monday.com Tutorial for Beginners 2026 (Step-by-Step)

Hi there, my name is Dan and in this video I'll show you how to use monday.com to organize your projects and tasks more effectively. Monday.com is one of the most popular project management platforms out there. It helps you and your team plan, track, and collaborate on projects all within a single easy to use workspace. In this beginnerfriendly tutorial, we'll go over how monday.com works and how to properly set up your workspace from scratch. So, by the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to manage your tasks and get things done more efficiently. Let's start by signing up for monday.com. To get the best deal, click the link at the top of the description. Doing so will get you the best current offer that we have for monday.com and we'll start the tutorial from there. I'll click get started. And signing up is free. So, create an account using your email address or your Google account. And then we'll navigate through the first few prompts. The first few screens will ask for some basic information. I'm here for work and I'm a team member and then I'll click continue. In this tutorial, I'll use our small medics media team as an example. So I'll say 2 to five people for our team and I'll say 1 to 19 for our company. Then I'll click continue again. And then here I'll select other for what I'd like to manage first and then task management for what I'd like to focus on first. You may get a few other questions. I'll click other for what I've used in the past and YouTube for how I've heard about monday.com. Then continue. I'll show you how to add team members later. And we can now exit the tutorial. So I'll click the X in the top right hand corner. And we'll name our board together in a second. So let's close this as well. Perfect. Now we've landed in the main view of our new account. You don't need to change anything for this tutorial, but I do want to quickly show you where the plans are. Up in the top toolbar, click see plans. By default, we're on a trial of the standard plan for the next 14 days. And this is how you would downgrade to free. Don't worry about being charged for now because we didn't need to enter our credit card details for the trial. But from this view, you'll be able to estimate the cost if you decide to go with a paid plan. Here is where you can estimate the number of seats for your team. And here you have the monthly and yearly pricing toggle. The biggest limitations of the free plan that you need to be aware of, you'll have a limit of two seats, three boards, and 200 items. I'll link to more info about the free plan in the description. Let's close this plan comparison as we'll continue our standard plan trial in this tutorial. Back to our home view. Now, one of the biggest keys to success in monday.com is understanding the organizational hierarchy of the work that you are going to manage. It's not complicated, but the default naming conventions can be tricky. So, I'll walk you through each with examples so that it's easy to understand. To best explain the hierarchy, let me first just name all the levels, then we can go through each in more depth one by one. Let's close this. So here at the highest level we have what's called a workspace. In this default example you can see that this one is called main workspace. Here next we have boards. This board is called my first project. Boards are organized into groups. And we can see two groups here to-do and completed. Groups organize items. And you can see that we have a few items added by default in this first group. And finally at the lowest level we have sub items. There are no sub items present in our example. But if we expand task one here and add a sub item, this is how they would look collapsed and uncolapsed. Now that we've named each level of the organizational hierarchy, let's take a closer look at each as we build out a new example from scratch. At the top of the organizational hierarchy, we have workspaces. Workspaces contain multiple boards. And you can think of workspaces as grouping boards by departments, teams, or big goals. To rename this workspace, click the three dot menu next to workspaces, then edit workspace, rename workspace, and I'll type medics media so that we can begin our real world example. This workspace is special. It's called the main workspace, and it can't be deleted. So, if you only want one workspace, we'll edit this main workspace to end up with the cleanest possible setup. Let's open the menu and click manage workspace. Here, we can also add a description if we'd like. So, I'll click to edit and I'll add tracking work for the MedX Media YouTube channel. If we click here, we can also change the icon and background color. I'll change this to deeper red and I'll keep the M. If you want to set these up for multiple departments, you may want to add more workspaces. To add a new workspace, let's open the menu and click add new workspace. Our workspace icon will change, but we can further customize it by clicking on this icon. Unless we're on an enterprise plan, all new workspaces will be open to all team members. And I'll click add workspace. If we click on this drop-own menu here, you can see how to navigate between workspaces. And in this video, we're going to continue to modify this main workspace. So, let's go over here, switch to new workspace, then the three dot menu, and click delete