📋 Lesson 5.2: Card & Board Buttons

On-Demand Automation: What a Button Is

Last lesson, your Rules did things the instant a trigger fired — you moved a card, Butler pounced. But not every routine should be automatic. Sometimes you want to run a sequence when you say so: set up a fresh card exactly the way you like it, or sweep a whole list clean once you're ready. That's a button.

A Butler button is a labeled control that runs a saved list of actions in one click. Think of it as a Rule with the trigger removed and replaced by "when I press this." The "Do…" half is identical to a Rule — move, label, assign, set dates, archive, comment — but nothing happens until you tap it.

Because a button waits for your click, it's the natural home for the setups that are too situational to automate blindly — the "I want to start working on this now, so get it ready" moment, or the "it's Friday, clear the finished pile" moment.

Card Buttons vs Board Buttons

Both live under ⚙️ Automation, in the Card Button and Board Button sections. They look almost identical to build — the difference is entirely about where the button appears and what it acts on.

Card buttons — act on one card

A card button appears when you open a card (on the card back, among the buttons and add-ons). Click it, and its actions run on that card. Card buttons are your "do this to the card I'm looking at" tools: start work, mark blocked, snooze to next week, escalate.

Notice there's no "When" row — a button's trigger is your click. Everything is a "Do."

Board buttons — act on the whole board

A board button sits in the board's top bar. It doesn't have "a card" to act on, so it works differently: it usually loops over a list of cards. That's what makes board buttons perfect for bulk chores — archive everything in Done, sort a list, or move a batch of cards.

Building a Multi-Action Button

The builder is the same friendly dropdown flow as Rules — minus the trigger step. Here's the flow for a card button that gets a task ready to work on:

1. Open ⚙️ Automation → Card Button → Create Button.
2. Give it a name ("Start") and pick an icon/emoji (▶️). This is what you'll click, so make it obvious at a glance.
3. Click Add Action → Move, choose "move the card to list ▢," pick Doing.
4. Click Add Action → Add/Remove (members), choose "join the card."
5. Click Add Action → Dates, choose "set due in 2 working days."
6. Save. The button now appears on every card's back, ready to click.

Actions run top to bottom, so order can matter. If a button both moves a card and then sorts the destination list, the move needs to happen first. When something surprises you, re-read the action list in order — Butler does exactly what the sequence says.

Buttons Worth Building

A handful of buttons will cover most of what you do by hand. Steal these — adjust list and label names to match your board.

1. ▶️ "Start" — get a task ready to work on (card button)

The single most-used personal card button. One click turns a passive card into "I'm on it."

2. ⏸️ "Blocked" — flag and date-stamp a stuck card (card button)

When work stalls, capture why and when without typing it every time.

3. 📥 "Archive Done" — clear the finished pile (board button)

The classic weekly cleanup, on demand. Your Done list stays a rolling record during the week, then one click clears the deck when you're ready — and because it's a button, it doesn't cost you a metered run.

4. 🔀 "Sort & Tidy" — organize a list (board button)

Bring order to a messy backlog before a planning session.

Here's a board mid-workflow, where the ▶️ Start button has just set up a card in Doing and the Done pile is waiting for a 📥 Archive Done click:

Buttons vs Rules: When to Use Which

You now have two tools that run the same kinds of actions. The choice is entirely about who decides when it happens.

A good instinct: if forgetting to do it would be a problem, make it a Rule so it can't be forgotten. If choosing when is the whole point, make it a button. Many boards use both — a Rule to auto-clean Done as cards arrive, and a board button to archive the pile when it's time.

🎯 Project: One Board Button + One Card Button

You'll build one of each — the two most useful buttons most people keep forever — and actually click them on real cards.

Card button "▶️ Start":
  move the card to list "Doing",
  join the card,
  set due in 2 working days.

Board button "📥 Archive Done":
  archive all the cards in list "Done".

Best Practices for Buttons

✅ Do's

• Name and icon for glance-ability. ▶️ Start, ⏸️ Blocked, 📥 Archive — you should know what a button does without reading it.
• Prefer buttons for routines you time yourself. They keep control in your hands and spare your metered command runs.
• Mind the action order. Actions run top to bottom — move before you sort, set before you stamp.
• Test on a throwaway card. Click once and confirm the whole sequence did what you meant.

❌ Don'ts

• Don't make a button for something that should always happen. If forgetting would hurt, that's a Rule, not a button.
• Don't build a card button that needs a whole list. Bulk actions belong on a board button.
• Don't hoard buttons. A card back crowded with rarely-used buttons is clutter — keep the few you actually press.
• Don't fear "archive." Archiving hides, it doesn't delete — archived cards are always recoverable.

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You now command both halves of everyday Butler: automatic Rules and on-demand buttons. Two clicks you built yourself now replace a dozen manual ones, and you understand the one decision that tells you which tool to reach for. Your board is genuinely faster to drive than it was an hour ago.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

Next we add the final trigger type: time. Scheduled commands run on a clock (every Monday morning, the first of the month) and due-date commands fire around a card's due date (the day before it's due). We'll also do the honest run-budgeting math so your automations never quietly hit the monthly wall.

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Keep your Start and Archive-Done buttons and use them for a few days
• Notice one routine that would be better on a timer than a click — that's next lesson's fuel
• Write your Learning Journal entry — your button-or-rule decision

📚 Additional Resources

• Creating Butler buttons (Atlassian docs)
• Trello Butler — official overview
• trello.com/pricing — command-run limits (as of early 2026)