I hate the steep part of the learning curve … wearing out my welcome while not providing any value to anybody else yet. But Jason Woods told me not to be a stranger, so I guess I’ll keep posting. (Seriously though, thanks Jason - much appreciated.)
We have a task that we’ll manually assign a due date for upon project creation. Then there are two tasks that we’d like to trigger upon completion of task #1 - the 2nd task 30 days after, and then the third task 60 days after task #1.
Pretty sure I was doing this in MS Project back in the 90s, and was definitely doing it in SmartSheet long ago, and Teamwork more recently. It looks like this might fall under the “dynamic due dates” can of worms that I see discussed in the forum? Staggering to me that something so simple (and essential) hasn’t been available since release 0.1, but such is life.
When I was researching Rules, I thought this might work perfectly for our extremely simple requirement - but now it looks like I can’t do it at a task level. Am I missing something, or is there really no way to do this without Flowsana?
Looks like Flowsana is a no-brainer … if nothing more than to pay back the creator for all his help in the forums. But it might be a fight within my company, as they are strongly opposed to bolting things on.
Sorry, I meant to mention this post, which seemed to let me do exactly what I wanted:
But I find no way to assign the rule that I created to this particular task. So my only assumption is that the rule applies to all tasks in the project … which is stupid … which is why I’m thinking there’s something obvious that I’m missing.
As Jason said, do not worry about that!! We all started out there. Post!
Thank you, I truly appreciate that!
Well, yes, that’s true. But one thing you could do to solve that problem is to use a tag or custom field to “filter” a rule, so to speak, so it only applies to one particular task. This is now possible because subsequent to the other thread you referenced, Asana added the feature of multiple conditions. (IMPORTANT NOTE: This solution requires a Business or Enterprise subscription since it requires custom rules.)
How it could work, for example: create a dropdown list custom field, let’s call it “Followup”, with values of “Second Task” and “Third Task” (in reality you’d likely pick more meaningful names).
When you create the initial task and the two follow-ups, you’ll make the two follow-ups both be dependent on the initial one. Set Followup on the second task to “Second Task” and on the third one to “Third Task”.
Now you can create these two rules in that project:
If Dependent task is no longer waiting AND Followup = "Second Task", Set due date = 30
If Dependent task is no longer waiting AND Followup = "Third Task", Set due date = 60
I haven’t actually tried this but it should accomplish what you want.
I’m slowly starting to get that custom fields are important and powerful. Since we’re still in pre-rollout mode I’ve been pretty much inside the box so far to try to just do “standard” stuff, but looks like I need to start thinking deeper. This seems simple and elegant.
I’m sure we’ll wind up being Flowsana users before too long as well.
But it might be a fight within my company, as they are strongly opposed to bolting things on.