Video Transcript with Timestamps
00:01
Good afternoon, Adam here. I wanted to do a quick video on three different useful automations for buttons. So you might ask, why use buttons? It can only do a single thing. You click a button and it does something, I’ll tell you it’s useful because unlike you, most of the people on your team are in organization are not going to have the same level of expertise or knowledge with how to use this program. Just for example, using my follow up from vendors template. The way I have this one set up, as I showed in a previous video, was you click on Status and then click down the list to move it down the page. Yeah, I mean that works fine, but there’s of training involved, especially if you’re adding a bunch more stuff or you need to click multiple times. Rather than do it that way, a button is click one time, the button says, I’m going to do this click one time and it does the task and it’s less learning.
01:08
It’s directly in front of you can see the name. That’s essentially the purpose. The purpose is simplicity. The purpose is to keep things as simple as possible for your team when simplicity is worth the real estate on your screen. Let me show you the first one to start. You have to make a button. You just go into your column centers and you make a button. Okay, I know how to do that. The first thing we’re going to do is I’m going to show you how to do the escalation that I’ve done in previous videos where essentially it moves it down to the Escalate column and then notifies a particular person and emails them to tell them that attached is stuck. We’re just going to call this Escalate and we’re going to rename the button. Invoice Bob, I want to rename the click me button to watch me set up.
02:12
All right, so we’ll start up first. The Escalate button is clicked, now that I named to Escalate, we’re going to move it to the Escalate column. So it’s down lower again. I’m going to notify and this is where you say what notification is going to be. Here it’s going to be this invoice is stuck, please advise. It’s going to notify you can choose who you wanted to notify in your team. Here it’s going to notify me because I’m the person that wants to know that something is stuck. We’re going to create that automation and now let’s do it to let me customize the description. There we go, escalate. Let’s match the color we’re close to. Now you just click the Escalate button, give a nice little arrow, there it goes. Pops down there. I’m going to get an email that says, Bob is stuck, please let me know what to do.
03:19
So that’s test case number one. All right, test case number two is a little more complicated this time. Let’s say we want to actually use this screen to send follow up emails to the people who need the invoice. Let’s just say rather than need to escalate it down to Bob, we’re invoicing Sally. We’re going to attach it as a file, which I’ve shown how to do in a previous video. So I’m not getting into that. We’re going to send Sally the invoice. Here we need to do two different things this time. First, we need to do a text renaming this email. I’m going to send it to myself just so I can show you how it works. I’m going to send it to my work email. Let’s just pretend this is Sally’s email. We’re going to put Sally’s email in there and you could actually pull this from another board if you wanted to, but that’s a little beyond the scope of this video.
04:23
We’re going to add a button to send this email. Button and I want this to set it up. This time when the button is clicked, I want to name it first. That’s annoying. Send client email. We’re going to make a button automation. The send the client email is sent, we’re going to send an email, please pay invoice, your invoice is due, please be attached. This time we are actually going to pull it off the email column. That’s looking at that column where I put in my email address. We’re going to create this automation whoops got to link your email account. Now I’m going to name this to Email. I’m going to click the email button and let me pause for a second. I’ll pull up my emails and show it to you. All right. Now you see the email is from the Gmail account which I use to send it.
05:51
It is to Adam and Mountain Verdict, which was the text that I had in the email box right here. It said your invoice is due, please see attached. Which it wasn’t attached, but that’s not the point right now. You can even add on to this automation if you’d like to. Let’s just say after you send the initial request, you can make it even more complicated. Editing it doesn’t work. You basically just have to start over every time, which I find a little annoying. Let’s just say you wanted to move this down to the next column. Move item down to follow up. This time if you click on it’s going to send it’s going to move it down to follow up. You can set up another automation if it’s in follow up to move it down to second follow up and then finally, when you click the email button on second follow up, you can move to escalate.
07:13
This really simplifies the movement between the different categories for your team. You just click a single button and it goes through this whole list. You don’t have to change statuses in this kind of list. You can almost just remove the status. You could just add another button that says done. Click the button goes to complete. It’s archived everything in the background and all you have to do is click the button again. You can accomplish the same thing with the status bar if you wanted to, but this is just much easier and you can just basically feed everything into this one function. I got one more to show you today. Give me 1 second. I’m going to reset my board. All right, third example. This is what I would call the Snooze button. This might actually be my favorite of the three. Maybe I should have started with this one.
08:05
Let’s just say rather than a vendor request, let’s just say it’s something you need to do. Let’s just say you need to make the invoice. You’re going to see that I already have automation set up in this board to make the due date today. That’s just to give an initial date. I would always recommend giving an initial date, otherwise sometimes they get a little lost. Let’s just say you’re not going to get it done today. It’s your to do list. You have some stuff that you had set due today. You’re just not going to get to it. But it’s not a big deal. You could click on date and then click next Wednesday, whatever, by two weeks. Or this is more fun if you ask me. You can do it as a button, go into buttons, and when the button is clicked, then you’re going to set the date to today, and then you’re going to push the date a week.
09:26
So let’s just do seven days. We’ll call this the snooze button news. Nice blue color. You click the snooze button, you’re going to see it gets pushed to the 19th, which is exactly a week from today. This is especially useful if your staff is feeling a little overwhelmed. They have too many things to deadline. They don’t want to have to click on this. They just click this news button. And, you hope they don’t do it too often because the idea is to get things done, but sometimes you just got too much to do. You just click this news goes out a week. It’s kind of cute, maybe not the most practical. It’s not too hard to click on the date and click a week down. But I like this one. All right, those are three basic examples to get you started on using button automations and just my thoughts behind why you may want to consider incorporating them, especially if you have some convoluted process that really all just needs to go on in the background but is done the same way every single time on that board.
10:43
You can make them very specific to each column, in each group if you want to, but it’s going to be more useful on a process board rather than like a project board. If it follows the process the whole way down, it’s going to be much more useful in that context, because it’s a single set in stone process. A process being something that you have steps A to Z, and you may not use every single step every time, but there are no unique steps. It’s just going to be the same steps every time, although sometimes you skip some. That’s when a button can be useful. If there’s a lot of unique steps or unique tab tasks that need to be done or something very specific to a single client, then not quite as useful. All right, I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions about this or anything else you’d like me to cover, let me know in the comments and I’ll get around to it.
11:39
Thanks.