How I use Trello & Butler to track and report on my work

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Once a year, we do self-assessments at my work. The first few times I had to do this, I really struggled, because I could not remember anything I'd worked on longer than 3 months ago, in any level of detail.

Collecting the information to write the self assessment for my manager was quite time consuming and arduous. At that point I decided that there must be a better way to do this! I started using Trello to track my "Achievements" (or just things I worked on and learnings - not everything can really be called an achievement).

The Trello board I set up looks a little like this:

Every week, I'll prompt myself to put down at least one "Achievement". I do this with a Butler rule:

every friday at 12:15 pm, create a new card with title "<Insert this week's Achievement>" in list "To Do", and set start now, and post message "Hey, make sure you update the Achievement card this week! {cardlink}" to Slack channel "AEJ2BLA6D" in workspace "Atlassian" as myself

This rule creates the card on the board for me, sets the start date, and messages me on Slack with the link to the card, and a prompt to update it, every friday afternoon.

Some week's I'll add more than one card - some weeks I will just archive the card (often when I'm working on a bigger project that's already sitting in "In Progress").

I have a couple more automations set up, like setting the due date and marking it as complete when a card is moved to the "FY{*}" list.

Recently, I discovered I can also use Butler to send an email report of all the stuff I've worked on. I found this pretty handy to send my manager a report of projects she'd asked about.

I created a Butler Board button to send this report - I tested it on my own email a few times to get the formatting right, and eventually sent it to my manager.

The command looked a little like this:

create a report with all cards in list "FY23" using pattern "- **{cardname}**\n_{cardduedate}_\n{carddescription}", and send an email notification to "example@example.com" with subject "What has Felix been up to?" and message "Hey!\nIn this FY, I've has been up to a lot! \n\n---\n\n{$report}\n\n---\n\nCheers, \nFelix"

And produces an email like this:

Obviously my real report had a bunch more bullet points than this example, but you get the idea 😄

I hope this helps some of you looking for inspiration with regard to Butler reports!