Let the board tidy itself: automations that wait, archive and move quietly

Every board has a column nobody looks after. Done fills up one finished job at a time until it holds two hundred cards, and the work that matters this week sits next to work from the spring. Nobody decides to let it grow. Tidying it is just never anyone's job.

The fix is to make tidying part of the board instead of a chore. A rule that waits a fortnight and then archives what's finished does in a few seconds a day what nobody gets round to in a month. Here is how those rules work in Skybase, what they will and won't do, and a pair worth setting up today.

Why finished work piles up#

A full Done column isn't a sign of a messy team. It's a sign that the board only moves work forwards. Three things keep it that way:

• Archiving feels like housekeeping, so it waits for a quiet afternoon that never comes.
• Nobody is sure when a job is safe to clear. The client might still come back about it, so it stays "for now".
• When someone does tidy, it happens in one go, with a burst of notifications that tells the whole team about work they finished weeks ago.

What helps is a clear, shared answer to "when does finished work leave the board?", applied the same way every time, without anybody having to remember it or hear about it.

Rules that wait#

Most automations react to something that just happened: a job moves, it gets a label, someone is assigned. One trigger waits instead. In the rule editor it's called a job has been in a column for a while, and it reads like this:

• When a job has been in Done for 14 days
• Then archive the job

A few things about how it counts are worth knowing before you set one up:

• You choose the column and the number of days, anywhere from 1 to 365.
• The days count from when the job arrived in that column, not from when it was created. A job that spent a month in progress and two days in Done has been in Done for two days.
• Skybase checks these rules once a day, overnight, so a job that crosses the line today is dealt with on the next check.
• Each rule acts once per stay. A job left in Done is archived once, not every morning. If you move it out and back in, its wait starts again.
• If the rule has conditions that don't match the job yet, it checks again the next day.
• A job restored from the archive waits the full time again, so nobody restores something to look at it and loses it the following morning.

Archive quietly, keep the record#

Archiving with a rule is deliberately quiet. archive the job sends no notifications and posts nothing to Slack. The team doesn't need a ping for every finished job leaving the board.

Quiet doesn't mean invisible:

• The job's activity says which rule archived it, with the rule's name and a lightning bolt.
• The board updates live for everyone who has it open.
• If the job is linked to a GitHub issue, the issue still closes, exactly as it would if a person archived the job.
• Archived jobs aren't deleted. They stay under Project settings, then Archived jobs, and anyone opening one sees Restore job at the top.

Archive is always the last action in a rule. Once a job is archived nothing else should happen to it, so the editor keeps it at the end.

Moves that don't need an announcement#

The other half of a tidy board is getting finished work into the right column in the first place. Plenty of teams mark a job complete from the job itself and forget to drag it. A rule fixes that:

• When a job is completed
• Then move to Done, quietly

Ticking quietly on a move means nobody is notified about it and nothing goes to Slack. The move still shows in the job's activity and on everyone's board. It's the right choice whenever the move is tidying, not news. If a move does matter to someone, leave the box clear and they're told as usual.

The pair worth setting up today#

Take a small studio, say Harbour Studio, working through a rebrand for a client called Northwind. Harbour is made up: it's the example in Skybase's sample workspace. Its Northwind Rebrand board runs Brief, In progress, Client review and Done.

Harbour's studio lead, Maya Chen, sets up two rules:

1. "Move completed jobs to Done": when a job is completed, move to Done, quietly.
2. "Archive jobs in Done after 14 days": when a job has been in Done for 14 days, archive the job.

Now follow one job through. Sam Okafor finishes the "Brand audit" and chooses Mark complete on the job. A few seconds later, the first rule moves it to Done without telling anyone. Northwind's board already had a "Done means completed" rule, which marks a job complete when it moves to Done. That move sets it off too, and it finds nothing to change, because the job is already complete.

Two weeks later, on the overnight check, the second rule archives the Brand audit. Its activity reads "Archive jobs in Done after 14 days archived this job". Nobody got a notification, and Done holds only what finished in the last fortnight.

Fourteen days suits Harbour because Northwind usually comes back about a deliverable within a week. Pick the number by asking when your clients stop asking about finished work, then add a few days.

Let one rule set off another, a little#

You saw it above: the quiet move into Done set off "Done means completed". A change made by a rule can set off another rule, which is what lets small rules work together. There are limits, so it stays easy to follow:

• Up to three rules in a row.
• Never the same rule twice in one chain, so two rules can't pass a job back and forth.
• Each rule's changes are signed with its own name in the job's activity.

If a rule that waits sets off one that notifies someone, that notification says the rule ran on its daily check, so whoever reads it knows why it arrived overnight.

Start from an example#

You don't have to write either rule from scratch. Open Project settings, then Automations, and choose Examples beside New automation. Start from an example lists ready-made rules filled in from your project, using your own columns, labels and people. "Move completed jobs to Done" and "Archive jobs in Done after 14 days" are both there, named after your own Done column.

Each example opens in the editor for you to check. Nothing is saved until you choose to create it. Only administrators can add rules. Team members can read every rule and its runs, so anyone can see why a job left the board.

Check what the rules did#

Choose Runs on a rule to see its Recent runs. For a rule that waits, each run carries a Scheduled check label, so you can tell the daily check from a person's change. When one rule set off another, the run says Set off by and names the rule that started it. A run marked Nothing to change means the rule looked and the job was already as it should be, which is what you'd expect from "Done means completed" in the example above.

If a column a rule relies on is deleted, the rule switches itself off and says why. Edit it, then turn it back on.

If you used Job Rules#

Before 2 October, archiving after a number of days and moving completed jobs lived in a separate Job Rules page. That page is gone, and the settings weren't lost. Each project's archive setting became a rule called "Archive jobs in" your column "after" your number of days. Its completion column became "Move completed jobs to" that column, as a quiet move. You'll find both on the project's Automations page, where you can change them like any other rule.

A checklist for a board that clears itself#

• Completed work moves to your final column with a quiet move.
• A rule archives jobs that have waited long enough in that column.
• The wait is longer than the time your clients take to come back about finished work.
• Archive is the last action, and there's only one archive rule per column.
• You've checked each rule's runs after its first week.

Everything automations can do lists the triggers, actions and limits in one place, and how to set up automations in Skybase walks through the editor step by step. If you're writing your first rules, six automations that take hand-offs off your plate covers the ones that react as work moves.