workspace. We get a notification that it's been successfully deleted. And we can always go back to the menu. And we can view our archive and trash from here. Let's click trash. and we'll see that our new workspace is in the trash. If we go over to this action menu, we can see that we have the options to restore or delete permanently. For now, I'll exit out of this and I'll navigate back to this main workspace. Now that we've looked into how to manage our first workspace, let's take a look at boards. Boards can be divided into groups, and they contain the information about our work like task names, owners, and statuses. This default board is called my first project. And that could be a little bit more clear. So, let's open the three dot menu here and rename it to default board. We can delete or archive this later, but you might want to reference it occasionally to look at the board's columns. Those columns are what we have here for task, owner, status, etc. So, instead of removing this board, let's create a place for reference material. Let's click the plus, then add a folder. We'll call it reference material. In the menu of our default board, let's click move to move to folder. Then we can select our newly created reference material folder. Now this default board is nicely tucked away and we can toggle the folder open and closed here. One thing I like about monday.com is that you can often access an action like that from a menu, but most things are clickable and dragable. We can easily move this board back and forth by dragging it in and out of this folder. To add a new board, let's click the plus icon. And under board, we have two options, new board and start with template. We're going to start blank with a new board, but if I select start with template just to take a peek, you can see all of the options here. We have templates for basically anything that you can think of. And there's no harm in exploring these, modifying them, and then archiving them if they don't quite fit your needs while you experiment. But let's start from scratch. That way, you know how to make changes even in the event that you use a template later. I'll close out of the template center up here. Then I'll go back to add board. new board. And here we have a simpler board setup window. We might end up with several boards for the work we do here at MedX Media, but the biggest workstream is making tutorials. So, I'll call this board tutorials. Tailor my board and quick start are both going to start you with very similar boards. Let's choose quickart because I'll show you how to add columns and views later. And we could make this board private to select team members or sharable with external guests. But I'll keep my privacy set to main. That way when I invite team members later on, they'll have immediate access. Now click create board. Quick start will include these three default columns. Person, status, and date. And we can see that we have three items created for us to start. Task 1, 2, and three. In the lefth hand pane, I'll drag this tutorials board to the very top. Now that we've seen what's on our first board, let's look at how we can organize the board information into different groups. This new board starts with two groups, to-do and completed. They're colorcoded, collapsible. We can rename them, and boards have their own three dot menu, visible when you hover over the group header or next to the group handle. Let's open this to take a look at our options. The main things I want to draw your attention to are that you can delete and archive this group with these items at the bottom of the list. And you can duplicate or move the group to a different board as well. Many of these other options like collapsing and selecting all items and renaming, we can do those from here in the menu, but we can also do them from the group itself without opening the menu. Let me show you that using a new group. So let's go to add group. And this will create a group underneath the group that we just clicked on to add it. If we hover over this group name and select it, we can rename it to anything that we want. And I'll call this one in progress. Similarly, if you've clicked to rename and you hover over and click this colored swatch, we have some color options here as well. And using groups like to-do and in progress and completed is a fairly popular way to structure work. But in some scenarios, it might make sense to group your work in a different way. For example, at Medics Media, there are a few of us video creators that work on tutorials, my co-workers, right? So, for us, it might make more sense to create a group for each video creator. I'll go ahead and rename these three groups. So, workspaces, boards, and groups all help organize work. Items are the actual work itself. And you can see by default, these items are called tasks. Let's take a look at how we can customize these. For this MedX Media organization, I think it makes sense to have an item in monday.com represent a tutorial. To rename a task, let's hover over the task name until we see the box outline and click to edit. The title for this tutorial is monday.com tutorial for beginners 2025. For any given column, we can resize it by hovering over the column border until the handle appears. We can do the same with the lefth hand menu to give ourselves more or less room. Moving to the right of item name, this icon will show the update