My team is coming from Taiga where using IDs verbally and in text and generally knowing an item by its ID is reasonable because even after multiple years of working with Taiga, we have only reached 4 digits. However, the Item ID generated by Monday.com is absurdly long and only useful for automation. I can’t reference something like 4337329163 as it is too long to memorize or refer to.
There seems to be no reasonable support for a shorter version either. There is an Auto Incrementing field, but it is based on the position in the board and thus if you move it around, you will change its number by which you render the reference of its number useless. I came up with a really really complicated alternative myself, but while it does work, it is a subpar solution.
My solution is as follows. I have a normal board and a magic board. Whenever an item is created on the normal board, I have an automation set up to automatically create an item with the same name on the magic board. I then also have a connection set up between the boards and an automation on the magic board where if an item is created on that board that it will automatically connect the item to an item with the same name on the normal board. I then have an ID field (just a regular number field) on the magic board that we update manually when a new item is added. There is then a mirrored field on the normal board that points to the ID field of the matching item on the magic board. So in short, when adding an item we have to immediately go over to the magic board and manually add the ID (the previous ID + 1) and then wait about 1 minute and then it will populate on the normal board. Convoluted I know.
The reason why we have it this way instead of just having the number field on the normal board is due to knowing what the next number should be. On the magic board, you just look at the previous one, while on the normal board the previous one could be in a different group at the top, at the bottom, in the middle, who knows where. Thus you would have to keep track of that number by some other means, which would be even less ideal.
I am not sure what the benefit of having a long Item ID is or the benefit of it using numbers that are clearly part of a larger sequence that involves more than just my boards, but I do see a benefit in the Item ID only pertaining to my boards and starting at 1. At the very least, this should be an option to do this. Maybe a configuration of the field or a separate field type.