Trello is one of my absolute favorite tools for staying productive. Today I want to show you a little bit about Trello—what Trello is and how you can use it either for your organization’s benefit or for the benefit of your own personal productivity.
Trello really has three key terms or three key concepts. There’s a Trello board—that’s what we’re looking at right here, a blank Trello board. There are lists, which live within the Trello board, and then there are cards, which live within the Trello lists.
We’ll get into some of those examples in just a moment, but you can have as many Trello boards as you like. We’re just going to work with one for today. You can think of a Trello board very similar to an Excel workbook—a place for you to create, manage projects, and create processes. Whatever you’d like to do all happens within a Trello board.
So within my board, we can add as many vertical lists as we like. I’m going to use an example today of maybe brainstorming some ideas and how that would look—moving it to an agenda, maybe moving it to a to-do list, and then maybe I want to keep track of the things that I’ve completed, so I’ve got a done list over here. Perhaps this is a board that I’m going to share with my team, so we can all create some ideas, brainstorm some issues here, and then we can move it through the process. We can add it to an agenda for an upcoming meeting. We can track what the to-dos are that have come out of that and who are assigned to that, and then finally we can move it to the done list when we’re complete.
So in Trello, you can have as many of these vertical columns, these vertical lists, as you like. You can see here to the right, I can just add as many as I like. But now that I’ve got a couple of lists that I want to work with, I can start adding cards. Again, very much like a column or perhaps a table in Excel, I can list different ideas. We’re going to review our sales pipeline, we’re going to change the support schedule, and maybe we’re going to revise our website feedback tool.
Okay, so just a couple of ideas that I’ve added here, and you can see how easy it was for me to add. When I hit add card, as soon as I hit enter, it opens up another one for me, so I can very quickly generate ideas and add cards to this list. Trello is a drag-and-drop application, so in this case where I do have a process, it’s so easy for me to just move this over to the agenda. Maybe these are the two things I want us to talk about in our next meeting, and I can keep moving them over if I like. I can revise the wording maybe when it gets to the to-do stage, but it’s very easy to drag and drop these cards back and forth. You can do the same thing with lists in terms of moving them around, but it’s effortless to really move your tasks or whatever you’ve captured here within your cards.
Now, you might say, "That’s not a lot of detail." Right? I’ve just added some three- or four-word descriptions here for my ideas. What if I want to add more detail? Well, the great thing about Trello is that it really keeps your workspace nice and clean, so I can keep the front of my card or the top level of my card nice and clean, but when I click on it, it opens up what Trello often refers to as the back of the card or the guts of the card. So within that, I can now add a much more detailed description if I want. I can add a comment, and it’ll keep track of when I made that comment, and if I have other members of my team who are commenting, it’ll keep track of that discussion here.
I can add some color-coded labels if I like, and you can add text to those labels. So here’s an example: this is my "go-ahead" label, as in we want to go ahead with this project, so I can add that to this task. I can add a due date—I want to make sure we do this by the end of the week. A lot more options can be found within the cards, so you can provide a lot more details within the card, yet it keeps the front of my card nice and clean.
I love that aspect of Trello, that you can have your project, your to-do lists, your agenda—whatever you want to use your Trello board for—you can keep the front of the cards nice and clean, but all of that juicy content, all that further description, comments, and so forth can be held within the card. You can even easily add images to your cards as well. I can just hit paste on this particular card, and you can add an image to that card, which will also, by default, become the front of your card. So if you like a more visual format, you can add that to your Trello cards as well. I can remove the cover if I only want that image within the back of the card, but it’s very easy to do. That was just a copy and paste that I used to attach that to the card.
You can add further attachments, whether those are PDFs, documents, or links, to the back of your card—very functional, very fully featured within the cards themselves.
A couple of other examples of how I’ve used a Trello board in the past: great for managing projects; it can also be used as your own personal to-do list. When it comes to your personal life, I’ve used this for home renovations; I’ve used this for planning a vacation. An example is my first two lists when we’re planning a vacation. Once we’ve selected our destination, we’ll often have an activities or a things-to-do list, and then we’ll have a places-to-eat or restaurants list. Then the remaining ones can be the days that we’re actually there—maybe this is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc.—and then we can just sort of drag and drop the things, like yeah, we want to go see that on Tuesday, and maybe we’ll go eat there on Tuesday since it’s near that location. So, home renovations—really anything that you can think of—you can do within a Trello board.
So that’s just a real quick overview of what Trello is. I’d encourage you to try Trello out if you haven’t yet. Trello.com is the website address. It’s free to use, you can have as many boards as you like, and once you start playing with the application, I’m sure you’ll find out some really interesting ways to incorporate it into your work.
It’s very simple.
