Check your Trello workspace filtering first
Okay so hear me out — the first time I couldn’t see two of my weekly boards, I thought Trello had deleted them. Like, full-on panic: “Where’s my Monday planning board, why is only the client projects board showing, what did I DO.” 😰
Turns out, I’d clicked into my personal workspace and not our shared team one. The left-hand sidebar has that dropdown that says “Workspaces,” and sometimes mine weirdly defaults back to my solo one after working in an incognito window or after a cookie clear. I just forget it exists.
What tripped me was that the boards _looked_ like the real boards… so I wasted like ten minutes adding a checklist to what turned out to be a 2023 archived version 😑
Fix:
– Go into the top-left hamburger menu
– Click “Boards” under the right workspace
– Then manually pin the boards you need most so they show up under Starred
And now I keep a little table in Notion with direct board links. Old school, but nothing vanishes anymore 😅
| Board Name | Link |
|---|---|
| Weekly Team Sprint | Saved Link |
| Next Week Planning | Saved Link |
| Recurring Tasks | Saved Link |
Make sure you’re not sorting cards without noticing
This one got me last week. I was updating our “Next Week Tasks” list and couldn’t figure out why half the cards were shuffled in weird order. It made no sense — cards I added that day were showing up at the bottom, and ones from last Wednesday were suddenly at the top.
Turns out I—somehow—clicked “Sort by Due Date” while dragging something. I didn’t even know you _could_ sort individual lists like that, and Trello doesn’t always show that sorting is active unless you click the three dots next to the list name.
Fix it like this:
– Hover over the list title
– Click the three-dot menu (•••)
– See if any sort is active (it’ll say “Sorted by Due Date” or similar)
– Click “Remove Sorting” to restore the original manual order
I really wish Trello made list sorting more obvious visually 🫠 Like at least add a little icon next to the list title or something.
Anyway, if your checklists or weekly tasks keep jumping around mysteriously — check if list sorting is on without your knowing.
Recheck Butler rules if nothing is triggering
Oh boy. The first time our “Review Friday” card didn’t auto-populate, I thought the whole automation was broken. Give it a sec, refresh… still no card??
I had a Butler rule that triggers every Friday at 8AM to make a new “Weekly Review Checklist” under the current week’s column. That rule had worked for _months_. Then one week, poof — nothing.
Here’s what actually happened:
– I had edited the board name (I added a year like “2024 Planning”)
– The trigger in Butler was scoped to fire on a specific board title
– That board title changed, so the rule just silently failed
There was no error log, nothing visibly wrong in the Butler dashboard. It just… didn’t run. 🤷
Checklist to debug silent Butler failures:
– Double-check any board-specific filters in the rule trigger
– Look for connected fields like list names that might have changed recently
– Use the Log tab in Butler to see if it even attempted to run
– Try re-saving the rule — sometimes this resets the API connection if it’s buggy
If your recurring card isn’t triggering, 90% chance it’s because a name changed somewhere. Butler is powerful, but very brittle about names being exact.
Once I fixed that, it worked again — until next time I accidentally renamed something 😅
Make sure the right calendar powerup is installed
Everyone on the planet assumes Trello has a built-in calendar. I mean sure, there’s one for free users — _but_ you have to explicitly add the Calendar powerup to each board. Every time.
So if you’re switching between boards to drag and drop your tasks for the week and suddenly you open one board and the Calendar view is gone — nope, it’s not broken. It probably just never had it installed in the first place.
To fix:
– Open the Board
– Click Powerups in the top
– Search for Calendar or just scroll to the “Views” section
– Click Add
Once you activate it, you should see “Calendar” show up as a tab along the top (next to Table and Timeline if you’re on Trello Premium or using a trial).
Also? The calendar view only shows tasks with actual due dates. That confused one of my teammates for a whole month lol. So to see anything show up there:
– Click the pencil icon on a card
– Set a Due Date
– Now it appears on the calendar
Do that until your eyes bleed 💀 We mapped over 50 cards that way once.
