how i plan my week with ical + trello | time blocking for productivity

in today's video i'm going to be sharing how i use digital calendars specifically ical and trello to organize my week as a self-employed artist [Music] if you've been around my channel you know that i have a lot of videos about planning on paper the way that i use my digital and paper planning together is digital planning for me is more of a pre-plan so i start by digital planning and then i use my paper planners when the actual week and day comes for me it really is important to have both but i'm going to show you how i use trello to sort out my projects and then i'll show you how i use ical to plan my week and i'll show you how i use them together because they do integrate together very nicely we're going to start in trello and i do have my laptop here in front of me so i will share my screen with you but you will see me looking down throughout this video as i am setting it up i'm not going to show you my actual trello board i'm going to show you a sample board but i promise i'm going to show you exactly what i do and it won't be any different it's just i have so many ideas and projects that i can't necessarily share in my actual board so i'm going to make a sample for you here in trello.com you can see your boards and i just created this sample board and then you can create what they call lists so you can see my lists here that i started to create are ideas design writing filming videos editing videos and let's do another list and let's say published so this is kind of how i take my projects through trello i start by creating a card so let's create a card and let's say this is going to be a blog post about my 2022 goals okay once i have the card it's really easy to drag and drop these through different stages of work that i need to do depending on what it is so let's say for a blog post the first thing that we need to do is write the blog post so i'm going to drag that over into my writing section some of my other ideas that i have sitting here are a planner setup video and so the first thing that i need to do for a video is actually film it so i'm gonna throw it over here and then once it's filmed it will get dragged to editing videos and you can kind of see that when i log into my trello i can really easily tell which projects are in what stage and usually i have ideas is a long long list i'll just throw my ideas in there as they come to me and then i know that i have a backup of all kinds of ideas so let's say i want to design a line of planner stickers for summer i'm going to move that to design and then let's say once i've done that let's say fall planner stickers that will just be in my ideas for my next ideas i want to do christmas stickers and so on now the reason that i set up my list with these titles design writing filming editing the way that i choose those titles is those are my work blocks throughout the week and so design is always a work block that i'm going to have throughout the week i'm always going to be filming videos maybe not every week maybe every other week i'm always editing videos and so on so these are the things that i regularly do i also keep a list called published so that when these tasks are done i can just move them to the published section and i can just kind of keep a record of the things that are already done so we're going to take the example of a planner setup video and i'm going to show you exactly we're going to fill out this card fully and i'm going to show you exactly what i would do for this so for labels you can completely customize your labels battery died one moment okay okay so i'm going to go ahead and customize my other labels the way that i normally do so just to show you some examples of the labels that i use i've created a few here and so for this example this is just going to be a video so i've added that youtube tag and then let's go ahead and tag the other ones with appropriate labels for a blog post for example i want to do blog post and then let's also give it a pinterest label let's give that a new color okay and then for planner stickers for example this would be an example of a product release in my shop so let's say we're going to do products just so i know that's something i need to create and then let's say i'm also going to do a blog post about it and i'm also going to do a newsletter about it and this would be if i want all of these things to come out the same day so for example if i wanted to do a blog post i actually would make a separate card for that because i want that to come out on a different day and all of these are going to have products and newsletter attached to them so the labels are just really helpful it is an optional thing i think but if you click on them in this view they kind of disappear so they can be really small or you can click on them so you can actually read them i usually just have them displayed this way and then the other thing that you can do with the cards is you can assign them a due date so in the description this is typically where i would write a video outline or an outline for my post or whatever it is i do give every single card a due date and this is where it gets really exciting so let's say we want to schedule this video for 12 o'clock p.m on a friday i'm going to say that my due date is in here and it also gives you a check box so you can check this off when the project is done you can also add a checklist so let's say i'm going to add all the steps that i need to create a video so we'll say film edit work on a thumbnail work on a description um and then check comments i know i have a typo there but we're just gonna roll forward it's really flexible in all the different features that you can add i'm sure there's more there's an attachment you can really be creative with whatever you need your trello board to have now here is the very cool part i have assigned this card a due date so the most important thing about trello for me is the calendar