Rules are available on Asana Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Premium, Business, and Legacy Enterprise.
Rules allow you to streamline routine tasks and establish workflows with ease. For a rule to work, you need a trigger that activates the rule and an action that is performed automatically. This article will cover the various rule actions in more detail.
Let’s take a look at an example:
- A rule can be created to automatically assign a task to someone (this would be the action) when a due date is set (this would be the trigger).
- Trigger: Due date is set
- Action: Assign task
Action: Create task
You can use rules to create tasks, milestones, and approvals in your project automatically. Choose a trigger or combination of triggers, and Asana will create the task when the rule runs. You can pre-select the task name, assignee, relative due date, and more.
To create a task with a rule:
- Navigate to Customize in the top-right corner of your project
- Click + Add rule, then Create custom rule
- Choose a trigger or combination of triggers
- When the trigger is selected, click the Actions tab
- Under Create new, select Task
You can customize the task by pre-selecting details:
- Task name
- Assignee
- Due date (relative to task creation date)
- Click View all fields to open up the task details pane for further customization
- Choose a project association, task description, collaborators, and subtasks
Action: Create subtask
You can create a custom rule in the rules dialogue and choose Subtasks from the list of actions. This rule action allows you to add a predefined list of subtasks to a task automatically.
To add a subtask:
- Click on Subtasks.
- Write the name of the subtask.
As soon as one subtask is added, the rule can be created.
You can create up to 20 subtasks.
To edit the rule, click on the pencil icon next to the rule on your sidebar. The changes made will be automatically saved.
Action: Remove task from project
Previously you could use rules to add tasks to a project. You can now also remove tasks from projects using the Remove task from project action, unlocking more options to automate actions in your projects.
To use the Remove task from project action:
- Navigate to Customize in the top-right corner of your project
- Click + Add rule, then Create custom rule
- Choose a trigger or combination of triggers
- When the trigger is selected, click the Actions tab
- Select Remove task from the project, under the Move task section
Action: Set task title and description
You can now use a rule to set a task title and description. These rule actions can be found in the Actions tab of the rule builder under the Change task field to… section.
Action: Set task title to
To set a task title:
- Navigate to the Actions tab of the rule builder
- Choose Set task title to
- Enter the task title in the box provided under Task Name
- Click Create rule
The example in the screenshot above uses the trigger Task is added to this project. In this case, any tasks added to the project will be automatically given the title you provided under Task Name when creating the rule.
Action: Set task description to
To set a task description:
- Navigate to the Actions tab of the rule builder
- Choose Set task description to
- Enter the task description in the box provided under Description
- Click Create rule
The example in the screenshot above uses the trigger Task is added to this project. In this case, any tasks added to the project will be automatically given the description you provided under Description when creating the rule.
Note: The description provided when building this rule will replace any existing task description when the rule runs.
Adding variables when setting a task title or description
The Set task title and description feature also supports dynamic values meaning that you can have the task title or description refer to a specific variable like a task, person, date or custom field. For example: "New work needed from [Assignee]".
Including variables in your task title
- Choose Set task title to as your rule action.
- Click the + icon to the right of the text field.
- Choose from the variables Task, People, Dates or Custom fields.
Including variables in your task description
- Choose Set task description to as your rule action.
- Click into the text field and then click the + icon in the lower left-hand corner.
- Select Variable and choose from the variables Task, People, Dates or Custom fields.
Action: Set or clear date custom field
Use the rule builder to set or clear a date custom field. Note that a date custom field is separate to the Due date field.
In the example below, Estimated launch is a date custom field and the rule will set the value to 5 days in the future. A rule can also clear the date custom field value.
Action: Set or clear custom field values
You can also use rules to update the contents of a text custom field or a numeric custom field. This means that you can select the values for a text custom field or numeric custom field based on a previous trigger.
Text custom field
When the trigger of a task moved to a section is set to To be scheduled, you can add the action of setting the Content Channel custom field to “Blog”.
Numeric custom field
When the trigger of Content Stage(QGEC) is set to On Hold, you can set the action to select the estimated time.