You have enough on your plate — there are aspects of your job only you can do. So why waste time with mindless busy work? Why fight to maintain the status quo with repetitive actions that require no creativity or insight? Instead, let monday.com automations take over, and keep your focus where it’ll really have an impact.
You may be familiar with the monday.com platform and its sweet suite of tools that lets you manage projects and workflows. But are you getting the most out of your account? Not unless you optimize your work processes with monday.com automations.
You’ll increase reliability and productivity and decrease annoying hassle. Learn how to use and create “automation recipes” to maximum effect.
Cook Faster: Reasons to Automate Business Processes With monday.com
You know how you’re the absolute best person to do some parts of your job? The parts where you can truly shine and feel accomplished at the end of the day?
Well, automation can free you up to focus on those.
Take data entry, one commonly automated task. Inputting the right data into the right fields tends to numb the mind — one reason for the high prevalence of human error.
Sending prompt notifications, organizing information, creating new tasks when an item is ready to handoff to the next department . . . all of these are tasks monday.com automations may be able to do better than you. The "Monday Machine" won’t forget tasks or misplace documents. And it can take a lot less time to do the same mundane work, freeing you up to focus on more exciting things.
There are many benefits to business automation. When you increase efficiency and reduce error, you also reduce operating costs and make your business more competitive.
Finally, you send the message to your team that you value their time and energy too much to waste them on busy work. You free them to do the parts of their jobs that only they can do. The parts that let them go home at the end of the day feeling accomplished and proud, not numb and unfulfilled.
Cook Better: Tasty Automation Recipes
In your monday.com Work OS, each of your boards has several buttons in the top right corner of your screen. One of them says, “Automate.” This button will take you to the Automations Center.
Once there, you can use prewritten automation recipes or create new, custom ones. Automation recipes set automations by combining triggers with actions. When the trigger conditions are met, the action will occur:
- When X, then Y
You don’t have to limit yourself to one “X” either. You can combine multiple conditions and have them collectively trigger an action.
Maybe you need to remind Kate to submit a form for each item (row) by a specific due date in one of your columns. No problem:
- When Due Date arrives, notify Kate
At that time, monday.com will send Kate the message you’ve written. You can also set up recurring notifications if the form needs to be resubmitted regularly.
But maybe the cue for Kate to submit the form isn’t time-based. Perhaps she’s waiting for someone else to finish filling out some other information first.
You can pair triggers with conditions. In this case, you want Kate to be notified when someone else changes the status of the Status column “Form” to “Done.”
- When Form changes to Done, notify Kate.
The status change is the trigger, and then adding “To Done” is the condition. And the notification to Kate is the action.
Monday.com provides several automation categories, each of which holds ready-to-use recipes that you can use to automate tasks:
- Notifications. Send notifications to people to ensure that everybody is on the same page at the right time.
- Status Change. Update project managers or people working on related tasks when an item’s status changes.
- Recurring. Set actions to recur at regular intervals.
- Due Dates. Alert people when important deadlines are approaching or have passed.
- Item Creation. When new items are created, automatically assign items to certain people or teams, plus set due dates and reminders.
- Move Item. Shift items between different groups on a board, or to another board entirely, when certain conditions are met.
- Subitems. Apply automations to subitems as well as items.
- Dependencies. Adjust dates of dependent items to reflect changes in the timeline elsewhere.
You can even link items between different boards and set up cross-board monday.com automations.
Attain Master Chef Status: Getting the Most Out of Your Automations
But you can do more, adapting your system until it fits your business perfectly.
There are multiple tricks to maximizing all that the monday.com platform can do for you. Here are seven of our favorites.
1. Explore What’s Possible
Warning: it’s a lot. There is a potentially overwhelming amount of coolness at your fingertips. There are literally thousands of potential combinations you can automate to streamline and automate your business processes.
One of the best ways to do more with monday.com is to let the platform itself be your guide, so to speak. Look through all the categories of automation recipes.
