How to use Trello to get things done
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In my previous article I introduced you to the method I’ve been using for a few months now to “get things done”. There, I mentioned that I’m using Trello to keep track of all the projects I’m committed to and of what I need to do next.
As an aside, remember that you shouldn’t commit to a project for which you cannot decide what the next physical thing you have to do is, given that it’s all too likely you’ll never make progress towards its completion otherwise.
Let’s dive into how you can use Trello for your own benefit!
Why I’m using Trello
In “Getting things done”, I mentioned that the tool you should use to keep track of all the things you have to do should be reliable, easy to use and easy to access. Trello fulfills these three criteria.
First, it’s reliable: it’s owned by a very large technology company, Atlassian, which has been around for 18 years now, has around 4000 employees and a revenue over 1 billion dollars. Not the scrappy startup which might shut down any day. Trello itself was created 9 years ago and was acquired by Atlassian for around 500 million dollars, which means Atlassian is seriously committed to maintaining and developing it.
Second, it very intuitive to use and easy to access. The web interface is modern and there’s both an iPhone and Android app, which means you can add the things which come to your mind anytime during the day, and wherever you are, provided you have your phone with you. Whatever you do in the apps will be immediately visible on the web interface, and vice versa. You don’t have to manually sync Trello across devices, which is really nice.
I find the app particularly useful because you don’t need to have access to the internet to write down new ideas. The app saves all your changes locally and, when it’s opened, it tries every few seconds to automatically sync all the cards you’ve created . For example, the cards I add during my daily commute in the underground are accessible on the web interface once I’m back behind my computer.
Core features to “get things done”
First, you need to create a board for your project. It’s fairly simple to do from the Trello landing page. There are a few things to decide at this stage:
- A title. It should describe the project the board corresponds to. For example “Finding a gallery”. You can change it once the board is created, if you have a better idea later on.
- The colour the board will have on the landing page. It doesn’t matter to me and I use blue for all my boards, but you can use colours to visually identify boards when you have many of them.
- The visibility of your board. That one is very important, make sure it’s private. Otherwise Google will index the content of your board and anyone on the internet will be able to find it. When a board is private, it can only be seen by the people you’ve explicitly added as members.
- The team you want to share it with. You can create teams on Trello to make it easier to manage who you want to share boards with. In my case, I have a team with all the employees of Out of the Cube, which make it easy to coordinate all our ongoing projects.
- Whether to use a predefined template. People on Trello have made their board settings available to everyone. I recommend that you create one board which works well for you and whenever you want to create a new board, just duplicate an existing one.
