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Rule triggers

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What is a trigger?
Choose a trigger
Trigger examples

Rules are available on Asana Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Premium, Business, and Legacy Enterprise.

Visit our pricing page for more information.

Rules allow you to streamline routine tasks and establish workflows with ease. This article will cover the various rule triggers in more detail. For information on rule actions, please visit this Help Center article.

What is a trigger?

A rule trigger in Asana is an event that activates a predefined rule, causing an automated action to occur. For a rule to work, it needs two main components: a trigger and an action. The trigger activates the rule so that the action can be performed automatically.

Trigger

This is the event that initiates the rule. Example triggers include:

When a task is marked as complete
When a due date is set
When a task is added to a project.

Action

This is what happens automatically once the trigger event occurs. Example actions include:

Assigning the task to a specific person
Moving the task to a different section
Creating a subtask

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 to ...

Choose a trigger

Choose a rule trigger by following the steps below:

Choose a trigger

Open your project and click on the Customize button on the top right.
Choose Rules under the Add section.
Select Create custom rule.
Click into the + When… card and choose a trigger from the options on the right hand side.

Trigger examples

Date-based example

Trigger: Task is overdue

The Task is Overdue trigger can be chosen 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.

Additional notes

This trigger fires based on the moment a task becomes overdue, not simply because a task is overdue.
This trigger will not retroactively fire upon rule creation for all of the existing tasks in the project that match its 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.

Task-based example

Trigger: Task moved

These Task moved triggers will run the rule in the following situations:

A task is moved to a specific section within the project where the rule is configured.
A new task is added to the project where the rule is configured.

Custom field change example

Trigger: Custom field is changed

You can create a custom rule based on custom field changes. This trigger monitors changes to the selected custom field and runs the rule when its value is changed.

Note

Note: It may be helpful to use coupled conditions in these cases. Coupled conditions allow you the option to combine a trigger and a condition in certain scenarios. Coupling enables the creation of more intuitive rules and simplifies the process of creating certain types of rules by reducing the number of setup steps required. You can learn more about coupled conditions here.

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