Creating dynamic/relative checklist due dates

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Happy Thursday! This edition is coming to you from Baton Rouge, and with a slightly more focused format. I’m taking a Dear Taco question and diving deeper into it since it’s a tough one.

And to save you reading time, im cutting out the other sections today. Let me know what you think!

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🌮 Dear Taco

This is a section where readers can submit their Trello questions, and each week I’ll pick one and answer it! It’s like “Dear Abby” but make it trello. Have a question you want to submit? Share it here.

I'm involved in a collaboration every month and make several items for sale. I duplicate the card each month and just make edits to the items included. there are several items in the checklist with dates, especially after the sale and I need to produce the items, label, prepare for shipping ect. I'm manually adjusting the dates for each of these items. Is there any way to have the dates automatically adjusted such as the same calendar date adjusted to the proper month or a certain number of days before the ship deadline? 

~Angie

Hey Angie!

I hear a lot of folks ask about this and I recommend using automation to do this.

If you prefer to watch, here’s a video explanation:

But for my reading homies, here’s the steps you’ll take!

Go to the Automation Section and choose Scheduled and then click Create Automation. (You could also create a Board Button that does this - the important part is the action.)

Add a trigger for every month on the 1st then click the blue plus button at the end of that row.

Choose the action for creating a card with the name {monthname} checklist (or whatever you’d like to call it. Using {monthname} will dynamically place the name of the month in the card.) It’s important to remember what you call it because we will use the name of that card to trigger the automation that creates the checklist.

Save this rule and then go to Rules section on the lefthand side and choose to create another automation.

This time, add a trigger and go to the Content tab and choose the first action for when a card name starts with… and then set the same value you set for the newly created card to be named.

Next, go to the checklist section to start adding actions. For each item you want to add, you’ll need to do the following:

• add an item (give it the name of the item you want) to checklist called Checklist (make sure to use the same Checklist name for each)

• add another action for “set item due” and choose the one that works for you

  for instance, you may want it to be 5 days from when this card is created, or maybe you want it to be always on the 10th of the month, etc.

  

• click the blue plus button at the end of the row, and then move on to the next item and rinse and repeat until your rule looks something like this

Then save your rule, and it should work to dynamically set those due dates on the checklist items based on whenever you run the rule!

PS - If you were shifting CARD due dates, then I’d recommend using Bulk Actions Power-Up to select all the cards you copied and then shift the card due dates by 1 month. But as far as I can tell, this only works on card due dates and not checklists.

Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!

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