- Do you use Trello for your business? If so, I hope you're not making any of these seven mistakes. Hello, everyone Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress and I have provided Trello consulting for the past five years and I have literally laid my eyes on thousands and thousands
of different Trello boards. So here in today's video I wanna show you the
seven most common mistakes that I see my clients using and showing you solutions so you can fix each one. The first one has to do with using our lists and far too often, I come across teams and businesses that are using individuals
for their own list. Here in the first half of this board, you can see that we have a task list and in progress and complete, some standard things
that many boards contain but if we move over to
the right hand side, we see things like
Kristi's list, Brian's list and sometimes there's several, maybe a dozen of lists moving out here, all with individual names. Now their intent is good in that they're trying
to keep things organized that if Kristi is assigned something, we can move it over here but that sort of defeats
the purpose of the workflows and the different stages in
which Trello is so good at. What we really should be doing is using this member assignment as you can see on these other cards so that we can assign members
directly to specific cards regardless of which stage they are in. The other thing you want to keep in mind is that if you or other
members of your team need to see specifically
what they are assigned we can come up here to show menu and we can go under search cards and filter things just for ourselves. So for example if I just wanna see the
cards that are assigned to me I can click my username and now I just see the six cards that I have been assigned to. I can now work in this mode. This is more than just a view. I can work and edit and move these cards around if I need to and whenever I want to, I can click X up here and go back and see all
of my cards at once. So I would strongly suggest that you avoid using individual lists for individual members of your team. Take advantage of Trello's
use of a Kanban board and make use of the stages. The second mistake that
I see far too often is not using labels effectively. Now, here in this demonstration board you can see that I have
several different labels. One quick tip is that
if you click directly on the label itself, it will expand and show
you the name of that label that can often be very, very convenient so you don't have to
remember the different colors and what they associate with but far too often I come across boards and teams that are not using labels at all or at least not very effectively. Labels can be so helpful
here within our Trello system and one of those reasons is that we can use again that filtering capability to narrow down and zero in on certain types of labels. So I'll often ask my clients to see what would make the most sense for them to segment or
break out their Trello cards on a given board. How would they like to see it maybe from a reporting standpoint or would other members of their team like to see that information. If we go back here to search cards, you can see at the very top we can filter by either
one or more labels. Do I just wanna see my new projects? No problem, I can select that. Keep in mind, you are not limited to just
the first six or so colors that Trello provides you here. If you need to, you could actually have
several green labels which may be represent the
exact same geographical area but you can give each of
those labels a different name. So you can have as many labels as you need as long as they have distinctive names. Now, the third problem that
I come across very often here when it comes to using Trello is the lack of a back up plan and although Trello is a
trusted name and service things can go wrong. Whether it's your fault, or if there is some downtime with Trello how about you add someone new to your team and they start mucking things up here within your Trello board and you wish that you could go back to the way it was set up a week ago or maybe just certain elements. Well, one way that you could do so is come up here to show menu, select more and we could copy this board. We could select copy and give
it a name with a date perhaps so that we know when this board was copied but the problem with this strategy is that it's a manual process and either you or
someone else on your team is gonna have to come in here and remember to copy
this board every Friday and give it a name and then that's going to
stack up in your organization and count towards your boards
here within Trello as well and what if the mistake
was made just two days ago. You don't wanna go all the
way back to last Friday. What if you wanna go to a
particular point in time? Well, a much better solution is to use a power up called Backups by Rewind. If you go to the power-ups
menu here within Trello and just type in back or back ups, the very first selection
will be back ups for Trello. Now, backups for Trello
is designed by Rewind which is the same organization which creates backups
and on-demand recovery for products such as Shopify
and Quick Books Online. The great thing about Rewind is that it backs up every
single aspect of your boards. In fact, the list includes
boards, lists cards, checklists, custom fields,
labels and attachments. So you can have the security of having someone either new on your team or maybe even you make an honest mistake and like to go back and revert to a prior iteration of that board, you can do so with Rewind and it will do it on a nightly basis. So you don't have to remember
to do something manually. If you'd like to learn more
about backups for Trello be sure to see the link
in the description below. Now, the fourth mistake that you may be making here within Trello as it pertains to your
teams and your business is notification overload. As you start to add members of your team, as you start to add due dates you're automatically going to start receiving email notifications and far too often people are receiving too many
notifications at a given time. The negative consequence is that some members of
your team including yourself may start to ignore all of
those email notifications. So a better solution is
to change the frequency of those notifications. If you come up to the
top right-hand corner and click your profile picture and then come down and select settings, you'll have the opportunity
to change your notifications. If you want to, you can
allow desktop notifications but the one that we're gonna focus on here is this first one, change notification email frequency. Now by default, Trello sets this to instantly meaning that whenever a change is made to a card that either you're assigned to or that you are watching, you're gonna receive an email notification but the one that I prefer and that I recommend to many of my clients is to change this to periodically and what that means is that it's going to send a summary
of all of the changes that have taken place
within the past hour. If there's something that pertains to you, something that you're assigned to or that you have been watching, it's going to summarize
