Executive Summary
Adam is demonstrating a follow up worksheet that he has been using in his day job as a lawyer. The purpose of the task list is to have an escalating system of checks for requests made to third party vendors or providers, so if they don’t respond, eventually the boss can get involved and take appropriate action. Adam explains how to set up the board with labels and automations, which will move items down from Initial Request to Follow Up, Second Follow Up, Escalate and Complete after certain time periods have passed (e.g., 30 days). He also shows how it can be automated so that when an item reaches Complete status it archives automatically after 30 days.
In this video, a tutorial was provided on how to use automations in Monday.com for managing requests from third parties. It involves sending John an invoice, assigning the individual responsible for the request today’s date, and following up 30 days after that date. After 14 days of follow-up has passed, it will escalate and send a notification. Finally when the status is done, it will archive after 30 days so there can be additional space in which to work.
Transcript of Video – With Timestamps
00:01
Good evening. Adam here with some efficient stuff. That’s the tagline I’m going with right now for this channel. We’ll see how that goes. Anyway, I’m here with a video for Monday, which is my current favorite productivity tool that I’ve been using in my day job, which is as a lawyer. I wanted to showcase is a specific thing that I’ve been working on over the last week or so that I think a lot of people could find very useful in a variety of different industries and even just for your own personal use. That is essentially what I’ve been calling a follow up worksheet or a follow up priority task list. The general purpose of this task list is to have there’s a lot of issues in a lot of businesses where you have a request you make to a third party vendor or provider and you don’t even really realize that they never responded.
01:02
It’s important, especially in an industry like law, to have an escalating system of checks basically. You have someone who’s going to make the request and then if the third party provider doesn’t give you what you need, eventually at the end of the line, the boss is going to have to get involved and get on the phone and start getting mad to get things done. If the boss never finds out that things are getting clogged up, you end up with an issue where there’s a lot outstanding requests from third party vendors that just never get back to you and it can cause a bottleneck in your business. This also has some application for just from a personal standpoint, if you are someone that has to send out invoices, let’s just say you’re in some design field where you have to send out invoices to people for payment.
01:58
Let’s just say graphic design or photography or something like that. You may want to have a system where you send out a month, an invoice and then a reminder after a month. You need to keep track of how many times you’ve requested, how many times it’s been so you can take an appropriate action should you not get what you need. That’s the explanation for this worksheet I’m going to show you. I don’t know that people are going to find this or want this, but it’s just something neat that I found and I’ve been wanting to make a new YouTube channel. Let’s just jump right in and I have set up a test workspace so that you don’t get to look at all my stuff that they use for work. Let’s just set up a new private board. Starting again, we’re going to make any board, any private board with follow up from vendors.
03:00
We’re just going to start with the basic empty board, which is basically what you’re greedy with every time you make a new board, which just has titles and it has two different groups. We are going to start it from scratch. Let me just delete everything and we’ll just start from there. This is going to be a walkthrough because we’re going to use a good number of automations. It’s important for you to start from scratch, see what I’m doing and then you can go from there. We’re going to start this one with basically an initial request. This is going to be the group where the request will live to start. This will before you actually make the request. Let’s just go ahead and make a couple of groups and I’ll explain what I’m going to do with each one a spell. We’re going to have an escalate group and then we’re going to finally have last group is going to be complete.
04:28
Let’s sort these into the correct order. We’re going to have initial request, follow up, second follow up, escalate and then complete. Now I’m going to change the colors over here and you’ll see why here. In a second we’re going to do yellow, orange, red and green. This one should actually be gray. Okay. Here’s essentially the idea of what we’re going for here. We are going to make the initial request. Let’s just say we have an invoice. Let’s just start a fresh one. It’s got dates, and I’ll explain the automation after I finish this. Let’s just say we’re going to do invoice to client John Smith. What’s going to happen then is you’re going to make this to tell yourself I need to send an invoice to John Smith. I’ll set up the automation to show you how this is going to work at the end.
05:58
What’s going to happen is you’re going to change it to I’ve sent the invoice and it’s going to move down to right here. You’re going to get a new date, basically a 30 day deadline or whatever deadline you want to remind yourself the follow up. Let’s just say John Smith doesn’t respond to your request for an invoice. You’re going to send a follow up and then it’ll move down to right here, telling you that you’ve now sent a follow up message. If you get to this deadline still hasn’t responded, you’re now, let’s just say 45 days out. Finally, and this is maybe not, this may be a stuff that you don’t need if it’s just for you individually, but for, let’s just say corporation or, some business, you get to the 45 day mark or whatever your internal guidelines say. Now it’s time to escalate.
