How to Automate Monthly Tasklist Creation inside Teamwork Projects

Learn how to set up an automation that will help you save at least 1 hour of work per month for every 10 clients you have inside Teamwork.

We'll be building an automated tool (a node based server that's thoroughly commented to ease the process for you) with step by step instructions to make this as easy for you as possible.

Efficient Project management is critical to a digital agency's success

Managing a team of digital marketers means helping them work at peak efficiency with as few roadblocks as possible. Sometimes little things can make a huge difference. In our agency, recurring tasks and how they look to each team member, was getting in the way to our success.

When I signed up with Teamwork Projects, I was stoked because it allowed us to quickly set up and powerfully manage projects for a digital marketing agency of any size. It is our favorite project management software and is currently one of the most popular choices for digital marketing agencies needing to run efficient projects, workflows, and recurring work like monthly retainers.

One feature I really like is the ability to set up recurring tasks (or a task that repeats routinely daily, weekly or monthly or annually).

Teamwork allows us to assign the task to repeat each Tuesday.

I set up each project up once and then Huzzah, each team member would execute the tasks each month.

Then team members started to offer feedback.

The Problem

While I was stoked about the project administration simplicity, the team hated it because when they marked a task complete, it wouldn't go away, it would just create a new task with the next deadline.

The fact that the list never seemed to get smaller made them feel anxious.

The team's anxiety was hurting their ability to get their jobs done at peak performance. And this was what compelled us to find a better way to work.

So I dove in deep into using Tasklist Templates in Teamwork's robust help center.

What's a tasklist template?

A Teamwork Projects tasklist template is a tasklist that you create inside your Settings (if you have the appropriate permissions) wherein you can define the task's details, resource files, start and end dates, team member or role (more on this below), and more.

Simple and very powerful, they would serve as the cornerstone of our solution.

We already used tasklist templates and knew that a more structured and automated approach could be the solution we needed.

Goal Setting

First, we needed to define what success would look like. We knew that our new way of managing monthly work would need to:

• Make it easy for team members to work at peak performance with streamlined visibilty into remaining monthly tasks to execute.
• Make less work for our project manager to manage on a monthly basis. Without automation, I envisioned a dystopian nightmare (too much perhaps good reader?) where our PM would import tasks from tasklist templates each month and then manually assign tasks to team members.

• We learned that automating this process could save 1 hour /month of work for every 10 projects in Teamwork.

The Solution

After diving into Teamwork's api documentation around projects, roles, and tasklists we saw a path.

Here's how our automated solution works:

1. At midnight of the first day of each month, or tool, polls Teamwork's Projects API to pull in all projects inside specific categories.
2. Our tool then grabs the roles and User Ids of each role on each project from our first query using Teamwork's roles API.
3. Our tool then creates a new tasklist called "July SEO Tasks" where July is the new Month's name and assigns each task in the new tasklist to the person who has been assigned a role inside the project. All the dev tasks are siigned to the project dev. All the SEO tasks are assigned to the project SEO.

Prerequisites

For this automation to run, you need to set up several things for each project in advance inside Teamwork and on your Server.

Teamwork Requirements

Create Tasklist Templates for each Package Level

You need to create a tasklist template for each Project Category that you want to include in your monthly automation.

Pro tip: make your life easy by naming each tasklist template to match the name of the Project Category.

Pro tip #2: assign each task to choose later and put the name of the role in the popup like this:

This will allow our automation to assign the task to the user with that role inside the project when the automation runs each month.

Categorize every project carefully

Set up the Project Category to match the tasklist template that you want your team to execute for the client every month.

Log into each project's settings by navigating to Project > settings along the top navigation over the project's tasks.

Once on the settings screen edit the Project category and set it to the appropriate category.

Assign Roles in each project

When you build out a project in Teamwork, assign different roles to each Project.

In our agency, each SEO project had a simple set of roles: PM for Project Manager, SEO for the responsible SEO, PPC for Paid Search Practitioner, and DEV for the team member who would be building out content for each project on a client's website.

The Script

1. Download the zip file

   The zip contains the index.js file (that you'll see commented below) and also the node dependencies you'll need.

2. Edit your copy of index.js to match your agency's needs.
3. Upload the auto folder (and all files inside) to your server.
4. Set up the cron to run each month.

