How do I use Monday.com like a Pro?

In the past couple of episodes of Automate Your Agency with Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson, we've talked a lot about project management systems with the intentions of answering questions like:

1. Should I implement a project management system in my business? 
2. What do project management systems actually do? 
3. How do I choose between ClickUp, Asana, or Monday.com? 

We feel we've adequately covered #1 and #2, but we'd like to spend a little extra time helping you out with #3. 

The truth is that Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com are all great options for systemizing your business, but none of them are perfect. 

Over the next few episodes, we'll be exploring each of these platforms individually to answer what each platform does well and where they are lacking. 

Join us on this week's episode of Automate Your Agency with Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson, as we dive into Monday.com. We'll discuss the highs and lows of Monday.com, our favorite features, and how you can make it even more powerful by extending its functionality using Make.com. 

If you want to learn what Monday.com has to offer, you don't want to miss this episode! 

If you're already using Monday.com, take advantage of our Monday.com team training in our Workday Ninja community. It promotes consistent usage by directing everyone on best practices for general features and navigation. Use coupon code "AYAFREE" to get it for free. 

If you have yet to choose a project management system, use our free Project Management System Selector Tool to get a personalized recommendation in minutes. 

If you found this episode valuable and want to help other businesses reap the rewards, would you mind leaving us a 5-star review? It will help with show rankings and give more listeners the opportunity to find our show. 

Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Thank you and see you next time!

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. If you've been using Monday.com and you're starting to feel like maybe I'm not using it correctly, or you're looking at it and going, it feels like a glorified checklist, then this episode is for you. Micah and I are going to cover the seven biggest pitfalls that we see in Monday.com users.

0:00:37 - (Micah): I just want to say, if you're listening to this and you're already using Monday or thinking about using Monday, congrats. You're already on the right track.

0:00:45 - (Alane): And they've done amazing marketing because we see Monday is probably the one of the most popular ones we see when we start working with a company.

0:00:53 - (Micah): Yeah, I'll be honest, when Monday, Monday was originally called de Pulse and when it first came out, I thought, no way is this going to get anywhere. It wasn't pretty. It was hard to use. It was super limited. And now I had somebody tell me just last week, oh, isn't Monday Enterprise? So talk about a success story. It went from a name that's a hard to say kind of, and just awkward all the way through to successfully marketing and becoming a recognized enterprise solution.

0:01:30 - (Micah): That's not to say it's only enterprise. Any size business could be using Monday and should be using a tool like Monday. We'll get into that.

0:01:40 - (Alane): Yeah. And it's, you know, I think also, not just that they had great marketing, but the UI is the easiest for people to get into and use. So when you're first looking to use a project management system, you feel really comfortable going there first.

0:01:55 - (Micah): Well, I think they made a really smart play here because most companies, we recorded an episode on this recently, but most companies start managing projects in some form of a spreadsheet, and Monday is the smallest jump away from a spreadsheet to a project management platform.

0:02:12 - (Alane): Yeah. And that's also why I think we see it structured incorrectly when companies start using it.

0:02:21 - (Micah): Yep. That's one of the major issues that, that we definitely see is a company will start using Monday, they'll make a board. All of a sudden, one board is treated like a spreadsheet and instead of multiple tabs, it's got all these multiple groups. It becomes this monster board. Instead of creating separate boards or designing the boards correctly or getting the right custom fields in there, the structure of Monday becomes really really important as you get your team in there and as more and more people start using it.

0:02:53 - (Alane): Yeah. And the structure piece of how you're structuring your work spaces is so important because when you're not doing the structure correctly, that's when it starts feeling like a glorified checklist for each person has their own, where they're managing just their task rather than managing a piece of the workflow that they're a part of.

0:03:14 - (Micah): That's a really good point, Alane. I think kind of paired with structuring is this concept of standardization. How should you be using Monday, even though you can't get super crazy with it individuals, instead of using the my work section or the my work area of Monday, they can just go right in and make their own boards and duplicate their tasks and mirror a bunch of columns and communicate in one way when other people are communicating in another way or designing it in one way and other people are just designing it in different ways and suddenly chaos still ensues.

0:03:48 - (Alane): We often see that template creation for your workflows is underutilized and often not being used very well. And this is where that standardization, where you're working off of a template versus taking just tasks individually, can help too. And Monday's great because they have templates of their templates, they have a template library. So another one is conditional forms to get the data from one place and into Monday.

0:04:17 - (Micah): Yeah, I think this is one of the more common questions that I get asked when we're working with clients that use Monday, which is, how do I get data in without reentering the data over and over again? Monday forms have made exceptional headway in the last 1224 months. You have great looking forms. You have conditional forms now, so you can answer a question one way and you can have it go one line of questioning or another line of questioning.

0:04:47 - (Micah): But that is the hands down easiest way to get data into your Monday boards so that they can then be worked on. So check out Monday forms, check out the conditioning.

0:04:57 - (Alane): I love this one because it can kick off the rest of the tasks that need to happen. And you already have all the information right there. And we use, we don't use Monday internally, but we use forms a lot for all different things, for reporting a bug with our software, for a new feature request, for onboarding a new client when we need to get some of the information from them. It's already going into where we do our work. So it makes things where you're not having to do double data entry once.

