My employees sometimes forget due dates on our tasks and subtasks. For our system to work properly, those dates have to be filled it. How can we set the due dates as required fields, so without them you can’t leave the page???
Hello ![]()
I think you can’t. Asana is really open about all of this and you can’t set anything to be compulsory. You would have to educate people. Also you can create a report with tasks without a due date, and everyday comment on those to ask for a due date to be filled…
Hi John,
Since Asana is so flexible and can be used in different ways it would be difficult to require a due dates, especially since many tasks are not technically tasks at all. Similar to @Bastien_Siebman I would suggest the Advanced reporting feature to monitor though tasks that don’t have due dates. If you would rather not comment on each individual task I might suggest setting up a recurring task that is a general ‘Please update your tasks without due dates’. It would cut down the amount of work on your end. Or you can offer a little incentive for those that have due dates on all of there tasks throughout the week, like a free coffee on Friday or 1:1 with the boss, etc.
I hope that helps,
Katie
Our business requiring mandatory fields shouldn’t filter into other business. Seems it should be easy enough to toggle mandatory fields off and on dependent on their application/team.
Hi John,
I guess I’m not following. Can you explain a little more what you mean by requiring mandatory fields shouldn’t filter into other business?
Thanks,
Katie
Katie, I’m just saying one Team that mandates Due Dates shouldn’t reduce the flexibility of Asana on a whole-scale, only within that one Team.
John,
I see. I would think this would be cumbersome to manage at the user level. We have a mixture of tasks as well as documents, descriptions, etc all within the same project. If this needed to be managed at the task level I would think that would be too granular and if this was managed at the project level you would have many cases where the ‘tasks’ would need a due date, yet you would get an error. Just my thoughts.
Katie
This is not a complex issue in my mind. Add the ability in advanced search to look for task with no due date and you have what you need. Unfortunately this is not a current feature.
Allowing it merely as an option at admin would be a HUGE lift. If people don’t want to, fine, but for many, MANY orgs (not just ours as I can see through my journey in community), being able to require certain users or types, or universally, have a required field would be great.
In our case it’s due date, assignee and task status, for example.
SOMETIMES those show up, sometimes I have to back out into a list view, re-add task status to my view, THEN change it from that because I can’t get it to appear on the task (This happened recently in a follow-up task). I’ve worked in many platforms and never had such difficulty.
Can this be revisited please?
If it’s optional, then it only affects those who wish for this feature. The “educate your people” answer stings a little, to be candid, because ideally our tech aligns with people, but even so, it shouldn’t be so difficult to comply (like in my example). Hope that makes sense.
Thanks,
Tiffany
So I am wanting to do the same thing, where members are adding their tasks but forgetting to update the due date. What is the method to create a report where I can see all task due dates that are empty?
I tried the other day and I think you can’t filter on missing date. Correct @Julien_RENAUD ?
Yes I didn’t find how to do that …
@Rebecca_McGrath Any advices?
Oh yes it works!!!
Thanks @lpb ![]()
Nice workaround!
I find it agreeable.
A similar proposal.
Hi,
Please make us happy with a toggle that could set date requirement for a project view or even sections.
The thing is that the project views Calendar, Timeline and Gantt all require a date (or time period) for tasks to be visible in the Calendar or Timeline, but often people like List view to plan out a project and tasks, but they then forget to add dates straight away - or this is not clear or necessary yet in the beginning of the planning. The result is that those tasks do not show up in any of the date-based views!
How amazing would it be - if we could set a toggle for “Require task to have dates” in project views or even on sections!
I’ve read somewhere that Asana does not like the idea of due dates / fields to be mandatory - okay, if that is the case and a core belief - how about that the toggle function then would simply highlight the date field with a colour and a simple reminder “Please add date for time-based project views”.
Take a project as our content calender for example - We always like to plan out our content(tasks) per section in List view looking a couple of weeks ahead, but we have a lot of sections / channels we make content for. A required date toggle would make things so much easier for us to ensure tasks show up at the required time in project and in everyone’s individual My Tasks!
Would you like to see a feature like this too?
I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the Vote button.
See that topic’s posts for some workarounds. Another is that you can make a rule like this, perhaps to add a comment, multi-home, or other flag to catch these for correction, or even set the date directly, automatically.
Thanks,
Larry
