'Weekend awareness' being deprecated - impact on Fri-Sat Weekends

As of recent, the ‘Dependency management options’ menu have changed from this:

…to this:

Essentially the ‘Weekend awareness’ option has been relocated to the new ‘Project settings’ menu within the Customize menu where we have these (project-level) options under ‘Schedule’:

The ‘Work days’ dropdown menu contains a M-F week or an every day. Note, there is no option for a Sunday-Thursday week which is observed in several countries in the GCC and Africa - this is the root cause of this issue but allow me to elaborate further.

Before this change, the ‘Weekend awareness’ feature was driven by a user-level setting in the user’s Settings > Display > First day of the week:

Once this is set to Saturday, then that user can see their weekends, in Timeline, Calendar and Gantt views, displayed on Friday & Saturday. When shifting task due dates (or durations in the Gantt view) with the old ‘Weekend awareness’ option enabled, that would actually skip Fridays & Saturdays. I know this because I have trained clients in countries that observe such weekends.

However, now with this new update, I realised that this expected behaviour is no longer the case. The weekends are now considered by the ‘Work days’ setting in the new Project Schedule settings and appear to override the user’s display settings, regardless. This is now a critical issue for all users that observe weekends on Fridays & Saturdays.

Pinging the @Forum-team to hopefully escalate this to the product team as I would regard this as a Critical bug for the impacted users.

For a proposed solution, I have created a separate Product Feedback request here.

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Hi @Richard_Sather

Many thanks for reporting this. I’m filing a bug report for our team now and will keep you informed once we have an update. Also, thank you for the suggested solution—we’ll share it as well. This is highly appreciated!

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Hi again @Richard_Sather

I’ve connected with our Product team, and here’s what they shared:

The user-level “first day of the week” setting will continue to:

  • Change how weekends are visually highlighted (grey stripes) in Timeline, Calendar, and Gantt views.
  • Affect Gantt duration calculations.

However, when it comes to auto-shifting tasks with weekend awareness enabled, this setting has never influenced which days are treated as weekends. Auto-shifting has always skipped over Saturday and Sunday, regardless of your personal settings. We understand this may now be more noticeable with the recent changes to where weekend awareness is configured, especially since the options are now clearly defined as “Every Day” vs. “Monday–Friday.”

That said, the team is considering ways to provide more flexibility around how weekends and workweeks are defined. This could include options to:

  • Set any day of the week as a weekend at the project level, including Friday–Saturday weekends.
  • Customize workweeks, such as a 4-day or 6-day workweek, to better align with different workflows.

Since this behavior is expected, we’re moving this from the bug category and tracking it as part of ongoing improvements.

Thanks again for your feedback—it’s really appreciated!

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I could swear this wasn’t the case, but respect the team’s response.

Thank you for looking into this @Julio_V
It’s great to hear the Asana team is considering this and will be adding that extra flexibility for non-working days, hopefully in the near future.
:pray:

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