0:05:29 - (Micah): Things go in from the form that can then trigger our next item, which is using statuses to trigger automation or integrating to other platforms. So because it's coming in from a form you have standardized structured data that's going in as an item in a Monday board, you can trigger the automation that says things like, hey, when a new item is created in Monday, set the status to do well. Once somebody starts working on that and it changes to in progress, maybe we want to send out an automatic notification.

0:06:05 - (Micah): No problem. That status change can trigger automation that then can perform other actions within Monday.

0:06:13 - (Alane): And this one with Monday is really, I think a popular question. Can I use it to send an automated email to my client when it moves to this status? And I love this use case because you don't have to remember to do it. Once it moves to that status, then it's automatically going to let them know, hey, this is happening. This is ready for your review. And it can be external like that where it's going to a client, but it also can be internal where whenever it moves to validation, it creates a task to assign to whoever needs to approve that, look at it, whatever it might be, and just really simplifies what the person managing the project has to remember to do.

0:06:56 - (Micah): Yeah. When we use terms like workflow, what you're talking about right now, Alane, is what really drills it in for me is, well, what is a workflow? Well, we're going to have these steps happen, but as we're working through these steps, we can also trigger status updates to the client via email, all just by managing the project as if we were to manage the project. Regardless, we don't have to do all these other things just to keep things running.

0:07:26 - (Alane): Yeah. Where those tedious tasks is where people forget, make mistakes or burns them out. You know, they can continue being creative, doing the things that they enjoy doing rather than all the little tiny pieces that they're trying to remember as part of the process.

0:07:42 - (Micah): Yeah. And we all know, like you said, those are the things that get forgotten or I've got to send out, I've got to do too much, I've got to do all of this. Those important things get treated like busy work and now instead of customer follow up or notifications. Nah, I'll do a status update later. That later is never going to come.

0:08:04 - (Alane): Yeah. And you know, when we're around this topic of automation, there are a few use cases that Monday doesn't have that you have to use an outside third party system like Make.com to build the automation to work.

0:08:20 - (Micah): Great point. I mean, one really, really popular one right now is two way syncing boards. So Monday does have a feature called column mirroring, which will allow you to take data from one board and mirror it to another board. And it's super cool, but it does have limitations and you can hit those limitations pretty easily. So what we have done is developed a way to use a tool like Make.com to do a Monday to Monday automation. But it goes from Monday out into make.com

0:08:52 - (Micah): and back into Monday and will allow the ability to sync one board to another board, either one way, where it's just going to send data from one board to the other board, or it's going to two way sync, which means it'll send data from one board to another board. And then if any changes happen in that second board, it will send it back. So a really common example or a common use case for this is project management. Let's say you have one project manager, but you have 25 projects that they're managing.

0:09:23 - (Micah): You don't necessarily want them to have to go to every single board, check in, check every single step. So what you could do is two way sync certain elements from each of the project boards into a single project manager board. And then that project manager manages one board with only the critical information that they need and if they make any changes, that distributes it back down to the individual project boards.

0:09:52 - (Micah): That also means you can throw a dashboard on the project manager board and make it easy to manage things from a high level without running into limitations on dashboard limits. Inside of Monday.

0:10:03 - (Alane): Yep. Which is another complication to overcome.

0:10:08 - (Micah): That's right. That's right. While we're talking about complications, I do think we need to touch on recurring tasks.

0:10:13 - (Alane): Now, this one is a huge deal to me and the way that I use a project management system because I love and use recurring tasks for so many pieces. But with Monday, you're not able to do it inside of Monday, and so you again need that third party automation to create it.

0:10:35 - (Micah): Yeah, again, Monday's marketing is great. It's going to tell you there's certain ways to do it, but really what you're doing is doing some manual steps to get there, setting up your manual, or like manually setting up your automation to get there. It's not like Asana or ClickUp or outlook or Google calendar where you can do a pull down that says this is a recurring task. When would you like it to recur?

0:11:03 - (Micah): Every other week or custom? How long would you like it to recur? That kind of stuff. You don't have that functionality inside of Monday. So there are workarounds that again, you could use a tool like Make.com to say, all right, I want that functionality, but it's not in Monday. So we could build a make.com set of automations that get you there. But that's just another kind of use case where you might want to go outside of Monday and into a tool like that to have maximum flexibility on how you want things to work inside of Monday.

0:11:40 - (Alane): And then there's, there's one more key thing that we see that Monday users want to do that we need to use like a make.com or something for, and that is auto updating statuses and other fields.

0:11:53 - (Micah): This one is my personal favorite because this is when it starts to really feel like the workflow has turned into this magical system. So a good example of this is, as things are happening, let's use the we're going to send an email out to a client, the status, the project status has updated, or the item status has updated, and we're going to send an email out to that client letting them know, hey, it's changed. We're this far along now.

