How to use Trello to speed up your personal projects and learning

An update from Jun 17, 2019: I no longer use Trello and this guide is left here just for archive purposes.

Last updated: .

Have been using Trello for: ~12 months, with some breaks.

Table of contents

  1. Intro
  2. Why use (free!) Trello for your personal projects
  3. How to get the most from Trello
    1. Understand the basics
    2. Save yourself from Trello burnout
    3. Try (free!) Pomello, a made-for-Trello Pomodoro time tracker
    4. Try these scenarios for special cases
  4. Things I don’t use because I don't need them, but you might
  5. What's Next? + additional resources

I. Intro

Growing as a person, creating things, making money, staying alive — all this requires, at least occasionally, getting things done.

Task & project management tools can help. Put your ideas and plans into one place, organize them, and this will reduce your stress and add clarity to your life.

I've tried, used, and discarded a bunch of such tools over the last years.

And I didn't see any real value in Trello at first. Then I came across an article that challenged readers to "put everything you are working on in Trello for a week" to see how great this tool is.

I did. But it’s only a few weeks later that I became aware of all the benefits.

This article sums them up. And gives you everything you need to know to get the most from Trello.

II. Why use (free!) Trello for your personal projects

An ode to Trello:

  1. It adds clarity to your life. All that chaos of project-related tasks and aspirations gets eliminated (because you keep it all in one place — in Trello!), your stress level goes down, and your ability to get things done goes up.
  2. It prevents you from getting short-sighted. You can see your progress, what's coming, and where you are going.
  3. It speeds up your “getting back on track” after a long break. Say, you took time off to handle a health emergency, or worked on a client project, or had exams. Just check out your Trello boards afterwards and your amnesia from being deeply invested in irrelevant activities will go away. Your will remember your priorities, strategy, and todo in a matter of minutes.
  4. It's great for one-person projects. Unlike in other popular project management tools, Trello' team collaboration features are unobtrusive — you don't get distracted by what you don't need.
  5. It’s an open-ended tool. The way you use it depends on:
    • What kind of activities you do and what is your schedule. On each of your boards you can group tasks by project stages, topics, days of the week, or whatever criterias you choose.
    • Your strategic & systems thinking skills. If they aren't your strong side, using Trello is still a good idea — you will gradually get better at them, noticing patterns in your Trello activity and optimizing your boards.
  6. It’s well-designed, minimalist and… lightweight (a Chrome tab with my biggest Trello board takes just 52Kb).
  7. It's playful. You can drag items, choose board backgrounds, use colorful labels. Somehow, this makes for a freeing, playful experience.
  8. It’s integrated with lots of other tools. It's been out there for a few years and is one of the top project & task management tools, so lots of satellite products (e.g., time tracking software) have Trello integrations. There are even made-for-Trello tools. It's easy to find something that matches your extra needs.
  9. Its free version is free-forever and has totally sufficient functionality.

III. How to get the most from Trello

1. Understand the basics

Note: I don't mention team collaboration features here. Only the things that matter for personal projects.

1.1. Cards and Labels

Card = a task + its full profile (description, tags, checklists (subtasks), attached files, comments).

Available actions: add, rename, edit card profile, copy, move (via a button or by dragging), archive (archives are searchable), delete.

Cards are organized into Lists.

Once the task is completed, you can move the card to DONE list (and keep it there for motivational purposes for a while), archive it, or delete.

Labels = tags that you assign to a card (can be of 3 types: text name + color (default), text, color).

You can use Labels to show yourself what type of task the card is about (strategy, research, tech, writing, etc.), or maybe to estimate time costs (color labels for: up to 2h, 2-4h, 4-8h, etc.), or use them to indicate task completion status, and so on.

You can search cards through all boards or filter your current board by those tags (filtering vs. searching).

1.2. Lists, Boards, and Organizations

List = a group (list) of cards.

Available actions are the same as for cards, except for deleting: add, rename, copy, move (via a button or dragging), archive (the list itself or all cards in it).

Board = a group of Lists that you can see on your screen all at once (with some horizontal scrolling if there are lots of Lists in this board). Think of it as a whiteboard with a bunch of todo lists on it.

You can structure each of your boards by any criteria (section 1.3 will cover typical cases).

Available meta actions: add, rename, change background, edit settings, print and export, copy, archive (but archiving here is called "Close Board" and archived boards are under "See closed boards").

Organization = a group of Boards.

Available actions: add, rename, edit profile, edit settings, delete.

You can have multiple organizations in your account. You are free to add your boards to an organization or keep them out.

So far I have just one organization which name is just a list of 3 meta principles I want to get reminded about when working on my tasks.

1.3. Best criterias for grouping Cards into Lists

Since in Trello you can scroll boards horizontally (drag the board background or use Left / Right keyboard buttons), you can leverage this with the following board structures:

  • By project stage (example: by stages of writing & editing in editorial process).
  • By meta status of the task (On Hold, Queue, Ongoing, Next Up, Done). Also called Kanban method. On Hold is for the tasks you can’t work on because of temporary obstructions (e.g., you are waiting for a reply from somebody).
  • By level of importance. Could be MITs (most important tasks) and Good To Have. Corresponds to quadrants #1 and #2 in the Eisenhower matrix.
  • By time period (e.g., days of the week).
  • A mix of the above.

Depending on the board, you might also want to add a separate List for relevant ideas (Ideas) or questions (Questions) that you might get when working on a project. If you put them as first columns on your board, you will be constantly getting reminded about them, so they have a chance to marinate in your subconscious till it produces valuable insights.

To get the most from Trello, it's important to organize your boards so that they honor your core priorities.

Questions to ask yourself:

  • What goals do you seem to be pursuing? There is a gap between your real values and the ones you think you live by, and there might be the same kind of issue with your goal pursuit.
  • Are you measuring and rewarding the kinds of achievements that matter most to your strategic aims?

(both questions are adapted from The First 90 Days)

For example, my main board has this structure (thank you, horizontal scrolling):

  • ON HOLD
  • DOMINO REACTION METHOD. Here I have a list of tasks (big ones, I even created separate boards for each of them) and habits that will create a positive domino effect. This list is just a motivational reminder, because no movement will happen here for a few months at least (the habits will take a few months to develop, big tasks will take even more time).
  • QUESTIONS
  • MITs for 2016
  • MITs for Q3 2016
  • MITs for this MONTH. I used to have a general one (not just MITs), and also THIS WEEK list, but it proved to be cumbersome for my kind of work & life situation. Now I just have a sheet of notepaper on my desk with this week' tasks that aren't project-specific and are hard to remember.
  • DOING: learning & mastering skills (this list is explained in the chapter about using Trello for learning) — these are long-term, slow-moving cards with multiple checklists in them.
  • DOWNTIME & WARM-UP tasks. Massive decluttering (processing scattered notes in various text files and on paper, cleaning up Downloads folder and mailboxes) and so on.
  • DOING: tripwire minimums. A very slow-moving list, so it’s placed at the end of the board. And the whole concept of setting "tripwires" for big decisions is from the book on decision-making.
  • someday OR maybe
  • DONE. Is for motivational purposes (you can actually archive cards that are "done"). You might want to archive cards from this list from time to time to remove visual noise and keep your Trello board lightweight.

1.4. Pleasant surprises

Trello understands copy-pasted lists of tasks!

Just copy-paste your list into a new checklist item or new Trello card (depending on your needs), and it will get rendered it into a proper list of checklist items/cards.

Dragging

You can drag cards (within and between the lists), lists (within the board), checklist items (within and between the checklists of the same card), and board background (to scroll the board horizontally).

(Apparently, you can now even create a card from any webpage via dragging).

Card aging is visualized

Show menu -> Menu -> Power-Ups -> enable Card Aging

Just do it. This visual effect reminds you about too-dormant-for-your-own-good tasks. You will be grateful for this thing after a few weeks.

Smart links

If you paste a link to the existing card into your card description, checklist item, or comment, it will get rendered as a linked card title.

To delete a card, just press Del on your keyboard

They either added this trick recently, or I didn't find it at first (had to go to the card profile, click Archive, and only then Delete option became available).

1.5. Weird things and workarounds

Due dates for cards

If the card’ due date is today, the date on it will turn red. So if you’ve completed the task but want to keep it in your DONE list for a while, or maybe archive it, it’s a good idea to remove the due date from the card (shortcuts: hover over the card, press D to open the date picker, choose Remove).

Due dates for checklist items

Can’t be done in the checklist, but there is an official workaround.

I just put such cards in THIS WEEK / THIS MONTH types of lists.

Description for a List

If you want to add some reference information for the List, the only way to do it is to create a separate card with that information and put it on the top of the List.

Formatting list items in Description of the card

If before an unordered list you have some plain text (description of/foreshadowing for the list), make sure to leave an empty line between the text and the list itself. Otherwise, list items won’t get rendered as list items.

This issue doesn’t arise if there is a heading or no text at all above the list.

1.6. Unusual shortcuts

  • ? is a hotkey for the list of shortcuts
  • Esc — close a card profile
  • hover over the card, press N — to add a new card placed after this selected card
  • quick edit modes (without opening the full card profile):
    • hover over the card, press E — quick edit mode
    • hover over the card, press L — Labels menu

2. Save yourself from Trello burnout

In the first days you might find yourself spending lots of time in Trello.

You figure out the optimum (for you) granulation level for the tasks and whether to put them in separate boards. You do some planning (strategy & todo) on the go, feeling inspired by how easy it is in Trello. And maybe even try out some Trello add-ons (but most of them just rob the product of its simplicity and low noise level, and don’t add anything really valuable, so you end up discarding them).

Give yourself time for playing with Trello, but don't overdo it.

My "lessons learned" are:

  1. Maintain a healthy balance between Trello time and getting things done. The risk when using productivity systems & project management tools is to spend too much time on them, robbing yourself of the time for actual work. Pay attention to how you are doing.
  2. Track in Trello only the stuff you have trouble getting done and activities that you want to optimize. Otherwise, this tool will be just too noisy & disruptive to your performance.
  3. Take occasional breaks from Trello interface. 1 day per week is usually enough. You can still do work/studying on that day — Trello-integrated time trackers (one of them is described below) are fully capable of serving you on that “day off”. If you don’t use a time tracker, you can just take notes in a text file or on paper and manually update your boards the next day.

3. Try (free!) Pomello, a made-for-Trello Pomodoro time tracker

Pomodoro technique gives you a sense of urgency and makes any task more playful. Its official site (How and Benefits) explains it all.

There is a long list of time tracking tools that are integrated with Trello, some of them are Pomodoro tools.

I ended up choosing a free, lightweight (in terms of consumed memory), and simple Chrome app, Pomello (there is even a help guide).

Cool things it can do:

  1. Show how many pomodoros you’ve spent on the task. The counter is visible both in the time tracking pop-up and in your Trello board.

  2. Via keyboard shortcuts:

    • (or from the menu) Create Trello cards (no need to go to your Trello account!). You can create a Trello task even during an ongoing session.
    • Open the current card or board in Trello.

  3. Cancel an ongoing pomodoro if you don’t feel good about its quality.

  4. Track your daily productivity during the last 2 weeks.

  5. If you are in the state of flow and feel it would be a mistake to take a break now, you can just skip the break. After the break counter started, press Home on your keyboard and pick the same task you've just worked on (it will be on the top of the list).

But if you choose Pomello, make sure to

  1. Memorize its keyboard shortcuts (listed on Pomello Dashboard, launch it via Ctrl + , or the menu). Otherwise, using Pomello will slow you down.

  2. Change app settings to
    Settings (general) -> Always on top -> disable

    …or you will get stuck with a distracting big red time counter through the whole Pomodoro session.

A shortcut for exiting Pomello app is the same as for closing a browser tab.

And a side note about Pomodoro technique:

To last through the day, it's really important to take healthy breaks between pomodoros, off the computer/device screen.

Do an exercise, pace the room with a Gokhale posture, look at a green plant (nature and just green color revitalize us!), or something like that. You brain will reward you for this swiftly.

4. Try these scenarios for special cases

CASE #1. Reading edu books & learning skills

If you read books to learn or improve your skills, it can be more motivational & strategic to track your reading by skills (e.g., smart decision-making, accelerated learning, people skills), not by books.

In this way you

  • get reminded why you are reading a particular book (increases
    motivation);
  • can track time for the whole skill (seeing your progress also creates a boost of motivation & grit);
  • can set and track universal skill-practicing tasks;
  • can set and track "what success looks like" criterias for the whole skill (setting such criterias is one of the rules for accelerated learning).

The process that works for me:

1. On my main, strategic board, I use a separate list to track skill development.

It's called DOING: learning & mastering skills list and has

  • assumptions & testing card on the top;
  • skill cards (for the skills I'm already working on).

assumptions & testing is the thing I've just discovered. Making and testing hypotheses is one of the rules for accelerated learning, but turns out it's also used in lean startup approach and there is a Trello template for that (Assumptions, Hypotheses, Build, Measure, Learn). So for several big tasks of "create" type I now have boards of such structure. And the time spent on brainstorming in these boards I track in the assumptions & testing card mentioned above.

2. Each "DOING" skill card has multiple checklists (example):

  • WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE checklist (subjective criterias and habits I need to develop based on those books' advice).
  • BOOKS checklist for the books I'm reading for that skill, plant to read, or (marked as completed) have read already.
  • book title: what to do with this book checklist for each book I'm reading for that skill — to track reading progress (it the book is a slow read, then there is one checklist item per chapter). "what to do" can be: read fully, read only relevant chapters, just skim through the book. And the checklist also contains a "make a cheatsheet" task — it’s according to the “Can I compress the most important 20% into an awesome cheatsheet?” rule for accelerated learning from The First 20 Hours).

How to prevent the skill card from getting stuffed & visually noisy:

  • Hide completed items
  • Delete 100% completed checklists

3. How to track “to read” edu books?

Must-reads for the skill in development I just add to BOOKS checklist of the relevant skill card.

And the rest are just in my browser bookmarks, "to read" folder, with "!" marks in the beginning of the bookmark title (the number of "!" depends on how important for me to read this book, in my opinion).

4. One more thing to do, for learning enhancement:

Talking about what you learn improves understanding and memorizing of that material. Develop a habit of doing at least weekly journaling about what you've done/learned for your top-priority skills (where edu book reading gets discussed).

CASE #2. Tasks with serious, externally imposed deadlines

Trello can handle such situations.

You can

  • Add due dates to Trello cards. There is even a built-in reminder: color of the date changes depending on how soon the card is due.
  • Get email reminders, although you can get them only 24h before the due date.
  • Use a Calendar view for the cards on the board — it looks like a typical Calendar application.
  • Add Trello feed to your Google Calendar or iCal.

Based on the blog posts I've seen, people do use these options, especially when working on team projects.

I opted not to. And I use both Google Calendar and Trello.

  • Google Calendar is for tasks with externally imposed, "real" due or start dates. E.g. for social & legal obligations (going to the post office to get a package, sending an important email, legal bureaucracy stuff), and for remembering about book or movie releases I’m waiting for. (update: in a paid Trello account there is now a package tracking option).
  • Trello is for managing personal tasks and projects (studying, research, creating, etc.) with soft deadlines.

Choose the system that meets your needs.

CASE #3. Emergency management

If you pay attention to how you spend your days, you notice that “emergencies” that you deal with throughout the day/week/month (and that distract you from high-value tasks!) repeat themselves and also fall into particular categories, which means that

  1. You can manage repeated emergencies faster if you prepare clear, well-thought scenarios for dealing with them — based on all those past experiences.
  2. It’s a good idea to have those scenarios written down and easily accessible — in case your ability to think and focus is impaired (high level of stress, being severely underslept, being emotional, etc.)
  3. Lots of emergencies can be pre-managed — that is, prevented from happening, or their occurrences & consequences minimized.

And Trello can help you with this.

The approach I’m currently practicing is this:

  1. A separate board for emergency management tasks:

    • DOING
    • DONE
    • Categories
    • Cases & Solutions: INTERNAL SOURCES
    • Cases & Solutions: EXTERNAL SOURCES
    • Cases & Solutions: COMMUNICATIONS

    Cases & Solutions contain Cards with scenarios (in Description field) for managing particular emergencies effectively & efficiently.

    Examples of my cards (sample board): NEED: for variety & spontaneity, ISSUE: being underslept, WEATHER: rainy for days, (because I do this rarely and thus tend to forget safety rules for this specific kind of decision-making) ISSUE: purchasing clothes & shoes.

    So it's mostly the stuff that decreases my ability to think clearly and be productive, and increases the risk of relapsing to unhealthy habits.

    As a backup plan & for convenience, I keep & prepare Cases & Solutions in a text file, and copy-paste them to Trello. So, whenever I decide to update a particular scenario, I first do it in the text file, then copy-paste that scenario to Trello.

    To zero down conversion time costs, scenarios in the text file are in Markdown (a simple & popular formatting language that you use in Trello's card descriptions if you want complex things like headings/bold/italic/code formats or insert an image).

  2. IF there is an emergency of repeated kind that I don’t remember how to handle efficiently, THEN I refer to the relevant card on the “emergency management” board.

  3. Each new & time-consuming emergency I track in DOING (I also track time costs with Pomello if it's possible), then DONE list. And sometimes I just add tasks straight to DONE list.

  4. For future reference, the cards that I move to DONE list I rename as _Month Day card name

    Example: Dec 15-18_card name for the task that started on Dec 15 and was completed on Dec 18.

  5. Once per 1-3 weeks I review DONE list:

    • Is there something you can add to Cases & Solutions?
    • Is there something you can add to Categories?
    • Are there habits you can develop, are there one-time things to do, to pre-manage for these emergencies? Update your Trello boards & calendar reminders accordingly.
    • IF I can’t figure out what to make of a particular emergency, THEN I keep it in DONE list, in hope that over time, as new emergencies accrue, I might notice a pattern there.

As a result of such process you get a list of habits to develop, one-time things to do and plan, decreased anxiety, and better chances for high productivity — now and in the future.

