VIDEO: How to – Automations | monday.com

When I hear automation, I immediately think of automatons. Robots, cyborgs, androids, that sort of thing. And while I wish I was about to narrate a video talking about all of my favorite robots, I’ll instead talk about the next best thing: automations on monday.com. Heyy I’m Kyle, hope you’ve been good and great, great and good, and today I’m going to show you how to use automations in monday.com. If you’ve missed out on the other videos in this series, you can check out the playlist by clicking the annotation in the top right corner of your screen.

But if you’re ready to robo-rumble, so am I, so let’s get started. Automations in monday.com, much like the automatons I mentioned earlier, function off of basic input and output. You set them up so that if a certain input happens, the system will produce a specified output. In a real life example, if I get bonked on the head, I say ouch. So, if BONK then OUCH. Easy, right? Let’s see how that works in the system. To start, let’s pull up a board that we want to build automations for.

Then in the top right corner, just underneath the invite button, you’ll see this button called automate, and look at that, there’s even a little robot on the button. Click there. The automations screen will pop up. You’ll see that monday.com includes a handful of ones in here by default, and just looking at them can help you understand how the structure works. If we recall our bonk example from earlier, if I were to transform “If I get bonked on the head, I say ouch.” into monday.com’s automation language, it’d probably look like THIS.

Make sense? Great. Now, these automations that monday.com started us with are fine and dandy, but if you want to switch them off you can flip the little on off switch here on the right side of the screen. Now, I’m a big fan of tinkering with stuff or at least pokin’ around in things to understand how something works, and if that’s how you learn best, I’d recommend hopping over to the ‘automations center’ tab and just looking through all these pre-built automations so you have an idea of what is possible within the system.

These templates can be super helpful. TO start, let’s use a really basic one, ‘When date arrives, notify someone.’ When You click on ‘use template,’ that template will show up on your screen, but bigger, with an arrow, and with some words underlined. The underlined words are all variables that you will have to define based on what you’re trying to achieve, and the arrow represents the division between the “if” and the “then” of your automation. So let’s click on ‘date.’ Here it’ll ask us to select the relevant column on our board that represents the date.

Obviously, since this is supposed to be a date, only columns that are dates will be selectable here. If you’re not sure how to get a date column added to your board, check out our series on monday.com boards, the link is in the description. Now let’s click on ‘when.’ Here a pop up is asking us to choose specifically when on the date this action will take place. I can choose to have it either happen on the day of, or I can choose to have the action occur before the date, it just depends on what you’re looking to do.

For this example, let’s say we want it to happen at 9am the day before the date. Now if I click on ‘someone’ I can either choose a specific person to notify, or a people column, or an entire team, or everyone subscribed to the item. For this example, we’re going to use the person column, so basically anyone that is assigned to this item within that column will be notified. If I click ‘notify’ I can specify the notification that will be sent out to the relevant people at the predetermined time.

You’ll see little buttons down below the text box with variables like ‘item name’ or ‘board name’ or ‘date.’ While typing up the notification, I can click on those buttons and it will automatically fill in the corresponding variable within the message. For instance, if I wanted it to fill in the name of the item that’s due, I could use that autopopulation field and it’ll show up in the notification. So I’ll hit done, and then hit create automation.

Now you’ll see it pop up in our list of automations. A few interesting things to note, you can see when the automation was last updated and who did the updating. If you need to tweak the automation, you can do so by clicking the ellipses or three dots in the top right corner of the automation and then selecting ‘edit automation’ and it’ll take you right back to that page we were at earlier. And there we have it! You’ve created an automation from a template.

But let’s say you’re a rebel. A wild child. You don’t need no training wheels, you’re a lone wolf and you want to make an automation all on your own. Well, you can do that too! Instead of going to the automations center like before, just click on the ‘add new automation’ button and a screen will pop up, similar to the one we used earlier, but the text is a lot more vague, reading: ‘when this happens -> then do this.’ Now, because you’re not operating from a template you’ll have to be a bit more specific in what you want the system to do, but making automations in this way will give you a lot more wiggle room and space for customization.

Statuses? Columns? Dates? People? The sky’s the limit, so go make some automations. That wraps up our video on automations. Pretty neat stuff. I still want to talk about robots but alas, maybe next time. Oh! And while monday.com is awesome, it’s not the only PM software out there, so if you want more info on some alternatives, visit TechnologyAdvice.com for our list of the top options available today. Thanks for watching and go be good and great, great and good.