Rules

Rules are available for customers using Asana Premium, Business, and Enterprise. Certain features within rules, including the custom rule builder, custom rules with conditions, approval status changed trigger, and add comment action, are only available to Business and Enterprise customers.

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. For example, a rule can be created to automatically assign a task (action) when a due date is set (trigger).

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A rule can trigger another rule. You can also add multiple actions to one trigger to create similar functionality.

Creating a rule

There are two ways to create a rule for your project, selecting one from the rules gallery in your project or creating your own custom rule. The custom rule builder is available for all Asana Business and Enterprise customers.

Rules will only run on the first level of subtasks i.e. rules will not run on sub-sub-tasks, sub-sub-sub tasks, etc.

Editing a rule

Edit your rules any time by navigating back to the project and selecting the rule you want to update.

You can edit a rule by clicking the pencil icon next to the rule on your sidebar.

Pausing a rule

You can pause a rule at any time by clicking the pencil icon next to the rule on your sidebar.

Deleting a rule

You can delete a rule at any time by clicking the pencil icon next to the rule from your sidebar, and then clicking the Delete button.

Section-based rules

For Premium, Business, and Enterprise users, the rules icon will appear in sections (on list and board view) that have rules. Once the rule triggers, the icon will become animated. Clicking the icon will open a rules menu for that section, allowing users to add new rules or edit existing ones.

You can edit a rule by clicking the pencil icon that appears when you hover over it.

Trigger combinations and multiple actions

Custom rules with conditions, the Approval status changed trigger, and the Add comment action are available to Business and Enterprise customers only.

You can also use trigger combinations and/or conditional logic and multiple actions to automate routine tasks so your team doesn’t have to think about them.

Additional triggers and actions

Due date approaching trigger

Enterprise and Business customers can create a custom rule in the rules dialogue and find Due date is approaching in the list of triggers. You can choose from a couple of preset options or click Custom for more options.

The Custom option allows you to specify how many minutes, hours, days, or weeks before the due date the rule should trigger.

Task overdue trigger

Enterprise and Business customers can find the Task is Overdue trigger when creating a custom rule. You can choose from a few preset options or click Custom for more options.

With the Custom option, you can specify the number of minutes, hours, days, or weeks after the task becomes overdue for the rule to trigger.

If you choose days or weeks when setting up your trigger, it will ignore due times and fire based on due dates only. However, if you choose minutes or hours, it will respect due times.

A few notes on due date approaching and task overdue triggers

• These triggers fire based on the moment a task becomes due or overdue, not simply because a task is due or overdue.
• Both of these triggers will not retroactively fire upon rule creation for all of the existing tasks in the project that match their criteria. They will only fire for due events that happen after rule creation.
• These triggers only fire for incomplete tasks.
• Rules with day or week precision will not execute precisely at midnight. Rather, these rules will execute in the window between 00:00 and 01:00.

Create task action

With an Enterprise or Business subscription 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:

1. Navigate to Customize in the top-right corner of your project
2. Click + Add rule, then Create custom rule
3. Choose a trigger or combination of triggers
4. When the trigger is selected, click the Actions tab
5. Under Create new, select Task

Create subtask action

Enterprise and Business customers can create a custom rule in the rules dialogue and find Subtasks in the list of actions.

Subtasks allow you to add a predefined list of subtasks to a task automatically.

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.

Rule types and limitations

Regardless of whether the rules are in a Premium or Business project, the limit is 50 rules per project

Custom rules

Triggers

• You can add up to 20 triggers per custom rule
• You can select the trigger more than once

Multiple actions

• When one or more triggers happen, you can select up to 5 actions to occur as a result.
• You can't add the same action more than once.

Column or section based triggers

Column or section based triggers are for Boards View projects or projects that have been updated to use the new, collapsible sections.

Custom field rules

Custom field rules are available on all projects with custom fields. People custom fields are also supported.

To unlock these rules, you must first add a custom field to your project.

Triggering rules

You can trigger a rule from anywhere (web, mobile, external integrations). If you update something on a task, we check to see if that task is in any projects with rules, and if your action is the trigger on any of those rules.

Projects you don't have access to

You can trigger rules on projects that you don’t have access to, but the yellow lightning bolt icon will not be displayed to indicate that a rule is running.

Anyone can trigger a rule, including Guests.

Permissions: a few considerations

Rules, much like custom fields, are now editable by other members of the project by default. Rules that multi-home tasks into other projects are also now visible from the customize menu. These rules can be paused directly from their project.