0:12:24 - (Micah): Instead of somebody having to manually go in there and then say, okay, email was sent, or I sent the email and then I changed the status, email sent. We can just have make update the status. So now you have a workflow that's automating itself. It's going to send out this email to the client, it's going to send out a notification, it's going to do this, it's going to do that. At each one of those steps, it can update the status related to that in the board inside of Monday.

0:12:53 - (Micah): So when you go back and look at it, or your project manager goes back and looks at it, they're going to go, oh, the email was sent. Oh, this was updated. Oh, this document was created. All the things that need to happen in your workflow can be automatically tracked and updated, and a lot of it can be performed through the automation.

0:13:12 - (Alane): And right now, if you're listening to this episode, and you might be in the beginning of where we were talking about, like, it feels like a glorified checklist, some of these things that Micah and I are talking about might not even feel like it's doable or it feels like a foreign language, right? Like we're talking about status changes and automation and recurring tasks and things that you aren't currently doing in Monday but that are capable. And where you can start seeing this really work is, you know, when we're talking about your workflow and when you're saying, I wish I could do this, and we say it is possible and this is how you do it. So right now it may not be all, you know, coming together in your head and what we're talking about, but when we start looking at your workflow and you start asking the questions of how you'd like for things to work, that's when these things that we're talking about start coming into play and you know, it can be done.

0:14:06 - (Micah): Yeah, that's an excellent point. So this one that I want to bring up next, Alane, is not commonly asked, but it's a bonus one that I want to throw out here because it's a. Actually, I think there's two that I want to bring up. One is being able to dynamically create views, or rather being able to create a dynamic view so you can set the filter to say, I want to see just the tasks assigned to me. Well, you can do that dynamically inside of Monday so you don't have to have the mica view, the Alane view, the Bo view, the et cetera view for all your team members. You can make one view, set it to be dynamic to just show the tasks for the person logged in.

0:14:51 - (Micah): And then anybody who logs in is going to get that view with the filters, with the grouping, but only for their tasks. Super, super popular. The next bonus one that I want to say is Monday docs are getting pretty cool lately and one of the cool things that they can do is take data out of a board and dynamically populate it in a Monday doc. So if you have something like I want to do a project brief and you want to do it per client, and every client projects an item and a board, you could put the data in custom fields.

0:15:26 - (Micah): One of the custom fields would be a Monday doc. And then you open up that Monday doc template and put in a dynamic area that's going to pull from the Monday board. And suddenly you have dynamic Monday docs that are being pulled together all from the data without having to retype, without having to reformat. Everything just comes automatically into your Monday doc, which then can be collaborated on. Super cool.

0:15:52 - (Alane): One of the things that I love using that for is client briefs that could be coming in from a Monday form gets populated dynamically for that client as a Monday doc.

0:16:06 - (Micah): I love it. Call back to the first one already.

0:16:09 - (Alane): Yeah, well, you know, it's hard to understand like use cases for some of this stuff if you haven't been doing it 100%.

0:16:16 - (Micah): Yeah, it's very difficult to know how to connect all these dots and what the features are and what to do with them. That's the a perfect segue into. I originally had this at the top of our list and we usually talk about this first with clients, but because I think it's so important. But it's also the most boring thing that nobody wants to hear.

0:16:41 - (Alane): Don't say training.

0:16:44 - (Micah): It's training. It is training. Yes. We see so many times companies will use a tool like Monday and go, hey, everybody, we're using Monday. And everybody goes, thumbs up. Cool. We're using Monday. Now what?

0:17:05 - (Alane): No one knows how to use it the same way. They're all going to do it their way and not everybody's going to know the features that can be done. So you've got just spaghetti noodle chaos.

0:17:18 - (Micah): Yes, yes. I might realize there's a my work section and use that correctly. Alane might not. I might see the inbox. Alane might start sending me emails or get super frustrated. And so every user you're multiplying the chaos by, well, I wish somebody would have told me this is how we're collaborating. Oh, that's what a status column is. Oh, I need to change this. Oh, this is how I manage my tasks.

0:17:43 - (Micah): There's all those little gotchas that the team members are going to do the best they can, but without some sort of structured training or just guidance on how you want people to work inside the system, everybody is going to do it their own way for sure.

0:18:01 - (Alane): And lucky for you, we from doing so many engagements across the world with companies, we have developed a basic training for getting into Monday. It takes less than an hour and because you're a listener of our podcast, you get a free code. It's going to be in the show notes so that you and your team can all use the basic training for free and you can even have it as part of your new employee onboarding. So the first day that they're getting in there, they know how to do the basics of Monday. So that'll be linked with the discount code so that you can get it for free.

0:18:33 - (Alane): If you've got workflows and you're not sure how to turn it from. We're using it as a task management system and we want to build this out. A lot of things might have sound foreign, but you're ready to start putting these things in place. We have workday Ninja, that's Mica and ice company where we help implement these workflows into Monday. We'd love to talk with you workdayninja.com. reach out to Micah or I and we can set up a call and start helping you build out all the things that you've been missing out on in Monday.

0:19:02 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:19:13 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:19:18 - (Alane): Bye for now.