How should you set up a brand new Trello board?
Well in today's video I'm gonna give you a seven-part checklist, the seven things that I do for almost each and every Trello board.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Today I thought I would take you through a full walk-through from a brand new board.
Here I've created a new board setup.
I haven't done anything with this board just yet and I want to walk you through the different steps that I take to set up a board, to not only set myself up for success but especially if I'm gonna be collaborating with others.
Changing the Trello Board Background
So let's dive in and start with something that you may be surprised with, and that is the board background.
Now of course the board background is so much more than just what you see here in the background, and you want something that represents the board that you're using.
But the reason why I think selecting an appropriate board background is so important is that it makes it easier, so much easier, for yourself but also other people as they go and look and find that board.
Here you can see a collection of some of the recent boards which I have been using, and look at this one with this sort of pinkish color, how it just sort of stands out, it sort of jumps out; and the ones that I have images on, that might make it that much easier for me to find that board in the future, especially if I have a number of boards which are named in a similar fashion.
Or maybe I want to purposely use the same color or the same background for multiple boards.
And remember, this is even more apparent when you start using Trello on your mobile device such as your phone.
So make sure that you choose an appropriate background.
From the menu we can select change background.
We can either choose a static color, we can choose one of the photos which Trello provides, or if you are a business class user you can upload your own picture, your own custom background.
So be sure to start with the background.
Create your Trello Lists
Alright, next up we want to get into our lists, and of course, this is going to vary depending on what you want your board to do.
I'm just gonna create a very, very simple workflow here.
Idea, confirmed, let's say doing, and then complete.
Compete? No, we're not gonna compete. (laughs) Complete, alright.
So just a very, very simple, straightforward, we're gonna move things from the left to the right.
Of course, that's not the only way in which you can use Trello, but in most cases, people are using a Kanban method, moving from left to right.
But before you start adding any cards, make sure that you take the appropriate time to make sure that you have enough lists for your particular workflow, that things make sense before you start adding pieces of information.
Now at this phase, you may be thinking...
Add List description cards in Trello
that I'm probably gonna start adding cards immediately.
Well, I am going to start adding cards, but maybe not in the way that you think.
Something that often gets overlooked is that as we share this board with others, are they gonna understand the differences between these lists and how they should be using them?
Now, in today's example, this is pretty straightforward, but you may have a process that has 10 lists involved in it, and maybe some of the lists are very, very similar.
So what I often recommend is that the very first card is a description card where you actually take the time, and I don't mean just write the word description, but you write a little bit of detail such as "place tasks which we have committed to doing this quarter."
Alright, so that you've actually got something to tell people what should be going on within this particular card.
You can add this for each and every one here. Now again, complete might be pretty straightforward and doing, but you can add just a very short paragraph at the top of every one of your lists.
Now Trello doesn't give you the opportunity to pin this card at the very top; it's true, someone could drag it down somewhere else within this list.
But what I usually recommend is that you pick a particular colored label. Now I like blue for a couple of reasons, not only is it the Trello default color in terms of the Trello blue, but it's also the last one in this list, so I find often we don't use this color as often as the other ones above.
So I'll often pick something like blue, and I'll put that for each and every one of the top cards here; so if I'm adding a description at the very beginning of each of my lists.
And remember, this can be a full paragraph, it can be a lot longer than just what we see here. Again, let's go into maybe a little bit more detail here.
For description, I can say "add a detailed description of what you want to do." Alright, that adds a little more detail there.
Doing, "place tasks which you (laughs) are engaged with currently," how about that?
Okay, and then "cards that have been finished" or something along those lines. Again, what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna add that blue label to each of these areas here.
So again, these are intended to be things that remain here, they're just adding a little bit of further description to what's going on in this list.
As we start adding other things within these lists, everything down below is going to adjust, are going to move, are going to move between lists, and they might be dragged up or down in that particular list.
But the idea here is that this label always remains at the very top.
It looks like I had the expanded function on there. If you click on the label, for those who don't know, you can get not just a bigger view, but you can actually start to see the text which is very next in my checklist.
Define your Trello Labels
Once I've designed my list, once I've added some descriptions, even before I start adding my cards, the very next step I will do is start editing those labels.
So what I mean by that is actually adding some text examples here.
For example, for the blue that we just created as the description, I might just add that in, right?
I might just say, well, that's a description label so people realize why I chose that color.
Green may mean approved, green may mean that things are good, green may mean go in this particular example. So I'm gonna start adding that label.
Yellow may mean wait for approval, for example, in this particular case; and red means, let's say it means urgent in this particular case.
You're not limited to just these six colors. You can have more labels and actually duplicate these colors; so you can have multiple green for example, and each of them can have a different label.
I think this is especially important before you start adding team members or before you start adding other individuals to this board that you have designed the labels appropriately.
Again, you're giving them that much more information so as they start engaging with this board, they know what the labels mean and how to start using those labels.
So don't forget to take a look at the labels.
Review Email Settings for Trello Board
Next on my list has to do with email, and something that I may not do for every single one of my boards, but especially if it's a board that is crucial to my work, if it's something I'm gonna be using on a daily basis, I want to take a look at the email to board settings.
Now in order to do that, you want to select menu and then select more, and about halfway down we have our email to board settings. I'm gonna click this and what you can see is that I have this unique email address for this board.
Now, probably one of the easiest things you can do is select this option to email that address to you so you immediately will have it in your inbox, and for many cases many of our email clients will automatically add it to our contact list. Then of course, you can give it a more appropriate name such as maybe Trello New Board Setup or whatever the name of this board is.
But the next important step here is to determine when you forward or send an email to this particular address where do you want it to appear?
Now in many cases it's often the first list, so yeah, I'm gonna stick with idea, that's where I want it to be; but maybe I don't want it to be at the bottom of the list, maybe I want it to be at the top of the list.
Now, I want to be careful because with these description cards here, of course, a new card is gonna go above it there, so you know what? On second thought, I'm gonna say bottom in this case.
But remember, the choice is yours. You can determine which list these emails go to and what position, whether it's going to be top or bottom.
Enable Trello Power-Ups
Now while we're here in the menu settings, the next thing on my checklist is power-ups, and I am never complete, I am never finished setting up a Trello board without looking at power-ups. Now depending on which version of Trello you have,
whether you have the basic version, whether you have business class, for example,
you may be limited on how many power-ups you can use at a time.
But there is one that I use almost every single board, on every single board, and that is the custom fields power-up so I'm gonna add that right away here. This is a great opportunity for me to go in here and what I can do, if I select edit power-up settings,
is I can start adding my fields, right? So maybe there's a checkbox here and I want to
just give it a name here, so I'm gonna start adding a checkbox. Maybe there's a start date, I don't just want the due date which is default. A variety of options here in custom fields. I'm not gonna go into the details, if you'd like to learn more about Trello custom fields I'll leave a link to another one of my videos in the description below.
But whether it's custom fields, whether it's calendar, whether it's some other integration that you need, now is the time to set that up, especially before you start inviting other members to your board.
Invite Team Members to Trello Board
So, once we've set up our appropriate background, we've designed our lists, we've added a few descriptions, a few helpful pieces of information at the top of the cards, we've decided what labels we are going to use, our email settings, and yes, our power-ups.
And if you don't want to see, oh, there's my custom fields button right there so there's my power-ups.
The very last thing is to start inviting other people to participate with us.
The quickest and easiest way to do that is to use this invite to board link at the top of the screen. You can either paste in email addresses or use their Trello username, but perhaps the easiest one of all, especially if you're adding a large group of people, is just to send them a link, and you can select this create link button.
Here I can copy this link that they're giving me and then I can just paste that into an email. I can just send that directly to the 12 or the 20 or whoever it is that I want to join and participate here in this board.
Well, there you have it, my checklist of how I set up a brand new Trello board from scratch.
I would love to hear from you next. Are there certain things that you do when you first set up a Trello board? Was there something that was missing from my particular list?
Please be sure to leave your answer in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching, I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Be sure to give this video a thumbs up and leave me a question or a comment down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