The Commented Script

Here's the main file that you'll be customizing

You'll need to update the Index.js file as follows:

1. Update the company to match your Teamwork company name. You can find this after logging into teamwork in the URL address bar in the following pattern: https://yourcompanyname.teamwork.com
2. Update your API Key: Click on your Initials > edit my details > api key and mobile found in top Corner of your teamwork log in.
3. Update the catIds Query parameters list to include ALL Project Category Ids you want the monthly automation to run for. You can get these ids, by going to the projects tab and hovering over one of the categories in the left of your window. The category ID will at the end of the URL ?catid=1234 where the 1234 is the category ID.
4. Update the roles to match the role names as you assigned them to every project. Let's look an example below that is also in the commented gist:
5. Update the Variable assigments as found in lines 132 - 142 to match the roles in your agency. To take the first example found on line 132 you'd need to change as follows:
   if(indexSEO == -1){ seo = '' } else { seo = "\"SEO\": "+data1.roles[indexSEO].users[0].id+"," }
   
   to
   
   if(indexOutreach == -1){ outreach = '' } else { outreach = "\"OUTREACH\": "+data1.roles[indexOutreach].users[0].id+"," }
6. Update lines 145 - 159 to match your agency's project categories and tasklist template ids. To get the category ids see step 2 above.
   
   To get the task template ids for each tasklist template go to Top right corner of Teamwork and go to Settings > and then go to Templates on next screen. Click the edit button in the Task templates section. On next screen you can hover over each tasklist template and you'll see the id at the end of the url.

The Server

Server Requirements

Set up a linux based server (it is really easy we promise). We love Digital Ocean. This is an inexpensive host that costs us less than $10 each month and is our home for our automated scripts that allow us to automate a number of processes that run each month.

Digital Ocean is a breeze and you can sign up with them here and save $50 over the first 30 days with them.

Build a Droplet

According to Digital Ocean's documentation, "Digital Ocean Droplets are flexible Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on top of virtualized hardware. Each Droplet you create is a new server you can use." They are easy to set up and super easy for us to use.

Here's how Digital Ocean recommends you build your droplet from their control panel.

Good news time: the least expensive plan that costs $5 / month is totally sufficient.

Choose: 1GB / 25 GB of SSD Disk Storage which will set up a Ubuntu 18.04 server for you.

Take note of your ip address that is created as you'll need this whn FTP in / SSH in to upload your script / setting up the cron.

Setup Root Access

For the purpose of this article we'll be using a root password to make it easier for you to set up your FTP tool / your SSH terminal or putty connection. I found that setting up a root password was much easier than using SSH Keys. If you want to set up SSH Keys you can follow Digital Ocean's documentation here.

1. Log into your Digital Ocean Control Panel and click Access.
2. Click Reset Root Password.
3. Got to your email address inbox associated with your Digital Ocean Account and open the email from Digital Ocean with the Subject Line "Your droplet's password has been reset."
4. Copy the password from the email.
5. Log back into your Digital Ocean Control Panel and click Access > Launch Console.
6. When the console opens a popup window click anywhere inside the window. It will show you a login prompt with a "login:"
7. Type "root" (no quotes).
8. At password prompt paste in the password from your password reset email.
9. Follow the password reset instructions by:
   1. Repasting in the current password once.
   2. Changing the password to your new secure password. (use numbers, Special Characters and both upper and lower case letters.
   3. Confirming the new password by typing it in again at next prompt.
10. Write down /type out your new password, you'll need this to set up your FTP Software / ssh into your server later.

    Setup FTP / SSH Access

    Open up your FTP tool of choice. I use Transmit for Mac which is made by Panic. There are tons of free options if you prefer including Filezilla.

    In terminal, we set up our FTP connection like so:

    Port 22, SFTP, Address: is your Digital Ocean Droplet's Ip address: User: root, password, your newly created password.

    After creating settings, connect to the server. You'll be set up in the root directory of your droplet. This is where you'll add your automation files in the next few steps.

    Placing the script on your server

    Now that you you've edited your index.js file, you'll want to ftp the auto folder named auto and all the files and folders inside to root folder in your new server.

    We are so close now. Get excited.

    Setting up the Cron

    You can edit your cron via FTP or via SSH, we'll show you how to edit it via FTP, because it is super easy.

    In your FTP software you'll want to go up one level, and then navigate to Var > Spool > cron > crontabs > and double click the file named root inside. We'll be adding one line to the end of the current crontab.

    We set up our cron so that it runs at midnight on the first day of each month. You can modify the timing to match your needs by going to cronguru to learn the proper syntax.

    If you want to use our method add the following line to the end of your crontab:

    0 0 1 * * cd /root/auto && node index.js > /tmp/project.log

    This sentence tells the cron to go into your auto folder and run your index.js file with node at midnight on the first day of the month.

    Testing the Cron

    You can test the cron by modifying and your cronjob file so that the time and date are a few minutes out from now. Again, use Cronguru to help you set that up.

    After you run the script, make sure to delete the unwanted tasklists in each project and get stoked for time savings.