Coordinating projects can be like herding cats—everyone is scattered everywhere, no one knows what’s going on, and no one is sure what they’re supposed to be working on. Not a recipe for workplace efficiency. It become even more complicated when different people have to work on different parts of a task. If you can’t complete your job until someone else finishes theirs, you’re stuck—and if you don’t know when they finish their job, you could be sitting around for no reason.
There are many moving pieces in any project, and project management can definitely be a difficult job. But Monday.com wants to help you put every piece into order.
Monday.com is a platform designed to help you manage your team and projects. We’ll review it today, and see if it can help you bring your team and efficiency together. So, without further ado, let’s get started with this review of Monday.com.
What Is Monday.com?
It’s not just a day—it’s a team collaboration site started in 2012. Their goal is to help businesses bring “better collaboration, organization, and efficiency in all their work.”
Monday.com is used by over 115 thousand organizations, from construction companies to software developers. With 100’s of visual and customizable templates, they let any team easily get started at working together well.
How Does Monday.com Work?
Starting is easy, the site allows you to sign up for a 14-day free trial, without even connecting a credit card. You can sign up using you email, Google account, Slack account, or LinkedIn account.
As you begin, you go through onboarding process to help you get started. Monday.com will ask you about your company, your role, and what you’re working on, so it can suggest some templates for you to start with.
But this is a collaborate site after all—so you need some people to work alongside. You’re given the opportunity to add the other people in your team, so you can start delegating tasks right away. However, if you’re not quite ready to do that (or are simply a team of one), you can always add in others at a later point.
As you begin, Monday.com gives you a quick video and a tutorial—but the site is simply to use. You can create a board either from scratch or use one of their templates, ranging from marketing schedules to task lists to class schedules. (Pro tip, scroll through different templates to get an idea of all the different ways you can use Monday.com, and the special columns you can create.)
Monday.com’s boards look like special Google Sheets. You can adjust how many columns there are, giving them different names, labels, and even colors. For each row (i.e., task) you can create a column for duration, status, calendar (for due dates/launch dates), links, and many others. You can even create sum and stats columns, that keeps track of all of them together, whether that’s how much projects cost, or what percentage of jobs are completed.
You can customize the boards easily, simply drag and drop. Assign each task to a member, and your team is ready to go!
As your team members complete tasks, or interact with the projects, they can adjust the columns. There’s also an option to chat on each row, so any questions or clarifying comments can quickly be added. There is also for each task a place to add notes, and an activity log to see exactly what has happened with that entry.
You can create as many boards as you like, for different projects, schedules, or simply to help you keep assignments straight in your head. As you create boards, you can have them open to all your team members, private to you or select members, or available to be shared with outside guests. All of your boards live together under the workspace tab, in the far-left navigation.
Monday.com also has a notification tab—to allow you to see if something was assigned to you, if someone tagged you using @, or other built-in notifications. You have an inbox as well—for more conversations. Then is the “My Week” tab, you can see a virtual to-do list of all the tasks assigned to you that week. Finally, is the option to “Search Anything” that allows you to do precisely that. Forget the where you were supposed to send that email to? Have no clue when that conversation happened? This feature allows you to search through all boards, comments, and notes, so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
But Monday.com wants to help you work more efficiently. To do this, they have created automations—little programs you can use to help do the busywork for you. These are basically “if this, then that” commands, that you can use to move items, assign projects, or even alert your boss when a project is finished.
Automations become more powerful when connected to another feature—Monday.com’s integrations. Monday.com has integration with +40 apps, from Mailchimp to Survey Monkey to Calendar. This allows you to create automations that automatically put your due dates into your calendar, or to create new leads when new customers come in.
How Much Does Monday.com Cost?
Of course, the question with any tools is if it’s worth the price. While Monday.com does offer a 14-day free trial, their pricing system depends on which plan you use. You pay per member (starting out at 3), so the more users on your team, the more it will cost.
Monday.com’s Basic Plan starts out at $24/month, when you sign up for an annual contract. This allows you to create unlimited boards and templates, as well as use the iOS and Android app, but you cannot use Timeline view, nor any automations, integrations, or formula columns. You also can’t create private boards.
Standard Plan costs $29 a month for three team members, allowing you to use calendar view and the important automations and integrations—but you are limited to 250 actions with both each month.
Pro Plan costs $49 a month, and gives you the opportunity to create private boards, along with utilizing formula columns (to see totals and stats), as well as chart layouts. You’re freed up to use automations and integrations as well, as the limit is now set at a massive 25,000 actions a month.
How To Best Use Monday.com
There are a few ways to take advantage of to help your team work more efficiently with Monday.com. First is to look at different ways you can customize your columns. Don’t be restricted just to status (not started/in progress/completed) tags—you can create columns with geographical locations, so you know precisely where things go. You can create a vote column, that allows your team to pick a new feature or a new place for lunch. You can even add a call button, and be able to connect with contacts right from the board.
Second, don’t be afraid of using subtopics, or to schedule little tasks. If something isn’t written down, it often doesn’t get done. That’s true here as well. And even just marking a task complete, even if it is a small mundane one, will give your brain a shot of dopamine that encourages it to complete the next, bigger task.
Conclusion: Monday.com
Monday.com can be a useful tool—but it has its downsides. The pricing is complicated, and the lower levels don’t have the features that makes Monday.com a useful tool. While there are other free sites out there like Asana that offer a free service, Monday.com does not. However, the ease of creating boards, and customizing them makes this site easy to use and integrate into your workplace. If you have a plan that gives you access to all the unique columns, they are a great way to not only keep your work more organized, see how everyone is progressing, and keep information in one place—you can also have more information and more productivity.