conversation on the item. If we open this up, we can update and mention others. We can attach files here and we can see the activity log. I have to take a break from recording this video. So, I'll go back here and make a quick update to say sections still left for me to record. Then up here in the toolbar, we have some text editing options. I'll add a checklist and then I'll note down my remaining video chapters to remind myself where to pick back up. Then I'll click update and I'll close this panel. And now we can see a quick count of the conversation that is happening for this item. Under person, we can add or remove a team member. I'll show you how to invite someone new shortly. Next, the status column is flexible to fit your needs. By default, we have statuses of working on it, stuck, done, and this default status. But I want to modify these options to better match our video workflow. So, let's click on edit labels here. For each of these, we can edit the label value. We can change the label color and we can add entirely new labels. We can also rearrange the order of the labels with this handle that shows when you hover on the left. And each label has a three dot menu. This is where you'll find options to deactivate or delete labels. But take note that if we were to look at the menu for this status, we can't delete a label that's currently assigned to an item. Also, this default label that is assigned the color gray is special. If we open that menu, we can't deactivate or delete the default label. This is the status that will automatically get assigned when you create a new item. You could leave this label blank, but not started as most fitting for us. I'll take a few minutes to customize my labels. I'll apply these. Finally, we have a date field. If we click on this date, it will bring up a calendar picker, and we can toggle the time on and off if we need that. I'll date this task for sometime later in the month. We can add a new item by simply clicking to add here, giving it a name, and each new item is going to have its own three dot menu. One of the handy options here is to duplicate an item. And you can see options to duplicate with or without updates. So, if we head to the menu of our first item, we could duplicate without updates. And that will duplicate the item underneath the item we clicked on. If I expand this column, it will designate this item as a copy. I'll go through my group here and add a few more of my recent tutorials to fill out these items. Now, you might wonder how we add even more details to our items. And that's what sub items are for. They are the lowest level or most granular level of the organizational hierarchy. To add sub items to one of our items, simply hover over the collapsible arrow to the left of the item name, then click to expand this. The level of detail to include in sub items may depend on your personal workflow. Or perhaps you might decide on conventions as a team. In this example, I might include sub items for thumbnail, scripting, and publishing. These are some milestones in the tutorial process that I may need to assign to others to help me out on. So, it makes sense to have these as sub items. If you need to include even more detail than this, you can always use the sub item updates tab. And this works very similar to how it did for the items updates tab. I'll close this for now. By default, we can enter an owner, status, and date on each sub item until we fill out the team. I'll add myself on these sub items. For the status at the sub item level, we have stuck, working on it, done, and the default. So these are separate from the statuses that we customized at the item level above. These sub item statuses work for me, but you can always edit these labels just as we've done before. And then finally, you can enter date. When we collapse our sub item list, we'll see the number of sub items indicated here at the item level. We have our count of our updates. And if we go ahead and open this and check off two items on our checklist, we can also see a small indicator showing us progress on that checklist. So we always have an idea of what's happening with any given item just at a glance. Sub items were the last level of the organizational hierarchy. But so far I can only assign myself to work because I'm the only person in this workspace. Let's see how we can add teammates. Just before I add teammates, I am going to change my profile picture to keep things clear. I'll click on my profile up here, then profile. I'll hover over this icon to change profile picture, and I'll upload picture. You'll be able to crop your image here. Crop and save. Cool. I'll close this. And there are a few ways that we can invite teammates. If we want to invite someone specifically to a board, we can click this invite button here at the top right here. You can invite by name or team if they exist in Monday already, or we can invite them by email address. I could invite Caleb to my tutorials board this way, but I would prefer to invite him to my entire workspace. So, let me show you how to do that. Let's click the X on this invite window. Then, over in the workspaces three dot menu, we can click manage workspace. From here, click on members and manage users. Take note that we're now in the users tab of the administration settings. I'm going to close this popup. And we can always get back here. If you click your profile settings and