Boost Your Productivity and Focus with Trello

Skate toward your daily finish line with tactical precision by organizing and prioritizing your tasks

A sketch of a real-life Trello board I once made while volunteering — by Kimberly Shyu

Like a Record, Baby

Sometimes it feels like we’re professional stuntmen and women — spending our days juggling armfuls of balls while spinning in circles on an ice rink — centrifugal forces tugging on us. One lap down. Check. A few balls released from the juggle stack. Check. Check. Our armfuls of responsibility slowly diminish until the next lap, when someone throws a new ball at us from the sidelines.

Here’s something more concrete: maybe you lie awake at night, plagued by little to-dos that randomly pass through your mind. Don’t despair. There are ways to manage your life without getting lost in Taskland, even if you spend your whole life inside the ice rink. If you’re ready to step off the ice or deflect the balls, there are myriad options for that approach as well, as explained in the books at the bottom of this post, but this article is about dealing with the work on your plate, some of which is inevitable. So let’s dive in.

The Kanban Approach

Kanban is a methodology of working, which is traditionally used by software development teams to visualize and track work as…