How could you apply these to your current workflows? The recipes may suggest things that wouldn’t have occurred to you initially.
Put them into practice. You’ll see; when you take full advantage of these recipes for monday.com automations, you can speed through a ton of work that used to occupy too much of your time.
2. Build Custom Recipes
Don’t see what you need when you search the recipe library? Not a problem. You can create your own from scratch.
In building your custom automations, you’ll need to establish the trigger, the condition, and the action for yourself.
Say that Stephanie is in charge of content creation for your company. Every time she writes a blog post, you need her to turn it into a LinkedIn article.
Stephanie is currently working on a blog post. Its status is “In progress” on the blog management board. You could create an automation recipe to move her along to the next step when she completes a post.
As in one of the examples above, you can set the trigger and condition to:
- When Status changes to Done and Type is Blog Post
But your action is a little more nuanced than simple notification. Instead, you want to create a new item on the board, “Repurpose content for LinkedIn article.” You want to assign the new item to Stephanie and set a due date for three days into the future. So this could look like:
- Create an item
And fill out the data accordingly.
3. Map Data Between Items
But how should you fill out the data in that new item? Map it: pulling the information from one card into a new one.
You use mapping when you automate item (or task) creation. In some columns of the new item, you’ll see a little blue plus sign (+) to the side or when you hover over the input field. These are dynamic fields.
Dynamic fields are those in which you can pull column-specific data from a previously created item into the new one. Common examples include:
- Item name
- People
- Status
- Date
Static fields are those in which information cannot be mapped. If you input data, then it will be the same across all automated items.
4. Create Templates
Stephanie churns out blog posts and articles once every two weeks. Why create the automation from scratch every time? Create templates from your custom automations to make it easier and faster to repeat processes.
The beauty of automations is that they let you standardize work at its highest level.
5. Use Apps and Other Integrations Alongside Automations
We would never suggest that the monday.com Work OS is the answer to everything. (Just, you know, most things.)
And for everything else, you have integrations and apps. Handle some business tasks that are most advantageous to automate with integrations — they allow you to combine the ease of monday.com automations with the special capabilities of other tools.
Integrate monday.com with CRM software, eCommerce platforms, and marketing tools for centralized workspaces that make it easier to share information and streamline and duplicate processes.
There are a ton of custom developed Marketplace Apps for monday.com to choose from, with more being added all the time. Most have a small additional fee but some are completely free to use, so be sure to check them out.
6. Add Buttons for the Most Common Actions
You can add a button column to your boards — and you should. Buttons allow everyone to take advantage of automation.
Once you add the button column, monday.com will direct you to the automations set so that you can configure your shiny new button. The platform fills in the trigger for you:
- When Button clicked
And then, you can choose what you want your team members to accomplish at the push of a button. Do they need to create items, start time tracking, notify someone, push dates back?
Now they can.
Let Us Help With the Prep
There you have it: reasons to use monday.com automations, the basic components of automation recipes, and tips for success. You know the basic vocabulary and have some ideas on how to get started.
But before you go running off to play with your new toy — er, work on your automations — let us provide one last suggestion.
7. Hire an Expert
Here’s the thing. We believe in you. You can optimize your monday.com Work OS all on your own.
But should you have to?
See, we also believe that monday.com should make your life easier, not harder. And when you have a tool with this many facets and capabilities, it takes time and dedication to truly master it.
Plus, the monday Work OS is constantly changing and improving. It can be a full-time job keeping up with the latest changes and features. And you already have a job of your own to do.
That’s why Polished Geek is here to help. We deliver a unique blend of collaborative consulting and personalized training with our clients to build your monday.com system step by step, together with our team. And while we're at it, we share all the latest monday.com tricks, tips and best practices you may not have heard about.
Start by sending us a message or schedule a free 30-minute consultation.
Come and Geek out with us. We make mastering monday.com fun and easy, we promise.