, especially when dealing with 400+ tasks and no heads up on conflicts or undoable tasks.

Bottom line: can I use a start date for the project followed by tasks with precedencies and durations and leave it to calculate automatically? If so, how?

Thank you for any input, much appreciated.

Just to clarify, I didn’t insert dates, just added the tasks with only dependencies and duration, and let Asana calculate the dates.