How to customize monday.com for your team

If you’re like most people, you probably set out to use monday.com with the best intentions You want to get your organization, well, organized and monday.com seems like a great platform to do that. You aren’t wrong, it’s a robust, flexible project management system that allows you the ultimate freedom to set up your boards however you want. 

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem. Since monday.com is SO flexible, it can often be challenging to understand, well, where to start. Too many times we see folks just give up because they can’t understand how to customize monday.com to work with their system. That means more frustration, more work, and ultimately more time wasted – when all you wanted was a way for your team to get organized and focused!

That’s why we thought it might be helpful to look at how to conceptualize your monday.com system. That way, you’ll be able to more easily integrate monday.com into what your team already does. Let’s take the mystery out of monday.com.

Step One: Log off of monday.com and plan your approach

Surprised this is the first step? Don’t be. Just close the laptop and step away – slowly. Now, we’re actually going to plan the best way for you to use your monday.com account by looking at what you need it to do. 

Create a document that maps your existing structure. This could be on a piece of paper, a word document, or some sort of process mapping software. Think about your processes on a macro level. The reason we say that this might be easier off monday.com is that monday.com is a hierarchical structure. It can be a lot harder to get the wide-angled lens you need to understand everything that will need to be included. 

Making this plan doesn’t have to be totally comprehensive, but you will want to make sure that you’re at least mentioning every process that your team needs. You’ll see why in a second. 

Step Two: Compare your document with monday.com existing structures

We’ve broken up in past posts (and in our webinar) the different organizational tiers on monday.com – so we won’t go over that here. Just know that it IS important to understand the difference between boards, columns, etc. Does your monday.com board match the general organization that you have on your document?

Look at the way your account is structured, making sure your workspaces make sense, that they are in the right categories. You’ll also want to look at your workspaces and decide what should be a folder, what should be a board, etc. 

Step Three: Clean up your boards. Get the details right.

Once you have that, you’ll have to go smaller – look at an individual board. Is it structured the way you want? Within that board, what are your groups? What does your item-level look like? Think about what columns you might need. Even if you don’t et as far as columns, going that far and restructuring your account will make it so much easier when you go in to build or rebuild.

The last thing to remember is this: DO NOT GIVE UP. We know it can be scary to start something new, but honestly – you’re going to love monday.com. And if you need a little more help from some friends who know (and care) there’s always Lucid Day. Now get out there and become the monday.com rockstar you were born to be.