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Dear Airtable Community,

I am refining a project management base, established in June 2025, to streamline task tracking for a small marketing team using Airtable’s Professional plan. While the base effectively organizes tasks, I seek to optimize automations to sync status updates across linked tables efficiently. Your expertise in this area would be greatly valued.

My base comprises three tables: “Projects,” “Tasks,” and “Team Members,” structured per the Airtable project management template (https://www.airtable.com/templates/). The “Tasks” table links to “Projects” and “Team Members” via linked record fields, tracking approximately 200 tasks for 10 projects and 5 team members.

I configured an automation in the Airtable Automations panel to update a task’s status in the “Projects” table when its corresponding record in “Tasks” changes to “Completed.” The automation uses a “When a record is updated” trigger and an “Update record” action, referencing the linked project record.

However, during peak usage with 50 tasks updated daily, the automation occasionally delays by 2–3 minutes, and some status updates fail to sync, requiring manual correction. I reviewed the automation run history, which shows no consistent errors, and confirmed sufficient automation limits via the workspace settings.

Despite these efforts, the automation’s reliability and speed remain suboptimal, suggesting inefficiencies in my configuration or table relationships. I am particularly interested in strategies to enhance automation performance for real-time status syncing across multiple tables, ensuring seamless project tracking.

What specific configurations or techniques would you recommend to optimize Airtable automations for syncing task statuses across linked tables?

Thank you for your insights and guidance.

Hey ​@Gabrielavale_1,

Would you provide some more detail of your use case?.

If there is certain logic to your workflow, which it seems there is (e.g. when all tasks under a given project are complete, mark the project status as Done. Or something like this….), then you can probably achieve the exact same result with a Rollup and/or formula at the Project level rather than with an automation. (more on Airtable’s Rollup Fields here)

Formulas are way faster, and not subject to random errors. Downside: Project status would become a calculated field (meaning that you cannot manually change it as needed, rather than a flexible single select field).

If you provide further details of:
Amount of tasks per project
Tasks statuses
Project status options on the single select
Conditions under which Project status should change from Option X to Option Y

Then I can for sure guide you through it! Also, feel free to grab a slot using this link and we can hop on a brief call to go through it together. I’d be happy to help!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hey ​@Mike_AutomaticN 

Thank you for suggesting rollup fields and formulas to optimize my Airtable task status syncing. My Professional plan base has projects averaging 20 tasks, with task statuses (Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Blocked) and project statuses (Planning, Active, Done, On Hold). I need projects marked Done when all tasks are Completed, or Active if any are In Progress. My automation delays 2–3 minutes. Could you suggest a rollup/formula setup to achieve this dynamically while allowing manual status overrides?

Best,

​@Gabrielavale_1 

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