Butler Automation Has Learned Some Useful New Tricks

Trello is all-in on automation to help you manage your work. We started 2021 with some new updates to Butler—Trello’s automation arm. Now we’re excited to announce some new tricks that Butler has learned to help remove the tedious tasks you may dread doing every day.

From creating cards on a schedule to triggering actions based on specific behaviors, Butler Automation is Trello’s deceptively powerful, built-in workflow automation. Butler frees up your time—and mental space—to focus on the work that matters. 

The best part? There’s no coding involved. 

Quick Action Automation

Recently, we introduced a new Butler Automation button on your Trello card back. This button lets you quickly add a new card button (with templated suggestions), right from where you’re working. 

Inspired by the speed and ability to automate your work directly in context, we’ve also built this quick action automation directly into your lists, too:

From the list menu (menu icon next to the list title), you can quickly select a suggested automation (or create your own custom rule). Set this up once with just a few clicks, and you’ll save countless more clicks every day.

Try out a quick action automation like this for a workflow that involves triaging work by when it’s due: 

With an automation like this, you’ll begin each day with an organized list of what to work on. This is just one example, try out the new quick action automation in your Trello lists to match your workflow!

Starting On The Right Foot...Err Date

With our new Timeline and Calendar views transforming the way your team visualizes work, it’s crucial that your workflow automation is keeping up with how you work.

Butler Automation can now interact with start dates (in addition to the due dates it could already modify). This means your workflow automation can set start dates for you, and the timelines will be visible within the Timeline and Calendar views of your board.

Try a simple rule like this to ensure every card has a start date the moment it’s, well, started: 

Note: Timeline view is only available to Business Class and Enterprise Workspaces.

Play Nice Together

We’re now better at highlighting the ways you can integrate Trello with all of the other tools you already use. The new integrations section in the Power-Up directory now lists featured integrations Trello supports with tools you’re likely using every day (such as Gmail and Microsoft Teams).

Go ahead and collect ‘em all—make your work more seamless!

Trello can be the glue that holds your work together, so try these integrations to kick (some) context switching to the curb.

The Productivity Journey Never Ends

Quick note: In some places in Trello we’ve started calling Butler “Automation” to make it easier to find automation when you need it. This doesn’t affect automation features—Butler is still your automation sidekick.

Workloads (for the most part) always seem to be trending upwards. It’s important to adopt an agile mindset so your workflow is keeping up with your work. We hope these new Butler Automation features and integrations help you (and your team) tame that neverending list of to-dos.