In this article, we'll share a few tips and tricks to help you create recurring tasks in order to make your workflow smoother! 🤩

Create a new group every time period

At our small soap-making company, we use the board below to keep track of our store's inventory orders throughout each month.

Every time a store needs to restock a product, it requests the product and quantity using this board. At the end of the month, we can tally up the numbers to see how much we should be producing back at the factory!

Since the groups on our board represent each month of orders, we need to create a new group at the beginning of each new month. To make a new group instantly gets created every month, we used a recurring automation. 

To do this, start by clicking into the Automation Center and into the custom automation builder. From there, create an automation that reads "Every time period, then create a group":

Next, customize the template as we've done below. You can choose how often a new group is created, its name, and at exactly what time it will be created!

Create a new item every time period

Similarly, if you have a single item (or task) that needs to be repeated every so often, you can use a recurring automation to instantly create it according to your desired cadence.

In our soap company example, we manage the scheduling board below to stay on track of all our daily assignments. In this case, we have a meeting every single day, which we need to ensure is consistently added to our board in time.

To ensure that we have a new item for our daily meeting every day, we set up the automation seen below. Now, every morning at 10am, a brand new item titled "Daily meeting" will be automatically created for us to ensure it never goes amiss!

Tip: Try using the Recurring Tasks app for another way to instantly create recurring tasks with ease! 

Notify your team every time period

We found that our sales team was forgetting to restock the shelves in our stores at the beginning of every week, and we don't want our customers to see empty shelves. To fix this problem, we've added this automation template:

We customized the automation to notify the entire Sales Team every Monday morning at 9am with the message "Reminder to restock shelves!". Now, we are able to start every week with a fully stocked store and happy customers.

Tip:  We can use this automation to notify anyone of anything. For example, we can use it to remind our entire team to fill out the hours they worked in our billing calendar at the end of every month.

Duplicate a group every time period

At the Thorn & Thistle soap company, we release a brand new product every month. Every time we do so, we follow the same workflow, which we track with our "Product Release" board. Each group in this board represents a different new product, and the items in each group represent the different events related to its release. Rather than rewriting each item every time a new product is released, we'll use automation to duplicate the group.

All we have to do is set up the automation seen below. We chose to duplicate the group every month on the 1st of the month at 9am so that we can rename our group accordingly and start working on our new product release right at the start of each new month. 📆

Since our group was created identically to the original "Candied Apple Spray" group, we want to clear all of the data using batch actions.

First, we'll change the name and the color of our new group. Next, we'll hover over the left side of each item to select each item in the group. Now we just have to reset each column, as shown below:

Time-based automations

You may be wondering how time-based automation works. Let's look at how the date field works in the following template: When a date arrives, notify someone.

The automation will run according to the desktop timezone of the person who sets it up. This means that if I'm in New York City and I set up the automation to run at 9 a.m., then it will run every day at 9 a.m. ET regardless of another teammate's timezone. If my teammate is in Los Angeles, they'll receive a notification at 6 a.m. PT.

 

Note: If you are using a template that states "When date passed..." the automation will trigger on midnight of that day.