BlogPlaybook

Getting more out of your monday.com boards

Most people use monday.com boards at a fraction of what they do, because the default view works well enough that there is never an obvious moment to look further. These are the features that make the difference between a board you tolerate and one that does actual work.

Views are the main thing people underuse

The Main Table is a view, not the board. The board is the data underneath it, and you can look at that data in as many ways as you need without duplicating anything.

That distinction matters because the arguments people have about board setup are usually arguments about views. One person wants to see work by owner, another by deadline, a third by client. All three can have exactly what they want, looking at the same items, with no copies to keep in sync.

Views worth setting up on most boards:

A filtered table for each person or team, so nobody scrolls past work that is not theirs
A calendar or timeline view where deadlines matter
A kanban view grouped by status for anything that moves through stages
A chart view for whatever you currently export to a spreadsheet to graph

Views also carry permissions. A view can be private to you, shared with the board, or restricted, which is how you give one group a focused view without exposing everything else on the board.

Filters do more than search

Filtering is the fastest way to answer a question about a board without building anything.

The obvious use is finding items. The more valuable use is finding problems: everything overdue, everything unassigned, everything with an empty field that should not be empty, everything that has not moved status in three weeks. Those are the queries that surface work quietly going wrong.

Filters can be saved as views, so a question you ask often becomes a tab you click. If you find yourself rebuilding the same filter every Monday, save it.

Batch actions

Selecting multiple items and acting on all of them is the feature that saves the most time and gets noticed the least.

The one worth knowing specifically is shifting dates in bulk. When a project slips by a week, you can move every affected deadline together rather than editing them one at a time, which is otherwise a job people avoid and the board goes stale instead.

Batch selection also handles moving items between groups or boards, bulk assignment, and bulk archiving at the end of a cycle.

Keyboard shortcuts

Worth ten minutes of learning if you live in monday.com daily. There are shortcuts for creating items, navigating between them, opening the item panel and searching across boards, and they compound in a way that is hard to appreciate until you stop reaching for the mouse.

Check the current list in monday.com itself, since the shortcuts have changed as the product has.

The item panel and the activity log

Opening an item gives you its updates, its files and its full activity log.

The activity log is the underrated part. It records every change to that item, who made it and when. When there is a disagreement about what a deadline was, or a value looks wrong and nobody knows why, the answer is in there. It turns "I think someone changed it" into a fact.