Bardeen is different from the traditional automation tools. With Bardeen, you can participate in your automations by triggering them manually and adding new information every time you run them.
Playbook is what we call automations that are triggered manually.
You can launch Bardeen from anywhere with a shortcut (Option ⌥ + B) and click on the Playbook card to run it.
Playbooks are both created and edited from the Builder.
To create a Playbook, click on the big “Create Playbook” button. A new window will pop up with the canvas and the sidebar with apps and actions.
Start adding actions on the canvas and configuring them.
Action arguments
Almost all actions have some required arguments. For example, the “create event” action requires the event Name and Date to run.
There might also be optional arguments such as attendees, event description, etc.
If you want to input something different every time you run your Playbook, select “ask me every time” from the drop-down.
Mapping data
Often, you will want to reference data from one action as an input in the other. To do this, select the desired action from the dropdown and pick the relevant argument.
Saving your Playbook
When your Playbook is ready, click on Save. A new window will open, asking you to name it.
Now, close the Builder window and find your Playbook highlighted in My Playbooks.
Click on it to try it out!
Importing Playbooks from the catalog
Often, we need to create multiple variations of the same Playbook.
Take meeting reminders, for example. One reminder needs to send an email about running late, another one about waiting in the meeting room, and one more reminding that the meeting begins in 15 minutes.
All Playbooks in this case consist of the same actions (Find event and Send email), but have different arguments.
Instead of creating each Playbook from scratch, you can import actions from an existing Playbook with a few clicks.
This should speed up Playbook creation significantly – an awesome hack to save even more time!
If you haven’t yet explored our Playbook catalog, right now might be an excellent time. Your dream Playbook may already exist!
