Trello—My Ultimate Productivity Sidekick
So many ideas in your head and so little time. How do you effectively capture everything that’s floating around in your brain, refine it, and put it to action? I’ve tried various task trackers over the years, but when I found Trello, my productivity and strategic planning got a huge boost.
Trello, a web application from Atlassian, offers a colorful, streamlined digital task board that can be used to map and collaborate on tasks or ideas. You can create Trello boards for nearly any topic, and its visual capabilities make it fun to use.
Sound interesting? Here is a peek into 3 of my Trello board layouts—2 collaborative and 1 personal. In this article, I’ll explain how I use these boards and include free templates you can use to create your own!
If you’re new to this, you might find Trello 101 useful, and if you use this link to sign up, I’ll receive a couple free months of Trello Gold features: https://trello.com/sarahnagorsen/recommend
Program Roadmap (collaborative)
I’ve used this board layout with the learning and development team to plan and organize quarterly training initiatives, OKRs, program launches, and training software feature releases. This board helps us take a longer view of our projects and includes lists for backlog, Q2, Q2, Q3, and Q4.
Template: Use template Program Calendar/Roadmap, but remove month cards for a cleaner board.
Program Calendar (collaborative)
This board can be used to capture routine program activities, including:
Semiannual and annual reports
Monthly and seasonal topics and information campaigns
Software maintenance activities
Budget activities
Contract renewals
Account reviews
Template: Program Calendar/Roadmap
Personal Kanban Board
This is my master Trello board layout where I organize all my personal, work-related, and professional development tasks. In the past, I’ve tried managing work and personal tasks separately but I’d always end up forgetting one over the other (usually personal tasks ☹), so now I just group them all onto one board and plan accordingly.
Here’s a breakdown of the lists in this board:
Ongoing/monitoring—Cards in this list represent recurring tasks and active programs and projects I need to check up on each week.
Career backlog—This list contains professional development tasks (courses, certifications, books to read) that I want to work on, ordered by priority.
Backlog—This is my great big list of to-dos. I stash tasks here to stop them from circulating in the back of my mind. This allows me to revisit them all, prioritize them, and then move them to the “selected” section when it’s time.
Selected (limit 8)—These are tasks I’ve selected and prioritized to work on in the next week. Here, I’ve set myself a limit for 8 selected tasks for any given week, depending on the size of each task.
Development (limit 4)—These are tasks I’ve moved from selected to development. I’m actively working on all tasks in this section.
Test (limit 3)—Content or processes I’ve finished developing are moved to this test list for users and stakeholders to test or provide feedback on.
Release (limit 3)—Once tested and ready to roll out, I move tasks to the release list. Because many of my tasks involved rolling out programs, training, or communicating to a large group, tasks wait here until the release has shown enough traction with users or participants. If I’m releasing a long-term program, it gets moved to the Ongoing/monitoring list.
DONE 🎉—My personal definition of done can vary per task and yours can too. Pro tip… a party popper emoji in the title of any list will activate virtual confetti across your screen when you drop a card there. This really emphasizes the done-ness of a task!!
Template: Personal Kanban Board
Summary
No matter which productivity tools you use, YOU make the rules that work best for you and the tasks at hand.
How do you use Trello or other productivity tools to get things done and collaborate? Please share in the comments!
Wishing you a collaborative and productive week! 🎉