power up so to add this i'm going to go to power ups add power ups and i believe you can have just one power up oh no now it says they are unlimited so that's exciting um the only one that i use is the calendar power up so i'm going to click add and i'll just x out now you can see my calendar power up is right here so when i click this calendar power up you can see that any cards i gave a due date they're now showing up on my calendar and this is really nice because you can view your monthly calendar right here in trello and it gives you a really good outline of all your projects but you can also go into settings and put enable sync and it's going to give you an icalendar feed that you can actually add into your ical and that's what i do so that all of my trello due dates show up in my ical and when i go to plan my week they're already in there so we're going to go into ical i have a sample calendar here in ical that i've already filled out with some of my regular tasks and these are tasks that are not on my trello board they're just some of the other maintenance things that i need to do so for example on monday morning i always do emails and any admin tasks oftentimes on friday i'm doing payday and financial tasks so those are just kind of the regular administrative things that i always need to do um and then i will go in and add my trello content so we're going to go new calendar subscription and we'll just paste that link that trello gave us and push subscribe it allows you to customize the settings and the color i'm going to give it a blue color and i am going to make sure that it does refresh as often as possible and i'll just push okay synced right away so you can see my sample board and i'm just going to call this trello so i know those are my trello items showing up here now it's really cool when you click on the trello card it actually shows you which list this card is in on trello so that way i know which stage of the product process this card is in so for example this would be a video that i am posting on youtube and so i know that it's in filming okay that tells me that i need to work backwards and that at some point i need to film videos and whenever i see this film videos in my ical if i'm uncertain of what videos i need to film where i've forgotten this is where i go to my trello board and i go to my filming videos list here and i just do whichever ones are in this filming list and once those videos have been filmed i'm just going to drag them over to editing and again let's add editing videos to our calendar and if this day comes around and i've forgotten which videos i need to edit i'll just check the edit videos column here and edit any videos that are in this section and i can see right away okay i only need to edit one planner city setup video for this week and so i know that won't take me as much time so i can kind of adjust my times as i think that they're needed based on how many tasks i have now let's say i have a new release due let's give this a due date let's say it's due the following tuesday at 12 p.m so this is in the design category okay so i'm going to look over here and it's gonna show up on the following tuesday this might take a few minutes for it to show up but i know it's going to be over here so that means back here this week i need to start designing for that new release so i'm going to put in design i like to give myself blocks of two and a half hours for design i'm going to push it up so i have a 30 minute lunch break for this day and then i know a new release is going to take me several blocks of designing so i'm going to just kind of adjust my schedule as needed so we'll give it three design blocks and i only have one project in that design list right now so i think that's going to be plenty of time to get that project done by the following tuesday so i hope that kind of helps you explain how i plan my week i basically work backwards and this is with only having a couple of due dates in mind my actual trello board is full i have for each list i probably have five to ten cards of projects i'm working on so it does get a little bit complicated the more cards that i have in there but again this allows me to work in blocks and so it's really easy if i've forgotten what to do i can refer to my list and i can see those five or ten cards in a row and or in a column rather and it just helps me know exactly what i need to be working on during that work day so then on a weekly basis as i go into my work planner this is my happy planner i either use my own inserts that i have designed and they look like this they are just a three column layout or sometimes i will use the happy planner vertical inserts and they also have three boxes on each column and so what i do is i personally put my surface design tasks in the top box i then put my tasks for my online shop in the middle box and then anything personal or just other tasks goes in the bottom and then i put when content is due at the bottom of the page again i do have a setup of this work planner on my channel so if you want to see that in more detail do check it out but the whole trello and ical system that i've set up that allows me to know exactly what i need to write down in my work planner so usually on a saturday or sunday i will take a look at my ical for the following week and i will go ahead and write everything in pen on my work planner i know exactly which tasks need to be worked on so i hope that helps explain how i use my trello and ical as a digital planning system if you have any questions or there's any further videos that you'd like to see about digital or paper planning please do comment below because i would love to hear your suggestions thank you for watching this video i hope you enjoyed and it was helpful for you i will see you again in my next video bye [Music]

Channel: Ashton Womack

Views: 6,639

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Id: Tec7gj7hNgw

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022