In my opinion, this is one of the biggest & most glaring problems with Automations.
It is a HUGE ROADBLOCK & MAJOR LIMITATION that automations trigger while users are still editing a field.
Automations should WAIT until users HAVE LEFT A FIELD before triggering an automation, but they don’t.
This major flaw makes automations infinitely less powerful than they could be.
Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of a way to solve this, but maybe others have some tricks up their sleeve that they can share.
I think that this problem is why nearly everybody is triggering their automations with checkbox fields or single-select fields — but then your automation has suddenly become a very manual process.
The best thing I can think of is to trigger your automation on a schedule, but even then, the schedule could trigger while you’re in the middle of editing a field!
But a schedule is a delayed trigger, so you will be waiting for a while until it kicks in. And even worse, a scheduled trigger eats up your very limited amount of automation runs every month. And Airtable gives you no way to add more runs into your monthly set of runs!
So for scheduling automations, your best solution might be to do scheduled automations with Integromat, which lets you purchase more runs if you go over the limit. But even still, the same problem remains: the schedule could run while you’re editing a field.
Maybe someone else has some better ideas than what I’ve come up with.
In the meantime, I would suggest that you write an email to support@airtable.com to ask them to PLEASE change this behavior. Without this behavior changed, the usefulness of automations is incredibly reduced.
