Trello is my favorite organizational app. It syncs across all of your devices, and is an incredibly simple way to organize your thoughts and to-dos lists. Plus it is free, or you can have a paid account that lets you use pretty pictures as the background for your Trello boards.
Trello is based on the Japanese Kanban system, which you can learn more about here.
But to summarize, there are three main concepts to understand: the board, the list, and the card. These are comparable to a blank poster board (board) with columns (lists) drawn on it, and post-it notes (cards) in each column. That’s the entire basis of the system!
When you open up Trello, you are greeted by a page containing your boards. Here is my page:
Trello Boards
You create a board for anything you have rattling around in your head that needs to be organized or get done. I have a schedule board, which I manually sync with my planner in the mornings, several work-related boards, a bucket list board, and more.
Trello Lists
On each board you create lists. The lists will vary depending on the nature of the board. A task board might have “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done” for lists. A schedule board might have a list for each day of the week. A Christmas shopping board might have a list for each member of the family, and so on.
Here is one of my Trello Boards with its lists.
I also like to include a “Done” list on each board.
The beauty of Trello is that you can move cards from list to list. So on a task board, you could drag a card from “To Do” to “Doing” once you started working on it.
Trello CardHere is a sample Trello card.
I didn’t use very many of the options, but you can create tasks within the card by clicking on the “checklist” icon to the right. I did label the card green, which you could see on the original board. Here on the card itself, you can see that green means “Monday”, or the day of the week I wanted the handyman to tackle the task.
Trello is flexible and customizable. I can change the name of lists, remove lists, and add lists whenever I like.
Here are some other things I love about Trello:
1. You can drag the cards from list to list within a board. I mentioned this earlier, but this is so key! So on my schedule board, if I have something in my “urgent and important” list, I can move it to my “big-three-tasks-of-the-day” list. And when it is finished, I can move it to my “Done” list.
2. You can archive your lists. So at the end of January, I can archive my “Jan monthly done” list and create a “Feb monthly done” list.
3. You can drag cards to different boards — for example if I have a blog idea in my blog board, and I want it to be one of my big three projects of the day, I can drag it to my schedule board.
4. You can share your boards. So I can share my business boards with associates, or I can share my schedule board with my husband.
5. You can add a lot of information to the cards. For example, each card can have a checklist, or it can be given a due date, or shared with a colleague. You can attach a file, or a picture to a card too.
To learn more or sign up, you can visit the Trello website. And let me know if you have any questions or favorite tips yourself!
Leave a Reply