monday.com Tutorial: A Practical Guide to Getting Started

monday.com looks simple on the surface, but there's a learning curve to actually using it well. Most people sign up, create a board, and then stare at it wondering what to do next. This tutorial will walk you through everything from initial setup to building automations that actually save you time.

I'll show you the stuff that matters—setting up your first board, organizing with groups and columns, building useful views, and creating automations. If you want to compare monday.com to alternatives or dig into the specific pricing, check out our monday.com review or pricing breakdown.

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Step 1: Create Your Account

Head to monday.com and click "Get Started." You can sign up with your email or Google account. monday.com will walk you through some onboarding questions about your team size and what you're planning to use it for—answer honestly, because it affects the templates they recommend.

When you sign up, you'll automatically start a 14-day free trial of the Pro plan, which gives you access to all the advanced features like time tracking, automations, and integrations. Use this time to actually test the features you'll need, because some important stuff (like automations) isn't available on lower-tier plans.

Step 2: Understand the Building Blocks

Before you start building, you need to understand how monday.com is structured. Every workflow in monday.com starts with a board. Boards are made up of items, subitems, groups, and columns. Items can be clients, deals, meetings, tasks—whatever you're tracking. Each item on the board represents one instance of whatever you're managing.

Workspaces

Workspaces are containers for your boards. Think of them as folders. You might have separate workspaces for Marketing, Sales, and Operations. Every project gets a dedicated workspace where all related activities, discussions, and updates take place.

Boards

Within your workspace, you set up boards to represent different aspects of your work. To create a new board, click "+ Add" in your left panel. Name your board, select the privacy level (main, private, or shareable), and choose what you'd like to call your items.

Groups

Groups let you organize items within a board. For a project management board, you might have groups like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." Or for a content calendar, you could group by week or by content type.

Columns

Columns track the details of each item—due dates, status, assignees, priority, files, whatever you need. Add columns to organize important details like email addresses, locations, and the status of an item. Most columns are available even on the free plan, but formula columns and time tracking require paid plans.

Step 3: Build Your First Board

You can build a board from scratch or use one of the 200+ templates in the Template Center. If you're just getting started, templates are a good move—they show you how monday.com is meant to be used and you can customize them from there.

Here's how to set up a basic project management board:

  1. Create the board: Click "+ Add" → New Board → Name it (e.g., "Website Redesign Project")
  2. Set up groups: Create groups for different project phases—"Research," "Design," "Development," "Review"
  3. Add columns: At minimum, add Status, Person (assignee), and Due Date columns. Click the "+" on the right side of your board to add more.
  4. Create items: Add tasks as items in the appropriate groups. Be specific—"Write homepage copy" is better than "Content."
  5. Set statuses: Update the Status column options to match your workflow (Working on it, Stuck, Done, etc.)

Step 4: Use Different Views

The default table view works, but monday.com offers 27+ view types to visualize your work differently. The two primary options most teams use are Kanban view and Timeline view.

Kanban View

This is the drag-and-drop card view popularized by Trello. In Kanban view, you can drag tasks between categories like "Done," "In Progress," and "Stuck." It's great for visualizing workflow stages and seeing bottlenecks at a glance.

Timeline/Gantt View

Timeline view shows your items plotted on a calendar, which helps with project planning and spotting scheduling conflicts. You can outline your project's timeframe by adding start and finish dates using the date column. This view requires the Standard plan or higher.

Calendar View

Shows all items with dates in a monthly/weekly calendar format. Good for editorial calendars, event planning, or any date-driven work.

Workload View (Pro Plan)

Shows capacity across team members—who's overloaded and who has bandwidth. This is available only on the Pro and Enterprise plans but is essential for larger teams.

To add a view, click "+ Add View" at the top of your board and select the view type you want.

Step 5: Set Up Automations

This is where monday.com gets powerful—and it's also where a lot of beginners miss out because automations aren't available on the Free or Basic plans. You need at least the Standard plan ($12/seat/month) to access automations, which gives you 250 automation actions per month.

monday.com uses a simple "when X happens, do Y" format. Head to the automation center, choose the task you want to automate, and configure it. For example, you can define the software to notify a team member when a task's status changes from "In Progress" to "Complete."

Useful Automation Examples:

You can also create automations using AI Blocks—just describe the workflow you want in plain English, and monday.com will build it for you. For example: "Summarize this week's updates and send to leadership" or "Extract due dates from briefs and autofill the deadline column."

Step 6: Connect Your Tools (Integrations)

monday.com offers over 200 native integrations with tools like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Zoom, and Trello. Integrations also require the Standard plan or higher, with the same 250 actions/month limit.

Connect the platform with tools your team already uses to seamlessly share information and files. Some common integrations:

Step 7: Build Dashboards

Once you have multiple boards running, dashboards let you see all your data at a high level. Dashboards are capable of integrating data from multiple boards into one view, making it easy to compare progress and measure team performance.

To create a dashboard, click the + icon in your left-hand menu, select Dashboard, and choose the boards you want to pull data from. Add widgets to visualize the data—charts, numbers, timelines, workload breakdowns, whatever you need.

Dashboard limitations by plan:

Step 8: Collaborate With Your Team

monday.com is built for team collaboration. Here's how to make that work:

@Mentions

Use the @mention feature to get someone's attention on a specific task or update. By tagging a team member in a comment, they'll receive a notification. Click "@ Mention" or type "@" followed by a team member's name.

Updates Section

Every item has an Updates section where you can communicate with your team, add notes, attach files, and keep conversations connected to specific tasks. You can even like and reply to updates, add photos or GIFs, and attach checklists.

Guest Access

On Standard and higher plans, you can invite external users (freelancers, clients) as guests. They can edit specific boards without having full access to your account.

Workdocs

monday workdocs are flexible, multi-media whiteboards for brainstorming and documentation. You can add elements like text, images, videos, and even embed board data. Once you're ready to turn ideas into tasks, you can create items directly from within the doc.

monday.com Pricing Quick Reference

For the full breakdown, see our monday.com pricing guide, but here's the quick version:

Important: monday.com uses "bucket pricing," meaning you buy seats in groups (3, 5, 10, 15, etc.). If you have 6 users, you pay for 10 seats. Annual billing saves you 18% compared to monthly.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

After watching dozens of teams set up monday.com, here are the mistakes I see most often:

What's Next?

Once you've got the basics down, there's a lot more to explore. monday.com offers different products beyond Work Management—including monday CRM for sales teams, monday dev for software development, and monday service for customer support. Each has custom tools and features built for specific use cases.

For more advanced learning, check out the monday Academy for certifications, or explore the Knowledge Base for detailed tutorials on specific features.

If you're still deciding whether monday.com is right for you, compare it against alternatives in our monday.com vs Asana comparison or browse our list of monday.com alternatives.

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