Audit checklist templates if your recurring ones look wrong
If you copy a task from a template card each week, and suddenly your checklist titles have weird indenting or checkboxes are missing, it’s likely the _template itself_ got edited.
It’s super easy to accidentally change a checklist that’s in your master template card. Especially if someone on the team opened it thinking it was just a regular task. Then next week everyone starts with a broken structure 😣
What I do now:
– Mark your template cards clearly with something like [TEMPLATE] at the beginning of the title
– Move them into a structure-only list, maybe called “Do Not Touch”
– Lock the card description with staff-only edit permissions (if you’re on Premium)
Also, if you’re using automation to copy cards on a schedule, your Butler rule might say:
“Every Monday at 9AM, copy the card named ‘Weekly Planning Template’ to list ‘Next Week'”
So if anyone renames it or adds an accent (true story), your rule silently fails. Again. 🙃
Run a simple test: change the template name, leave the automation alone, and see if it still fires next week. If it doesn’t, well, now you know.
Review recurring cards during Friday cleanup
Here’s what made it finally stick — we just built Friday Cleanup into our weekly flow. At the end of the day Friday, I pull up our recurring card list and just… walk through it. It takes 5 minutes tops.
Here’s the little checklist I use:
– Are next week’s tasks pre-loaded?
– Did any Butler rule not run?
– Are all the checklists consistent?
– Do any due dates overlap with holidays or PTO?
– Is anybody tagged who left the company? (happens… more than you’d think 😬)
That weekly review saves me whenever small things snowball. Like that one Zapier integration that duplicated cards every time I rescheduled a Due Date. Didn’t catch that until we had 6 “Create blog post” cards for Monday.
Now I just mentally run down that list every Friday before I shut my laptop. And if something _feels_ off with a workflow we just fixed, I write a tiny sticky note and leave it on the bottom of the screen.
Yes, physical sticky notes next to the Automator tab that’s eating 800MB of RAM. Just embrace the chaos 😉
When in doubt duplicate working boards
Anytime I get a setup just the way I want — automation works, checklists copy correctly, Zapier doesn’t choke — I make a full clone of the board.
Open the board you love, then:
– Click the three dots next to the board title
– Choose “More” > “Copy Board”
– Rename it something like “Weekly Template Master”
– Do NOT check the “Keep Cards” box unless that’s part of your intended structure
This is how I save myself from future silent bugs.
If sometime in July, I click a checklist and the automations randomly stop working (again), I go back to the working board, re-test from there, or just rebuild the workflow with debug logs turned on.
You can’t trust Trello to alert you when something breaks. 😐 But you _can_ trust your own last working version.
Doublecheck dependencies outside of Trello
Here’s a spicy one: half my Trello issues weren’t Trello’s fault. It was outside tools I’d forgotten were tied in through Zapier or Make.
Example: I had a Zap that watched for a new card in a list, then added it to our Notion content calendar. But that Zap stopped working after I renamed the Trello list to fix a typo (“Ready to Review” became “Ready for Review”).
Of course Zapier didn’t auto-update the list name. So the trigger just silently stopped catching anything.
Zapier didn’t even throw an alert. Just a dead zap sitting there twiddling its thumbs 😓
What helped:
– Go check connected tools (Zapier, Make, Integrately, whatever) after any name changes
– Walk through each integration step by step
– Test changes using a card you _know_ should trigger it
Trello itself won’t know these broke — it’s doing its job fine — but now your whole planning workflow is missing pieces because the outside links got desynced.
Best fix: document with a table that shows what boards, lists, and card names your Zaps or automations expect:
| Tool | Board | List | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | Weekly Tasks | Ready for Review | Add to Notion |
| Butler | Content Prep | Published | Move to Archive |
Save it. Check it. Then when something breaks silently, at least you’re not starting from zero again.