Trello Automation: 9 Workflows You Can Use Right Now

in this video we'll have a look at nine practical workflow automations that you can build and make use of right away using Trello and the integrated Butler feature so these are all automations that you can apply to Trello boards and Trello cards to save yourself time to automate parts of your workflow and to generally just make your boards much more efficient and much cleaner to work in now before we dive in let me just clarify a couple of things that are especially important in case you've seen some other Trello automation tutorials first of all this is not a basic how to use Trello type tutorial I'm not going to be waffling on about the basics of Trello or the basics of this feature or go straight into actually useful workflow automations if you want a more basic tutorial on how to use Trello to be productive I have a separate video on that that I will link to below also what we're looking at here is the integrated butler feature in Trello so a lot of tutorials you can find our about Butler back when it was a separate plug-in or a separate add-on that you could apply and it has a totally different UI but now this has been integrated and made a native feature by Trello and as a new UI and that is what we're looking at without side let's get straight into our nine useful workflow automations here's my Trello demo board and up here we have a butler button and click that to start building automation and the first one we'll do is I'll go to rules and we have different types of rules we can create right here and create a new rule and every automation will have a trigger followed by one action or a set of actions so let's add a new trigger and let's say when a card is added to a specific list such as the in list by anyone usually you want to set that to by anyone so that rules don't only apply to you but anyone working at the board click on the plus to apply that as our trigger now we have to define the actions that happen once this trigger fires so when a card is added to the in list move the cards at the top of the list same one that it's in add the plus this gives us a summer when we save we get basically a text summary of what our new rule does okay so when a card is added to list in by anyone move the car to the top of the list so let's close this and test it out right if I go to the bottom of the list test card I add a new card and it takes like a second or two and as you can see the card jumped to the top of this list this is the first super simple automation that can be useful for a list like this one where new tasks come in and by adding this rule we just by default we sort the list to show the latest created ones at the top and then as we go down the list tasks get older next let's go into recurring tasks this is the most requested type of automation that I've seen from customers who've used my course and on other Trello tutorial videos that I've done so anything where you have a recurring set of tasks where on a specific interval you want the same kind of tasks to come in the same kind of checklist of steps to come in this is how to do it as an example I'm going to show you how to make a morning routine that recurs every morning so once again on our Trello board the first thing I recommend doing here might seem a bit strange but you'll see why in a second I have a card on this board it doesn't matter what list its in have a card called checklists template and in here I build any checklist that I want to reuse on a regular basis so for example I have a blog publishing checklist morning routine video checklist and other checklists like that now the reason I have three asterisks at the beginning of this name is the following whenever you're working in a card whenever you add a checklist manually I'll do that right here you can either create a new checklist or you can copy items from another checklist on this board and these items to choose from are sorted alphabetically and so I have the three stars here because that will always put it at the top of the list and that means that when I manually want to add one of my recurring checklists it's always at the top of the list so this is what you should create first create a CH templates card and put any checklists that you want on a recurring basis in here so for this automation with the morning routine we have the card called checklist templates and the list called morning routine so with that let's head into Butler and for recurring tasks you want to have a calendar automation or a calendar command create a new command and here our trigger is going to be either every day or we can refine that make it every weekday and we can also add a specific time let's say 6:00 a.m. so every morning at 6:00 I'll hit plus to add that as our trigger then what do we want to do we want to add a card called morning routine and I want to add this in my day list that's today's tasks make sense that it's in that list and then I want to add a checklist so here this checklist item I want to add a checklist called morning routine from the checklist templates card so here I enter the exact name of the checklist I want a copy and here I enter the exact name of the card I want to copy it from and in addition to that we can also add other things so for example here I can add a label if I want so we can have a whole stack of actions happening to this new card that we want to create every day and we leave it at this hit the plus to create that and save and once again we get this summary and here's what it looks like I'm not gonna wait until 6 a.m. but here's the one from today as you can see it creates this it labels it and it gives me my check list from this card right here so this is how to create recurring daily tasks and with exactly the same recipe you can create recurring weekly tasks so that could be something like maybe a weekly work review every Friday afternoon it can be a monthly task a monthly reminder for payroll or anything like that and this is probably one of the best features in Butler because it can just save so much time and make sure you always get the right task at the right time moving on our next automations are about keeping the board clean so I have this board here where we have a flow and this is usually how you set up your board you have a flow that goes from left to right and we have a list where tasks come in then we prioritize tasks for this week for today then we have different steps of a process now