Most automation in this category is a notification engine with a rule builder on top. Planner.day workflows change the work as well as telling people about it.
What sets a rule off
Triggers fire from task events and from intake submissions, and a rule can be narrowed with conditions so it only runs on the cases you mean.
Due dates are handled as events too. A sweep notices dates that have just passed and raises an ordinary event, which flows through the same conditions and actions as everything else. A due date that moves correctly fires again rather than being remembered from the first time.
The sixteen actions
A rule can create a task or a subtask, move a task to another list, and set status, assignees, tags, priority, type, name, start date, due date, estimate or a custom field. It can add a comment. And it can create a GitHub issue or branch, which is the one that tends to change how a team works rather than just what it is told.
Who gets told, and where
Recipients can be an individual, a designation, a custom group, a channel, the task’s assignees, or, for an intake rule, the person who filed the request. That last one is how a customer hears back without anybody remembering to write to them.
Delivery is over in-app, email, Slack as a direct message, a Slack channel, or Google Chat. Overlaps are removed, so somebody who matches three audiences is contacted once per medium rather than three times.
Why runs are recorded
Every run records an outcome: delivered, skipped, partly failed or capped. A rule that quietly did nothing is the worst failure mode automation has, because everything looks fine until you discover a month of notifications never went out. Here it is visible on the rule.