📋 Lesson 5.1: Butler Rules: When This, Do That

What Butler Is (and Where It Lives)

Up to now, you have been the engine of your board. You drag the card to Done, you tick the due date, you add the label, you assign the teammate. That's fine — until you're doing the same five clicks twenty times a day. Butler is a tireless little robot that lives inside your board and does those repetitive clicks for you, exactly the same way, every single time.

The best part, and the thing most people get wrong: Butler is built into Trello on every plan — Free included. It is not a Power-Up you have to hunt for or a paid add-on. You already have it. The only thing that scales with your plan is how many times per month certain automations are allowed to run, and we'll do honest math on that later in this module (Lesson 5.3).

You'll find Butler in the top-right of any board:

• Open any board.
• Click the ⚙️ Automation button in the board menu (on some layouts it's under the ⋯ Show menu then Automation, or shown as a little robot icon).
• You'll see categories down the side: Rules, Card Button, Board Button, Calendar, and Due Date. This lesson is all about Rules; buttons come in 5.2 and the scheduled/due-date commands in 5.3.

Here's the honest scope, so you build the right expectations: Butler is genuinely no-code. You never write a script. You assemble sentences from dropdown menus, and Butler shows you the plain-English result as you go. If you can describe the chore out loud — "whenever I move a card to Done, check off its due date and slap a green label on it" — you can automate it.

The One Mental Model: Triggers & Actions

Learn this single idea and every automation in Trello — and honestly, in most other tools too — becomes obvious. Every Rule is one trigger followed by one or more actions:

WHEN something happens (the trigger) → DO these things (the actions).

That's the whole grammar. Let's make each half concrete.

The trigger — the "When"

A trigger is the event that wakes Butler up. There is exactly one trigger per Rule. Common triggers:

• A card moves — added to, moved into, or moved out of a specific list.
• A card changes — a label is added, a due date is set, a member is added, it's marked complete, it's archived.
• A card is created — added to the board, or emailed in.
• A checklist item is checked or completed.
• The card name starts with, contains, or matches some text.

The action — the "Do"

Actions are what Butler does once the trigger fires. A Rule can have many actions, and they run top to bottom in order. Common actions:

• Move the card to a list, or to the top/bottom of a list.
• Set or remove a label, a due date, a member, or a cover color.
• Mark the due date complete (or incomplete).
• Add a comment, a checklist, or a checklist item.
• Sort or archive cards in a list.
• Post a message (e.g. to Slack, covered in Lesson 6.2).

Put them together and you get a readable little sentence. Here's the canonical first Rule — the one you'll build in the project — shown in the Butler mock so you can see the shape:

Read it aloud: "When a card is moved into Done, mark its due date complete and add the green label." One trigger, two actions. That's a Rule. Notice how the second Do row just stacks on — a Rule is a trigger with a to-do list attached.

Writing Your First Rule

Butler's Rule builder is a series of blue buttons that unfold a menu, then a plain-English sentence you fill in with dropdowns. Here's the flow, step by step, for that "move to Done" cleanup rule:

1. Open ⚙️ Automation → Rules, then click Create Rule (or the +).
2. Click Add Trigger. Choose the Card Move category, then pick "when a card is added to / moved into list ▢ by anyone" and select your Done list from the dropdown.
3. Now add actions. Click Add Action → Dates, and choose "mark the due date complete."
4. Click Add Action → Add/Remove (the label category) and choose "add the green label." (Name your labels first — Lesson 2.3 — so this reads nicely.)
5. Click Save. That's it. Your robot is on duty.

As you assemble those dropdowns, Butler prints the sentence back to you at the top so you can sanity-check it. That live preview is your friend — if the sentence sounds wrong when you read it aloud, the Rule is wrong.

Anatomy of the builder, in one glance

Every Rule you'll ever build is just these four zones stacked: the trigger at the top, a list of actions below it, an optional filter to narrow which cards qualify, and the Save button. Don't let the wall of blue buttons intimidate you — you're always just answering "when?" once and "do what?" as many times as you like.

Starter Rules Worth Stealing

Here are four Rules that pull real weight from day one. Each is shown in the Butler mock so you can copy the structure directly into your board. Change the list and label names to match yours.