one of the problems that will happen in Trello is that usually in any given board more tasks come in that can get completed and stuff tends to get clogged up so if you're working on a Trello board either alone or with a team what you'll find is over time the lists keep growing if they get clogged up with more and more cards because stuff is coming in quicker than it's being processed the more clogged up your boards are the less productive you tend to be so how do we fix that well here's how we can use Trello automations to do so let's go into Butler again go into calendar once again create a new command and as a trigger in this case let's do every day at some time in the evening as to 9:00 p.m. this is our trigger and what I want to do is I want to move cards as an action I want to move cards from the list today into the list this week so I'll save that and we'll go straight into our next automation which is closely related so we create another calendar command add trigger say every Sunday and I'll make this at let's say 10 past 9:00 and here I'll move cards from this week into the in color and save that so let's look at what we have here at 9 p.m. every day we move cards from today to this week and at 10 past 9:00 every Friday we move cars from this week to in what this means is that we have an automatic clean-up process that moves cards back in the process so by default we want to move from left to right as cards get processed but to clean the board here's the idea right if something is in the today column and it hasn't been done by 9:00 p.m. it's not gonna get done today so I move it back into this week and if something is in this week column of Friday evening it's not gonna get done this week so I move it back into the in column the great thing about this is that it keeps my more important lists this week and today clean plus everyday instead of just taking whatever is left from yesterday I have to reprioritize I have to look at my tasks that I want to do this week and I have to decide which ones will I do today and again every week instead of just working on whatever wasn't finished last week it forces me to reprioritize and this is very important because your most effective work isn't always just cleaning up whatever wasn't finished yesterday or last week we can take this even further by the way and you can even move cards to a different board so for example we can create a calendar automation let's add another one for once a month for example every month on the first and again I'll make this a bit later such as 9:15 because I want the other automations to run first and now I can move cards instead of just emptying my entire in column I can move cards that are older than 30 days in the in column and I can move them to a different board so I hit that board icon I can go to the brain dump demo board so the brain dump board will basically be my idea board that's before my process my work board and I can put them into Uncategorized in the brain dump board so here again we have once a month it will look at cards that have been in that in column for longer than 30 days and move those off of my work board so those are two ways in which to essentially auto clean and auto process your board now I find that some of the most useful automations are based on the stage or the type of work that needs to be done so as something moves through the process it will get to a certain stage and with that stage certain tasks people and processes will be associated for example we might have a writing process for blog content where there's a writer who does the writing then once the writing is done and I'm sure you know if you've done any blogging or content marketing there's a bunch of stuff that always needs to be done before a blog post can be published you have to make sure you have the feature they made you sign it to the right category make sure you have your social sharing images your SEO title and so on and so forth and this is once again a task for a checklist template so I have an example for this as well which is the blog post publishing checklist let me just copy that name there and we have a stage so we would have the ready to publish stage right here where a writer would put a card once it's ready to publish so let's make an automation for this this would be a rule-based automation so we create a rule the trigger is that when a card is added to the ready to publish list again by anyone that's our trigger and then what we want to do is we want to add a checklist we want to add the checklist called blog post Publishing checklist from our checklist templates card and let's add some other steps to this as well so let's say there's a specific member on the team who needs to do this so we can say you know add someone to we add them to the card as a member of the card we can even add a comment at someone this one is ready for publishing let's add that and then save it so now we have an automation with more steps but it's all about making sure that when something moves in here the right person is assigned of the right tasks or assigned so let's try this out we have a card here actually let's make a new one new card so we have a blank card we move it into ready to publish we wait for a second and here we go so this adds our checklist and it doesn't assign or post a comment because this adds some one person I said doesn't exist on the board so that was just for demonstration purposes you'd have to choose someone who is actually a member of the board in order for those automations to run but here you can see the principle of making sure you always have the same checklist with the same tasks this is super useful as a quality assurance kind of thing just like you know a pilot uses a checklist before takeoff or a surgeon this is a checklist before surgery like even experts will do better work and will be more consistent if they can follow the same checklist or procedure each time now let's go slightly more advanced on this same idea of assigning a specific person and checklist and so on based on the stage of work there are some more advanced features in here that can be really useful so let's create a new rule in putler let's switch on the advanced option here which gives us further filtering options so here let's say when a card comes in - I don't know the ready for publish list so we want to add another filter criterium so for example if the card has the video label and it comes in - ready to publish then I want this