Weekly Task Review Workflow Using Trello Custom Fields

Table of Contents

What made me rebuild this workflow again

So quick story. I used to do my weekly task reviews in Trello manually every Friday — scroll through my lists, rate how I feel about each progress item, drag cards around a bit, tell myself I’m getting systematized, and then forget all about it until the next week. 😅 Then at some point I added Custom Fields to my review process and everything felt organized — for maybe two weeks. After that I got hit with an extremely dumb bug (one I caused entirely myself): I set up a custom “Review Status” field with a checklist-style dropdown… but forgot to save default values. So none of my new cards showed anything, and I didn’t notice until later when over half had “No Status.” It became chaos fast.

That’s when I realized: it’s not about building the perfect workflow. It’s about building a system that *recovers* gracefully when you miss a week, forget a field, or load the board on your phone like a feral raccoon at midnight. 🦝 Let’s go step-by-step on how this is working now.

Setting up a truly trackable task card

Before anything else works, your Trello cards need to carry the right data. This sounds wildly obvious, but if you’ve ever scrolled through a board and wondered, “Uh, what was this even for,” you know how fast things get ambiguous.

Here’s the field list I currently use for each weekly task card:

All of that lives inside the “Custom Fields” section, which you’ll need to enable via the Trello Power-Ups menu first. If you’ve never added Custom Fields, it’s under Power-Ups → Search “Custom Fields” → Enable. Then it adds a small icon on each card where you can add new fields.

The key for me was the Time Spent field. I resisted putting that in for a while because, frankly, I didn’t *want* to admit that some of these tasks were taking 6+ hours over multiple days. But once I started tracking honestly, my end-of-week reviews got ridiculously more useful. Like, actually make-decisions-from-it useful.

How the weekly review actually works step by step

I tried doing end-of-week reviews on Thursday night. That’s ridiculous and no one should do that. Your brain is half-fried at that point, nothing makes sense, and you will 100% drag something to Done out of spite. Instead, I now do it Friday midday, before the last stretch of reactive emails.

Here are the literal steps I follow:

1. Open the board → Filter by “Due this week” (you can do this using the built-in filter bar)
2. Click into each card → Fill in Review Status, Time Spent, and Notes if missing
3. If card was abandoned, set Review Status = Skipped and fill in Notes field with why
4. If card was done, double-check checklist was completed (yup, double validation)
5. Then I drag every “Reviewed” card into one list — I call it “Reviewed 🧠” but you do you
6. Finally — and this changed everything — I manually sort them top to bottom by how I *felt* about doing each one. Like, actual gut satisfaction.

That part of the process (gut sort) seems fluffy, but it gave me quick data on which weekly tasks were energizing vs. draining. When I started noticing all my top-ranked tasks were creative ones and all my bottom ones were tagging tickets in Zendesk, I realized I should probably offload that part.

Rebuilding automations that broke silently

Yes, I originally had a Zapier automation that was supposed to move all “Done” cards each Friday into my Archive list, update the Review Status to “Done,” and timestamp it. And yes, it worked for a while. Until I renamed one of the dropdown options (literally I changed “Done” to “✅ Done”) and forgot that Zapier uses the exact field value match, not the display label. 🤦

So after that quiet failure, I switched to doing only one automation: copy a blank card template each Monday into the right list, set default fields, and automatically assign me. Here’s how I built it:

– Trigger: Schedule → every Monday at 9am
– Action 1: Trello → Create Card in the “This Week” list
– Action 2: Set Custom Field values:
– Status: “Not started”
– Priority: blank
– Action 3: Assign member (me)

That’s it. No more trying to guess statuses or outcomes automatically. I’d rather overwrite manually later than debugging field mismatches again.

If you want automation back, still be cautious. Populate dropdowns explicitly. Always check if the field name changed. And whatever you do, don’t change dropdown labels mid-week unless you love chaos.

Using card colors to identify stuck tasks

Here’s a thing I didn’t realize for months: you can totally use Trello’s card covers for functional color coding. Most people use labels, sure — and I still use those too — but the actual card cover color setting gives you a full-block visual.

For any task card marked as “Stuck” in the Review Status field, I manually update the Card Cover to red using the Cover button at the bottom of the card. That way when I come back on Monday, I can visually scan the last column (“Reviewed 🧠”) and instantly see what kinds of things are not flowing.

Bonus trick — once a month I export the board JSON (from menu → More → Print and Export) and tally how many red covers vs. green covers happened. No automation. Just quick pattern scanning. Helps me detect whether I’m overcommitting on certain work types like dev tasks vs. content creation. Some months it’s hilarious — fully half my cards end up stuck for reasons like “Waiting on legal” or “Asset missing, again.” You start seeing patterns quickly once you unlock the color system.

The one thing you should always manually overwrite

Every time I’ve tried to auto-set the “Expected Result” field, I’ve regretted it. For a while I was testing a Google Form → Zapier → Trello automation that pulled in new tasks with a pre-filled expected result field. But it kept looking like this:

> expected result: “complete marketing task” 🙃

Not helpful. Now I *always* go into each card to write what outcome I wanted — even if it’s loose like “Finish first draft of onboarding doc.”

It forces me to answer the question: what would make this “done” in my brain? If I can’t answer that cleanly, then the task itself wasn’t scoped right. And those are the ones that always get dragged forward multiple weeks.

Ironically, once you write Expected Result manually, the rest of the review process speeds up. Because when it’s Friday and you’re doing the gut-check, that field is the one that makes it obvious whether you actually completed something or just poked at it for several hours.

Using Butler for just one weekly automation

Trello Butler is great when it works. But it’s also stunningly fragile compared to something like Zapier. Still, for one key action, it’s totally worth it.

Every Friday at 5pm, I had Butler run an automation: it adds a yellow label to any card in the “This Week” list that hasn’t had “Review Status” set.

To do that, I wrote this rule:

> When Friday at 5:00 pm, for each card in list “This Week”, if custom field “Review Status” is empty, add the yellow “Needs Review” label.

This makes it extremely obvious where I left off when I forget to finish the weekly review. It’s the digital equivalent of a sticky note yelling “HEY, YOU SKIPPED THIS.”

Fun fact: the first week I ran this, literally half my cards lit up yellow. Caught red-handed 😬

Template card setup that saves me every week

I have a single “Card Template – Weekly Task” stuck in a frozen list at the top of my board. It’s got all custom fields filled in with blank or placeholder values, this text in the description:

> Use this card to clone new weekly task cards. Don’t touch the original 😬

And checklist structure like this:

– [ ] Define scope
– [ ] Assign owner
– [ ] Do the thing
– [ ] Fill Review Status and Time Spent

No automation touches the template. That’s important. Because I’ve had multiple times where a rogue Zap copied *every* card, including my template, and I ended up with five versions of it scattered across different lists.

The big benefit of this template is speed. On Monday, I just copy the card, drag it to “This Week,” rename it, and fill in Expected Result. That saves like five clicks per task — and more importantly, keeps structure really tight even when I’m rushing or half-distracted.

Now that it’s stable, I can finally say: this actually works week over week. The only time it breaks is when a field gets renamed *or* I try to get clever again with automations 😅