1. The "Done" cleanup (the classic)

Keeps finished cards tidy without a single manual click — and it's the rule almost every seasoned Trello user has on almost every board.

2. Auto-assign what lands in "Today"

Great for a personal board: anything you pull into your Today list becomes yours automatically, so ownership is never ambiguous.

3. Auto-label by keyword

Type fast, stay organized. When a new card's title starts with a tag word, Butler labels and cleans it up for you — a tiny bit of structure with zero discipline required.

4. Nudge stale work

On a team board, a "Review" gate can silently pile up. Pair a label with a comment so nothing rots unnoticed. (This one fires on a change to the card — moving into Review.)

Here's how a board looks after these Rules have been quietly working — notice the finished card already wears its done badge and green label, and nobody touched it by hand:

Testing, Editing & Run Limits

Test it for real (safely)

The honest way to test a Rule is to trigger it. Make a throwaway card called "test," drag it into the list your Rule watches, and watch what happens. If the card gets its label, date, or move as designed — great, delete the test card. If nothing happens, re-open the Rule and read its sentence aloud; the mistake is almost always in the trigger (wrong list, or "by me" when it should be "by anyone").

• Every Rule has an Enabled / Disabled toggle — flip a Rule off instead of deleting it while you experiment.
• Butler keeps a run log / usage view so you can see when a Rule last fired and whether it errored.
• You can copy a Rule to another board — build it once, reuse it everywhere.

The one gotcha: command runs

Here is the honest limit, and the single most useful thing to understand about Butler's pricing. Butler itself is free on every plan. What's metered is the number of Workspace command runs — roughly, each time an automatic Rule (or a scheduled command) does its thing counts as one run.

• Free — about 250 Workspace command runs per month.
• Standard — about 1,000 runs per month.
• Premium — effectively unlimited runs.

For a personal board with a handful of Rules, 250/month is genuinely plenty — you'll rarely feel it. The place it bites is a busy team board where a Rule fires on every card move by everyone. We do the full budgeting math (and how to stay comfortably under the cap) in Lesson 5.3. For now, just know the meter exists.

🎯 Project: Build Two Rules

Time to make your board work for you. You'll build two Rules on your existing board (your "My Week" or any board with a Done list and a Today or Doing list). Both are safe, reversible, and immediately satisfying.

Rule 1:
  When a card is moved into list "Done" by anyone,
    mark the due date as complete,
    add the green label to the card.

Rule 2:
  When a card is added to list "Today" by me,
    join the card.

Best Practices for Rules

✅ Do's

• Automate real chores. The best Rule replaces something you actually do repeatedly, not something that just seems clever.
• Read the sentence aloud before saving. Butler shows you the plain-English version — if it sounds wrong, it is wrong.
• Test with a throwaway card. Trigger every new Rule once and confirm it did exactly what you expected.
• Name labels and lists clearly first. Rules read beautifully when "the green label" is actually named "done."

❌ Don'ts

• Don't build ten Rules at once. A board full of mysterious automations that surprise you is worse than none.
• Don't ignore "by me" vs "by anyone." On team boards it changes both behavior and your run count.
• Don't create loops. A Rule whose action re-triggers itself (or another Rule) can burn runs fast — watch for cause-and-effect chains.
• Don't forget the meter. If a Rule fires on every card move on a busy team board, it adds up (math in 5.3).

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You just crossed the line from "person who uses Trello" to "person whose Trello does chores for them." Two working Rules is a bigger deal than it sounds: you now hold the exact mental model — trigger then actions — that unlocks everything else in this module and most automation you'll ever meet. The board is starting to run itself.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

Next up: buttons. Where Rules fire on their own, buttons put a one-click "do all these steps now" control right on a card or the board — perfect for the multi-step setups you want on demand, not automatically. And personal button runs are effectively unlimited, so they're a smart way to save your metered command runs.

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Keep your two Rules enabled and use your board normally — notice them working
• Jot down one multi-step setup you do by hand (great raw material for a button)
• Write your Learning Journal entry — your automation wish-list

📚 Additional Resources

• Trello Butler — official overview
• Getting started with Butler automation (Atlassian docs)
• trello.com/pricing — check current command-run limits