automation to run so let's add this and then again we could have a similar thing right so again I have a checklist for this for example which is the video checklist we want to add that and we could add due dates and all kinds of other things here as well but the important point here is to make use of the extra filter which allows you to have different types of work coming through the same stages and followed by different actions so let's save this and let's try this one out so I'll create another new card and this one will assign the video label and then move that in here and now you'll see that we have the video checklist but we also have this blog post publishing checklist and that's because the new rule we created doesn't exclude the first automation from firing now in some cases maybe that's what you want because it's a video inside a blog post so you want both these processes to run but you can also again use the Advanced Options to make exclusions so go in here let's basically fix this if we only want one of these two checklists to appear so we have they more generic rule that has no filter let's edit this automation and this is something that is somewhat peculiar is that you can't edit the trigger you can only delete it altogether so then we add a new trigger and we say when a card is added to ready to publish and we add a filter and we can say without the video label so we make an exclusion it's basically the inverse rule and once I add this rule the actions are still there so it looks like all the actions go away once I delete the trigger but that's actually not the case so this is basically how you edit the trigger is you delete it and add a new one and you don't lose any of the actions so now we've added a filter to both of these so that only one of the two automations fires depending on whether that label exists or it doesn't exist so here as a general note if you're building more and more automation you always have to make sure that there are no like unintended consequences this is why I had different start times for my board cleaning automations because I want to make sure that one automation runs before the other one starts and you can also mess things up you can basically make automations that run too often or that run in loops and so on so you have to be careful about how automations may interact with each other but having said that let's get into our next automation which when setup right can save you tons of time let's go into Butler again and make a new rule based automation where our trigger so we create a new rule our trigger is going to be when a card is added to the ready for design list and then we want to add a checklist this is familiar process when I add a checklist from our checklist templates this is nothing new so let's save that but let's go a bit further let's create another rule based on checklists so now I'm going to the second row here and say when the checklist called blog post design checklist is completed in any card so when this is completed then I want to move the card to the next stage so move the car to the top of the list ready to publish and this basically gives us automations leads to further automations so let's have a look at what this looks like so let's test this out right if I have a demo card here I put it into ready for a design and the first automation runs gives me this checklist now we could also have automatically assigned the designer post a comment all this stuff that I showed before so someone then comes in on the team and completes the tasks on this checklist once all of the tasks are completed you can see here it was automatically moved to the next stage and the blog post publishing checklist has appeared so we now have as soon as this card is completed what we can do is move it to the next stage automatically add a new checklist plus all the other stuff so you could in the first automation assign a certain person then unassigned that person assign the next person and so on and this way you can based on completion of the process you can automatically move cards through the board now we've touched on many of the automation features already let me show you two more that are kind of semi automation features just two more examples of what can be useful so you can also create board buttons or card buttons that will trigger a set of actions when you click them so it's kind of a manual trigger followed by automated actions so let's look at a board button one board button that can be useful is a sort by date button so as to sort by date and we can choose an icon here then add an action and we can say sort the cards in a specific list so let's say an in by due date ascending and we save that and what happens is this sort by date button appears so here if I have cards with two dates spread out to this list I can hit sort by date will give me an indicator at the bottom here and then sort the cards by due date and the other type of button we can create is the card button so here we can create a button that will appear inside a card and a good one that I find useful is if you make an I got this button so where you'd add an action or basically the person that clicks the button joins the card and we can add some content such as those comment I got this one and of course we can also add labels and all kinds of things you know the drill by now so this is what this looks like if we have a card here there's an I got this button when I click that it assigns me and it posts this comment alright so those are nine useful trailer automations that save time and add efficiency and quality to your workflows now think about any kind of tasks that you repeatedly do either yourself or that people in your team repeatedly do and think about how to automate those in Trello because if it's something that happened on a recurring basis it can probably be done within these features which one of these workflow automations did you find most useful which one of these can you actually take and apply for yourself or your team let me know by leaving a comment below and also if you have built some badass workflow automations yourself share them with us by leaving a comment below [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ActiveGrowth

Views: 46,803

Rating: 4.9818511 out of 5

Keywords: trello, automation, workflow, examples, tutorial, productivity, get things done, Shane Melaugh, efficiency, kanban

Id: CnqPFtrywCY

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020