(electronic whirring) - [Scott] Are you needing
a better way to manage all of your tasks? Are you needing a to-do list solution that really works for you? Well, in today's video I'm gonna show you five different ways to
create a custom to-do list right here within Trello. And we're gonna start simple and we're gonna work our way up to something that I call the Ultimate To-Do List for Trello. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And we're gonna start
with the default here. When you open up or start a
brand new board in Trello, most likely you'll have these
three lists waiting for you: To Do, Doing and Done. And that gives us a great way to work through sort of
a Kanban style method of dragging things through the process until they are complete. Now you can add due dates if you want to keep yourself on task but, you know, a pretty simple way to get started here with managing your tasks within Trello. Why don't we turn it up a
notch and go to level two. Those of you who may be familiar with the book Getting Things Done, also known as GTD know
that it can be helpful to group certain tasks together. So, for example, if
I've got something here like Review customer feedback survey. Let's say that's something that
I'm gonna do at my computer. I'm gonna add a label. I'm gonna add a label called Computer. And you can see here that
I've already pre-created a number of labels. I've got about five here. Email, Phone, Errand Meeting and Computer because what I wanna be able
to do is quickly identify things that are, for example,
all of my phone calls, so I can get them all done
in roughly the same time within the same batch of time and then move on to something else. So let's group a few of these here. Workout at the gym, well,
that's certainly an errand. I'm not doing that at the office. Hire new staff, that's gonna be a phone interview, so I'm going to say two there. Decide on a website budget, that's a computer related. Redesign website. Call long-lost friend. Yeah, that's definitely a phone call so I'm gonna put that
as a phone call there. So the nice thing here is that as I go up to show Menu, I can choose
the Search Cards option. And let's say I just want to work on the things that are at my Computer. I can select that label and
now everything else is hidden. So for the next half hour or next hour, whatever that bulk of time happens to be, I can just focus on these three areas. If I'm done with that, I can go back here and let's say, hey, I've got a few minutes to make a few phone calls. Let's go to the Phone and now I can focus on just these tasks. So the combination of
adding different labels and then using the Search Cards option to filter things out can be a great way to up your productivity. Now I'm just gonna reduce these labels. I'm gonna minimize these
labels, if I click on them, just so we can focus more on the tasks. Why don't we step it up a notch once again and something that you may need within your To-Do List
system is the ability to add sub tasks, right? So, for example, Review
customer feedback survey. Maybe there's a few different things that I need to get done here. Well, if I open up this card, a great way to add sub-tasks
is to add a checklist. So if I add a checklist in here and I'm just gonna call this one Sub-Tasks for our example. I'm going to say Add. Now what I can do is I can add a bunch of smaller tasks within this. I'm just gonna use a few examples, just so that we have
a few to look at here. So let's say that there
are three sub-tasks that I need to complete
for this particular task. I can come in here, I can list them and I can
start checking them off. And the great thing is is
that on the front of the card, you get a nice little icon that shows me, hey, I'm 2/3 of the way done. When I'm, you know, all three done here, I can then move this over to the Done list but I'm still not quite finished here. If I go back in here and I
finished task number three. Hey, that's great! I get that little green label and now I can move it over here to Done. But let me show you one other thing that you want to keep in
mind with using the task or the checklist function. Let's say as I'm working out these tasks I realize that task
number three is actually a bit bigger than I thought. This might have some of
its own sub-tasks as well. Well don't forget that you can break out anything within a checklist. So if I come over here
and select the three dots, I can say Convert to Card. And so now when I go outside of this card, here you can see task number
three is now its own task, its own card within this list. So some things that can
start within a checklist if it's a sub task, for example, you can break it out to
its own task if necessary. All right well so far
we've only been working with three different lists here but why don't we add something else, which I think is very valuable, and that is a Projects list. So I'm gonna add a new list and I'm going to bring
it all the way over here to the left-hand side. And something that is often missing is that as we go about planning our day, we start to analyze and
prioritize all the things that we would like to get done here. However, often what we get done or where we focus our attention
