Sneaky Tips and Tricks Ahead: We've developed plenty of key in-house strategies to maximize our use of Airtable, which are specific to our content production needs but can also be applied to managing other types of projects.
Level-Up Your Airtable Game: Both new and seasoned Airtable users should come away with insights that can help you streamline your project operations and improve your project workflows.
Getting the Most from Airtable: These practical tips should bolster efficiency and boost output if you are using Airtable in similar contexts or for project management more broadly, so you can ensure tasks are executed smoothly.
We’ve been using Airtable at The Digital Project Manager to manage the production of articles, podcasts, and member events for more than three years.
In that time, we’ve honed our production engine under the expertise of our content director and created a few in-house tips and tricks for getting the most out of the software.
If you’re also using Airtable (or considering using it) as your project management software or content management tool, here are a few tips and tricks that can help you get up and running as quickly as possible.
Airtable Tips & Tricks
Ingrained into every stage of our production workflow, Airtable has proven useful when it comes to tracking production and performance on everything we produce. Here are some of the ways that we’ve made it as useful as possible.
1. Assignee Views
Airtable’s Views feature allows users to set up customized displays in the form of grids, calendars, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and more. These can be used for everything from tracking project progress to resource assignments, due dates, and budget usage.
We’ve set up an “assignee” view for each member of our editorial team. Everything that’s assigned to that person appears in their view, along with a due date, the stage of production that it’s in, and other metrics that help the assignee decide on the priority level of each item.
Below, you can see my personal assignee view (and where this article currently is in the production process). The items visible in the view (which I’ve added to my favorites) are the ones I’m writing.
Looking at this grid view, I can see that the “digital asset management demo” article is further along in the workflow than this one—it’s in stage 12, Quality Assurance (QA), as opposed to stage 5, Writing. I also know that the QA stage won’t take me as long as writing a new article from scratch, so I’ll tackle that first (and I did).
Assignee views can help your team see and prioritize all the work on their plate no matter what type of work they’re doing. An addition to this is to set up a “tag” field that you can use to set the priority level of each item.
2. Automation For Completed Work
Airtable also allows you to create custom automation that can automatically complete repetitive, manual tasks like assignments, reminders and notifications, and reporting. We’ve set up a few automations in our Airtable base to make our lives easier.
For example, we have an integration with Slack that sends a notification to a specific internal channel when an article is published or updated. That way, everyone on the team can easily keep an eye on what’s been completed in our content plan.
This also allows the higher-ups to see exactly what we’ve been working on and to periodically check in on our progress at a quick glance.
We also have an automation that sends an email to the editor's inbox when a piece goes live. It includes the link to the complete piece and some text that asks the recipient (the writer) to share the article with their network.
This template ensures we’re always including all the necessary details—and without the notification in my inbox, I might forget to send it at all.
This is an important part of our distribution strategy for content items—writers will share the piece with their networks to help the piece get some early traction.
You can set up similar Airtable automations for whatever kind of projects you’re working on. Think about what your stakeholders need to be notified about on a regular basis, and find a way to automate it.
3. Progress Bars
One of Airtable’s many field types is the formula field. This field works similarly to formulas in Excel or Google Sheets—you can use it to tabulate project costs, set incremental due dates, or track progress.
We’ve set up a formula field that calculates the percentage complete for each item in production. This progress bar is displayed on most of the Airtable views that we have set up for in-progress and due items, so we can quickly see at a glance if the item is on track to hit the due date or not.
As you can see below, about half of the items that were set to publish in mid-September were on track. Luckily for us, we keep deadlines flexible and over-plan to make sure we can hit our goals.
You can use this feature for individual deliverables on your projects or on projects as a whole. The overall progress bar can be automatically calculated based on how complete the items within that project are (if you’ve properly connected your tasks to their projects—more on this below).
4. Custom Workflows
Another feature of our Airtable setup is our custom workflows, which we’ve set up using Airtable’s linked records feature. It allows you to link records from one base within your workspace to another.
