What Is It
In one word? Amazing. It’s one of the best management, organizational tools that I’ve ever used. And trust me, I’m a big fan of organization (everything except my apartment, so I should probably limit my expertise to virtual organization). What started off as something that was introduced to me at work as a task management tool slowly creeped its way into my personal life. I know, I know—they always tell you to keep your professional and your personal life separate. I guess I’m just the type of person to mix it up and live life on the edge.
A Brief Trelloview
The best thing about Trello is that you can organize your organized lists. It’s brilliant. You have your home page, with lots of boards. And then each board has multiple lists, and then each list has multiple cards.
So I have a few boards for different things at work, and then a board for my personal things.
As you can see, I made the personal one with a pretty background instead of the boring work ones.
In each board I have multiple lists:
I keep track of things like, my shopping list, things I need to get done, recipes that I want to make-eat-blog, etc.
And then there are cards. Each card has a title, description, comments, links, due dates, and you can prioritize each card using labels (clearly I categorized the recipes based on how awesome it tasted when/if I made it). You can create sublists in the card as well, for situations where you need a checklist….inside a card, inside a list, on a board. 😀 I also think the comments are super helpful in my work boards, considering you can tag people and address them directly, and they’ll get notifications for them so they can follow-up with you.
Speaking of tagging people, you can also share your boards with other Trelloians by adding them as Members of the card. That way they’ll get notified regarding any changes on that card. It really helps with coordination among, say, your team at work! Or, if you have any roommates that you want to share the shopping list with or divide up chores. See? A cornucopia of options!
The Cornucopia of Options
There are absolutely, so so many ways you can utilize Trello. Some of them I’ve already mentioned throughout this post, but since I’m SO nice, I’ll add them to this list anyways.
- Shopping lists – archive things when you buy them, and share the list with your roommate or something
- To do tasks – good use of the due date! (And if you use Sunrise calendar like I do, you can integrate it with your calendar)
- Chores – Sharing is caring. Plus no one like to ALWAYS take the trash out. Use Trello to remind people whose turn it is.
- Process flow – I have an entire board for a process we do at work, and each list is a part of our “grading” process. So when someone completes one part of it, they click and drag it over to the next list in line. It’s a good way to see where in a process something is to not duplicate effort.
- Trip planning – you have a board for a vacation! Add a list for all the relevant things: packing list, places you want to go (link them up to their websites!), hotels on where you need to stay, keep track of reservations and tickets with those due dates
- “Sprint” planning – or any type of task managing, really. One cool power-up that you can enable for this is Card Aging. So if you have a task (and all those little subtasks in those lists), it fades away based on inactivity. Also good for teamwork if you want to vote on something; voting is another one of their power-ups.
That’s all I have so far, but I’m sure that all my creative readers will contribute and add to the cornucopia via the comments section 😉
The App
This entire time I’ve been giving you screenshots of the web app and browsing through all those options, but since I am the mobile queen, I feel obligated to tell you about their amazing app, available for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, and apparently Kindle Fire too (go Trello!).
Other than their high platform compatibility, I don’t really have that much to say except for 2 things:
- They’ve managed to encompass all of their features very beautifully into their app. It’s perfectly flawless….almost like Beyoncé. I guess that’s what I should expect from a TechCrunch startup though.
- My favorite part about this app is that when you’re on a list, you click and drag to the top of the screen to archive a task. I love it. I don’t know why; I have no explanation, but I love it.
……..Sidenote: I may have to reconsider how easy it is for an app to impress me…..
So now that you know all about it, say hello to Trello and welcome it into your life 🙂
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