Update: If you are looking for a simple way to create recurring tasks and whole lot of other cool automation within Trello you should check out Butler bot.

Something I’ve seen over and over again is people creating recurring tasks in Trello. There’s a joke somewhere in that last sentence. Maybe not a good one admittedly, but it was only a short sentence.

There are a couple of manual work-arounds people adopt to deal with these situations. Let’s not worry about those, because today I’m going to show you how to automate recurring tasks in Trello. There are two versions of the story I’m going to tell. Firstly, the longer one for those of you who have 5 minutes to learn how to use If This Then That (IFTTT), and secondly a quicker one for those of you who just want to get your recurring tasks set up already and aren’t interested in any of my jibber jabber! Take pity on a fool and scroll down to the bottom if that’s you.

For both you’ll need an account on IFTTT, a free service which works as a kind of magical web glue for sticking your internets together. Clear? Fear not, it will be.

The long(er) version

Get an IFTTT account (free) by clicking the signup link on their homepage, which should take you here.

They will walk you briefly through how IFTTT works. It’s pretty simple. You pick two events, a this and a that. If this happens then we want that to happen. For example:

If ‘the weather is sunny’ (this)

Tweet ‘weather looks nice, let’s all go to the beach!’ (that)

Or in our instance, if the time is 9am on a Monday create a new card in Trello. Each of those is called a recipe by IFTTT.

So now you’re logged in, click on ‘My account’ and then ‘Create a recipe’ to get started. Or, you can go here which should do the same thing. You should see something like this

IFTTT has a bunch of what they call Channels which can trigger your recipes. Click on this and you will see some of them. Now, stop looking at all the channels and idly imagining the possibilities of wiring up every service you’ve ever heard of. We know we need the time channel, so type time in the search box and select ‘Date & Time’.

You now need to choose how frequently you want to create your new Trello card. Daily? Monthly? Annually? I’m sure you can work it out, you got this far!

I’m using the “Every day of the week at” trigger which doesn’t fire every day of the week, but every day of the week which you select. Ie, every Monday or every Tuesday and Friday.

Pick the time of day you want your trigger to fire on, and the days of the week (or whatever is appropriate for the frequency you selected) and click on create trigger.

We’re half way there! Click on that and search for the Trello channel.

When you click on Trello you will need to log in to your Trello account and let IFTTT access your boards. You will then need to choose which action you want to take in Trello when the trigger fires. Luckily there’s only one action…

So let’s choose ‘Create a card’.

From there you get to set which board and list to create your card in. Choose a title and description as well as assign members, add labels and link attachments. All pretty handy.

Finally you’ll be asked to confirm your choices and create your recipe. You should end up back on your My Recipes page and see your new recipe there. Now, just sit back, relax and wait for 9am Monday morning to roll around and your new robot overlord will tell you what to do :).

The quick version

Head over to IFTTT using one of these links, depending on the frequency of your recurring task

For daily or weekly tasks. Doesn’t let you assign members etc.

For monthly tasks. Includes adding members, labels and attachments

If you’ve got an IFTTT account sign in and add the relevant recipe. If not, click the signup link and follow the instructions.

Need a dashboard to keep on top of your Trello boards? Check out Corrello – Dashboards for Agile teams using Trello.