administration, users will bring us right back to where we were. To add a user, let's come over here and click invite. And for the purposes of this tutorial, I'll invite one of my other email addresses to impersonate Caleb. Assuming your teammates will also be using monday.com regularly, you can select member here. You could immediately invite them as an admin. Or if they don't need to contribute, like in this tutorial, I'll click viewer readonly. And I'll show you how we bump him to admin shortly. I'll click invite. And I'll close this. And we can see our status for our new user is pending. Here is where we can change the user role. And we have a warning that monday.com recommends adding another admin. So here I could come in and change this user to admin. Then that warning will disappear. Now I'm going to open a new tab and log into this email and I'll show you what the invitation will look like. So now we're in my inbox and your teammate will see an email that looks like this. If we open it, we can accept the invitation. Then they'll enter their name and password to continue. And again, I'll be impersonating Caleb for the purposes of this tutorial. Then they'll click continue. They'll choose their current role and their department and how they're planning to use monday.com. They'll be given the chance to invite even more team members, but I'll skip this and click the X. I will add a profile picture. That'll help us keep things straight for this tutorial. Going to zoom way out on this. Crop and save. And I'll click done. When I first get into monday.com as Caleb, I'll be viewing this workspace in our tutorials board first. In the top right, I can see that I'm logged in as Caleb. And you might have to refresh the page to be able to see the profile picture you just uploaded. There we go. I'll close this. And while I'm in here, I might as well add a few items under Caleb's group. And now that I've included Caleb in this workspace, you can see that when I click on person, I can select him as an option. Once your teammates have been invited, this update tab becomes more useful. So if I open this for Caleb's first item, I could at mention Dan and say thanks for inviting me. I can update this. Close out of here. And at this point, I'm going to sign off of Caleb's instance here and return to monday.com, my original instance under Dan. Let's do that now. So, I've stopped impersonating Caleb. I've signed off. I'm back signed in as Dan. And you can see this notification is where Caleb has mentioned me. I'll close this. And now that we've invited a teammate, I'll show you a few different ways in which we can interact with our boards using some common views. Our current view right here is called main table and this has a three dot menu. We can pin the view here which is helpful if we end up with many views. But we can also share. I'll click share view and I find this sharable link especially useful for external sharing or to quickly bookmark it. Clicking preview will open your board in a new tab and you can see how your shared board looks. Let's go ahead and close this tab for now. And I'll close the share window. If you want to unshare, click this banner here and select stop. We can always start if we need to later. I'll close this. Now we'll create a new view in addition to main table. Click the plus icon to add view. And we can see a variety of options. Calendar and conbon are my favorites for small teams. So, let's add one view of each. I'll click calendar first. And we now have this calendar view added as a tab at the top of our board. On the calendar, we can see our tasks organized primarily by date. And they're also colorcoded according to our statuses. We can navigate the calendar with the arrows here. And we can toggle our calendar window between month, week, and day here. You don't need to be on the main table to add new items if you prefer to add work from within the calendar view. We can click add on any date. And this is what the item creation menu looks like from within the calendar view. By default, the date is set to whatever day we clicked on. I'll cancel this. Let's go up to the menu and remove this calendar view. And now we'll add a view for conbon instead. In the classic conbon style, items appear as cards and cards are organized into columns for each status. On the cards, we have the column data that we saw on our main table. The update counts and sub items are still visible. We can see our assigned people. Everything is dragable. And we can move our columns into a different order. I'll go ahead and rearrange mine. Now you can add a new item from here or you can click on the column to add a new card. If we click to open this card, we can fill out the rest of the information here. Let's close this. If you click on the three dot menu in the column header, you can also set a column limit. When you set a limit for a given column, that limit is going to display in the column header. Here you can also find additional settings here. I'll click to open. And in my case, I might want to divide by and then select group. That way, each of us creators has a clearer picture of what we're responsible for. While in this view, you can see we now have a group for me and a group for Caleb. We also have customization control over how our cards look. I'll open this. And we can simply drag and drop to remove columns or add them back. This works for both the task or the