Best way to 'weight' Cards and then automate the ranking!
Asked by Fun Man Andy:

Hi y'all! ? ?

Life as a Freelance Consultant for some of the coolest company's in the world has me ***busssssy***.... so, my Trello board to manage all tasks is overflowing and now I need better ranking on my cards to work out the day's/week's highest Prios.

But I need it **automated** as much as possible, as well! ?

* What is the best way to 'mark' a card quickly (*so on the Front of the card it's clear it's a Prio!!*??), ensure the list is weighted, and then which automation works best for ranking each List daily...!??

Herewith an example: this List is just in order of when Cards were added. No ranking yet. But there is a clear 'this week / next week / another week' to their importance  
*(Overall I have about 8 lists... and they're all filling up real ass quick!!! ?)*   

![Screenshot 2023-09-07 at 07.44.44.png](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/279240iA6EE4FD48FE597CD/image-dimensions/168x328?v=v2 "Screenshot 2023-09-07 at 07.44.44.png")


Answers:
author: Dreamsuite Mike
body: Hi [@Fun Man Andy](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2550134)

Love this question. The amazing thing about Trello is its flexibility so I hope you get some ideas from different people who will use Trello in different ways.

The ideas below are all designed to work without you changing your board structure and are designed that you can quickly rank things on the card front without having to open the Trello card, saving valuable seconds...

<https://trello.com/shortcuts>

Of course, if you don't mind clicking into the card, you can add a **Priority** custom field to the card and set that to be visible on the card front and trigger off it in an automation
> when the custom field priority is set in a card, sort the list by custom field "Priority" ascending

If you do prefer working with the card fronts, here are some ideas...

#### **Labels** {#toc-hId-264460927}

Firstly, create a label or set of labels to give you a ranking system, you can either just have a red **? Priority** label or have something like **? Urgent** , **??High** , **?Medium** , **??Low.**

The automation for sorting will be something like,
> when the label "regex:/? Urgent\|??High\|?Medium\|??Low/" is added to a card, sort the card by label ? Urgent,??High,?Medium,??Low ascending

You might want additional automations to ensure things stay tidy and you don't end up with cards that have all the priorities on them
> when the label "regex:/? Urgent is added to a card, remove the ??High label from the card, remove the ?Medium label fromt he card, remove the ??Low label from the card

* Use keyboard shortcuts to bring up the label menu by hovering over a card and then clicking the '**L'** key and select the priority label you want to add. Once added the automation will sort it...
* In the case where you just want to get the **? Priority** items to the top of the lists and you want to save even more time, the fastest thing you can do to a card using keyboard shortcuts is hover over it and hit the **Space** key to add you to it. In addition to the automation above, you add an automation *when I am added to a card, add the "? Priority" label to the card*

#### Naming Convention {#toc-hId--1542993536}

You could add a code to the naming convention of the card, like P1, P2, P3...

I would advise for speed to stick it at the end of the name, you can then put easily in the card name either at creation or when editing a card (keyboard shortcut for quickly editing the name from the card front is **'E'**

The key is to have the automation trigger of
> when the name of a card contains "regex:/P(1\|2\|3)/"...

There are several options at this point...

* You can use automation to move the priority code to the beginning of the card name and then sort the cards by name  
  *...rename the card to {matchedtext} {textbeforematch}*
* You can take the code and get automation to set a Priority Custom field based on it, then use an automation to sort the list when the Priority custom field is set.
* You could use the priority code to set the label structure mentioned above if you wanted

#### Dates {#toc-hId-944519297}

When you use the keyboard shortcut **'D'**, the date popup defaults to the exact time on the following day. You can use this default date setting to be your prioritisation trigger.
> when a due date is set on a card, sort the list by due date ascending

comments: author: Fun Man Andy
body: [@Dreamsuite Mike](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5153180) - epic stuff. One of these is definitely the answer... I just need to sit with some admin time and working it all out, then I can share what I went with.

AMAZABALLZ!!


author: Fun Man Andy
body: Still working out the best approach for myself [@Dreamsuite Mike](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5153180)

Right now, **Labels** is for sure the one that will work best for me: I don't use Dates, and I want the colours of labels/custom fields to help with overview, so Naming Convention not ideal/applicable.

Where I need to make a decision:

- Do I stick to my current Labels convention, that each Label is the project (and thus I would have to use your recommended solution but with a new Custom Label), or;

- Totally re-set-up my board to use Lables as priorities and the projects is a custom field....

One is gonna be fastest admin wise but ugly and in-scalable. The other admin intense with a better outcome and will work longer term!!

Let you know the final outcome...!

![200wi.gif](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/288914iA26DA3AA27FAD746/image-dimensions/113x113?v=v2 "200wi.gif")


Tags: automation

priority

rank