How to use Kanban, Trello, and Pomello to become the most productive version of yourself

6 min readMay 9, 2018

I’m not normally one for productivity advice — given or received.

But: when I started working remotely (read: living the dream with the awesome team over at Custos Tech) at the beginning of this year, the demands responsibilities associated with being solely responsible for an entire business function demanded I rethink my approach; both w.r.t. how I’d add value to and extract happiness from my free-range working lifestyle, and the projects I choose to tackle.

TL; DR:

When you’ve got a million ideas and a billion things to do, chances are — like me — you kind of maybe do all of those things just a little bit, but not really at all, and then suddenly it’s the end of the day and what have you really got to show for yourself, Natasha?
Even if you don’t self-identify as a person who struggles to get shit done: I’mma need you to try out this Pomello-facilitated, Trello-integrated, Kanban-inspired list and card system for personal productivity (introduced to me by the incomparable Fred Lutz).
The basic framework of the system talked about in this blog post is built around three essential and well-known productivity practices:
— Mindsweeping
— Prioritising
— Monotasking

A desktop-researched refresher of the philosophy behind Kanban, for the uninitiated:

The term “kanban” is Japanese (看板), [which gives] the sense of a sign, poster, or billboard, and [is] derived from roots which literally translate as “visual board”.¹
At the core of Kanban lies a paradox: by limiting the amount of work we do, we become more productive.²
Like Scrum, a Kanban implementation requires a prioritised backlog of work-to-be-done, from which the team pulls their priorities for each day, week, month...³

Step 1: Create a Trello account, if you haven’t already.

Trello’s list format is literal perfection for Kanban purposes.

Obviously feel free to vary from these, but the list headings currently working for myself, Fred Lutz, and Annie Spies in a personal productivity capacity are all variations on the following concept:

To do
A mindsweep of everything currently on your list.
This week
A Friday-afternoon or Sunday-evening prioritised list of things you need to get done in the next week.
Today (optional)
A list, looked at and prioritised — in order of intended execution — every evening prior, of the 25-minute+ tasks you intend to tick off the following day.
Doing
The one thing you’re working on, right here, right now.
Done
Pretty self-explanatory.
Blocked (optional)
Work doesn’t always flow like you want it to. Using a ‘blocked’ list to benchmark impediments preventing you from being your most productive self is a reflective exercise that’ll prove valuable in the long run.

Step 1: Set up your Trello board and name your lists

Step 2: Start populating your backlog to-do lists.

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them.

You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

— David Allen

First up, pour out every single thing that’s been occupying cognitive space for the last week.

Enter each task as a ‘card’ under your ‘To do’ list.

Indiscriminately.

Just stream-of-consciousness every thing you’ve thought about needing to get done over the last couple days.

Done?

Cool.

Step 3: Prioritise.

Ha.

“Prioritise.”

Stated casually, as ‘Step 3’, as if a task easily accomplished.

Here’s where the Pomodoro thing comes in handy.

A Lifehacker-sourced primer:

The Pomodoro Technique was invented in the early 90s by developer, entrepreneur, and author Francesco Cirillo. Cirillo named the system “Pomodoro” after the tomato-shaped timer he used to track his work as a university student.
The methodology is simple: When faced with any large task or series of tasks, break the work down into short, [25-minute] timed intervals (called “Pomodoros”) that are spaced out by short breaks.
This trains your brain to focus for short periods and helps you stay on top of deadlines or constantly-refilling inboxes.

Before you can accurately prioritise your task list, you need to take a critical look at the mindsweep of to-dos you listed in Step 2, and decide which of them are going to take longer then 25 minutes.

You’re aiming to create somewhat more detailed cards for each Pomodoro session you intend to allocate to the completion of the tasks you listed in Step Two.

Step 3.1: Be real — break up your first-draft cards into the smaller tasks you’ll need to complete in order to tick them off your list

All done? Nice. Now it’s time for you to:

Open your calendar for the week;
Look at how many hours you have in front of your computer each day; and
Establish which tasks have hard deadlines (i.e. related meetings or launch dates) and which ones are flexible (i.e. publishing the blog post you’ve been meaning to get to forever).

This process, for me, looks a little something like this:

Step 3.2: Date and order your cards according to when you intend to work towards completing them

You’ll notice:

I add the dates I intend to do the work to the beginning of the cards for ease of execution; and
I try not to allocate more than three tasks to a single day.

The latter might seem strange, given that each card is supposed to represent only 25 minutes of work — but, in my experience, that’s almost never the case.

Which is where the Pomello integration comes in handy: when cards take you longer than one Pomodoro’s worth of time to complete, you can simply roll your timer over on the same card and it’ll reflect on the tomato counter up top.

Here’s a great tutorial on how to get the most of Pomello and Trello:

Like most systems designed to improve your life, I suspect this one works best when you play it with it for a prolonged period of time, break it, and make it your own.

(Personally, for example, I used the Pomello integration for the first three weeks or so, then found I no longer needed to time my sessions.)

If you take one thing from this post, let it be the Kanban philosophy of limiting the amount of work you do in order to become more productive.

In summary, here are the key principles underpinning this Kanban-inspired productivity practice:

Your ‘doing’ column should only ever have one card in it at a time.
Only once you’ve confidently moved that card into your ‘done’ column (or added it to your blocked list), can you move a new card into ‘doing’.
Because you’ve already arranged the cards in your ‘prioritised’ column in the order in which you intend to do them, you save yourself precious decision-making resources by simply being able to pick up the top card in that list and move it into ‘doing’.

Was this post helpful? Or do you have more questions? Let me know in the comments.