How I Use Trello to Organize My Work and My Life
If you’re like me and you like to use software to organize your life with to-do lists and calendars, chances are you’ve heard of Trello.
Trello is my personal favorite organizational tool that I use to keep track of everything from my fraternity alumni board monthly meeting agendas to my weekly housekeeping tasks. I find its use of boards, lists, and cards incredibly easy and customizable to organize my life in the exact way that best suits me.
These are the top 3 ways I use Trello to maximize my productivity and organize my life:
Create separate work hubs with Boards
Trello allows users to create boards. Much like a physical board I’d normally keep in an office, I use Trello boards as my hub to pin up necessary information such as due dates, tasks, to-do lists, and more.
What’s convenient about Trello boards is that I can easily maintain multiple boards at once, unlike with a physical board. Why might I want multiple boards? Well, I like to have an individual board for each different area of my life where I typically have different tasks and projects to attend to. Here’s an example:
As you can see, I currently maintain three different boards — one for the career advancement program I’m doing (Praxis), one for my fraternity’s alumni advisory board that I serve on (Alumni Advisory Board), and one for my general life management (Adulting). You can also see I utilized the option to color-code them.
I find it useful to maintain different sets of boards so as to not mix up the professional and the personal details of my life. Another case for this could be if you have multiple jobs, using boards allows you to keep details of each completely separate. Having one board that acts as a singular hub for every project and task can feel cluttered and cause some anxiety. Keeping things separated and organized in this way is the first step for setting up your organization system.
Map out the workflow with Lists
Trello lists serve as the medium through which I think through and execute my workflow and organize my individual tasks. This is the point in the process where one is able to get really creative and personalize their Trello board in a way that works best for them. If you don’t know where to start, though, here is a suggestion for how I use lists:
This specific method I use is based on the priority of different tasks, and where they are in the process of showing up on my to-do list. In general, high priority tasks will be tasks that are due soon or may take a large chunk of time. Low priority tasks are ones that have a due date but aren’t as immediately important. Extra tasks are things I need to work on, but have no specific due date or may not take a whole lot of time. The “in progress” and “done” tasks are self-explanatory.
If you’d rather try out a different method of organizing your Trello lists, here are a couple of different examples I’ve seen others use:
As you can see, there are several different ways you can organize your lists, whether it’s by project priority, project due date, your weekly calendar, where you’re at on individual projects, and more, you can really go crazy here and do what works best for you!
Detail projects and tasks with Cards
Cards are going to be the individual projects, tasks, or bits of information I need to have within your workflow. For example, here you can see I’ve labeled a card “Update AAB roster”:
Cards can have all kinds of useful features in that I can add things to them that’ll aid me in whatever individual project or task I’m working on. When I click on an individual card, you’ll see that I can add several features such as due dates, checklists, labels, attachments, and more. When you utilize some of these features, a card can look something like this.
As you can see, I’ve added a checklist of the specific things I need to do to consider this task completed. I’ve also set an exact due date for myself as well as attaching the Google Sheet that includes the roster I’m updating. Like all things with Trello, you can really be creative with this and do what works best for you!
Trello is an excellent task management software that has all kinds of customizable features where you can use boards, lists, and cards to organize your life and your work. I hope that after reading about how I use Trello to organize my workflow and keep track of my projects you have a better idea of how you can use Trello to do the same!
