Automation - Due Date Automatically Set to Tomorrow

[tjb (Troy Brophy)]

I know this is probably a very basic question, and if I had more time I’d hunt for the answer more thoroughly, but I’m trying to convince my bosses to use Monday.com and I have a demo with them tomorrow.

The thing I can’t figure out with Automation is how to have a due date column that is set for the day that the automation is activated. That is, I set up automations two weeks ago, to add new sub-tasks to a task that was created. Each sub-task has a due-date field. I set those fields to “Today” but they just retained the day that I created the automations. So when I created a new task today, the sub-tasks all filled in a due date of two weeks ago (the day I created the automations).

It seems like it must be possible to have the automation set the due-date in an automatically-created sub-task to be the day that the automation runs (or even “today + x days”) but I can’t figure out how to make this happen. I only have the ability to select a specific date when I set up the automation rules.

Can anyone point me to the documentation to resolve this? If not, I’m going to have a really hard time selling this product internally.

Thanks!

[basdebruin]

hi @tjb

Welcome to the community! This is indeed the case when you select “Today” to fill the Date column. There is an app called “Set Relative Timeline” which does do what you want, but it is writing to a Timeline and not a Date column. If that is something you can live with the app can be found here: https://monday.com/marketplace/10000032

[tjb (Troy Brophy)]

Thanks. I’m 100% new to Monday.com so I don’t know much about timelines and apps.

I think my issue is so simple that it’s hard to communicate it.

I have an automation set up so that when someone creates a new task, and the task is set to a specific type (e.g. “publish article”), it automatically generates six sub-tasks, each assigned to different team members.

The sub-tasks all have due-date fields, and the due date should reflect the date that the task was added, not be fixed to the date that I created the automation rule.

Example:

• We get a request to publish a new article.
• I go in and add a task with the article title, and set the task type to “Publish Article.”
• This creates the six sub-tasks through the Automation.

Each sub-task should have a due-date that is based on the date I created the task, but instead, it’s locked into the date that I set up the Automation rule. I can’t imagine this is how it was meant to work, as I can’t picture a situation when you’d want an automation to constantly fill in a specific date going back weeks and years. There must be some simple way to have the date for an Automation set to the current date when the Automation is trigged, not when its rule was created.

We’re also looking at Asana, which handles this by using Templates instead of Automations. The Asana template is very straightforward and handles this date in an intuitive way, with the date filling in based on the date that the template is used, not when it was created.

If I can’t sort this issue out in the next day or two, I’m back too pushing for Asana, even though it costs more.

I’m attaching a screenshot here showing that the Due-Date field for all of the sub-tasks (generated by an Automation) are defaulting to the date that I created the Automation rule, and not to the Due-Date set into the parent task.

I created a task today and set the Due Date to today, but the sub-tasks (created by Automation) all load in with the Due-Date set to Feb 14, when I created the Automation).

This can’t be the intended behavior of this feature, as it makes no sense. Why would you want a date field that always points to a fixed date in a dynamically generated item?

[basdebruin]

hi @tjb

I totally understand what you are trying to achieve. If you want to set the due date to today you can use the automation:

However there is no trigger for when creating subitems I’m afraid.

[tjb (Troy Brophy)]

This doesn’t seem to be an available option for subitems created via automation.

[tjb (Troy Brophy)]

Bumping this because my other question disappeared and I can’t believe we’re the only team who is dealing this this issue.

The issue is with SUBITEMS that are AUTOMATED. There does not seem to be a way to have the AUTOMATION-GENERATED SUBITEMS set to the same due date as the parent row.

[tjb (Troy Brophy)]

It looks like some one else has the same issue…and they are correct in that this seems like a very basic, entry-level project management solution feature that doesn’t seem to be implemented in monday.com. It looks like it just hasn’t been addressed?

I’m super curious how other people set up their monday.com lists and not run into this issue, or do they do it some other way that isn’t obvious?

Relative due date of subitem based on item date column

Hi, My company is trying to get setup on Monday.com and while many things are fairly intuitive and are coming together easily, there are a handful of seemingly very basic project management processes that I just can’t seem to figure out how to automate here. Before anyone suggests integromat or zapier, please know that we are a small company, so paying for an external automation system on top of what we are already paying for Monday.com is simply not an option for us. My current hangup is on s…

[DonBav (Hubertus Keil)]

@tjb

this seems like a very basic, entry-level project management solution feature that doesn’t seem to be implemented

can not agree more.
We have been using Date functions in automations in Asana and ClickUp before, and just cant find anything in Monday.com.

How can we make devs aware of this issue?

[cbenton (Christopher Benton)]

I know this is an old thread but I stumbled across it and wanted to offer my solution for a similar situation. I was able to get the desired result by having the automation set the date to Today then after that, push the same date back by 1 day.