[Status: Not Planned] Setting and locking start / end dates or duration

6 years, 112 upvotes, 81 people following and still no plans to address this is crazy lol. As someone who manages projects for a product team, I get that there are competing priorities but this feature makes Wrike practically unusable for many people. I turned off automatic calculation for those key constrained dates so they wont change but dependencies get missed all the time because I'm required to manually monitor for when dates push past key dates.

Travis Balthes I agree!

Hi Everyone 👋 thank you for showing continuous support for this suggestion. We understand it’s been a long time since this post was created, and it can be frustrating. Currently, this is still not planned, and there are no new updates. We are ensuring every comment from this post is passed on to the team. If there’s any update, I will make sure to post it here. Again, thanks so much for your patience and understanding.

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Locking duration is necessary to be able to use effectively Blueprints. 

We are a construction company and our blueprints will have set up the duration and predecessors, with these parameters we expect that in all the tasks the start date and end date gets automatically calculated, and this works well, however after we set up a project from the blueprint, of course we need to change the start dates according to the reality, and we expect that the duration isnot modified, just the end date, however Wrike is recalculating the duration, instead of the end date, which is a huge mistake. This makes the blueprint feature very useless 

Astrid C, we ran into the same issue and found these workarounds, maybe you're already doing this:
1. when you create the project based off the blueprint (you're probably already doing this) you can set the initial start date of the project or first task to be according to your reality, that way you start in the right ballpark

2. I've noticed if you are manually changing the start date of a task to be later or earlier, if the new start date is within or before the original start - end date window then Wrike will shorten or lengthen your duration, which is very annoying (example: a 5 day duration task that starts on 3/26/2025 and ends 4/1/2025, if you change the start date to a date inside or before that window your duration shrinks or expands and keeps the due date as the one thing that doesn't change). This causes our team to accidentally give people less time to work on tasks all the time. However, if you move your start date to further in the future outside of the original range your duration stays the same. Following the example above, if you change your start date to 4/3/2025, your duration will remain as 5 days.

3. All this has led me to tell my teams if you need to change a date, or duration, do so from the Gantt chart only, do not do it from the table. This way you can see exactly the change you are making and how it is affecting the tasks around it, and there is little to no room for error. 

Hopefully something here was helpful for you!

Hi Andrew Parrish,

Thanks for your comments, they are very helpful, I did noticed that applying the change from the Gantt view the duration doesnot get impacted. 

I also figure out a workaround to apply changes in date while keeping the duration locked. I created a costume field named Lock duration, I added the duration to this costume field. 

Then, I created an automation so whenever the start date is changed, the Due date is calculated with the following formula: Due date = start date + Lock duration.

Following the same logic in order to avoid issues with the duration when changing the Due date, I created a second automation so whenever the due date is changed, the start date is calculated with the following formula: Start date = start date -  lock duration. 

That helped me lock the duration, and secure automatic changes in the start date or due date respecting the duration, when one in manually changed.

Astrid C
Cool idea, thanks for sharing that!

I wanted to update everyone here, as I am a Wrike user and was on the "What's new in Wrike" call today. Coen Jardine, Solutions Consultant with Wrike, confirmed that from the Table view you can now lock end dates. The demo he provided on this was unclear, so I'm coming here asking if anyone has the steps to know how to do this. 

Here is the recording link if anyone would like to watch it. He discusses this at the 15 minute mark. 

The link takes you to a screen and requires the access code sent to your email to access. It is not discussed anywhere in the What's New in Wrike  - May 2025 write up.  They did make a number of changes to tables in Timesheets, which you can lock date dates for timesheet purposes so I'd be willing to bet that is probably what they are referring to. 

Hi everyone, I reached out to the responsible team, and there are currently no new updates. I’ll make sure to provide an update here if anything changes. Thanks.

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Good morning, 

As a new company joining Wrike, it was really frustrating to find out that durations are not locked. If an activity is accelerated or delayed this has no impact on the duration therefore I don't understand why the software would allow it to change. To see that this issue was flagged five years ago and have 5 pages of comments in support of the rollout raises some major red flags as to what gets prioritized for roll out. A fixed duration is industry standard when it comes to scheduling so the fact this was overlooks in the original design and has yet to be corrected is very concerning. What do we as the community and CUSTOMER need to do to convince the product team that this needs to be on the short term roadmap and addressed right away?

I completely agree with you Kim. I don't know what more we can do as paying customers to get Wrike to address this, and other important shortcomings that have not been addressed in years. It's very frustrating to have clear feedback on what needs to be fixed and to continue to get responses of "no updates" or "no on the roadmap." As you pointed out, there are a few very common industry standard practices in project management software that Wrike fails to achieve. Come on, Wrike, look at your competitors and provide the fundamental behaviors and features that we all expect in this platform. AI features may be cool, but it's the basics that we want, such as locked durations. This issue needs to be addressed.