Tricking an Asana rule into changing nothing

This one is a bit technical, but if you find yourself making a lot of rules chances are it may come in handy.

Rule branches are evaluated in sequence. This means that when a rule gets triggered, Asana will go through branches in sequence. Starting at the top, it will test brach conditions, until the first branch where the condition(s) evaluate to true and execute the corresponding action. That means any branches beyond that - eventhough they might also evaluate to true - are completely ignored.

So besides the fact that we need to take this into account when constructing our rules, we can also take advantage of that fact, as sometimes we want a rule to do nothing. A situation like the following:

When <trigger> happens, I want stuff to happen, but not when a <specific detail> is true

For example: When a custom field contains a certain value.

The way I used to solve this is to add the inverse of that specific detail to all conditions in branches, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Especially when you have multiple conditions per branch already, and because with current functionality you are forced to chose between and() and or() and can’t combine.

The solution is to have the first branch catch the exception and do nothing. The challenge however, is that Asana doesn’t allow you to save a rule unless all branches have an action.

Lucky for us, we can have an action that doesn’t change anything. Two actually.

1. We can set the task title to the task title:
   

2. We can set the task description to be the task description
   

This trick uses variables in rules and simply feeds the old value into the new value.

Jan-Rienk @ Improving Every Day

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