Ultimate Guide to Asana Recurring Tasks

Asana is a popular choice for task and project planning and management. It provides multiple task management and communication features for individuals and teams. Asana also lets you create recurring tasks for administrative duties that have to be repeated over and over again. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss what you ought to know about Asana recurring tasks and how you can get the most out of this useful feature. 

Why should you create recurring tasks in Asana?

Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that you can easily set up and maintain. First, you’d create a workspace where you can invite your team and collaborate on projects. Next, create a project and under it, you can proceed to add as many tasks as possible. 

Asana tasks usually have a title, description, and due date. You can assign them to yourself or a member of your team. The recurring task solution reminds your team of routine tasks and helps to enhance team productivity. Here’s why you should create recurring tasks in Asana.

• Asana allows you to create tasks on a loop. You can add the Task once and specify the Repeat Schedule. 

• The function sends a reminder before your task is due, whether on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

• It helps you to meet regular deadlines without having to remember them. You just need to do a one-time setup.

What Asana tasks you can schedule

During the lifecycle of a project, there are some tasks that will occur multiple times, for example, team meetings, status reports, project audits or testing, executive meetings, etc. 

Other types of recurring tasks include updating social media pages, monthly payroll, content calendars, and more Asana automations. It’s best to set up an automatic reminder for these types of tasks.

Asana recurring tasks ensure that you set up a task once and place it on a repeat schedule. You can also edit and delete such tasks at once without any stress. Below are the five selections for recurring tasks in Asana. 

• Daily: This is mainly for tasks that you need to do every day. 

• Weekly: Mostly for tasks that you need to do every week. 

• Monthly: For tasks that you need to do every month. 

• Yearly: This is meant for tasks that need to be done once per year. 

• Periodically: This is great for tasks that need to be done after a specific time frame e.g. every 5 days or 10 days, etc. 

• Custom: This is meant for tasks that should recur biweekly, bimonthly or quarterly. 

Those are the tasks you can automate using the native functionality in Asana. If you have other needs, you should apply third-party tools. 

How to make recurring tasks in Asana

Asana recurring tasks save you the stress of creating the same tasks for your project every day, weekly, monthly or yearly. Here is how you can make recurring tasks in Asana. 

• Sign in to your Asana account. On your Asana dashboard, click on My Tasks.

• Next, you need to create a Task. There are two ways:

1. Click on the Add task button above.
2. Click on Add task below your last task to automatically add it. 

• After adding the task, click on the Details option to make it recur. 

• Next, click on Due Date and a calendar will pop up. Search for the recurring icon at the bottom of the calendar. 

• Now, set the preferred schedule for your recurring task. 

That’s how you can set up a recurring task. In the example above, daily reminders will be sent to the user to perform a certain task e.g. post on social media. 

Setting up Asana recurring tasks based on completion date

It’s also possible to create Asana recurring tasks that are meant to repeat based on the last time the task was completed.

You will follow the same steps for creating a recurring task. But when it’s time to set the schedule, simply choose Periodically. 

When you reach Days after completion, you’re allowed to choose from 1 to 30 days. This helps Asana to determine when the task needs to be automatically repeated. 

The above is an example of a schedule set to 7 days after completion. As soon as the current task is marked complete, Asana will repeat the same task on the next due date. 

How to launch recurring reporting outside of Asana?

Universal reporting is a cool feature to enjoy reporting within Asana. At the same time, most Asana users prefer to build custom reports using third-party tools, such as Google Sheets, Excel, Looker Studio (former Data Studio), and others. To do this, they export data from Asana to create dashboards and reports.

Asana offers you the option to export a list of your tasks as CSV. Simply click the drop-down menu beside My Tasks and select Export CSV. 

But if you’d like to automate reports in Asana or create an automated Asana backup, you need a third-party tool like Coupler.io. It’s a data integration solution that you can use for your project’s recurring reports. It can help you send stories, tasks, projects, workspaces, and other data from Asana to BigQuery. There’s also an option for you to export Asana to Excel. 

First, you have to sign up on Coupler.io. You can use the 14-day free trial to test the features before deciding whether to purchase a plan. 

• Login to your Coupler.io account, and click on Add Importer. You should see the following:

• Add a source app and destination app. In this case, we will connect Asana to Google Sheets. 

• Connect to your source account, select the data entity for your custom report and pick a start date. Then, click Jump to Destination Settings.

In this case, your source application is Asana and the data entity is Tasks. This step ensures that you’re reporting useful project information. 

• Connect to your destination account, and select a spreadsheet and a sheet. Then, click Jump to Schedule Settings.

To set up the destination, we linked a Google Sheets account and selected a spreadsheet and sheet. 

• Now, activate automatic data refresh and set the interval to make a recurring report. Then, click Save and Run. 

Depending on how frequent your reporting ought to be, you can set the interval to hourly, daily or monthly. According to the schedule you’ve specified, the Coupler.io imported would automatically pull task or project reports from Asana to your Google Sheets account. 

Useful tips on recurring tasks in Asana

There are some things you need to know about Asana recurring tasks. Check them out below:

1. When you set a task to repeat periodically, the Calendar only shows the next time the task is due.  
2. When a recurring task copies itself, all fields excluding task comments are copied. If you mark a daily or weekly task as complete, it will still remind you of the next due date. 
3. If you want to cancel the recurrence of an existing task, navigate to Due date and simply click on the recurring icon below the calendar to remove the repeat function.

Asana recurring tasks not working

Some users complain about Asana recurring tasks not working. So we’d like to speak about a few of these issues and how you can go about them. 

The most common issue is that due dates for recurring tasks don’t display in the timeline. As a user, you should understand that most repeating tasks in Asana will only show up in the Calendar, Timeline, and Workload for only the next time that is due.

Another issue is that recurring tasks that have been marked complete may refuse to show up on the next due date. If this happens, make sure your project view is set to all tasks or incomplete tasks. If you created the task in the “Do Later” section, check the section for it. 

Are recurring tasks in Asana good for task management?

Asana is a great tool for managing your tasks and projects. It’s an efficient and easy-to-use tool for both individuals and teams. It offers a forever-free plan and a couple of paid plans. 

This project management tool allows you to keep tasks in one place, prioritize your work, improve collaboration, track team progress as well as stay on top of due dates and deadlines.

Asana is also great for task scheduling. You can use the recurring task feature to create tasks on a loop and eliminate the need to recreate the same tasks repeatedly.