Slack Me Your Task

4 min readApr 27, 2015

Create Trello cards from Slack using Zapier, in three easy steps

Lowering the friction capturing tasks means spending more time staying focused on the task in front of you. This is a central tenet of many time-management systems, including my hand-rolled lightweight system I call The Essentialist’s Dashboard.

At Undercurrent many of our tasks are generated during an Agile stand-up-like process we’ve inherited from Holacracy. Many of our team members are distributed and we’ve taken to holding our stand-up meetings digitally using Slack.

Recently I’ve integrated Slack with Trello using the elegant task automation software Zapier. In any public Slack channel if I type…

jrtask(create Zapier tutorial on Medium)

…that task will appear in a list on a Trello board of my choosing.

Here’s how you set it up.

1. Pick a keyword that’ll create a task

I use jrtask, which is a mashup of my first two initials.

2. Configure your Zapier ‘Zap’:

To connect Slack to Trello, choose them from the ‘trigger’ and ‘action’ drop downs. Next, select “New Message Posted” and “Create Card”.

Link your Slack and Trello accounts to Zapier:

Set up a filter that will look for your special keyword, and ignore Slackbot:

Select the Trello board and list you’d like your tasks to show up on. I have a list on my Dashboard I call “Inbox.”

Here’s the goofy bit.

In Zapier, there are these helpful things called Named Variables that allow you to capture specific bits of information and use them in your automations. Our jrhusney keyword is actually a Named Variable. Normally, if you put some example messages in Slack containing the Named Variables you want to use, it’ll offer them to you from a handy pick list. Recently I’ve struggled with this a bit, so here’s how you do it manually.

Under the “Name” field, click on the “Insert…fields” button and select “Text”:

Carefully select the little orange Text ‘chit’ that appears with your cursor and copy it to your clipboard with ⌘-c (Mac) or Ctrl-c (Windows).

Next, open a new tab and use your URL bar to paste it. We’re going to use the URL bar as a little temporary working space:

Edit this text by adding a little bit onto the end of it so it’ll capture our keyword. Just after the word ‘text’ add an undercore and your keyword. In my case I’ll add ‘_jrtask’ without the single quotes:

Select this text (⌘-a or Ctrl-a) and copy it to the clipboard (⌘-c or Ctrl-c). Return to the tab where you’ve been creating your Zapier task, delete the Text ‘chit’, and then paste your custom text (⌘-v or Ctrl-v). It’ll create a new ‘chit’ that will look like this: