Why can't I automate labels with the calendar or button?

[Rhys Campbell]

I'll say up front that Trello's automation has always frustrated me. It sits in that level between "user friendly" and "utterly restrictive" for pretty much everything I try to use it for. Why do my rules break if I change the name of a list? That's just how it is. So you sort of know where I am with this. 

In this case, we wanted to create a simple system. 

• List contains projects currently out with third parties. 
• We thought lets give every card in this list a label of what needs to be done with this client (e.g. call, email etc.)
• One of these would be a "Next Week" label which we put on clients whom we don't need to deal with at the moment. Due Dates are super clunky to add in and don't really serve the purpose as we don't have specific dates for these clients. 
• All we wanted was to have, either via Calendar on Monday morning or via a button, to change all "Next Week" to "NEEDS ATTENTION". 
• (the label names would likely have changed as we fleshed out the idea more but it stalled here)

This doesn't seem to be possible. Changing labels via these two functions just doesn't seem to exist? It exists in rules, but rules only automates when we manually do things and that's not useful in this case. 

The amount of things that are possible in one place and not elsewhere is frustrating. 

[Felix · Accepted solution]

Hey @Rhys Campbell - thanks for all the details. You can definitely create a workflow as you describe, but you'll probably want to leverage due dates to do this for a couple of reasons:

• It'll mean that if you're viewing your board in calendar view, you actually see when these projects will next need following up
• You can leverage Butler's due date commands to achieve the result you want with regard to labels
• You can manually bump a follow-up by adjusting the due date

I'd probably set up 2 rules for the workflow you're laying out:

1. when the green "Next Week" label is added to a card, set due date the next monday
2. the moment a card with the green "Next Week" label is due, remove the due date from the card, add the yellow "Needs Attention" label to the card, and remove the green "Next Week" label from the card

With those 2 rules, you shouldn't need to really think about setting the due date, Butler would handle it, and you'd just be able to set the labels.

Optionally, you could even add another rule to clean up the due date automatically when the "Next Week" label is removed.

[Rhys Campbell]

Checking something...

[Rhys Campbell]

@Felix 

So this is fine except that I have no idea how to put "the moment a card with the green "Next Week" label is due" onto a rule cause "The moment" and "is due" are not selections I can make for a rule. 

It makes no sense to me why they are not as that is the whole point of a due date. I can apparently "mark the due dates as complete" which is a strange way of doing things. The only options I have within Rules are "Set On", "Moved in" or "Removed from".

I would accept some as "When a card becomes overdue" but as far as I can tell there simply isn't an option to do this. 

[Felix]

@Rhys Campbell the "the moment a card is due" trigger is under the "Due dates" tab (on the left hand side, in the Butler "tabs").

There's a couple of other triggers that let you define when you want to run the rule in more detail (days before/after due date) too.