In this article, we'll share a few tips and tricks to create recurring tasks to make your workflow smoother! 🤩
Create a new group every time period
At our small soap making company, we use the below board to keep track of all of our store's inventory orders throughout each month.
Every time a store needs to restock a product, they request the product and quantity using this board, and then we can tally up the numbers at the end of the month 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 Automations Center and into the custom automation builder. From there, create an automation that reads "Every time period, then create a group":
Now, just 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 below scheduling board to stay on track of all our daily assignments. In this case, we have a meeting every single day which we need to make sure is constantly 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!
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.
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 is a different new product, and the items in each group are the different events related to its release. Rather than rewriting each item every time a new product is being released, we'll use an 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 has been created identical 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 automations work. For example, in the "date" field in the following template: "When date arrives, then notify someone".
The same time-based automation will run at different times for different users if they have different time zones configured in their desktop settings.
If your “When” in the aforementioned template is set to 9 am, New York City users will be notified at 9 am EST and Tel Aviv users will be notified at 9 am IDT.
Time-based automations will run on your local desktop’s time zone. If your time zone settings under My Profile are extremely different than your local time zone (more than a few hours), you may see an issue.
If this is the case for you and it is essential that these two settings are different, please reach out to our support team right here.
If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.
Comments
Is it possible to dynamically name a group generated by automation? My specific use case is wanting to automatically create a group for future sprints, with the name dynamically set to the date range for the sprint, e.g., "5/29/22 - 6/11/22".