item level and the subtask or sub item level. To further refine how we track our work items, let me show you how to use columns and filtering for more control. To add a completely new column, let's return to our main table view up in the top. On the far right of this first group, click the plus to add a column. Next, we need to select a column type. And there are many options to capture any of the information that we need to manage. For example, for our team, it probably makes sense to keep our thumbnail files attached to the item. I'll add a files column. We can rename our columns using the column menu. I'll open that and rename. And I'll call this thumbnail. And we can drag our column to new locations in the table wherever we please. Now I'll hover here and click the add manage files button that shows up in my item. I'll upload from my computer and I'll select the file for the thumbnail that I currently have for this tutorial. Once it has been uploaded, you'll see a tiny little preview here in our main table row. One important note about columns is that the columns that you have for items are different from the columns that you have for sub items. meaning you can control what you track at each level differently. If I open the sub items for this item, for example, we obviously don't have the thumbnail column added at the sub item level that I just added at the item level above. New columns for the sub item level can be added here in the exact same way that I just showed you. If columns let us view more data, filtering allows us to really narrow in on what we want to see when we are viewing our work. In this top bar, let's click filter. There are two main types of filtering. Quick filters and advanced filters. Quick filters are going to give us a highle view of the columns that we have and it will show us the number of items that will apply should we click any of these filters. So if I use quick filtering to select a status, only those items in the done status will be shown. To better see, I'll just close that filter window. If I reopen the filter window, we can clear that filter here and our other items will now show. Then I can switch over to advanced filters to show you that under the advanced filters we have more control to build a complex set of criteria. For example, we can filter work to where status is not not started. So this is going to show only the work that has been started. We can then add new filters with some and or logic here. And we can continue to build out our selection. date is after last week. If there's a filter that you will refer to often, you can save this as a view. I'll click save as new view, and it's named table up here by default. So, I'll open the menu, click rename view, and call this started work. Now that you know how to add columns and how to filter by them, you now have a good understanding of how to use your boards in monday.com. Besides boards, we can also add documents and dashboards to our workspace. Both help us get more visibility into our work, and they are especially helpful for small teams. Let's look at an example of each. To add a document to our workspace, click the plus button in the lefth hand menu, then doc, then new doc. I'll call this recording checklist. I'll keep the privacy set to main and then I'll click create doc. For teams that have standard operating procedures or reference materials, documents come in handy. You can see here that we have a block editor and there's every type of block that we can imagine. So, you have the flexibility to format your document in the way that you want. We also have the ability to add things like our boards for monday.com right into our new document. If you don't want to start from scratch, you can start with a template. You can choose one of these templates after you've started the doc or you can come back to add doc start with template. Let's say you'd like to create a doc for meeting minutes. I'll select this one and use template. Monday.com is going to create our template boards. In this template, monday.com will create an outline of some meeting minutes. Then they'll create a board for action items and then they'll place that board action items directly into the template itself. If we go visit that new board action items and we change the name of item one, then we return to the meeting summary, you can see how these items are linked in real time. Dashboards will also give us a chance to view our work in a different way. Click the plus again to add an item to our workspace and click dashboard. Here we can give it a new name, set the privacy and then create dashboard. monday.com will walk you through the two steps to create a dashboard. The first is to add a board as a data source. I'll select my tutorials board. The second step is to select widgets. Widgets help us visualize the data that we are using from our data source board. Let's click add your first widget. The popular widgets are shown in this quick select menu and I'll click chart. This one gets added by default with one click and it's already helpful. I'll go ahead and rename this tutorials by status. We can then move these widgets around on the dashboard using this top handle. And the widgets are interactive. So if I click on the recording status here, that one item from the board will show here beneath this bar. We won't cover dashboards in detail, but let's close this and add one more widget so