Adding Public Holidays - Content Calendar

I’m creating a content calendar in Asana. I would like to block out days in the calendar that are public holidays.

Does anyone have a way they are already doing this?

I’m thinking of adding tasks within my project that are tagged red to stand out.

Any tried and tested tips would be appreciated. Thank you :smile:

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One of my team managers has a ‘vacation/holidays’ project on his team. He creates tasks for holidays, and his team members add when they’re going to be out on there. That way he can see it when he goes to the team calendar view, etc.

I think your way makes fine sense for just the one calendar - make a task in there tagged holidays (so red, etc.) and in the title just do like ‘HOLIDAY - Ind. Day;’ or what have you, to make it even more clear.

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Is there a way to add holiday days so that asana does not schedule tasks on those holday days?

So for example if 27th Dec is a holiday for the whole team, could this date not be selectable as a date to schedule a task?

Thank you

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Hi @Charlie_Richardson, did you ever get an answer to this? I’m trying to see if there is a way to block out individual resource’s vacations. So if I have a task that spans 5 days, but a resource will be out one of those days, Asana will extend the task to 6 calendar days.

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Hey @Charlie_Richardson & @Zuad_Oropeza1

Interesting workaround to your Organization’s vacation needs, however at this point this is not possible. There is no way to restrict the creation of Tasks that are assigned for a certain day, nor according to resource allocation (which is what Zuad is looking to do).

What we do here is create a Project that’s home to Tasks with titles that schedule vacation days to help our Team stay on track. This allows our team to reference who is out of the office and at what times, which we police ourselves. That said, there isn’t a way to enforce this via the system in Asana.

This is an interesting idea though. I’d encourage you to make a quick search to see if someone has already made this suggestion in the Product Feedback category so you can up-vote it :slight_smile:

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Hi Michael,
Thanks for your answer.

Yes thank you. This is a standard MS project feature that I like. I am using Instagantt with Asana, but that feature is not yet available, although I’m told it is on the roadmap. :slight_smile: That’s why I was checking to see if it was available in Asana. I searched high and low and haven’t seen anyone with a work around solution.

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Any more updates about this, or another thread? Its a bank holiday Friday and Monday here but cant see how to blank them out like Satursdays and Sundays are. I have planned all my projects and dates and informed customers of deadlines and just realised its all delayed 2 days now due to not realising they were bank holidays when we scheduled them some time ago.

Adding tasks for holidays is not feasible, I would need to assign them to everyone to have them appear as a complete vertical blank in the timeline, and even then it wont appear in the Unassigned section and wont cover multiple rows of a user. Needs to work like Saturdays and Sundays.

Thanks

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Would love to see this feature in your devs backlog. Other task oriented SaaS have features where you can select Weekends as None-Working Days, as well as Enter a List of Holidays as Non-Working Days.

Most of the work I am involved in is operational. We plan out this work six months to more than a year in advance - really due to the nature of our work in Examinations. Having the ability to capture these dates at an administrative level for the entire organization on Asana would be very helpful. We dont want to run into a scenario where we have planned a sprint assuming we have 5 workdays, and instead only have 4, and the sprint was not realistic. You need a good memory and there is definitely an art and skill to this.

My workaround for Holidays and other days where resources will not be available is created a Holidays and Meetings Template which gets pulled every year to create a collection of holidays and meetings (meetings where resources will be unavailable to work). When building out our operational tasks by day duration, the Holidays and Meeting Project is referenced and pulled up on a separate window. This cross reference helps ensure more time is allocated, or a task is not set or due on these dates.

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I have just using the evaluation version of Asana, and find it rather incredible that this was raised in 2017, and doesn’t seem to have progressed.

As another user mentioned, this is a basic function with MS Project. I was asked to look at Asana as a replacement. If you can get such a basic function as this, then I won’t be proceeding with paying for the full version.

Also, I noticed that I can import an Excel CSV file, but it doesn’t calculate the % complete at the higher level. It doesn’t take my start and end dates as a due date. I’d have to manually copy over end date.

Nope, this isn’t for me it fails on so many levels.

I had been enticed to use it so that resources were alerted to outstanding tasks.

Standard checkpoint meetings resolves that in a blink of an eye.

The timeline only works with the due dates within Asana, and not from the imported file.

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“I have just using the…”

Should read, “I am just using the…”

“If you can get such a basic …”

Should read, “If you can’t get such a basic…”

“…copy over end date.”

Should read, “…copy over ends dates.”

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I can’t believe this is not possible. This is very expensive software and does not have this very basic feature…I don’t understand.

FYI you can trigger any rule action - such as moving a task’s date, adding a comment, sending an email - when a task falls on a defined holiday or time off using the If a task falls on a holiday or time off rule trigger in our Flowsana integration.