How to Organize Your Whole Life With Trello
Trello is a great project management tool that makes collaboration easy and dare I say even fun . But this visual list tool can do so much more, whether you’re organizing work projects, family affairs, travel plans, or whatever. Here are some ways you can use Trello to take control of your entire life.
How Trello works (and why it’s cool)
A Trello board is basically a web page containing lists arranged horizontally on the page for you to get a bird’s eye view of your project. Items in lists, called cards, can be dragged to other lists or reordered in lists.
By themselves, individual cards can contain checklists, images, attachments, deadline dates, colored labels, and discussion notes from other users using the board. You can have as many boards as you like – for example, one for “Household Items”, one for “World Domination”, and so on.
You can probably see how this comes in handy. Trello cards are like stickers you place on a corkboard, meaning digital stickers that are searchable, shareable, and have reminders. You can also create maps by email .
Trello works for me because I tend to think visually, and images and colored labels are perceived by my brain better than plain text. While I’m a big fan of Evernote for managing tons of information, in the past I’ve found myself going back to individual lists scrawled on paper and even index cards scattered all over the place to get an overview of my days. Trello was a big update; it is one of the few applications that truly combines a simple and elegant user interface with powerful flexible features.
But enough praise. Let me show you how I and other Trello users get things done on a few sample boards.
Use Trello to manage projects and tasks
Perhaps the most obvious and popular way to use Trello is as a project and task manager, for both personal and team projects.
Implement GTD in Trello
Getting Things Done Productivity (GTD) is ideal for this platform . You can have separate boards for each of your main lists (e.g. NextActions board with lists for each context like @calls and Someday / Maybe board with lists for each category) or as I use it (screenshot above), one large task board with related lists.
For example, my board has:
- Big picture / projects: I like to keep track of the projects I’m working on, so I create a card for each of them in this list, and also choose a color for each project (so when I see a related issue in one of the other lists, I know this is part of a larger project). I also add a card describing each color tag because sometimes I don’t remember if blue means personal and green means work or whatnot.
- Inbox: Take a brain dump and create cards for each task, then drag and drop them to other lists to prioritize and organize. You can also add due dates, detailed descriptions and attach files.
- NextActions: Basically what to do next
- Pending: delegated tasks or tasks on hold
- Someday / Maybe: tasks that I want to complete … someday
- Done: When the tasks are completed, drag the cards here to see your progress. Or, simply zip the card to remove it completely from the board (they will still be searchable on Trello).
Any other system of lists and labels could work as well, such as using one list for “This week” and another list for “Next month,” or marking tasks with your ” big stones, ” as Stephen Covey called them (things like family , training, health and so on).
Plan your weeks with daily lists
You can also use Trello as a weekly planner with lists for every day of the week. For example, in addition to a task board, I have a weekly message board where I can plan what articles and posts I need to work on each day for the next week. Colored labels refer to each client as well as each type of writing task (eg, focus on writing throughout the day, research, or editing).
You can create an even more advanced editorial calendar with Trello, or use the weekly planner for non-writing tasks to schedule meals, chores, exercise, homework, and whatever else you can list in a day for next week.
If you turn on Calendar (from the sidebar menu> Bonuses), you can even see all of your cards that have due dates in a monthly or weekly calendar view and use the iCalendar URL (under Bonuses ). > Calendar> Settings) to sync cards with an external calendar.
Create recurring tasks and log of completed tasks
If you have repetitive tasks and don’t want to add the same cards over and over, connect Trello to Zapier’s web app automation service and use this recipe to schedule cards for every day, week, and month.
Or, you can link Trello, Zapier and RescueTime to automatically track your time and log all tasks completed , as RescueTime’s step-by-step instructions show you how. Cool, isn’t it?
Integrate Kanban Method for Team Project Management
Kanban is a system that visually organizes a workflow, often with cards organized in columns (such as Tasks, Progress, and Done) on a board. As you can see, Trello draws inspiration from the Kanban board and is perfect for this way of managing projects. Agile software teams in particular seem to have turned to Trello to prioritize tasks and manage all stages of a project , as well as to record meeting notes and share resources.
Even if you don’t use sprints in your projects, you can copy this flex board sample to your Trello account and customize the lists (which include the following, questions, opportunities for improvement, and lists of awesome things) as you wish. for your work projects.
(By the way, the free version of Trello allows you to change the background color, but to get support for beautiful backgrounds for photos, as you can see in the screenshot above, you need Trello Gold, which is $ 5 a month or $ 45 a year.)
Use Trello for personal and family organizations
In addition to your tasks, you can create all kinds of lists in the tool, with cards being any text. Here are some examples.
Keep your small team or family updated
As shown in this template, you can also use Trello as a team or board for family status / messages. With lists for each person, each card can be a simple message from other members, a schedule reminder, an assigned task or chore, or a proposal. (You can turn on voting to turn on vote counting for team members.)
Conversely, instead of a list for each person, you can have a list for each area that the team needs to decide: for example, shopping lists, meeting agendas, project ideas, and so on. In the sidebar, you can drag participant icons to any card to assign a person to it.
Plan your entire vacation
Some trips require a lot of planning work, too many details to juggle and things to keep track of. We’re big fans of using TripIt to automatically organize our travel itineraries via email, but Trello comes in handy during the planning phase. You can have lists of all your reservations, places to eat, attractions, packing lists, and more. Share the board with anyone you travel with and they can add their maps as well.
When your trip is crowded, it relieves stress when you see day to day what you have planned to make sure you have everything you need (food options, transportation, etc.). And with this listings, you can Easily change your route by simply dragging and dropping cards for another day, or moving them up or down the list.
Organize a home improvement project
This example from Trello organizes a remodeling project with the To Doing, Doing, Done pattern, but you can add more specific lists like contractor ratings, product lists, budget, DIY, etc.
Plan your wedding from start to finish
Planning a big day is another huge project, but Trello can visually organize your wedding plans. Tabitha Neal has a great guide to using Trello to plan a wedding , and Trello has a Wedding Management Center template that breaks down tasks into lists for 12+ months, 10-12 months, 8 months, and so on until the wedding day.
Plan a novel or script
Using index cards to plot the storyline of a novel or screenplay is a classic writing technique. Trello can replace these physical credentials. The template above is provided by Reddit user tleisher and you can adapt it to any artwork.
Get Trello Templates
You can use Trello for almost everything you do lists for, especially complex projects. Want even more ideas? Check out this template board (each card is a template you can copy to your account), some inspirational boards, or these templates from Trello (event planning, freelancing and consulting, publishing, recruiting and software development). Plus, here’s how to use Trello like a pro .