• You now have the option to allow others with edit access the ability to edit rules. Now rules that are created will default to editable.
• Only the owner of a rule can delete a rule.
• When updating rules on projects and templates, the editor must have the correct permissions to save all of the rules. For example, if the rule adds tasks to another project, then the editor must also have edit permissions in that other project.
• When a rule is duplicated via project duplication, the duplicating user becomes the owner with insufficient privileges. In this instance, the rule is disabled, but the owner still has editing access.
• Rules will not break when the owner's access control permissions change. For example, if a rule is set up to add tasks to a project and you later lose access to that project, the rule will continue to run.
• When a rule is copied or duplicated via project templates new and & legacy, the template user will become the rule owner. Here, the rule will only be disabled if the template duplicator has insufficient access control permissions for the rule.For example, you cannot edit a project to which the rule wants to add tasks.
• If a user leaves a project, the rule will not break. However, if there are no other users interacting with the project the rule will be disabled.
• Rules are accessible to all contributors of a project and can disable them.
• If the Project Owner is a Limited Access Member, they cannot edit a rule, they can only pause or activate it.

Who can enable or disable a rule?

Any user with edit access to a project in which a rule is running will be able to enable or disable a rule created by someone else.

A user with edit access can pause or activate a rule but only the owner can edit a rule's triggers and actions.

The rule owner is still the only person that can edit or delete a rule.

Deprovisioning

When you deprovision someone who has rules, their rule will be paused and ownership of any rules on projects will be passed to the project owner.

If there is no project owner, ownership will be passed to the admin who deprovisioned the user. Only the new owner of a rule can re-activate the rule to have it continue running.

When a rule owner is deactivated and the new owner has sufficient permissions, this means that the rule will continue to run which the new owner will then be able to edit.

Updates on misconfigured rules

If a rule becomes mis-configured (example: “Marked complete > Move to column “Done” and someone deletes your “Done” column), we will email the owner of the rule to let them know to fix it.

• We will email you the first time a rule is triggered but cannot fire due to being misconfigured. We will not email you again until it has been corrected and successfully run at least once before misconfiguring again.

• All users with read access to the rule in question can see the correct status of the rule.

• Once you update the rule to a correct configuration and save the updates, those warnings will go away.

Rules integrations

Rules are an important part of many workflows, and so are integrations. Now, you can use a rule to integrate your team's favorite tools into your work in Asana, and let rules do the heavy lifting automatically. You can set specific triggers in your Asana projects, and trust rules to automate your workflow when your chosen criteria are met.

For example, the Slack + Asana rule integration allows you to send a message to a teammate in Slack, triggered by task or project completion.

You can create a rule which pings a specific channel in Microsoft Teams based on criteria such as a change in a custom field value.

Or create new issues in Jira Cloud and Jira Server when a task is added to a particular project section.

Recently launched rules integrations also support actions within Gmail, PagerDuty and Twilio. Learn more about configuring their respective rule integrations here

Triggering actions within apps

There are three types of triggers for rules, and this is also true for triggering actions with rules integrations.

Task added type triggers

• Task added to a section
• Task added to this project

Task updated type trigger

• Based on approval status
• Based on completion status
• Based on assignee
• Based on due date
• Based on attachments added
• Based on comments added

Task timing type trigger

• Task is no longer blocked
• Due date is approaching
• Task is overdue

Forms

When tasks are created from forms they can trigger any of the following triggers:

Task added to a project

This trigger will apply to all tasks being added to a project, not just from forms.

Custom field set

For each drop-down custom field in the project, you will see a trigger and an action. So if your project has "Priority" and "Stage" custom fields, you'll see "Priority set" and "Stage set" as triggers. You pick which value on that custom field you want to trigger a rule.

Example: If you have a drop-down custom field on your form for Type of Request, with the options “Blog” and “Website”, you can set a rule on the project for “When ‘Type of Request’ is set to ‘Blog’ it will add that task to the ‘Blog requests’ project.”

This only works for drop-down custom fields on the project. Some form's drop-downs are not custom fields.

Form submission triggers

With form submission triggers, you can automatically move your forms to a new process without having to triage them manually. Form submission triggers can help you standardize your intake process and automate forms in your workflows.

After setting the trigger, you’ll be able to see your rule in the customize menu.

Every time a form is submitted, you will receive a notification. You can also keep track of the form submission’s history through the task details pane.

Guest permissions

Guest cannot create or own rules, but they can trigger rules.

Pricing

Business and Enterprise customers:

The custom rule builder is available for all Business and Enterprise customers.

A subset of rules are available to Premium customers:

• Move to column/section > Mark complete
• Mark complete > Move to column/section
• Custom field changed > Move to column/section
• Move to column/section > Set custom field
• Custom field changed > Mark complete
• Mark complete > Set custom field

Inverse actions for rules

Business and Enterprise customers:

Inverse actions are a compliment to existing rules that now provide the option to reset or remove data. By providing the option of inverse actions for rules, we have created a more robust rule engine that better maps the structure, quality and efficiency of customer workflows.

Available inverse actions:

• Unassign task
• Move task to another project
• Clear due date
• Mark task incomplete
• Remove collaborators

Variables in rules

It’s now possible to reference dynamic values, called variables, when creating rules. Users can call on variables such as Task assignee, Task creator, and Due date for more clarity and flexibility.

Variables can be used in the Add comment text field when creating a rule.