Building your first workflow? You might want to test your settings without affecting months of work. Here are three ways to do just that.
Creating test projects
The best way to make sure none of your data is affected while you test out your flow is to create test projects. That way, you can see how it will affect your work items without actually changing anything that matters.
Some tools, like Asana, let you duplicate entire projects, that way you can re-create the exact circumstances of your use case. This is the best way to do it. Otherwise, you can always create a new project and populate it with placeholder tasks.
When you’re building your flow, make sure to use your newly created test projects when adding your blocks of work.
Note: If you’re completely new to Unito, you might want to start with a one-way flow. That’ll show you the functionality without having to manage too many projects at once. When you’re ready, you can easily turn your flow back to a two-way flow.
Using manual flows
By default, each flow will automatically sync changes between tools. How frequently this happens depends on your plan. When you’re in your day-to-day work, this is how Unito is meant to work; you set up your workflows and we track changes in the background without your intervention.
But when you’re testing things out, you might not want every change to get synced automatically. If you want the freedom to tinker with your settings without affecting your work items, you can turn off Auto Sync when creating or editing your flow.
With auto sync turned off, you’ll have to manually trigger your flow. This means you can edit your flow without worrying that it will impact your work items. Once you’re ready to see your changes in action, just click Sync now.
Only sync new tasks
When creating your flows, you might have noticed they have a label called Only new tasks.
Every new flow has this activated by default. What does it mean? Essentially, only tasks created after you finish creating your flow will be included in your workflow. That means all historical data and all the work you’ve done up to that point won’t be affected. This makes testing out your settings dead simple; just create new tasks in one block and you’ll see what your flow can do.
We keep this setting on by default to protect your historical data while you’re getting used to Unito. Take this opportunity to experiment with your flows. When your settings are working the way you want them to, just edit your flow and turn off this option. Your flow will then be applied retroactively to all the tasks in your projects.