Different types of content go through different workflows that contain stages tailored to what needs to be done to get that specific type of content published. For example, an article needs proofreading while a podcast requires checking the audio for sound levels and extraneous ums and ahs.
Below, you can see the workflows we’ve set up for podcasts and articles. There is some overlap—both podcasts and articles need to be loaded to the site and checked by a member of our team, for example.
Each individual stage in the workflow is located in the “Lookups” tab and linked to the relevant workflow in the “Workflow” tab.
We’ve also set up automations for moving items from one stage to the next. Each stage has a role attached to it, so the item can automatically be assigned to the person who is supposed to work on it. For example, once I’m done proofing an article, it’s ready to be sent to the design stage for a member of our design team to work on.
I’ll click the “Next Stage” automation, which will look up the next stage that the item is meant to go through as well as the role and specific Airtable user on our team who will fulfill that role, and then automatically assign the task to them.
Workflows in Airtable are fully customizable, so you can set them up to match any project workflow.
5. Follow Up View
I’ve also set up a view that lets me quickly see what items are still with writers and whether they need to be followed up on. It’s worth having a separate view for this because my assignee view only shows tasks that are currently assigned to me, not everything I need to keep an eye on.
This separate view narrows down the number of items I’m looking at at one time, so it’s easy to see what might be falling behind and who I might need to follow up or give a nudge to.
I’ve hidden it in the screenshot below, but this view also shows the due date and which editor is overseeing the item (i.e. myself or Kelsey). This allows us both to keep an eye on how much one single writer is working on, so we don’t overload one person with too much work.
Depending on your use case, you might not have a need for something like this. As a project manager, you’ll need to keep an eye on what your team is working on, but you’ll likely need a more comprehensive dashboard for that purpose.
6. Group Tasks Into Projects
In any project management software, you’ll need to organize all tasks under a parent project.
In our system, the equivalent is grouping each content item, using the linked record field, under the site that it will be published on (e.g. The Digital Project Manager, or one of our sister publications) and the type of content it is (e.g. podcast, article, member event, etc.).
Below, you can see a selection of the content items that are grouped under The Digital Project Manager publication.
Having our work organized this way provides us with a few benefits:
- It makes it easier to find all relevant content items in the workspace (and all relevant paraphernalia connected to each content item—Google Drive links, live website links, graphics, etc.).
- We can store important information on the parent “DPM” record, which makes it easier to maintain consistency across the site. This includes style notes for calls-to-action, links to important pages, and information on who owns which parts of the production process (e.g. which editors and designers are involved in working on the site).
For other types of projects, linking each task to a parent record in Airtable will allow you to set up progress bars for the entire project as I mentioned above. You can then use the parent record to keep track of other information that you might use in a status report or to track budget and resource usage.
7. Performance Review Views
We’ve also set up views to track the performance of each content item on a biweekly and monthly basis. Below, you can see the version that displays items published in the last two weeks on a rolling basis.
At the moment, it’s organized by what’s been published by topic—another layer of organization that we’ve set up to organize individual content items according to broader topics.
We can organize this view by content type, whether the piece is an update to an old piece or a brand new one, who the editor of the piece is, and more.
These views make it easy to find and copy and paste the live URLs for each content item into the myriad of analysis tools that we use to determine how the content item is performing.
You’ll likely need a more comprehensive dashboard for tracking project health metrics and team member productivity, but because Airtable is so customizable, you can set up your tracking view in the way that works best for your project.
Airtable’s interfaces are also great for this, and the higher-ups on our content team use them to assess performance on a larger scale.
Alternatives To Airtable
As you can probably tell, I love Airtable. But if you’re not sold on it (and you should definitely take a look at Airtable’s pricing before you commit), there are plenty of other Airtable alternatives out there that might fit your needs. Here are a few of our top picks.
What’s Next?
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