all of those notifications in a single email. Let me show you how
that looks in my inbox. So here within my inbox I've received a notification telling me that I have three new notifications on this particular board and when I open up this email it tells me here's what I've missed. Here are the three distinct
and different changes. Now you'll notice that
each of them include links to both the cards themselves but also the boards as well. So I can come in here, review this email and say, okay none of this
is really terribly important. I don't need to reply or respond or maybe just one of them is but the important thing is, is that it's come in a single email, it's not clogging up my inbox and I can deal with it directly here. Now, fifth on our list of mistakes that I see far too often is not seeing the bigger picture. Chances are that you're managing much more than just a single board and so are members of your team. So how do you stay on
top of all of the cards that are assigned to you and all of the things that are happening across multiple boards? Well, the good news is that Trello has introduced some new views. If you come up here to
the top left-hand corner and we go all the way to the bottom, we're gonna select open work space table. Now this is actually going
to open up in a new tab. What it's going to do is actually display our
board in a different view. So here you can see we've got a much more
column and row vertical view of the same board that
we were looking at here. Cards, lists, labels and members and the great thing here is
that we can actually change and edit these things on the fly. If I need to add myself or
someone else to this card I can do so, if I need to check this task off I can do so right from this screen but this still doesn't solve our problem about seeing things across multiple boards or does it? Here in this long dropdown menu, we can select add boards and here I'm gonna select
my Scott Demo Board So now if I scroll down to the bottom you can see I've brought in
additional card information to this view but the great thing is, is that now I can start to filter and interact with this data
across multiple boards. Now I can always add more boards if I want but let me show you some
of the capability here. Let's say I want to just see the cards that are assigned to me. Well, here you can see
I'm assigned to two cards on this other board, in addition to the cards
that I'm assigned to on this blue board. Maybe I want to scratch that. Maybe I just want to see
the things that are due or that are overdue, what are the things that we're behind on? Well, we're behind on a few
things in both of these boards. You can get this view
across two or as many boards as you would like in this space and if there's a particular
view or filter that you like you can always book mark this view so you don't have to come
back and reset the settings. A fantastic way to see the bigger picture across multiple boards. Now, number six on our list can certainly cause you a major headache and that has to do with filling up the description field with so much information that it almost becomes useless. Now don't get me wrong, the description area within a Trello card can be very valuable where we add links and as much data as we like but what if there's some things in here that are especially important, things that other members
need to see right away or that perhaps we even
want to be able to filter by for example, in this description you can see we've got things like, this will be a live broadcast, it will be a duration of 45 minutes and we need a half crew size. We know would be a whole
lot easier to manage this type of information is if you use custom fields. So down below low here, in this example I've added three custom fields so that we can see is it
a live broadcast or not? It is, well then let's check this box. What's the duration again, it's 45 minutes. Well wouldn't that be helpful
for others to be able to see rather than have to sift
through these several paragraphs in the description and last but not least, we can select a custom dropdown menu and say, it's a half crew size, perfect. It's a half crew size, now everyone will know and if I close this card, when it comes to custom fields you can even determine what
is displayed on the front. So now everyone can see that
this is a live broadcast and the duration is 45 minutes. In this particular example, I've chosen not to share the crew size that that's something
that I don't need to see on the front of the card, but if I wanted to I could do so with custom fields. Last but definitely not least I've perhaps saved the best one and that has to do with not taking advantage of automation. For the last few years, Butler has been baked into a Trello board and if you're not using automation well you're simply just wasting time. How often do you have a process in your Trello board where you need to move a card or create a new card and then remember to do stuff such as set the due date for
a particular time in advance or assign someone or yourself
or add a particular label? Well, Butler can do this all for you. You just set it up one time and then that automation will
happen the way that you want. Let me show you a quick example. Let's say I've got a new
card here called new idea and when I bring new
idea into the task list, when I bring anything into
this task list right here, I want to add the new project label and I wanna set the due date
to three days out from today. Well, watch what happens, if I drag this over here I'm not doing anything else, I suddenly have that new project label and it is now due three days from today just like I said it would but maybe I wanna add something else. Maybe I wanna make sure
whoever makes this move is also assigned to this task as well. Let me show you how to set that up. If we come up here to Butler, I'm gonna go over and
select my rules in this case and maybe I just want to filter it by the rules that are
enabled on this board. So here's this first one
that we just saw in action but let's add something to it. I'm gonna select the edit icon which is gonna open up
my Butler interface here and in this case beyond adding the label and setting the due date to
three working days in advance, I also want to add members. So I want to join the card. Whoever moves it, I want to join the card. I get to hit that green plus button. You can see it added to the
bottom of the actions here and I'm going to hit save. At this point, we can close the Butler menu. Now it's not going to apply it to anything that has already there. It has to apply to new
things going forward. So let's say I'm gonna call
this new idea two in this case and let's drag it over and let's see if this butler recipe works. I drag it over into the list, label, date and perfect. I'm assigned to it as well. So make sure you check
out Butler automations so that you can take
full advantage of Trello. Now, if you'd like to get
even more out of Trello be sure to check out
this playlist right here and if you're looking
for more tips and tricks be sure to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Thank you so much for watching and remember being productive, does it not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.
