For anyone who doesn’t know what Trello is; shame on you! For those of you who do, you might not read this as you’ll already know why I love Trello!
Trello is a web application designed to help you be more productive, organised and efficient and it does this by doing absolutely nothing for you! Let me explain….
Someone asked me to explain what Trello was the other day, and I thought for a moment and wondered how to explain such a tool — “it’s a to do list”; “it’s a project management tool”; “it’s a food planner”. None of the explanations seemed to actually explain Trello so in the end I settled for “Trello is e-PostIt Notes — if you can do it with a PostIt note you can do it in Trello, but better!” That’s what I mean by it doing absolutely nothing for you — Trello has no preconceptions about what you’re trying to achieve, or how you’re going to achieve it. For some people, this seems a bit daunting and I’ll admit, the first time I used it I thought “I’m not Project Manager, I’ve got no idea how to do this” but knowing how disorganised I was I knew I needed something to write my ideas and jobs down on; so I did.
My first Trello board was one list of my tasks I needed to complete — a mammoth list of tasks I had to go through and do. Then I realised I needed to know which ones I was working on, so I created an “In Progress” list. I finished my first Trello card and so I created a “Completed” list and moved the cards there. Suddenly, out of nowhere, and with no guidance I was organised!!
Trello’s great for one person organising their thoughts but once you put Trello in to a team environment it becomes truly awesome. The ability to collaborate, assign tasks, discuss and vote is fantastic. Using Trello, we’ve taken a team of 2 developers (Me, a PHP Developer and a remote-working Java/Android Developer) who rarely knew what the other was doing to collaborate on tasks and streamline our work to a point that was unimaginable before Trello!
My Trello workflow (which is inspired by some of the amazing Inspiration boards Trello provides) consists of the following lists:
Incoming — this is for tasks that need doing, but haven’t been started yet
In Progress — this is for tasks that are being worked on at the moment
QC — when the work is done but the testing continues
Completed — the holy grail of to-do lists; a “Done” pile!
I then have labels for our various software platforms but my basic software labels are; Bug: Minor, Bug: Major, Feature Request, Required for next release
They help me and the team know what’s important and we can see who’s doing what and when — it’s brilliant!
So, why don’t I pay for Trello if I love it so much?
Simply put; because I don’t need to!
That may seem a little shallow and I know people will say “If you don’t support them, they’ll go out of business” and I couldn’t agree more with those people and that’s why I do support Trello, 100%! No I don’t pay for it, but I literally tell everyone about Trello. Even if they didn’t ask! I don’t pay for Trello because the feature set they offer for free is more than I need from it, however I recommend Trello to people and maybe they will need a feature for which they have to pay for.
It’s another thing that makes Trello great — a feature-rich, free tool to do whatever you want with and if you need an extra feature then it’s expandable with a plethora of Power-ups to choose from and a very reasonably priced “Pro” tier.
I think Trello is awesome, and I think you should too!
