🎬 What's the due date?

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1

:calendar::bulb: Discover the many meanings of a “due date” in task management !

Question : What’s a task due date?

  • A romantic appointment you don’t want to miss
  • Could be used in different ways, according to your company guidelines
  • A hard deadline
  • A reminder date
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I tried to implement a custom date field to use for hard deadlines, but then you lose some of the sorting/filtering features that are available on the core due date feature.

My system right now is:

  1. Use due dates as reminders
  2. Use a custom single select “Deadline?” field, with two options: “hard” and “soft” (if left blank, then the due date is just a target date/reminder

It’s not perfect, but its working for now. Though my systems always changing. I wish Asana would take note from Skedpal on this one who has 2 core date fields: one for absolute deadline, and one for a target completion date.

Great topic though, that isn’t discussed enough.

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Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

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I completely agree. Having a “Do” date and a “due” date is a critical feature for actually deciding how to prioritize your work when you have a mixture of flexible and fixed deadlines. If you create a custom date field for either of these two types of dates you miss out on a lot of the Asana features that are based on Due Date (looking at you, Timeline view!). This is a major blocker for our team in feeling comfortable assigning tasks to others that don’t necessary have a fixed deadline and it desensitizes people to seeing overdue tasks when there are some that really needed to be done on time. Having a “Due” date and a “Do” date field as both core date fields that could be toggled between based on the project/view would be AMAZING!

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What do you think about assigning a Start-Date as “do date” and End-Date as “due date” for each task?

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We don’t usually do that because the “task auto-promotion” in Asana, which is based on “due date is approaching” in Rules doesn’t have a “start date is approaching”… :frowning:

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Unless of course you use Flowsana, which does have that trigger… :grin:

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I used “hard” and “soft” custom single-select, too! We set up rules that automatically set deadlines to soft to minimize manual labor. When a tasks’s deadline status was changed to “hard” we set up a rule that added a comment to a task alerting the owner to the change. This is a bit harder to miss than the running log of “Bob updated this…”

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That’s a great idea! We have also added a custom field that lets us select inflexible, semi-flexible, vs flexible and have agreed to what those definitions mean functionally.

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