I can show you the settings. I'll say add widget and one more chart. I'll rename this tutorials by creator. Then I'll go ahead and open this menu. Then I'll open settings. Under chart type, I'll change this to a pie chart. I'll collapse this and open labels. And I'll remove status. then type person and hit enter. I'll click the X and now I have my second widget on my dashboard that I could rearrange if I'd like. Before we look at automations, one of the more powerful features of monday.com, let's briefly review how notifications work and where you can find important settings in the menu. You can access notifications from within anywhere in monday.com. In your top bar, the bell icon will bring you to notifications. Notifications are where you will receive alerts when being mentioned in items, like we did here when impersonating Caleb. You'll also see these when assigned to items. The tray icon next to notifications will bring you to the update feed. Here you'll be able to see all the updates that are happening, and you can filter between read and unread updates. Here there's a tab to directly see your mentions. Again, in the update feed, you can interact very much like you would in a social media feed. We could react to this or reply. We can see who else has seen this. We can mark it red or unread. I'll adjust my filter to bring that back. And we could set a reminder here if we'd like. We also have a menu with a small set of options. And bookmark to update feed. We'll add this to our bookmarks tab so that we can see this easily later. Now that you know where to find your notifications, let's take a look at where settings are found in monday.com. I'll close this window and then I'll click on my avatar to bring up the settings window. From here, you can get to the most important areas of your account. For example, if you want to make changes to your notifications that we just reviewed, you can find those under my profile. From there, you can find the notification settings in addition to the other profile settings that you might expect. Trash and archive are important if you ever need to restore items that you removed. Import data will be useful if you're switching tools and you have a lot of work that you need to add to monday.com. And creating and managing teams may be important to you if you'll be setting monday.com up for a larger organization. Lastly, in settings, the administration section is where you can go to manage security, account customization, billing, users, like we saw earlier, and more. Now that you've seen settings and notifications, there's one last thing I want to introduce you to, and that's automations. Automations are more of an intermediate or advanced feature, and you use them to improve efficiency and reduce manual actions. But monday.com makes automations approachable. Let me just show you a simple one so that you know where they are and so that you can think about other potential automations to improve efficiency as you go. Let's go back to our board. I'm back on my main tutorials board now and I'll go up and click this automate button to bring up the automations page. As with most things in monday.com, we have a handful of categories over here and we have some templates to get us started. Many automations will follow an if this then that logic. Some basic templates, for example, are when an item is created, assign creator as person, or when status changes to something, notify someone. Many of these templates will allow you to incorporate applications that you regularly use, like Gmail, Google Calendar, or Outlook. For simplicity, though, let's test this first one and click use template. The automation builder is fairly simple. For an easy one like this, we could use the trash bin to delete parts of the automation. And the plus buttons will allow us to add conditions or add actions. A condition would be an additional criteria that we might have to meet. An action would be something to do in addition to assigning a creator, such as set a date. I'll just make the most simple form of this automation by clicking the underlying person, and I'll find a person type column to fill in here. In my case, and maybe yours too, that column is already called person. Once my column has been selected, I'll click create automation. That's going to land us in the manage tab of our automations. We were just in create. The manage tab shows us the automations that we have created already. We can toggle this automation on or off. And we can make changes in the menu here. Let's create one more item to test this automation. I'll close this window. I'm going to clear my current filter and then I'll add a new item called new automation test. And when I hit enter on my keyboard, monday.com will show us that the automation is running. I can now see that I'm the person assigned. I'm going to get a notification about this. You can see that here. And then if we open automations, we can check the run history that's in the menu. We can open up the details and we can navigate directly to the item from here if we'd like. That just scratches the surface of automations, but by now you should be ready to enter your work into monday.com if you haven't been following along already. Remember that using the link in the description will get you the best deal that we currently have available with monday.com. And thanks for watching. Let me know if you have any questions.