Making matrices on Trello

I love Trello.

Well, to be most accurate, I love Kanban boards. They’re an intuitive way to organise tasks, and there’s almost endless variety in how one sets them up, and how they work.

I use them for work, and also personal projects. For tracking, in real time, my work against my performance goals and subjects of highest interest.

And for doing things like prioritising tasks (read: cards).

The example below takes place in Trello :)

Turning 2d into sortable 1d

Prioritisation matrices are commonplace, and people use a range of values for the x and y axes.*

For the purposes of this particular set of tasks, I chose impact and complexity.

Impact’s a measure of the effect a given task will have. The higher the impact, the better (we’re not aiming for negative impact here!).

Complexity’s a measure of how easy, or difficult, said task is going to be to achieve. While lower complexity isn’t necessarily better, it’s definitely in the “low-hanging fruit” basket, as it were.

So, if we map low, medium and high values for each of these axes onto a grid, we get 9 lovely squares.

I’ve numbered them from 1/9 (best) to 9/9 (worst). We’ll get to why later.

I decided that impact was the more important of the two values, which is why, in terms of importance, it gets favoured when I did the scoring.

Caption: a 3x3 matrix showing low, medium and high values for impact (x axis) and complexity (y axis). Scoring is from 1/9 (best) to 9/9 (worst) as follows: high impact (HI), low complexity (LC) — 1/9; HI, MC — 2/9; MI, LC — 3/9; HI, HC — 4/9; MI, MC — 5/9; LI, LC — 6/9; MI ,HC — 7/9; LI, MC — 8/9; LI, HC — 9/9.

So, we have a 2d matrix. Now, to turn it into a series of 1d values, which we can assign to individual Trello cards.

That’s what the numbering is for. It’s also really useful for two other reasons:

• one can have Trello sort cards automatically by priority (yay!)if one puts the score at the start of a card’s title
• it’s easier for a human brain to interpret simple numbered scores than remember the matrix when interpreting the labels.

Labels?

Screenshot of how the labelled tasks look in a Trello list.

Yep. Labels are amazingly useful ways of filtering and marking cards. I use ’em heaps. Sadly, the colours are somewhat limited, so I had to make an approximation of the colours I use in the matrix (from the greenest meaning ‘best’ to the reddest meaning ‘worse’) — in this case, I used cool colours for impact, and warm colours for complexity.

Sidenote: I always have”colour-blind friendly mode” switched on, which adds a pattern to each label as well as a colour. Because accessibility, peeps :)

Each card then gets two labels — one for each value (low, medium or high) of impact and complexity. The reason to do this isn’t to uselessly double up on the scoring information, but it _does_ provide some checkable redundancy, and it also means one could filter cards to see, for example, only high impact ones.

Why I made this

After doing a bit of desktop research, I couldn’t easily find systems for mapping a prioritisation matrix directly onto Trello cards. Yep, there’s at least one awesome-looking power up which can do it, but I wasn’t really in a position to use a subscription service this time around.

So I had a bit of fun thinking up a simple one. This is the result.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome!

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* Sadly, I’ve not seen much in terms of 3d prioritisation matrices. Or at least 2d images of them. Sigh. I can see it so clearly in my head…

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