CASE #4. Planning big and biggish purchases if you live on a shoestring budget

Trello can help you with several problems of the limited-budget situation:

  1. You are forced to prioritize between top-priority purchases instead of making all of them.
  2. While you are waiting for the money to come (your savings to reach the required level or your income to increase after you took the necessary measures), your might change your mind about some purchases. For example, the context can change (cold weather comes earlier than expected and now warm shoes become a higher priority), or you may remember why one purchase is more important than others, or you can read something that will make you see your puchasing list anew.
  3. You've already researched what exactly you can buy and where (because you wanted to know at least approximately what it will cost you), even with some alternatives just in case, and want to be able to find & remember this information even in a few months, when you finally save enough money to make the purchase. You want to save the time & energy of your future self.

I have a separate Trello board ("Purchases") for dealing will all this, and I've settled on the following structure:

Card title: approximateprice purchasename (example: ~$130 winter shoes).

Card description: the reasons for the purchase, concerns, links to the researched
options (if I'll need to buy this thing online), with approximate prices for each.

Lists:

  • Experiments — my current experiments with nutrition and supplements that need regular expenses, but might stop if by a particular date I won't see good results.
  • THIS MONTH — what's planned for this month.
  • rest of the season — top-priority big and biggish purchases for or/and during the season (e.g. warm shoes for autumn).
  • good to have — something I don't have money for now, but will be able to buy within 6 months or earlier, if my income increases and tehre won't be unexpected significant expenses.
  • health stuff to fix & manage — health issues that will need financial investments till the end of my life.
  • someday — something that is very far away from what I can afford, but that is worth buying.
  • DONE — All completed purchases from the previous lists go here, but the card title is renamed to MonthDay_oldcardtitle. The cards stay here for motivational purposes and until I can generate useful insights from looking at the list. Then I move the cards to Archive.
  • Next season/year — Say, I've settled on a purchase I'm not fond of, because of financial restrictions, but next season/next year I hope to be able to make a better purchase of that kind, and already know what I want.

IV. Things I don’t use because I don't need them, but you might

Trello for mobile platforms

There is a bunch of official Trello apps.

Team collaboration features

Votes, file attachments, adding/removing/mentioning/notifying team members.

Paid features (“Pro plans”) and Power-Ups (except for fading)

Pro plans are Trello Gold for individuals (custom backgrounds and saved searches); Trello Business Class and Trello Enterprise for teams and businesses.

If you work alone, additional features of the last two are irrelevant.

Most of the Power-Ups used to be available only in pro plans, but since August 2016 they are all free (one more reason to use free Trello plan). Still, they aren't relevant to the needs of my personal projects, so I can't provide quality feedback on them.

Third-party Trello add-ons & integrations, except for Pomello

If you need more from Trello, check out all those huge lists at Trello Resources and (more usable) Trello Integrations.

You can export Trello data to spreadsheets, create cards from Gmail and Google Docs, schedule recurring tasks via Zapier, and so on.

Questions to ask yourself when making a decision about a particular Trello add-on:

  • Does this tool actually save my time?
  • Does this tool help me stay focused on what's important?

V. What's next?

Try Trello.

  • (regularly) Put there your personal projects & plans, especially the dormant ones.
  • (3-6 days/week) Review at least your main board. Plan new stuff.
  • (occasionally) Optimize your board structures.
  • (a one-time task) Choose add-ons that make Trello even more useful to you.
  • (happens automatically) Reap the benefits.

Additional resources:

  1. Sample board templates (you can copy a board via Show menu -> More -> Copy Board): my examples for this article and examples from the community.

  2. Accelerated learning checklists (are good for learning skills and Trello planning):

  3. Books with great meta advice:

    1. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath. A weakish title, but a great book. Explains in details a smart and very usable model for good decision-making. The book even offers chapter summaries, of cheatsheet style.

    2. The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded.

      Originally for "leaders and transition", its advice seems applicable to transitioning into any ecosystem (professional field/hobby, project, business direction, city, etc.). I found Chapter 1 (Prepare yourself), 2 (Accelerate your learning), 6 (Achieve alignment) and 9 (Manage yourself) to be helpful in optimizing my plans and, as a result, my Trello boards.

      This book' key value is in asking you uncomfortable questions and showing you examples of what can happen if you neglect answering them. And answering those questions gives you lots of insights and ideas, which is fun.

  4. iDoneThis. If you can afford a $5 monthly subscription, you might want to track your DONE tasks here as well (you can automatically export tasks from Trello' DONE list to iDoneThis via Zapier). In a paid account you can filter completed tasks by tags, and it's done in a handy way.

  5. The article I mentioned in the intro — the one that made me give Trello a second try.


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