How do I turn off the automatic "watch" function in Trello?

[Katherine Nicole Ball]

Hi there. I've been using Trello as a personal homework organizer for a few years now, and it's been great by the way! 

However, within the past few days, it has begun automatically "watching" every card I put a due date on (which is all of them, it's homework!) and setting a reminder inside the due date tab. I want due dates on everything because its simply understood at a glance - I don't want the reminders or the "watch" feature though. I check Trello every day, I don't need notifications on top of that. I reserve that for really far off due dates that I'm likely to forget. There is no option that I've found to disable this automatic reminder/watch system though. In fact, the due date tab doesn't even have a drop down option for "no notification." Does anyone know why they implemented this for everyone, and how to turn it off? 

I know it's just another click to turn off "watch," but I used to not have to worry about it at all. This stuff is supposed to reduce clicks, but it's doing the opposite for me because it's not what I want.

Thanks guys.

[Arash Adib]

I agree!

This is a known Trello productivity issue since 2018 and still not fixed?!

Trello: Anyone listening?

We use Trello for our workshop projects. We have a Trello card for each project and do all the project planning there.

Unfortunately it seems that as soon as a team member does any form of intercation in a card, that automatically activates the "Watcher" setting on that card for that team member.

That results in the team members getting a huge number of irrelevant notifications which creates a terrible noise that interferes with the really important notifications.

When we want to notify a team member normally, we tag them, regardless of in a comment or a task-list.

We need to eliminate all kinds of noise in our business, including this auto-watcher-one.

Trello is a productivity tool and this issue is a major productivity interference!

How is it possible that this fix not have been prioritized for so many years?

Something must have been lost in translation somewhere. This is not logical. Are you not understanding the major implications of this issue?

[Katherine Nicole Ball]

To be honest, I ultimately stopped using Trello partially because of this issue. I moved to Notion for a bit (I personally found it too hands on to be useful, I was spending more time preparing to plan than planning) then Microsoft To Do. I found Microsoft To Do was my perfect setup through the rest of my college, and I used it alongside a weekly planner (hobonichi) for appointments and work schedules.

I think Trello likely just wasn’t my perfect productivity/workflow application because it wasn’t necessarily made for my uses, and I would feel like a bit of a hypocrite voting for a feature on it when I haven’t used it in some time. I’m sorry to hear it’s still an issue effecting users today though, I seem to remember sending an email to support as I was instructed, I guess they didn’t listen.

[Nathan Smith]

Hey @Arash Adib!

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

Right now this is something Trello does by deliberately but we do have a feature request open for this here to see if we can change this in future - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/TRELLO-745

You can use the link above to view this feature request and vote for it, and you can also click on Start watching this issue to be notified of any updates feature request.

Hope this helps! 🙂

[Arash Adib]

There is a task for this named "As a Trello admin I want to have control over "Watch" behavior so I can manage my team and their notifications"

Please search for it in Google, login and Vote!

[Iain Dooley]

@Katherine Nicole Ball You can't turn this off :( But be sure to email support@trello.com and let them know that you dislike this feature, because they're listening, and they will roll this back if enough people complain!