We add sections to our projects to better organize them and break them down into smaller portions. When we assign a due date to a section, that date doesn’t show up like it does for the tasks. Are we doing something wrong?
Hi @Matt_Gugle,
Thanks for reaching out! Nope, you’re not doing anything wrong. Section headers act differently in Asana than normal tasks. Because sections are used to differentiate groups of tasks, the assumption is that they won’t need a due date, and thus the due date doesn’t appear in the project view.
A workaround could be to have a task just below the section that contains a due date. You could call the task, Prelim work due date.
I hope this helps!
Depending on the project type, we typically will have milestone tasks per section (like design completion, development, etc.) that live right under the section header.
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I think @Caisha’s recommendation is really good. Sections are really just used as headings to visually break up the work. If you need project milestones, use tasks.
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This is really unfortunate. The suggestion of adding another task just further complicates things, since usually long running sections have useful comments in them, therefore separating out the due date makes for a more cumbersome navigation and hides the information elsewhere.
As far as I recall sections with due dates used to show up in the calendar, now I am unable to see them. Was this a recent change, or am I confused?
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I agree this is not a great situation. Sections are often used as milestones, so I would assume the opposite - that due dates are useful to display because you want milestones done by a certain date.
It seems to me, rather than assume people wouldn’t want to see due dates, let people see them if they choose to apply a due date to a section. If someone doesn’t want to see a due date, then they won’t apply a due date.
I use sections to break up projects, but I want those broken parts to be done by a certain time, so it makes sense to visibly see Section due dates.
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In a task list one should be able to see the due date range (start/end date) assigned to a section “task”. Currently that is not possible. It is only visible in the task detail.
Thanks for your feedback @Bill_Doerrfeld. We already have a thread on this topic, so I have gone ahead and merged your post with this main thread; hope that’s ok!
Well if that’s the logic then sections should not contain any of the features of tasks including due dates, etc.
If that is the UI design assumption, then logic would follow that sections do not have the same attributes as tasks. Unfortunately they do. Sections have all the same attributes as tasks (set due date, tags, etc) and get selected in drag or shift multi-selects and edited accordingly with other “tasks” in bulk edits. If sections are something different than tasks, then they should behave as such. The only difference I see is the lack of the feature described in this thread.
Further “evidence” that sections = tasks is presented in the attached image. In the attached image 5 tasks are selected but the detail panel indicates 8 tasks are selected because sections = tasks.
I actually would prefer that sections do NOT operate as tasks. However, they do. Other apps such as Things treat sections as an independent entity. Asana treats sections as tasks but fails to show the same info as tasks in list mode.