Tips and Tricks for Trello
Organize your life with Trello
As this Lifehacker article shows, you can use Trello to organize your whole life. You can easily schedule your whole week using Trello, using different labels, colors or stickers. You can plan your meals, chores or exercises. With the calendar power-up, you can see track the due dates of homework, bills or library loans. Trello allows you to sync their calendar with the calendar you use every day.
The possibilities are endless. People use their Trello boards as a family message board (remember the voting power-up), vacation planning (you can share your board with your travel companion), home improvement projects, their wedding plans or when producing their radio show or writing their next novel. Start right away with copying one (or two, or ten!) templates offered here. For more tips and tricks, here’s a whole board dedicated to them.
Happy trelloing!
Trello as an editorial calendar
Kieran Wilson talks about using Trello as an editorial calendar. We all use our own systems for different things and you’ll make your own calendar. It could be medium-specific or encompass all the platforms you use (email, blog, social media, Youtube…) A few main items you probably should include are theme/focus of the post, Search Engine Optimization keywords, topic and/or title, the author responsible for the post, publish date and the Call-to-Action.
Take advantage of all the powerful functionalities Trello offers for the cards. To the description part, you can outline the content, keywords and Call-to-Action. You can attach documents to the card, create checklists of the progress and labels to show the theme, medium, media or category. When you are done, drag and drop the card to the “done” column and archive it when you want to. Calendar view gives you a week or month look of the cards — and boom, you have a content calendar!
Boost Trello with power-ups
Third party integrations
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a free service that helps you connect apps together to work for you and boost your productivity. Another service is Zapier, but their free plan is quite limited compared to IFTTT. Both services have a channel dedicated to Trello to browse recipes. IFTTT’s Trello channel is here and Zapier’s Trello channel is here.
Time tracking to Trello
Many people like to use time tracking when working on tasks. There are plenty of apps that allow you to track the time you spend on your todos. Toggl is a free plug-in for Chrome that integrates with Trello.
Pomodoro to Trello
If you use Pomodoro technique to get things done (25 minutes of working, 5 minutes for a break), then you might be interested in Pomodone which integrates with Trello.
Mobile apps
Trello has dedicated apps for iPhone and iPad, Android devices and Kindle Fire. It also works on desktop and most mobile browsers. They have a public board where you can follow the development process of their apps and services.
Trello power-ups
Trello has a few nice power-ups you can enable or disable via the board menu and settings. Most of the time these can be enabled only by the admin of the board. (Which, of course, is you if you’re the only user.)
Card aging
Card aging power-up allows you to see what cards have not been touched in awhile. You can choose between two modes: normal and pirate. In normal mode, cards “fade out” more and more the longer they remain untouched. In pirate mode, cards will tear, yellow, and crack like an old pirate map. You can toggle between these modes by clicking the gear icon next to the “card aging” power-up.
Calendar
Enabling the calendar power-up creates a link to the calendar next to the menu link. (Upper right corner.) Clicking the calendar helps you see the week or month view of your tasks. You can drag, drop and edit your cards in calendar view as well.
Voting
On the back of the card, you can see an option to vote. This can be very handy when figuring out the priorities of your task or project. The votes are public, anyone can see who voted what. As a board admin, you can decide who has the permission to vote. The options (from “nobody” to “public”) depend on the team and the visibility of the board.
Email to a card
From the “Menu”, you will also find an option to toggle “email-to-board settings”. From there, you will find your unique email address which you can use when creating new cards to the board via email. You can decide the column where you want your card to appear as well as its position on the list.
Subscribe to a card or a board
Under the Menu, you can find an option to subscribe to the board. This means that you’ll get a notification every time something changes in the board. If there are only one a few cards on the board that you’re interested in, you can only subscribe to them. This happens by clicking the card and choosing “subscribe” from the back of the card.
Stickers, emojis and backgrounds
To spice up your life (or your cards at least), Trello offers you some stickers you can use in your cards. You can find them under the menu and simply drag and drop them to your cards. Trello also offers some backgrounds for you to use. The default background color is blue. However, you can change that to some other color or a picture.
If you have Trello Gold, you’ll get more stickers (for example the Taco pack featuring Trello’s lovely mascot). You can also create your own custom stickers or emojis (oh boy!) and upload custom backgrounds. The gold plan also offers more space for attachments. It costs $5 / month or $45 / year.