is not necessarily in line with the projects, the big goals that we should be accomplishing. So let me just add a few here. I'm going to say Project 1 and Project 2, just for example here. So not only am I gonna
have them listed here in my Projects list, and, yes, you will definitely
have more than two projects on the go at any given time. Not only can I just
reference it and look at it. So when I'm looking at the things that I wanna be doing today or that I should be doing this week, not only can I look over here but we wanna go one step
further and actually connect some of these tasks to these projects. So I'm going to open up Project 1. And let's say that some of the things that are already in my to-do list are related to Project 1. What I can do is go over
here and select Attachment. I'm gonna select Trello. And you can see that it actually has some of the most recent cards that I have selected or viewed. So let's say Review
customer feedback survey is one of those tasks. Hey, now it appears here
within this project. Let's do it one more time because there's probably
more than one thing that is related to this project. Now I'm gonna go over
here and I'm going to say, "Well that new book is also
related to project number one." So now I have both of
those tasks listed here. You can see on the front of that card, on the front of my project card, you can see that there's two things. I can see that there are two
tasks assigned or related here, and when I open it up, not only do I see a nice
preview of these two but if I click on them, it takes me directly to that
card, directly to that task. So it's a great way to
create those relationships between your daily tasks
or your actionable tasks and the overarching project. And keeping track which one of those are related to this given project. All right so we added one more list here but I'm gonna actually
convert this one last time. We're gonna add two more lists, and we're gonna see if
that's gonna help us be that much more efficient. So the first one that I'm
gonna add is called Notes. Sometimes I call it Notes/Ideas. And I gotta add one more here
and it's called Waiting For. Okay, I'm gonna put them in
a few different places here. The Notes, I'm gonna bring
all the way over to the left, just to the left of Projects. And my Waiting For, I'm gonna put here between Doing and Done. So let's start with the Notes/Ideas. Often we don't think of Trello
as a good note-taking tool but remember all of these cards. Let's just put in a test
card here, for example. All of these cards give you the ability to attach documents, to attach image, to have full comments, and if there's other people involved, such as a meeting agenda, you can include that here as well, whether it's checklists and due dates, it's a great place to
add all of those notes, especially here in the Description area. And remember many of
the notes that you take will never become a
task or become a project but if they do, how easy
is it to just drag it over into the Projects list. Or if it's a task to just drag it over into your to-do list. You've already got all
of that information, you've got everything that you
need within that given card. And remember you can
also forward your emails directly to this list. So if you come across other ideas or valuable pieces of information, you can forward that directly here into your Trello board. So I think having a Notes or
an Ideas list is a great idea. Now moving over to our Waiting For list, I'd like to have a Waiting
For or a Pending list, it could be called Pending if you like, somewhere between the Doing and Done list, because, let's be honest, sometimes you're working on something and it's simply out of your hands for a period of time. So let's say Hire new staff. Let's say you're still waiting for more applications to come in. There's really nothing you
can do at this given point. There's nothing you can actually do except for maybe just wait
'til the end of the week or whatever that timeframe is for those applications to come in. So I think it's nice
to have that separation between things that you
can actionably do here and things that you can review maybe at the end of the
day or from time to time, see if you need to give someone a nudge, maybe you're waiting to
hear back from someone, that's a great thing to
put in a Waiting For list. And either it may return
back to the Doing list or when it's finished you
can move it over to Done. So I think the Waiting For
list is a great one as well. The list or I should say the board that you see here is
something that I refer to as the Ultimate To-Do List for Trello. And if you don't want to waste your time building out this list yourselves, you can make a copy of it. Please see the link in
the description below, so that you can create your very own copy of this Trello board, and then you can do
whatever you want with it. You can add other lists,
you can change the labels, you can do whatever you want to help you stay more productive. Well, thank you so much
for watching today's video. I hope that you leave me a comment and if you have any further questions, let me know down below. Remember, being productive
does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
