Hacking Time Management Using Nothing Else but Trello and Google Calendar

Although most people trully believe time is money, not many dedicate a lot of thought into how they plan and optimize their time. Probably the biggest reason for that is that they think you need a really complex and time and effort demanding system to do so. My main objective with this article is to show that is not true, and present the way I manage my personal time running a startup (Navarra Technologies) and still fulfilling a lot of other objectives.

Of course, the productivity methods each person adopts is personal and not necessarily what works for me will work for you. So, feel free to modify the system to better adapt to the way YOU work.

Sorry about the quality of the pictures, but I had to make them fit all the content I wanted to express. You can right-click on them and open on another page to expand, if you like.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT THINGS TO BE DOING

But before we even start talking about how to manage the activities you have to do, we have to talk about WHICH activities you should be doing. Time optimizing is as much about doing the right things than it is about doing things in an efficient manner. The way I do that is to start thinking big time frame objectives and deriving smaller time frame objectives from them. I’ll explain briefly how I do that.

First, I think about my VISION. For me that means the way I see my life in a long-term future, such as 10–15 years from now. I try to think about all areas of my life. What I would like my work to be like, what my family structure to be like, where I would be living, what title or conquists I would have achieved, what languages I would speak, etc. The more things you can name, the better. This of course changes with the passing of time, and you will review it from time to time, so don’t feel too commited to what you write down, just express the way you see your ideal future right now. I do it in a Microsoft Word document, but the tool really doesn’t matter, as long as you can save it for future reviews. An example of how I organize that is in the image bellow:

Next, I look at the next few years up until the vision timeframe. I will choose for each of the things I wrote down in my vision from 1–5 conquers that need to happen in the next few years. The way I do that is creating a board in my trello called YEARS, and create the following lists: TO DO; DONE; 2018 (or current year); 2019 (or next year); 2020; 2021 and so on.

The above picture is an EXAMPLE of how I would do it. But wait! How the hell am I going to know when I’m gonna be able to sell my company, or something unpredictable like that? Is this post about futurology or time prediction? Not at all. This is nothing more than what you would like your path to your vision to look like. It is you making SOME plan, and not THE plan. Of course, the plan is going to change along the way. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It is one of the reasons we use trello. It is absolutely flexible and you can change as soon as you like. Just bare with me and you’ll see where I’m getting at.

While filling up the years board, you’ve probably noticed it’s a lot easier to decide what you should be accomplishing this year than the next one, and so on. That being said, try to focus on a few objectives you can realistically accomplish this current year, and fill that out. You’ll see that in the next few days, weeks, or months, you’ll have a lot of ideas of new goals that you feel you can’t realistically fit into this year. Just allocate those to next year, and at the end of the year you can revise and see if they still make sense.

Once you’ve accomplished a goal that is on your board, don’t forget to move the item to the DONE list. Believe me, this is the main reason this works so well. The feeling you get after putting another item and filling up that DONE list is really motivating.

The next thing I do is break the structure down one more measure, which means doing the same process for the next months. Same framework as in the years board, with the following lists: TO DO; DONE; JANUARY, FEBRUARY, ETC (depending on the day you’re doing this, the next months will be others).

So now you’ll take the current year list and, for every objective you have there, you’ll include at least 3, but probably more, smaller goals in one of the following months, so that, by following that schedule, all of your current year goals will be accomplished. See where I’m getting?

After that is done, you can now move up to the weeks board (this board is optional, if you feel better, just jump straight to the day-to-day board). Same thing. Just break down your monthly goals in smaller goals and schedule them in the following weeks.

So, we’ve discussed the breakdown structure of getting to understand WHAT you should be doing with your time. This is so important, because once you have this mapped you can make long term decisions a lot more efficiently. Example: in choosing between a job that will pay you well now, and one that will teach you a skill that you need for long term goals is a lot more transparent if you know how each decision affects your future self.

Every time you update a goal, you should also update the lower levels of the goal. Example: if I insert a new yearly goal, I should update my months, weeks, and day-to-day (when applicable) boards as well.

Now, let’s get to the day-to-day time management. We have a lot of goals that will occupy our routines. But we know that in our daily lives, we have a lot of other things we have to deal with also. Dealing with all these activities can be overwhelming sometimes.

THE TIME MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

The way I do it is using a ‘Day-to-day’ trello board. It is similar to the boards I use to set my goals, but has a few specific traits. I’ll set it up with the following lists: TO DO; DONE; MONDAY; TUESDAY; WEDNESDAY; THURSDAY; FRIDAY; SATURDAY; SUNDAY; just like the image bellow (an example I created just for showing what I mean):

I use the color labels to identify the type of activity and level of importance it has. In my scale: blue is a regular programmed activity (example: going to the gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday); green is a non-regular low importance activity (that, if necessary, can be delayed); red is a non-regular high importance activity (should not be delayed unless absolutely necessary; black is a critical activity (kind of like if I don’t do it, an asteroid will fall on earth and destroy humanity).

Every beginning of a week, you should look at your monthly and weekly boards and update your DAY-TO-DAY board with the activities you need to get done on that specific week by placing them on the TO DO list.

