When Katie’s marketing team fills out their request form, a series of rules populates subtasks on the initial request. The automation is partially helpful– it helps auto-assign tasks, populate custom fields, etc., but she is still left with a lot of manual clean-up.

Instead of generating a series of subtasks, how can we use one form to generate a complete set of tasks complete with all information needed from the form?

There’s no “undo” here! Step one when you have a functioning rule in your workflow is to DUPLICATE and make your changes in the copy.

Before you go deleting all of the conditions you painstakingly entered previously, just start by adding a new action to your Do This column. Click the + and click Create a Task from the options. Then, click View All Fields.

The real magic happens when you inherit the fields from the trigger task into your newly created task. From here on out, you will be using variables to dynamically populate aspects of your tasks.

Task Name: Use variable fields to auto-populate your task name. In this example, I’ve used the Campaign Name: Asset Name

Assignees: You can create a static assignee based on your conditional check, or you can use a variable here. If your form submission auto-assigns to the submitter, use the bottom option “User Assigned to the Trigger Task”

Due Dates: There are many ways to automate your due dates from this rule, whether it is a 1:1 date based on the trigger or custom date field, or a relational date! For example, if you have a 7 day SLA on all new requests, you can set tasks to be automatically due 7 days after the request was received. PRO-TIP: Avoid weekends by toggling on Use Work Schedule to Set Date.

Projects: Multihome your new task to additional projects.

Custom Fields: Reference your original rule to set your custom field variables accordingly. To inherit a value, click the + to add a variable, and select the corresponding custom field.

In this example, you can either inherit any custom fields that were pre-set on the triggering task (see market in the example below), or predefine the values (see estimated time).

Description:

When multiple assets are submitted in one form entry, all data is parsed into the description of the task. In the original automation, Katie already has to copy and paste the relevant description details into the corresponding subtask.

We can help get part way there by using the Task variable in our updated rule to copy the full original task description into the newly generated tasks (+ » Variable » Task » Description). This is still not ideal. Katie would still need to go in and edit out the unneeded information from the descriptions.

To really get the descriptions how you need them, you can use Asana AI Studio to parse out exactly what information is needed for each asset in the description. To do this, add the Use AI variable.

Now, AI Studio will populate your new tasks only with the aspects of the description relevant to the request.

I’ve included the exact Instructions for AI that I used in my example.

Next, remove all the old actions that are no longer needed and SAVE. Here is how my final rule looks now.

Now that your new rule is ready for testing, PAUSE your original rules to keep them from running. Then – especially if you’re using AI – Test, test, test. Fill out your form and examine the results. Even if it looks perfect the first time, do it again! There is almost always one thing you didn’t think of.

Once your tests come back perfect, you can use this rule as your template. Duplicate and adjust the conditions as needed!

Join my free monthly Asana Office Hours and bring your questions and troublesome workflows! We’ll work through your issues in real time.

You can find more AI Studio resources on the Asana BFF Resource Hub where I share all prior webinar recordings, step-by-step guides, and articles like this one.