Team, I’m looking for a way of duplicating a task in some automated way.
The situation:
By the time a task has progressed in our business to the point that it makes it to the Engineering department (the halfway point of this task’s lifespan), there is SO MUCH information overload in that task that it’s a real mess. However, we don’t want to delete it because we may need to refer back to it at some point in time, because it reflects everything that happened it the Sales, Design, Proposal stages, etc.
So, our Engineers have just been manually duplicating the tasks so that all the custom fields stay the same, the Task Title remains almost the same, and documents remain. All comments, Description, and subtasks are all removed. The final product is a clean, tidy new task for the Engineers, Production, Installation, and Billing teams to use, while retaining the core information we needed.
This works but is tedious at times.
I cannot find a way of automating the duplication of a task. Is there any way to automate this?
@Matt5 - there’s not currently a way to automatically duplicate a task the way you’ve described. The closest alternative is a recurring task, but each recurrence still shows the description and subtasks.
To accomplish exactly what you’ve described, it would be a pretty simply automation with Make.com or Zapier.com (I prefer Make).
Both Make and Zapier have great tutorials and lots of supporting videos on YouTube if you want to learn and do it yourself.
If you are somewhat familiar with Make/Zapier:
Your automation will need a webhook for a trigger to watch a task for adding a tag, adding a custom field, or being moved to a specific section.
Your actions will be: (1) Get Task (to get all the info about the task being duplicated) and then (2) Create task (pulling only the info you want to keep from the previous task)
Or, you could hire out the small task to me/my team or quite a few other automation experts here on the forum. Feel free to message or reply with questions.
*UPDATE: Actually, this is a small enough task, I’d be happy to do a first automation for you free. You can click the “Quick Help” link in my profile if you want to do that.
We are trying to avoid using third party solutions at the moment such as Make or Zapier, what we have found for most of our needs is that managing those third party options ends up being about the same amount of work as doing it ourselves.
I also appreciate the offer to set this one up for free. We aren’t ready to go down that path for the reason above but it is a tempting offer, thank you!