06:50
You’re going to escalate it down to here. It’s going to be set up to notify somebody that you’re 45 days out. John Smith still hasn’t paid his bill, and it’s time for the boss to get involved or maybe just a different department. However you want to handle that collection, doesn’t matter. Or you may have some specific ball player that you have at this point. Again, totally your choice. Unless you say finally you’ve escalated it, he’s paid you, move it down to here, you’re done. All right. So now comes the fun part. We are going to do the automations for this board. First off, well, actually let’s just start here. 1st. First off, we need to do labels. Let’s give me back to that invoice that I have a button. We’ve got a couple of different labels here. This is going to become the soft explanatory in a second.
07:46
Follow up, new label. Then you’re going to see orange. Followed up new label, escalates. I can’t spell. That’s a character block. What are you going to do though? Thanks. Now we’ve got our labels and let’s put them in the order in which we need them. This is actually going to be bread. I think we all get down okay. What you’re going to see now is we’ve got the basic floor without the automation done. What we’re trying to do is when you put it here, it’s not going to have a label, it’ll have a date, which we’re going to say 30 days out. So you can have 30 days out. Once you’ve sent it, you’re going to hit the follow up button. It’s going to move down to right here and it’s going to get 30 days. Actually come back here. Again, it’s going to be blank.
09:34
Tell yourself you can have it set. I usually have it set just for today’s date. You have made a note for yourself to use an invoice. You send the invoice and change the follow up and move down to right here. You’re going to have it set to 30 days. 30 days from the date in which you sent it. So let’s just say send. You just change that label and then let’s just say another 15 days. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work perfectly here because you’re going to have, it’s already going to be December 23 when you make this request. Then you’re going to be whatever, january 5, two weeks, something like that. Finally you get to January 5. Still hasn’t done it going to hit escalate. It’s going to go to here and give it another week. It’s going to send notification and then finally get done.
10:43
This is where you get your confetti and it’s going to come down here. 30 days later it’s going to automatically archive so that you don’t get too clogged up. All right, I know that was a lot to follow, but that’s what it’s going to look like. That’s what the dates are going to show. Now I’m going to show you how to automate that to get what you want. Okay, let’s move back up here. Actually now we’re going to do a fresh one. This is going to be the fun part. We have two automations. The first automation is going to be, you want to do an initial request and again showing it from the basics. Invoice, let’s just say this is going to be your first step. So you can do that. And then you want two different things. First, you’re going to want to have a person assigned to this task.
11:52
Second, you’re going to want to have the date automatically assigned. You can do this all in one automation. Well, go to automate automation. We’re going to do whenever you create an item being whenever you create that invoice, you are going to assign a person. I have this in a private board. All I can assign is myself. Assign me as the person. Okay good. After we assign somebody as the person, what else we want to do? We’ve want to set date today. All right, here we go again invoice the invoice, assign me to set the date today. If you were to go and check your work you would see that this would be due today. All right, so then what was the next step? Next step was changing the status to follow up and then it’s moved down to here. So that’s step two. How are we going to do that?
13:34
We’re going to go back to automations, add new automation, custom and we’re going to, and this is going to work basically the rest of the list and the status changes. Status being, so I may need to explain these columns. You have selected a column you can have multiple columns that do similar things. Right now we have four columns. Person status date and file. File which I’m not going to use someone to link that person status and date. You have a lot of options for a lot of different columns. Don’t need to get into it right now. These are the basic ones. All we need for right now. I click on, when I ask for status, that’s this column here. When you change it, that’s where it’s going to show up. All right. We’re going to need to create an automation. Again this is going to be when the status changes to follow up.
14:41
We’re going to do, we need to change the date. So first we’re going to move it. We want to move it to follow up. We also need to do the date part of it. You’re going to set the date today. Then you’re going to push the date. What this is going to do, this is your follow up. We’re going to lock this in. I’m going to show you what it does. Let’s make a request. You’re going to change it to follow up. Bumps down the list now to the follow up. You’re going to see that the date today is the 25th. Now the date is 25 days past the day in which you sent the request. Now you have your deadline. You have your 25 day deadline. Really that is the most complicated portion of this. I’m going to now show you how the rest of them are done.
