5 ways to automate Linear

Linear is a powerhouse for managing software projects, helping teams track issues, plan sprints, and stay on top of their development pipelines. But even with its robust feature set, manual tasks like creating recurring issues, sending notifications, or logging issues from various sources can slow you down. 

That’s where automation steps in. Zapier makes it easy to connect Linear with your other business-critical tools, kicking your productivity into overdrive. By automating repetitive tasks with Zapier’s automated workflows (called Zaps!), you can keep your focus on what really matters—building great products. 

Whether you want recurring tasks to create themselves or new issues to automatically ping your team, here are five ways that automation can help streamline your Linear workflows.

Table of contents

Set up recurring issues

Whether it’s a weekly sprint review, a monthly code audit, or a daily stand-up, these recurring tasks are vital to keeping your projects on track. Instead of manually setting up repeating issues one by one, let automation handle it for you.

With automation, you can schedule tasks in Linear to recur at any frequency you need—daily, weekly, monthly, or even custom intervals. You’ll never forget to create that important performance review or stand-up prep task again. Simply set up a Zap that triggers a new issue in Linear at your desired frequency, and you’re good to go.

Notify your team about issues

Manually updating Slack or Discord every time a new issue needs attention can be tedious and prone to delays, especially if you have a large volume of issues or a distributed team that works across different time zones.

These Zaps automatically send a message to your team’s preferred communication channels—like Slack or Discord—whenever someone creates or updates an issue in Linear. That way, your team can respond immediately.

Create issues from form responses

Forms are a great way to collect user or team members’ feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. But transferring that data manually back into Linear can be time-consuming and error-prone. 

By connecting your form tools via Zapier, you can automate this process entirely. Every new form submission can instantly become a new issue in Linear for your team to review ASAP.

Turn emails and chat messages into issues

To-dos can often pop up within the flow of conversation, and manually turning those conversations into issues in Linear can be inefficient. You have to switch between email, Slack, Discord, and more to resurface those tasks and remember to enter them as Linear issues. 

Zapier can make sure nothing important gets lost in the shuffle. You don’t have to dig around for that one chat message—just set up a Zap to keep an eye on a particular Slack channel, a specific Slack emoji reaction, or an email inbox. These Zaps are super useful for customer support teams, developer teams, or anyone who receives a lot of actionable items via email or chat. 

Transform issues into project tasks

Linear excels at task management for product teams, but even teams that often use Linear use another project management tool, like Akiflow, Notion, or Todoist to manage work across the entire company. How do you manage the task handoff between Linear and your to-do list app of choice? Hopefully, not by copying over each issue to task by hand.

With automation, you can ensure new Linear issues get proper follow-up in your other task management platforms. With these Zaps, new Linear issues automatically become tasks in your project management tool of choice. 

Unlock the full potential of Linear with automation

By harnessing the power of Zapier, you’re not just saving time; you’re creating a project management ecosystem that works for you around the clock. With these automations, your team can spend less time on repetitive admin work and more time building the next big thing. 

And that’s just the beginning of what you can do with Linear and Zapier. What will you automate first?