Monday.com Time-Saving Tips: Unified Boards, Columns & Automation

my name is Laura I'm a customer success manager here at Monday dot-com and today's advanced themed webinar is easy

tips to save you time here at Monday comm super excited to be with you here today and I want to cover what we're

going to talk about today a few housekeeping items and then we'll jump right in so the first thing is we're

going to talk about our you knew Unified boards list I'm sure some of you have noticed this on your accounts already so

we'll go over that and some great things we can learn there hidden secrets of columns items and board views

streamlining your team communication and those with that are outside your account as well some dashboard goodies and then

I will open it up to some Q&A now a few housekeeping items before we get started the first thing is if you do have any

questions during the webinar please use the Q&A button on the toolbar of your zoom screen at the bottom rather than

putting them in the chat because there are a lot of us here today I don't want any of your questions to get lost so

definitely put those in the Q&A and I do have two colleagues here with me who are gonna help me with answering these

questions so that we can try and answer as many as possible in our time if your question is not answered please feel

free feel free to reach out to us at support at money.com after this webinar we'll be happy to continue answering

them particularly those that are workflow related we definitely want to hear all about your use cases and what's

going on so definitely hit us up after this if we don't get to it today the audio should be through your computer

speakers if for some reason you can't hear or see what I'm doing at any point during the webinar just let us know in

the chat and finally following the webinar you will receive an email with the link of this webinar so there's no

need to write in asking for the link you will get it and additionally it will be uploaded on demand on Monday comm slash

webinars again after this if you guys need anything please hit up Monday comm support for our knowledgebase definitely

check out Monday comm stories if you haven't already and of course you can always email or call us we're available

24/7 all right so let's hop right into the platform today so the first thing I want

to kind of start talking about is a new and better and revamp way to really organize all the boards that are going

on on your platform on on your account so it's really important that as you guys are growing and your accounts are

getting bigger and more team members are joining that there's an easy way to organize your boards and understand

exactly how to find them and the quickest way so we have here the new unified boards list on the left you'll

notice here in this first folder called themed webinar that I have all types of boards here I've got main boards

shareable boards and private boards denoted here as you can see and it's super nice to have these folders to

really just organize where you want to put things whether it's by project or by client by month or year by team member

whatever works for you and your workflow I'm actually gonna go ahead and just rename this one to tips to save you time

so we know exactly where all the boards are that we're going to be working with today on this webinar

so important note about folders is going to be that the folders now are account-wide so this is a great way to

organize everybody across the account to understand that where the boards should be organized and should go so please

take note of that as you guys are working with this new unified boards list that all the folders are going to

be account wide and you can put all different types of boards in them to help organize your workflows now another

way that if you're like me and you have lots and lots of boards is to be able to search for the board name so if I want

to go ahead and kind of search quickly for scram iteration planning I can go ahead and do that quickly here and it

will bring up the board that I am looking for the ones that related to that search additionally if you click

here you can filter as well between main private and shareable so if you wanted to only kind of see you know the

important boards that are private potentially you could go ahead and do that and it will pull up just the

private boards another thing is if you do have lots and lots of main boards on your account that you know may not be

necessarily relevant to your everyday workflow you can click here subscribe to boards only so only the boards that

you're subscribed to will show up of course you can always reverse this unclick them and additionally hide those

empty folders so if another team member has a folder with only private boards in it that is not relevant to you you can

go ahead and hide those as well you lastly over here on the left we do have

the bolt switch so if you see this little lightning icon here on the left alternatively you can hit command B this

is a great way when your left pane is closed and you're working on either in your inbox or my week or a dashboard or

a board to just easily quick click and find other boards that are going on on your account without actually opening up

your left pane and kind of switch quickly between between them while having this large boards list

alright so the next thing I want to do is hop into some item level tips and tricks to really help you guys push your

workflow forward and save you some time along the way so getting granular with your items can

be really important to really just nail down the right details share information and communicate with your team

effectively and efficiently so the first thing I'm going to do is actually go over to my scrum iteration planning

board so this would be for a team of developers who are working on an app and building out an app and all the

different portions of that workflow and you can see here I've got a couple of iterations I've got four iterations here

that I've posted and what's really important to be is also what's going on here with my bugs so when we're doing

iteration planning for the team I do want to include on this board I have bugs that have been filtered so those I

want to actually push into the iteration for the next iteration to be fixed so on this board what I'm gonna do here is

duplicate this group and I have the option now to not only duplicate the items but as well as the updates now of

course with bugs there's lots of communication back and forth to understand really what's going on and

it's important that that communication gets transferred over so I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that and then I

would love to really add this to my iteration so I'm gonna go ahead and move this to our iteration board as well

you'll get a little pop up of the things that aren't relevant on the other board but that's okay because this is a

duplicate and if I hop back here I now have this duplicate I'm going to quickly just move these down over to the current

iteration that's coming up so now you can see here I've got those four bugs are now in my iteration planning and as

well the updates that have been going on here are included so I can see the previous communication that was going on

while I'm on this iteration board now the next thing I've done here is added a linked to item McCallum what this is

gonna do is it's going to connect the two boards so all I did here was went to the column Center more columns typed in

link to item I added this to my board it'll then prompt you to add what's called a mirror column so what we're

gonna do here is I'm actually going to take this one off and we'll do a brand new one

you so you guys can see the full so we'll go ahead and add this board

it's going to explain how it's linking to another board we're going to select that other board

we'll go ahead and choose platform bugs queue team a it'll then ask you which mirror column so which ones do I want to

pull in from that bugs board so I'm actually gonna pull in the status the reason for this is that once these are

linked I'll be able to update the status on both boards which is awesome so I'm going to go ahead now and link these to

the four bugs that we've holdover from the filtered group and you can see how as I'm doing it the statuses are being

mirrored here now to save some time instead of having the devs change the statuses on both

boards they can just go in here and you know change these two done and and you know manipulate all the information from

here additionally if they click on the actual link to item it will bring up all the information from the platform bugs

cube board in order to change communicate you know and stay updated all the way down to every single item on

both boards so it's kind of a great way to really just save time if you have cross board information that you'd like

to kind of combine and put together rather than going to two places at once all right we're gonna move over to

another use case here which is managing company objectives and on this board what I want to know from you guys

actually is on average how many columns do you have on a board if you could just give me a quick number in the chat that

would be great you awesome so it looks like we have quite a

range anywhere from one to about 15 to 20 is the numbers that I'm seeing here some have lots more which is awesome I'd

love to know how you guys are able to manage that so I want to jump in here to how we can really create you know the

the best parts of the columns that we do use so I'm going to touch on some of our most commonly used columns and how to

really elevate those to the next level so the first thing is you can see here that I've got three different objectives

and a few strategies for each objective in order to achieve those and I've got status and I've got a couple of phases

so it's important for me to actually really make these updates to my team and who's working on it right from the

status column so if you can see here once I hover over the status column there's a little dog ear and if I click

that dog here the updates section will open up here in a little pop-up so I can go ahead and say where do we stand on

this and maybe I'll go ahead and tag everyone here on this board so that they are going to get notified about it now

when I click update you can see here that I've got an update showing right here and it's nice because it'll show

you this little red bar and it'll show you exactly where this update was written in relation to the status that

you're talking about so a way to a way to kind of stay granular and keep things in context to what exactly is going on

here on your board so again that's just being able to hover over the status column and you can

update right there and this will change as you change status column so if we go on change this to on target I can go in

and add another update and you can see here that it has added to that all right moving right along here so as if we

scroll over here and I'll just go ahead and put everything on one page for us you can see that I've created a

follow-up column this is a date column so as a manager really looking over these objectives it's important for me

to actually sync this to my calendar so that I could know exactly when to follow up on these objectives with my team to

see that we are meeting the goals that we're looking to do so what I'm gonna do here is first of all I've got the dates

already populated here by quarter but I would love to add a time to these so I'm going to go ahead and then actually

create nine a-m for all of these as the follow-up so I'm gonna go ahead and use batch actions to do that and what I'm

gonna do is hover over here and click add time and here it populates automatically 9:00 a.m. so that's great

for me and I'll just go ahead and click out of the batch actions and you can see now that the time has populated to 9:00

a.m. now in order to stay updated on my calendar on the go every morning to get these nine a.m. updates I can go ahead

here and choose column settings what this is going to do is I have the ability to sync this calendar managing

objectives 2019 to my Google iCal outlook and other calendars as well and it's just a great way when you're on the

go out of the office you don't have Monday calm in front of you to stay updated on all sorts of things I'm gonna

go ahead and sync that I'll go ahead and choose all the items on the board for this one we'll just wait a few seconds

as it sinks all right so let's just hop over to the calendar here we'll go ahead and refresh

here as well and let's see that it has synced so you can see here I've got managing

company objectives I'll go ahead and change this over to year I will change this to month actually and I'm pretty

sure I had some here we are so I've got strategy a to enhance workplace from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. so that's a great way

to really enhance and stay updated on everything that's happening on your board and kind of get those reminders

for things that are important and while you're on the go now additionally for this one I've added a time line in terms

of the quarters of the year that I would like these strategies and objectives to be addressed and sometimes things get

backlogged and you need to shift them forward so what I'm going to do is using batch actions I'm gonna go ahead and

hover over these two here for objective B and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click into this so that we can let's

switch back to main table let's try that one more time there we are you can actually shift these

selected items by a number of days so let's say I need to push it out by a month I can go ahead and enter in 30

days and you will see that it has now shifted the timeline by thirty days so now I can understand that

okay these items have been pushed I can do it quickly and a few clicks and I'm done and I can move on with with working

on these alright so now moving back here to these few status columns I've got status phase and

phase two so there's three different status columns but I don't really get a good idea of what's going on until I add

the progress tracking so all I've done here has just gone to the column Center and added progress tracking and what

this is doing is pulling in the status columns from these three columns here to show me the percentage of what I've

completed now how do we configure that you can click here to column settings on each of the status columns and you can

choose which labels are constituted as done so I'm just going to take off working on it for this one and I'm

pretty sure as well for this one we'll take it off and let's check it out you can see that the percentages have

changed here let's go ahead and move this to done we'll go ahead and move this to done and you guys can see that

the percentages are changing based on the labels that I've chosen as done so you may have a couple of different parts

of your workflow that might be considered progress so you can go ahead and you know choose the labels that work

best for you and use them as done now under the progress tracking I only have included here phase one and phase two

I've removed the status column and I'll show you guys how to do that so if you click here to understand what is being

pulled into the progress tracking you can go ahead and add the status column and it will give you equally weighted

distribution between the three or it will you can actually change this weight as well if I wanted to go 50/25/25 so

I'll keep the status one out and I'll keep this equal 50/50 again you can really manipulate what's

going on here and kind of see the progress tracking you know for for that and it's a great way to just kind of

understand what's happening in your workflow if you have lots of steps going on and really see that overview of how

much have I done you do get the horizontal progress tracking as well as the sub per group here so I can see that

it's 75% moving over here to the success metric so this is just a simple text column

that I've added to understand how I'm going to measure the success of these objectives so what I want to do is go

ahead and I'm going to set some permissions on here and the reason for that is I don't want my team to actually

be able to edit or view some of this information so if I click here to the drop-down and go to column permissions I

can go ahead and choose column edit or column view so this is a great way if you are looking to really narrow down

the information that your key members are being able to edit or being able to view so I'll just go ahead and restrict

the column view here as well and you can see there's a little pop-up that I am the only one you can add others as well

if you want certain managers or other team members to be able to see things I do want to mention that this is

available on pro plans and up so if you are interested after this definitely let us know and we'll try and get you you

know a little bit of time if you're not on the pro plan to test this out for a couple of weeks

so sometimes when we're importing from Excel we are prompted to choose certain specific columns in order to import the

information and down the road we would actually prefer to change that column type so what I'm gonna do here is I'm

actually going to go ahead and add a column to this board and I'll show you guys a super cool workaround here we'll

go ahead and add a text column and what I'm going to do here is go ahead and add Laura and then if I wanted to change

that down the road it can go down to here to say change column type and I'll go ahead and change that to people so

maybe you kind of want to set up your board and you don't necessarily want to assign your team yet and this is a great

way to just simply do that and I can go ahead and change this over to let's say owner and you can see now that my avatar

comes up so it's awesome to be able to kind of set up your board in your project and delegate who's going to be

working on what without notifying them every single time you assign them to something until you're ready so if

you're importing things you've got certain people assigned that's a great one you can do this with other things as

well so just definitely click that drop-down choose change column type and see what the options are

all right we're gonna hop over to our third type of board here which is the marketing calendar so one thing I wanted

to touch on was we did release this week the new board views that you will gradually start seeing on your account

and what that means is this you'll get a small little menu up here at the top that says main table now main table is

what your traditional board view should look like you've got your groups and your items and all of your columns and

you can scroll over then if you've added other views to your to your board they would be from here you can add any of

the ones that we know already calendar timeline and things of like so now you can switch back and forth quickly

between those views word views have been a really exponential addition to our platform but I do want to kind of look

into a few of them and just see some hidden time savers to increase your productivity we do have a whole webinar

on board view so I won't spend too too much time on it today if you're interested definitely check back with us

in two weeks time for the board views webinar which will go in much deeper so you can see here I've got main table and

then I've got submission calendar and deadline calendar so I'm gonna go ahead and actually hop over to the deadline

calendar so a great thing about this is you can create multiple views so I've got two different calendar views here

for two different purposes one for the submission of this marketing material and one for the deadline now a great

feature here is rather than switching back and forth and and having to manage that you can simply update directly from

the calendar it pulls up this postcard view again that we saw earlier with the link to item and I can go ahead and you

know assign myself or assign my team as well to you know to that item I can go ahead and you know put this as scheduled

for category I can go ahead and choose let's say and I can kind of manipulate all this information here it could push

the date out if I needed to and all of this information right from the calendar view which is super super awesome and

just a quick time-saver in terms of having to navigate back so this board I have used

to not only manage my calendar but I've also used it for my team to be able to submit requests for marketing material

and it's a great way to just have the team be able to say hey I really need this blog post or hey I really am

looking forward to you know adding this Facebook post and this is the you know this is what I want to have in it can

you work on it so what I've done here has created a forums of you and similar to you guys are already familiar with I

have all my columns and I've hidden some of them that are irrelevant and I kept the ones that are important and it's a

great way to just kind of see that you know all the information stays here on this one board rather than managing

multiple boards now in order to really speed up this process I've added a few automations and I'll add another one

here as well so what I've done here is when a new item is created assigned Laura as who so this is going to assign

me under the person column I can then delegate that out later if needed and additionally it's going to go ahead and

set the deadlines column which is just a date column - the creation date plus one week so essentially we have a week to

kind of get this deadline put together of course I can always push that out so let's go ahead and test this out let's

go ahead and copy this we'll go ahead and fill it out let's shoes we want a blog post and we want it

on let's say realtor.com will put today and will say include link to facebook post as well and we will submit that all

right let's hop back over to our board and let's just see these automations in action so you can see here that we've

got testing and it automatically assigned me and what it's done is it's pushed the date out to July 23rd by one

week which was the date entered plus one week in the deadlines column so a great way to really just speed up getting that

information whether it's from your team members from external people filling out that form if you're managing work

requests or things of the like a great way to really just kind of keep everything here and organized again we

do have a webinar that is really covering all of the full board views in a couple of weeks so definitely check

back at Monday comm slash webinars for that and we would love to see you there as well now getting into communication

so communicating with our team members is essential to continually moving your work forward and sometimes this really

does cost us valuable time that can be spent on our work so let's take a look at how to streamline that communication

within the platform we're gonna hop back over to the bugs board that I was working on earlier with our software

team and as I guys as I showed you guys before that we've got you know these group of bugs here that have been

filtered and that I've moved over to the iteration planning now what I want to do here as well is I'm gonna go ahead and

communicate this on this update what I'm going to do is I would like to actually keep this communication going as well on

this other board and by doing that what I need to do is add mention a specific item on our scrum iteration planning so

what's important here is that I've got Phoebe assigned she is going to be the developer of the

day that needs to deal with this bug so I'm gonna go ahead and @mention her and write dev of the day iteration four so

this update where I'll go ahead and not mention Phoebe can you work on this is now going to show up here on our scrum

iteration planning under the item deb of the day iteration for now i want to tell you that this will work on main boards

only so you if you do make use of this definitely make sure you're using it across main boards only great way to

just kind of have that cross communication between ports so let's go ahead and update it we'll hop over to

scrum iteration planning and we'll go to deb of the day iteration four and you can see here that I've tagged Phoebe can

you work on this from the other board and it shows up right here on this board great way for cross-border communication

and just keeping things in context and being able to move things forward much quicker

additionally maybe I want everyone on the team to be looking at this update so I'll go ahead and I can tag everyone on

this board on the account as well as certain teams so if I go ahead and type in let's say our logistics team as well

go ahead and update that you can go ahead and add mention that rather than doing it person by person so really

great to just get those notifications out to those members that are important to be able to see these updates and

comments on each of your items as you're working you

Oh ready moving onward you can see here on the top of my board I've got what is called the talks group now sometimes

it's really great to be talking you know very much in context on the item level but what if you've got more general

questions boards procedures files checklists things of the like that are pertinent to the entire board so what

we've done here is we've got a talks group it could be talks it can be general it can be whatever you like it

to be and I've created two different items here one is talks which is announcements questions and team updates

so this is a great way to just kind of give that board level information so I've written here hey everyone on this

board please update your statuses on each of your iteration items we will meet next week to discuss so great way

to just kind of have that more high level communication and then over here I've got what we call captain's logs now

captain logs would be a little bit more technical in terms of feature announcements bug fixes enhancements or

things of the like that are not necessarily you know more less up for discussion but do want to be

communicated so a great way to also manage more of a high level communication on each port

you the last thing I want to do is hop over here again to our bugs queue so what's

really important is that we do have some people who are involved here on our bugs board that are not part of our Monday

comm account now how can we speed up that communication we can go ahead and set up an integration I've entered in my

email for today but this could be somebody a partner a client a freelancer that is not part of your Monday comm

account that does use email and in terms of communication and what we'll do is I'll just show you this quickly when a

status changes to something send an email to someone so I'll just set it up today I won't show you how it works all

the way to the end but it will prompt you to write up your own personalized email that will be sent

so we'll say status update for this hey this and we can go ahead and say this item on this board has been updated

too and I can go ahead and include the status let us know if you have questions Thanks and then I'll go ahead and put a

user name so whoever changes that status it will show up as their user and then here under someone I could choose a

specific person for this one I'm going to choose the email column because we're talking to folks outside of the platform

and we'll update that so that's how that would work you could then go in as well and when an email is received you can

create items you can add them as updates as well too so when an email from the email column has received added as an

update this is a great way as well to really manage your communication within the platform now lastly I do want to

touch on notifications now notifications is a hot topic here at Monday comm we are currently working on improving this

and we'd love to actually hear your thoughts on how we can improve that if you do visit us at our community page

you can find the instructions for that from our Facebook group too in order to join the community page and I can touch

on that later during the Q&A as well so you've got a few things here and I'm gonna hop over to a dashboard that I've

created which for our software team that is pulling in those three boards that we were working on the first thing is that

I was mentioned widget so great thing here is every time you've been mentioned you can go ahead and kind of see that

here live I'll go ahead and choose all only mentions I didn't reply to and you can see here I've got all these things

that I was mentioned but I haven't actually responded to great way to stay up to date if you lose things over here

in the bail notification this is another way to stay on top of that if you click here it'll take you exactly to that

update in a new tab so super great for that as well the next thing is the board updates

widget so what this is doing is pulling in all of that communication that you've got from specific boards into one place

so rather than hopping to your inbox if you want to kind of keep it you know a little bit more in context in terms if

the project you're working on the client you're working with you can go ahead and add the board updates widget and I can

see here all the updates that we just showed you that we've made are all right here in one place I can go ahead and

actually interact here I can reply it can thumbs up I can bookmark it etc etc you can add

multiple boards of course so for here I've only added these three but if I had you know four or five boards I could do

that as well this brings me to my last part which is dashboard so using dashboards is the

most effective way to manage information across multiple boards projects clients etc there are a few ways that I want to

show you to maximize your dashboard experience that you may not have thought of yet so like let's just hop in and

then we'll get to the Q&A the first thing is the battery widget so many of you I'm sure I've used the battery

widget but a little fun fact is let's just open that fullscreen I've gone iteration status high-level so what this

is doing is it's pulling in the statuses from my boards so that I can understand exactly where we stand in terms of this

iteration of work over two weeks and what I can do here is actually click on the 60% that's done and it's gonna go

ahead and pull those items so I can see exactly what has been completed for example if I'm still waiting on

others I can kind of go ahead and pull that information too so not only does it give you that overview look you could

drill down even further to see exactly what's going on again you can interact directly from here you can write updates

asking your teammates you know what's going on what's the holdup how can we move this forward or great job thanks so

much for working on this looking forward you know to to seeing the final result I see there's a few comments about the

llamas of course we've got the llama farm here this is just a great way also to see what's going on in your status

columns and a little bit of a more lighthearted fun way to keep things late in the office as you're working so

definitely check out the llama farm as well now the last thing I'm going to show you before we move into the Q&A is

time tracking so everybody loves time tracking it's a great way to understand how much time you're spending on items

and your workflow and projects who's spending the most time how they're spending their time etc etc so a great

thing here is you can see that I've put this time spent on bugs so I've got a time tracking column on my bugs board

that tracks the amount of time we've spent dealing with this bug now I assigned to a specific team members

we've got Rachel Phoebe and Joey and this is for july 2019 I'm going to go ahead and switch it to a weeks and

you'll see that it changes so now I've got just this week July 15th sort of 21st it's great I can hop through days

weeks months or years now if I switch back to months you can see that Rachel's goes red now the great thing here is if

you go ahead and into your settings and go into more settings options you can set a threshold for the alert so maybe

rachel has maybe spent too much time on this bug or maybe she I want to understand that she her resources have

been allocated and I need someone else to work on things so I can go ahead and set that threshold and you know if I

want to n set the color as well so just to understand where my resources are being allocated when they're hitting

their limit and you know make the adjustments accordingly I agree that Rachel does need a raise and a copy

she's working really hard in july 2019 thanks so much for your comments guys you guys are awesome and it's making

this super fun