16:03
It really is you’re just going to be able to duplicate these. Now we need one for second follow up. You can move it down to second follow up. Again, you’re just going to set the date to the day. This one, we want a shorter time period, or I do anyway. I’m going to set this to 14 days, two weeks. We’re going to add another one. We’re going to duplicate it a little easier. And this one’s going to be escalate. This one’s going to be slightly different. We’re going to move this one to Escalate column. Again, we’re going to set the date to the day because, again, now you’re going to be 45 days out. You always want to reset your date in case, whatever reason you’re run a couple of days slow, you still want to give it a 14 day or whatever your time frame is to get around to it.
17:01
Or if you get to it early, you want to reset your deadline to two weeks. You set the date to the day, push it by 14 days, and then the last part of it is you’re going to notify. This is if it’s not just for you. You’re working in an organization, and you want to let somebody else know in your organization. Item name. Okay, you can notify somebody about this. This is another person on this specific board. I’m just going to notify myself. All right, let’s show how all these work in tandem in collaboration, whatever you want to call it invoice. All right, you made your invoice. It’s today’s date, except for today’s date. Again, you can change that. If you want to give yourself a couple of days to send it out. You sent it. Now you want to follow up. It gives you 30 days to follow up.
18:17
All right, so it hasn’t responded. You can change the second follow up. Again, this date is going to go backwards, but that’s just because he would have been saying on December 25, not on November 25. So this should say January 9. All right, let’s say he still hasn’t responded. Going to escalate. It going down to the escalate column, and you’re going to see, I got an education, I’m stuck. John Smith won’t pay his invoice. If that’s somebody else, you can have that set to somebody else. All right. Now finally we’re going to do the last part of this board which is to move it down to click. Let’s just leave this and start over. We’re going to do this in two different automations. First the easy one, you’re going to want to move it whenever the status changes to complete. You want to move it down to the cleat.com done.
19:15
Move to complete. Done. Easy enough. Actually. Let’s also change the date. We’re going to also make this set date to the day and I’ll explain why you do this here in a second. That was just sort of a shortcut. Not the best system for editing. If you try to edit, you’ll see that you can’t, you can change these but you can’t add new lines. You basically have to duplicate to add new lines and delete the original one. Anyway, it’s just a little add on there a little bonus for everybody following along at home. Now you moved it down to Done and I’ll show you how that works. You got it. Maybe a little slow. Signed me up to date. Now we’re going to move it to Done confetti and it’s done to complete and it has that date and I will show you why we’re going to do that.
20:39
If you remember I was saying you got to want to archive. Now you could go down here and just main to the archive and it’ll disappear. But that’s boring. We’re here to automate everything to make it as easy as possible for anybody that you provide this tool for. You can just click on the colors and the corresponding colors and really the goal is to make this as seamless as possible. Otherwise why are you using this program? This automation is the reason you use this program. So we’re going to make one more. We’re going to make an archive automation. So date arrives so when? 30 days after 30 days after the date, which again is going to be today’s date, then you’re going and only if the status is done, you’re going to archive and that’s it. This is all six automation you’re going to need for this board.
21:58
We’re just going to go through real quick again in order to send John steps. One more invoice then assign the individual whoever you choose today’s date. If you follow up it’s going to be 30 days from today’s date. Second follow up is going to be 14 days from today’s date. Escalate, it’s going to be 14 days from today’s date and it’s also going to send a notification finally done going to move down here and then once it turns to December 25, it’s going to archive it’s going to disappear and then you’ll have additional space in which to work. That’s really all I wanted to cover today. This is a pretty long first video, dense. I’ve just been a lot of fun working on this, getting it figured out. There are, quite frankly, an absolutely almost immeasurable number of different ways you can use these automations to basically work with these boards and ship them between boards.
23:07
That’s all stuff I’m going to cover in another tutorial. I don’t know how I’m going to arrange these tutorials in the long run. I’m just going to post this. Hopefully people enjoy it. What I think I’m going to do is end up using these to showcase various ways you can use automations on Monday. I may also do some real basic short videos to explain very basic things because this is pretty dense. This was a lot of different lessons all baked into one. If you enjoyed the format, let me know. If it was too long, let me know that as well. If you think I should have broken it up, absolutely. Tell me that. This is just a practical example. This is something I use in our business. I have an employee who is in charge of doing requests from third parties and she has found this very useful.
24:00
It’s extremely easy to follow along. It’s color coded. All you have to do is change the status. That’s all you have to do. I can go in and add the request or somebody else in the organization can go in and add a request, any kind of request. Just click on the buttons, goes down the list and it’ll show up in your work column. You can also, of course, go to Calendar View and see what you have to do and what you need to get done. Alright, that’s all I have for today. I hope you guys enjoyed. Thank you very much. Bye.