The New Year always brings a new perspective on life, a fresh start, resolutions, goals, budgets, tax season, annual maintenance items… sometimes it can be a lot to remember! The same can apply with tasks at work and other areas of life.
As an IT professional, I like to use software to simplify my life and today I’d like to talk about a web application that I’ve used nearly every day for the past three and a half years: Trello. Trello lets you organize your projects into into boards, lists and cards.
Most commonly, I’ll create a board for a new project at work, a list for each step in my workflow, and cards for each task. As I receive new tasks, I’ll create a new card for the task and put it in my Backlog list. When I start working on a card, I move it to my Doing list, and when I’m finished I move it to Done. As a side note, I prefer to keep no more than one item in my Doing list, and I’ll work on that item until I’m finished. This helps minimize distractions (perhaps I’ll talk more on productivity in a future post about Kanban).
But Trello doesn’t just have to be for work (or I wouldn’t be writing about it). I use roughly the same formula for items in my daily life. I have even used it to log my experiences with an assorted pack of safety razor blades so I knew which ones I would want to buy more of once I finished the sampler.
In short, Trello is a very flexible organizational tool that you can use to help you keep track of just about any area of your life.
Are you already using Trello? Let me know in the comments how you set up your boards!
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