I would like to know if is possible to shift specific tasks’s deadlines. Let me put in an example:
-Task 1 has a deadline the 17th of May
Subtask 1 has a deadline the 16th of May
Subtask 2 has a deadline the 17th of May
-Task 2 has a deadline the 20th of May.
Let’s say that all this tasks need to be shifted 5 days into the future for X reason. Then all tasks will have a new deadline:
-Task 1 on the 22th of May
-Subtask 1 on the 21th of may
-Subtask 2 on the 22th of May
-Task 2 on the 25th of May.
to make this deadline change in one or two tasks is easy…but when more tasks and subtasks are involved is really time consuming.
Is there a way to do what I suggest?
Asana works great for building and planning an editorial calendar, but it quickly becomes cumbersome when deadlines shift, which happens often. When I update the due date for a task – say, pushing it 1 week later than originally assigned – I have to manually update the due dates for 10-20 subtasks to account for this change. It would be great if subtasks could mirror the parent task and automatically update – to 1 week later, in this example.
Alternatively, I’d like to have a way to build in the amount of time individual subtasks take. For example, a ‘first edit’ subtask is dependent on the ‘first draft’ subtask and it typically takes 3 days to complete. If the first draft is delayed, I would like the due date of the first edit subtask to adjust itself to 3 days after the first draft subtask is completed.
As neither of these are possible at the moment, can anyone suggest a workaround?
Thank you for this suggestion, Marie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for my purposes as I need to change the due dates of subtasks within a parent task, based on how the due date for the parent task changes.
Hi @Marie, I’m looking for exactly the same functionality as @Alexis_Wnuk. It feels almost like a bug that I can make sub-tasks dependent on a task (all in the same project) but the dependencies don’t show in timeline (as they do when a task is dependent on a task) AND then when you move the due date of the task the due date of the dependent sub-tasks don’t change. A new user is almost certain to make some really important errors as a result.
We need the capability to make sub-tasks dependent on tasks and to show this correctly in Timeline (in fact dependencies were one of the main reasons we chose Asana instead of Monday!) but at the moment it feels ‘risky’ to use sub-tasks at all
Please can you advise if Asana is looking into this?
Hi @Phil2! To make sure your dependencies show in the Timeline, you must add your subtask to the parent task project manually following these steps. Once you do that, you should see the subtask and its dependency on your Timeline. Hope this helps!
I don’t think the suggested solution addresses what @Phil2, @Rafael_Mongelos_Mart, and I are looking for. Maybe it would help for me to explain how my organization uses Asana.
We use Asana for our editorial calendar – our project is ‘Editorial Calendar’ and each individual article/multimedia item we plan to publish is a task. The task due date is the tentative publish date for the article/multimedia item. Each subtask is a step in the production process for that particular item, e.g., first draft, first edit, art, web production, etc.
Our publish dates are subject to change; when that happens, we have to manually update the due dates for all of the individual subtasks. It would be a huge help if Asana could do this automatically. For example, say I have an article with a tentative publish date (due date) of January 31. The due dates for the subtasks might be:
-First draft - January 7
-Second draft - January 14
-Art - January 21
-Web production - January 30
If I have to push publication back a week (to February 7) and I edit the due date to reflect this, it would be immensely helpful to have the subtasks update themselves accordingly: to Jan. 14, 21, 28, and Feb. 6.
If I understand you correctly, it’s possible to do this if we manually add each subtask to the parent task project and make the subtasks dependent on the parent task. But it’s really counterintuitive to have a “first draft” subtask be dependent on the parent task of “article X.” And, we only mark off a task as complete once it’s published, i.e., once all of the subtasks are complete. In addition, it’s very cumbersome and inefficient to have to add each subtask to the parent task project.
Linking subtask due dates to parent task due dates would go a long way towards improving Asana’s utility for editorial teams.
Thanks for the additional context @Alexis_Wnuk, it is super useful for me to advocate for these feature requests to be implemented! I can’t promise when this will be fixed, but I have gone ahead and added your feedback to my voice of customers report. I’ll make sure to keep you posted as soon as I have an update on this topic!
That’s great @Marie and thank you very much @Alexis_Wnuk, you are absolutely correct that this is what I was getting at in my post back in September, I just didn’t know to explain it better so great job, thank you!
@Marie, this is a big deal. I totally understand it can’t be done overnight, but if you were to take a look at old fashioned Microsoft Project, for example, this is an essential feature of that and any other product that uses Gantt Charts. Without the auto-update of dependent due dates it’s not only time consuming to do manually, but much more importantly it’s far too risky because if one team member forgets or misses on milestone date update the consequences could be disastrous.
My company simply couldn’t use the Gantt chart view in Asana for anything important until this feature is standard.
But still love the product so fingers crossed on this!!
Hey @alexis_wnuk look what our Office Manager, Maarit, found in the Asana app store:
I can’t vouch for this yet but Maarit has got it working fairly easily and seems to be just what (I think) you and I are looking for. Fingers crossed it’s reliable and does what it claims to do!
Instagantt does work and a number of Asana users do use it.
You might also be interested in a new solution I’ve developed that solves your need, which is a bit different in that it works entirely in the background within the Asana interface (no separate app is involved):
I’ve some great news to share! We’ve recenetly built an auto-shifting features for Templates, and we’re now rolling it out to all projects in Asana. Have a look at these two announcements to find out more:
