#1 Way to Create Recurring Tasks in Monday.com (Beginner Tutorial)

So you finally set up your Monday.com account. Maybe you've been poking around for a while, or maybe you just got started. And either way, you're running into a bit of a roadblock around the topic of recurring tasks or repeating dates, whatever you want to call it in Monday.com when you're in a board such as this one, it would make a lot of sense for most of us to go into a given item, click on that date column and be able to say, hey, for this thing, whether it's an item or a shirt or a task or whatever, I want this thing to repeat to remind me of it or the person who's the assignee of it every X days or months or years. In fact, in most other task management tools, that's exactly what we see. But surprisingly, recurring things, as we would expect it to be in any other tool, is not a thing in Monday.com. that's right. I'm telling you that that this task management, work management platform that is all the rage somehow does not have recurrences. I know, right? So does this mean that it is time to just undo everything you just did quitmonday.com and move on down the line? I don't think so. In this video, I'm going to break down six workarounds, six weird paths that allow you to have recurrences in Monday. Each one has its preference, pros and cons. Some are easier than others. But if you locate the chapters below this video or timestamps or whatever, you can skip through each one and ultimately find the solution that'll work best for your use case. So with that, let's dive into workaround number one, which is duplicating groups. All right, so let's go into this first area where I've got this mocked up to use the duplicate groups method for having items RECUR Inside of Monday.com we're going to divide up our work into groups, these kind of sections, as you might know them in Asana, to allow us to break things up into our preferred cadence. So here you see we have monthly task in, monthly biweekly, payroll in fortnightly, and so on. Once we have our tasks broken out into these sections or groups, we're going to use a Monday.com automation in order to have each group recreated at a set interval. Let me show you what that looks like. So to create this, we're going to go up to the top right and locate the automation area inside Monday.com once we're in here, you're going to want to create, add a new automation. From here we're going to choose a regular cadence, a time period here to kick off our automation. This is a nice benefit of how Monday has automation set up, that we can choose these kinds of time periods. Once we have the time period happening on the action side of the automation, we want to duplicate a group, meaning recreate one of those sections we just had. Those are our two pieces. Every time period, duplicate a group. Now we're going to go into the gray area, the gray font on each side and actually set up the specific parameters. So rather than just every time period, whatever that means, we need to specify for Monday what time period we're talking about. So for now we're going to go in and choose monthly. Every month on the 2nd, let's just say every one month on the 2nd at 9am Cool. That is our trigger. That is the time period that's going to kick things off. Then our second part of this automation is saying we're going to duplicate a group. Well, which group do we want to duplicate? Well, in this case, let's duplicate our group that is called monthly. So we're duplicating all tasks in that monthly area. Here we go, we've got every month on the 2nd, duplicate the monthly group and then we're going to click Create automation. This is what that automation is going to look like and we can add a description if we want to make it clearer what this is in case we forget. Next week, now that we have that automation created and active, we are going to see that every month on the 2nd of the month, this section right here, this monthly group is going to be duplicated with new items or in this case, tasks being created on the 2nd of every month. In fact, I actually set up an automation a few weeks ago when where I set up a recurrence of daily. And you'll see if I scroll up here we have our original section of daily and this is what our duplicates look like. Duplicate of daily. Duplicate of daily. Every day it recreated and built out a new section. So that's our first option for creating recurring tasks inside of Monday.com. build out your sections based on the recurring frequency that you want and then set up one automation for every cadence. So the automation I just showed you, we're going to create that for monthly, then we're going to create another one for fortnightly, another one for daily, another one for yearly and so on. We will create one automation for every cadence and schedule it like so. Now, the downside of this approach is that we do end up with a lot of different groups being created. And I don't think it's the prettiest or most elegant option for how to set up recurrences. So that brings me to option number two. The second option for setting up recurring tasks inside Monday is what I'm going to call the Board Wide Automation met method. And in this instance, we're basically going to copy the same exact strategy we just did in the last example, except rather than having it be sections or groups that are repeating, we're going to be having repeating on the entire board. I don't know if that makes sense, but it will in a moment. Okay, so let's go in here we have a board, right? And on this imaginary board, I'm going to pretend that every single item or task on this board has a weekly recurrence. I want everything on here to happen every single week. When it is done, make it do next week. All right, to make this happen, I'm going to keep my tasks here, make sure I have a status field and a date field, and then I'm going to go up into Automate. From here, I'm going to click Add New Automation. And I'm going to start things off in a very familiar way. We're going to start by saying whenever a task is in the done status, start this automation. Okay? Because that's how we want everything to be kicked off. We're going to do things per task here, not just arbitrarily based on the date. So when a status changes to something, that is going to be our start. Now let's fill in those gray areas. When the status column, which is one that we already have as a colored field, changes to done, which is one of my statuses that's going to kick everything off. Okay, what does it kick off exactly? Well, the first thing it kicks off is a push of the due date. So I'm going to click on more options here and over to the right, we can search for the word push if I can spell properly and click on push date. This is Monday.com's option or action to allow us to adjust a date field backwards or forwards based on the values we provide. So I'm going to click on this. And then again we're going to fill in the gray. We are going to push in the due date. Push in, push out, push, push backwards. Yeah, that's the one. We are going to take this due date column that we already have, which is one that I'm selecting Here, because if you don't have a date field, you'll need one for this. I'm going to select the date field and push it by seven days. Push it seven days backward. I could also choose a week, business days, a month, whatever it is, and then click Set. This is the first part of our action side of the automation. Next, I'm going to click plus and add one more step in here. Because when a task is complete, the due date moving backward, that's great. But we also want to make sure the status goes back out of that final status. So we want to change the status column to. What do you want to say? Working on it. I don't know. Whatever your status for, like I haven't done this yet is that's what we'd want to select here. This is going to be our automation to make sure that things recur whenever they're on this list weekly. Create that automation. You'll see it show up on your automation area. You can turn it on or off as needed. We probably want this on. And once you have it on and working, you should be able to take any task inside your area, mark it as done or whatever your status was that you selected, and watch as the automation does its magic. You'll see how just while we were talking here, this screen changed from done to working on it and the date was moved back seven days. If I change the status to done again again, it is going to move back seven days. There we go. And change the status back to working on it. That is that automation working its magic and doing its thing in the background. That is option two for how to set up recurrence. This works best in the current structure if your entire board all has the same recurrence. If you want to get fancier with it, well, keep watching the rest of these workarounds. Okay, so let's go into option number three. We have automation per task. Basically what automation per task is about is using an automation not to change an existing item or record or task, but to create a new one from the parameters you set. So I'm going to show you what this looks like once again. Inside Automate. I actually have one mocked up here. So we're just going to go into edit. Here we have every day, which is a time period we are going to create a new item. And here we can choose exactly what that album. Album. Music. Album. I don't know. Here we choose exactly what that item. There we go. Is going to be. So perhaps every day I create a task saying complete daily Journal. I cannot spell complete daily journal entry. I can choose what status or date I want to have on it and move on. Once you have this automation set up, if we browse automation activity, for example, you can see that every day we are going to see a new task being created. And you're just seeing some of the ones pull in here. Since I first mocked this up, this isn't my favorite way to go about setting up a recurrence, but it's a nice one if you want to see a unique item or task be created for each day or instance of of your recurrence. So it's an option there. And that is number three. Next up we have number four, which is the notify method. I also call it the annoying method, but it is one that Monday.com has recommended when you read some of their help docs. So I wanted to include it here more as a nod to them thinking this is a good path forward. What Notify is, is basically we're going to set up an automation to shoot off notifications to people. Did I just use word notification twice? We're going to set up an automation to notify people at a set interval to remind them about a thing, whatever it is. So if I go into the edit window here, you'll see that every week on Tuesday we're going to notify. That's me, Layla. Okay. And I'm actually going to show you how to create this from scratch because I think the editor window looks a little funny. So we're going to go into add a new automation. And we would say every time period right there, we would then notify someone, check your time period, which might be daily, and then notify. You'd write your message, hey you. And then select your someone, which in this case is me. And this is how you can go about setting up some kind of recurring notification for somebody. When you have these kinds of automation set up, they're going to shoot off a notification inside of Monday.com's notification system to make sure the user is notified about something going on. The reason I'm not a big fan of this solution is probably one that you can predict. We all receive so many notifications inside of Monday or whatever tool we're using. Hell, even email, we get a lot of notifications. The reason I'm not a huge fan of this is because we're just adding more noise. And what I would rather see most folks do is explore using statuses and dates as, as we have done in the other examples. But that's just My two cents. If you are someone that does not mind additional notifications, hell maybe you like them, then go ahead and try out number four here. Super easy to set up notification. The gotcha here. The difficult part is that you will need to set up this notification per thing because your message for the notification is pretty specific, just says hey you or hey do this. So you're going to want to set this up for every reminder you want to have. I know it's a bit of a trade off, so that's our fourth option. Set up that notification. And I know it's not perfect, but none of these really are. Except for the one that's coming up here soon. But before I go to number five and number six of our workarounds, obligatory reminder here guys. If you're enjoying this free content, your way to pay for this content would be by liking subscribing and commenting below those things. Tell YouTube that you like this and it helps show this video to more people and it costs you nothing. So pretty cheap payment in my mind. So I would appreciate that. Let's move on to number five. All right, so our fifth option here is to set up automations again. Yeah, you kind of guess that by now, but this time we're going to break things down by a value that is not necessarily correlated with our groups or sections. In this automation, we're going to set a custom field or a additional column for every item or task or record that we have and that additional field is going to allow us to select the preferred frequency for that given item. In this case I have daily, weekly, fortnightly, there happen to be in sections, but these really don't matter. We could have these say anything we want to and it would still work the same way. The automation we set up is going to wait for a certain period of time and then look for any items that have a given value of say daily and then have those items be moved into the next day. So let me show you what that looks like inside the automation area here. We've got a few examples that are worked out. But let's go ahead and start off with this one. Here's what that automation would look like. And I know it looks like a lot, but I'm going to break it down and I promise it's really not that confusing. Okay, so first thing, this whole stuff kicks off when the status is changed to done. So similar to one of our earlier examples here. What Was that example 3. When the status is complete, that's what's going to kick off this automation. But unlike our former examples, we're going to also have a condition, an additional thing that we're going to click this plus sign to add. That will only allow this automation to happen if a frequency value is set to a certain label. So here we go. Only if the frequency that drop down column I showed you in the last view contains one of daily, that's our value that we're looking for, then move on. The reason I have this condition here, this thing that's kind of filtering it down, is because I want to have everything be pushed back one day. That's what's going to happen in the next step. So I only want that to happen if a given item or task should repeat daily. Otherwise that would be kind of silly. Right? So that's what our condition is doing here. It's saying hey, when something's done and the frequency says daily, then go ahead and do this automation. Okay, cool. Let's go through the second step. The second part of it, I guess I should say. All right, so once we have that first part set up, we're ready to do the second action step. And here is where we're going to start, you know, doing the things. What we're going to have Monday do is set the status to working on it again, moving that status back to our active position. Then we're going to push the date. Remember we did this before. We're going to push the date field, which is our due date in this case back by one business day again you can adjust that here to be any interval you want. And finally we're going to leave an update. And this is a bit of a posh detail but I think it's nice to have because automations can be so tricky in my opinion. So I have a little create an update action that says hey, this task name is set to recur on this frequency. So our automation automatically pushed the due date and changed the status to not started. This little note is just think of it like an audit trail. It helps the humans understand why automatic things happen. And I think it's a nice way to make sure that we can retrace our steps quite easily. But this is completely optional. The end result of these five lines that I wrote here is that we are able to change a task to done and if the label says daily then we will have it push back one business day, change the status back to active and have that log. So moving back here, I'm going to go ahead and just test this out. If I take this item here, change it to done. Let it do its magic there. The little celebration. You see how it changes back to working on it and moved back one day. That's the automation in action. What we'd want to do then is set up another automation, a duplicate of this for each different frequency we have. So I would go in here, click duplicate and set up another one for if the label is weekly and I would adjust the time duration here to be five business days or one week, set and create automation. I would repeat this for four nightly, annually, quarterly, any intervals that you wanted. And just make sure that whatever you create, you label it clearly. I'm labeling this here just by writing a description and this one's a duplicate, so I'm just going to delete that. So that is option number five and it's definitely one of my favorite options here. I think it's a nice way to go about having something very simple like a label field. And as long as you're consistent about filling it out, it's a good way to save a lot of manual setup on this whole automation journey. All right now, last but not least, it's time for the perfect solution. What is the best workaround for making sure you can set up recurrences inside of Monday.com ready? Drumroll Nah, it's fine. The best solution in my opinion is yeah, this on the screen. We need to tell Monday. I know, I know, that's such a lame perfect solution, but in my opinion that's what the answer is. I have a link here and we will make sure that we put this below the video here. So check that out if you haven't Currently there is this feature request sitting on Monday's community forum and it only has 55 votes, which is bogglesome to me because me, like many of you here, I just expect repeating tasks to be a thing inside of my task management tool. And I love how Monday has gone so into databasey things. It kind of feels like airtable and ClickUp had a baby. I love that. But Monday, you gotta get us those recurring tasks. So if you feel as strongly as I do about this, go to the link. I'll make sure it's below this video as well so you can get the most up to date info and upvote the heck out of this. There have been tons of threads as recently as 21 days ago, which, I mean, we can do better than that. Where people have been celebrating the need for having those recurring tasks. From the sassy comments to the where is it? Super helpful, classy mock ups that people have done on here. Clearly the user base of Monday.com feels the same way I do, at least in part. And if you feel strongly that the workaround I presented in this video if they all feel like a lot of work for just having recurring tasks, I agree with you. But we need to tell Monday that so that they know how to make their product even better. So find that link below for the sixth and perfect option of recurrences which is to have them simply be there, maybe like this. Who knows otherwise? Thanks so much for tuning into the channel. If you like videos like this, if you found this helpful, please do take a moment to subscribe. We've got a lot of other content coming out like this that I think you're going to find valuable. And if you want to try out Monday for yourself, if this hasn't scared you away, check out our affiliate link in the description below. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.