STRAW, A TEAM SOLUTION FOR INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTIVITY

Like so many of you, we’ve been spending a lot of time using Trello for teams to organize information and collaborate on projects. Today, we’re officially launching our first power-up Straw, so that you can work faster and better on Trello.

Some of the 150+ boards we made on Trello. This tool is more or less the OS of our company.

As I’m sure you know, collaboration on Trello relies on a combination of mentions and tags between users. When mentioned, you get a notification, prompting you to check the content of said mention. But, as you scale your use of Trello, these notifications turn into a barrier for productivity. Why ? Because they require :

• Time and mental effort to go from board to board, check what’s changed and remember what you need to do later.
• Constant effort on your part to prioritize tasks, according to what other members ask of you in the mentions.

DO THE RIGHT TASK, AT THE RIGHT MOMENT

If Trello unfortunately isn’t impervious to notification overdose, Straw brings an efficient solution to the problem: it converts the most important notifications into Trello cards, and sends them to an “🍹 INBOX” list, on the board of your choosing.

In other words, once you use Straw, one board becomes enough to consult and manage your notifications, prioritize your tasks and get the job done.

(1) Create a personal board (our template is here), (2) install Straw. That’s it, you’re ready to go!

We only send you the “notifications that matter”, meaning those that are most important for healthy collaboration. Here’s the workflow:

But that’s not all Straw does for you. Our Straw cards were designed to improve your workflow, having all the necessary information at hand in one place:

1. The name of the person who mentioned you.
2. The content of the mention, in the form of a feed, containing comments and other important events.
3. A link to the source card, for smooth navigation.

Straw’s notifications include descriptions, text, links, comments and a direct link to the original card for smooth navigation.

🎁 Bonus round: when someone updates the content of a card already in your “🍹 INBOX”, the Straw card will also be updated, thereby avoiding a mismatch of information AND duplicate cards in your inbox!

HOW WE CAME UP WITH STRAW

Before Straw, we had problems collaborating — mentioned in the beginning of this article — and we seeked Zapier for help, looking to maintain the equilibrium between efficient collaboration and meaningful notifications.

The concept was simple: everyone in the team would have a personal board, on which they would receive notifications in the form of a card. One notification, equaled one zap, equaled one card. This worked out fine for a little while, but we faced several limits:

1. We started to scale our usage of Zapier, and thus our pricing level
2. Though we had solved the problem of having to manage notifications, we still received too many cards
3. Any action would trigger a card, and we often had duplicates / triplicates / quadruplicates etc.

Still, we were incredibly more efficient as individuals and as a team. But we wanted to take it a step further. Hence the reason why we decided to code the Power-Up Straw for all the Trello Community, and the reason why we’re sharing it with you today. 🎉

Straw is free, try it out and send us your feedback to make it even better (new features are already coming… 🙌)