The catch here is that, since trello is automatically synced to your phone through it’s mobile app, AS SOON as you have a thought about something new you have to do (example: just noticed the tv remote control is out of batteries, you have the “I gotta buy some new batteries”), just pick up your phone and write it down in the DO TO list. You don’t have to figure out when you’re gonna do it on the spot. Later on, in the day, when you’re doing something tedious like waiting in a line, instead of playing candy crush, open up your trello and schedule your TO DO activities to some day in the week. This process also involves a curating process, since not all activities we, at some point, chose to do truly bring value to our lives. If it doesn’t make you happy, doesn’t make you money, and doesn’t make you better, DON’T DO IT (don’t know who said it, but it’s a really good advice).

Since you have a very graphic view of all of your activities for each day, it is pretty easy to decide which is the best day to allocate each task (maybe on Wednesday, you’re going to the supermarket already, so just put the “BUY BATTERIES” activity on that day also).

Once an activity is finished, I can then send it to the DONE list. If, at the end of the day, not all activities have been accomplished, just allocate the ones that are incomplete to another day. That way you’ll never leave tasks behind. Either they get done, or they get reprogrammed. One point here is that the blue activities (regular) don’t go to the DONE list, since they’ll be scheduled again for that day on the next week.

Another big part of this system is the ORDER. At the end of each day, I’ll look at the next day and put the tasks in the order I plan on doing them, from top being the first to bottom being the last. That way you don’t have to think about what’s next. Just follow your pre-arranged order and get shit done. Of course, this is flexible and you can (and will) make changes throughout the day. But it eliminates the process of figuring out at each step of the day what to do next.

Trello has a LOT of other features I’m not covering here, but that I do use in some cases, such as making a checklist inside a task, or making comments (example: you have a dentist appointment and you can write the address in the comment section).

If you’re anything like me, you’ll get addicted to the system and start checking and adjusting it all day long, trying to optimize the process. It ends up being fun and SO efficient.

Some people have asked me if I do any type of division between professional and personal tasks. I’m not a believer in the whole “work-life balance” thing. To me it’s just life. So, I don’t separate it at trello, which is specific for my personal use. But that’s just me. Feel free to use the colors in any way that suits you and your life.

That’s the trello part. Now let’s get to google calendar. Just as trello, I’m not going to explain at all how the platform works. There are endless sources for that information, and I don’t think it would be worth the readers time for me to explain here.

For me, google calendar’s main advantage is the ability to invite and be invited to appointments. That enables you to be more secure there aren’t any miscommunications between the people involved in the appointment. As trello works for my personal use, google calendar is my tool for time management with third parties (which can be someone from my team, from other companies, or even personal matters).

Every time I have an appointment with someone, I will ask for their e-mail address, create an appointment on my calendar, invite all the people that should be involved, and set a specific color. Here the color organization you use is entirely up to you. Since I share this calendar with some team members (I highly recommend doing that), I try to include all the appointments that will keep me out of the office (even if it does not involve other people, like a doctor's appointment), and will separate it in red (personal), blue (business related to ongoing projects), green (prospection of new clients) and yellow (time off). So, it would look something like this hypothetical example below:

Very important: each and every one of these appointments should have a specific task in your trello workboard also. That is the only way you will be able to have a complete graphic overview of what your week is looking like.

At the end of each week, I like to review my DONE list, and my google calendar for that week. Normally doing that gives me insights about some other follow up tasks I should perform. Then I archive all the tasks in the DONE list.

Pretty simple right? That’s all there is to it, really. It takes a little bit of time to get used to the habit of writing down things that pop up in your head that you need to get done, scheduling and organizing your time, but you’ll soon see the gains in productivity. The awesome part is that you end that feeling that you just “didn’t do enough today”. If you did all the items in your list, you’re done for the day. If that starts to happen too often, it’s time to put on some more demands in your TO DO list, make some bigger goals or try to accomplish your current ones faster. Soon you’ll find the perfect balance between overwhelming yourself and not doing enough.

Another cool thing about this system is that it is absolutely scalable for teams too. Trello allows you to delegate a task to a team member that is part of that board. That way, you can organize the time of your whole team in this manner, and you and everyone else will know what each person is dedicating their time this week to. I plan on eventually implementing that for my team, but haven’t got to it yet.

At last, I wanna leave a few tips about things I learned along the way of trying to be more time efficient.

If something takes less than 2 min to do it, and you could do it now, just do it. Sometimes we have people counting on an atitude of ours and doing it immediately probably won’t change a lot in your ongoing activity, since you were already interrupted to acknowledge that the activity has to be done. You never know how doing that immediately will affect the future events. It’ll probably gain you more than 2 minutes to do so. It also has the advantage of making you look sharp and aware of what’s going on.

Also, I believe technology has given us a present that we don’t quite use enough. I’m referring to UBER (and similars). It made being driven from one place to another a lot less expensive than it was before. I’ve read a few studies that said that for most people using uber would be cheaper or the same price as having a car. Those studies didn’t take into consideration what you could do with the TIME that gives you. Imagine that instead of the tedious activity of driving in traffic every day (done by millions of people every day), you instead used that same time on the back seat of an uber reading a book. How many books would you have read in 20 years? Think about it.

Hope you guys liked the post. If you implement it and it works out for you, or even if it doesn’t, let me know your experience. Have a nice one!

Obs: I highly recommend printing your vision, and current year objectives and putting them in some place where you will see them very often. I put my vision on my door and my objectives on the bathroom mirror. It will help motivate you when things get hard. Kind of remembers you what you’re fighting for.