I want to show you one of the most powerful things that you can do here within Trello. On this sample board, I've got a list called Projects and another one called Tasks.
Now watch this. I'm going to open up this Team Project and under this checklist called Project Tasks I'm going to add a couple of items, Task 1 and Task 2
And you notice that immediately they become linked tasks. And guess what? Over here within my Tasks list, they've actually created separate cards associated with those tasks.
But better yet, if I come over here and I've completed Task 1, I'm going to mark it as complete. It's going to record it as completed over here as well. So let me show you exactly how to set this up because I think there are so many different ways
in which this type of setup could be helpful to you and your Trello boards. So just before I dive into the automation, I want to review exactly what is happening here.
What I have told Trello to do is to say that any time that a task is added to this specific checklist, I want it to create a linked card in this list over here. So we're going to have a relationship between this card here and the tasks over here.
But just because I've specified this particular checklist name doesn't mean that we're limited to this card. So for example, I could come up here to this Personal Project. I also have a Project Tasks checklist and here I'm going to say "Email the team" as one of my tasks.
I'm going to say "Call Jane" as another one of my tasks. And you can see that the same type of functionality is happening. It's creating those linked cards over here in the Tasks.
These linked tasks are going to end up in the same list, which I've specified, but if I check this one off, it's not going to be confused as to where to go.
It's checking off in my Personal Project. Let's check this one off as well. And now you can see it's going to be completed for all of my Personal Project tasks. Now you can go into much more detail and have certain things appear in different lists.
You could even have these tasks appear in different boards if you wanted to. So if you have a project-specific board, but you want to manage your tasks on a separate board,
you can do that as well. And best of all, because it's linked, I can go directly to Task 2 and I can see the details and then I can go directly back to that Team Project, which is linked as well.
So now that you have a better understanding of what is actually going on here, let's go and set it up so you can do it yourself. All we need to do is click on Automation and we are going to click on Rules. And in the top right-hand corner,
we're going to select Create a Rule, and we have to start off with a trigger. So I'm going to click that Trigger button. And for our trigger, we're going to come over here
and select Checklists and we're going to go all the way down to the bottom, "when an item is added to a checklist" and here is where we need to specify the checklist name.
So you can give it any name that you want, but this is the only checklist where this particular rule is going to apply. Now, in my initial example, I used the checklist name Project Tasks, but let's use something different in this case.
I'm going to call this one Sub-Tasks because that makes a lot of sense as well So I'm going to say Sub-Tasks and I can either choose to do it only by myself, but in this case I'm going to say anyone. And I'm going to hit the Plus button here.
So that is our trigger. When an item is added to this specific checklist, what do we want to have happen. Next, we need to specify the specific actions for this trigger. And for this, we're going to come over here and select Cascade.
Now, what cascade means is that we're going to give it a series of actions based on previous actions.
So we're going to want to scroll down, almost all the way down to the bottom, and say "convert the item to a linked card," right? Because whenever we create a new checklist item we want to convert it to a linked card.
Now, before we hit the Plus button here, we need to specify where that linked card will be displayed. So here under List Name, I'm going to type in "Tasks"
because we want it to appear within that Tasks list. Now there are a few other options here you can make, but we don't need to choose any of them for our purposes.
I'm going to hit the Plus button and you can see that it is added here at the top.
So now with both our trigger and our action in place, all we need to do is select Save.
And at this stage, I would recommend that you test out your automation just to make sure that everything is working properly. So here I'm going to use this Client Project card as our example. I'm going to come over here and select Checklist.
Now remember, we have to use the specific checklist name for that automation. In our case we called it Sub-Tasks so that is going to be the name of the checklist that I add here.
And here, let's call this Task A just so it separates from our other examples. And I'm going to hit add. It may take a few seconds. There is the linked task and over here we have the card itself.
So we can already see that the first part of our automation is working perfectly. But if I open up this card and I give it a due date
and then I decide to check it off, you will notice that nothing will happen in the original project card. That's because we haven't set up the second part
of our automation. So let's return to our Automation dialog. Once again, we're going to select Rules and we are going to create our second rule.
Once again, we need to add a trigger. In this case, we're talking about due dates because when that due date is marked complete, we want things to happen. So the trigger is going to be "when the due date is marked as complete in a card by," I'm going to select anyone
and hit that Plus button. And then once again, we're going to return to the Cascade option here for our actions. And we're going to scroll down to about the third option here, which is "for each card linked in the attachments." Let's hit our Plus button there.
You can see that it's added, but now we need to tell it what to do for each card linked in the attachments. We then need to select the Checklist subheader and scroll almost all the way down and say "check item, and within the item name, we have to give it some very specific instructions.
We're going to use the braces symbol. So we want an open brace and we're going to type in the word "triggercardlink" and then close brace on the end You'll notice that there is no spaces at all.
This is a specific command, a specific reference to what we want happened, triggercardlink. But before we hit the Plus symbol, don't forget to come back and select this icon so we can tell it which checklist.
Here, once again, we need to be specific and type in the name of that Sub-Tasks checklist so it knows exactly which checklist it needs to reference. Now we can hit that Plus symbol and the rest of our automation is ready.
Don't forget to hit Save at the top of the screen. And now with this second automation saved, let's go and see how things work. So once again, I'm going to come up here to Client Project, and we have our Sub-Tasks.
So I'm going to type in Task A and let's type in Task B. So it's working. As we saw last time, it is linking those two tasks together. And I can go directly to Task A here if I want to. And there we can see the master project.
Let me add a quick due date here so we can test the second part of our automation. So it's due in about a week's time. I'm going to say completed. And now you can see that it has been checked off within the project card.
If we go back now, Task A has been completed as well. Now I would love to hear from you next. Do you have any questions about this specific automation or other automation rules right here within Trello? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching this video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
