How to use TRELLO for Getting Things Done (GTD)

hi i'm lucas and welcome to this trello tutorial where you'll learn how to build a personal productivity system in trello that automates away busy work on the one hand but keeps you focused on what needs to get done on the other trello is often used and marketed as a collaborative project management tool however it can work for your own individual needs just as well how you engage with your tasks is personal so in this tutorial you'll get a high level overview of trello's capabilities whilst giving you the freedom to configure it in a way that works for you we'll go over the following chapters and while i recommend you watch the whole thing you can use timestamps on this video to jump to a specific chapter if you want to in the first chapter you'll learn all about trello's features and settings or it's better to say the ones i think are essential because trello is feature heavy and it's easy to get lost in it so if i'm not discussing a feature that trello does have i didn't consider it important enough or essential for this particular setup in chapter 2 we'll go over the workspace design with boards lists and labels in chapter 3 we'll talk about how you can capture new input into the system in many different ways in chapter 4 you'll be challenged to take the system for a test drive and in chapter 5 will build your personal reference library containing all the information you want access to in your life for this tutorial you of course need a trello account you can use the free version it will suffice but you'll be missing out on some features that premium has which is what i've gone with for this tutorial i'll make sure to highlight any premium only features as we go so you know what you may be missing out on in addition you'll need a unito account because they provide an essential power up for this trello setup it's like an add-on it costs 10 dollars per month but they provide a free trial so you can really test it to see if it works for you having said that follow along with artsy andy who we'll be setting up this system for once you've created your trello account navigate to the top right click your avatar and press settings here you can configure your account language notifications and access logs among other miscellaneous settings trello is part of atlassian similar to how google owns youtube so your account is actually with them some settings like your email password or account deletion must be managed from there once you're happy with your settings go back to the home page and delete any default boards if you haven't yet trello has the following taxonomies it starts with workspaces which contain boards which contain lists which contain cards for this tutorial we'll set up just one workspace by pressing settings you can edit your workspace details such as its name url and description make sure your workspace visibility is set to private since this is about your life membership settings aren't really relevant here since we're assuming you'll just be using this on your own billing is managed on the workspace level in trello so make sure everything is in order there before moving on first up let's set up our boards for this system you'll need to create five the runway a projects board a board named not now a personal wiki and a board called hire horizons i recommend keeping the same order by numbering your lists trello will automatically sort them on the left hand side use emojis to spice things up and visually demonstrate what a board is actually about inside of the runway board create these lists from left to right inbox my tasks completed and third parties press show menu to change the background to your liking either to a set color or an image now let's create some labels which you can apply to single cards usually tasks create the following labels next for tasks we can perform now waiting for tasks were waiting to be completed by others time denominators choose what makes sense for you here when estimating time required for your type of tasks energy denominators i went with low medium and high but you can get as granular as you like for estimating energy required for a task contexts which can be a place or tool that you require for performing the task this is one of the most personal elements of this system as everybody has unique contexts think about your tasks to come up with contexts that make sense for you tags containing names of any third parties you may be actively or at least regularly interacting with think about names of friends family but also companies or other entities i recommend updating this section of labels regularly to avoid clutter for andy we just have one so far for her friend gonzalo i recommend color coding these labels consistently and adding a symbol in front of the title to easily find them when tagging or searching for a card as well as making sure any card has all required labels in the project board create lists where you list out every outcome you're actively pursuing which requires more than one step to achieve andy for example is trying to get into art school and has a project for submitting applications she's also looking for a new canvas to paint on and already made some progress on this project under labels create the exact same labels that your runway has unfortunately this needs to be done manually and i understand this is a bit cumbersome but you probably won't need to change it much after so it's really a one-time setup thing in the not now board list out items you may want to do someday but can't or don't want to engage with right now i recommend splitting these boards up by category andy has a list of art museums she wants to visit but also recipes she wants to try cooking and drawings to make inside of the personal wiki you can store and organize information in a way that makes sense to you you can either create separate lists by category similar to the not now list or just dump it all on one list and use labels exclusively for andy here we've gone for a mix sorting on the list level by general topic and using labels for the type of information like pdf video etc in the higher horizons board you can capture what is meaningful to you on a deeper level create the following lists my areas of focus my smart goals my vision and my ikigai i hope i'm not butchering the pronunciation there this is also known as life purpose for example andy is currently paying the bills through a starbucks job which she doesn't really enjoy but takes seriously nonetheless which is why it's defined here as an area of focus in her life associated responsibilities are showing up on time serving customers with a smile and not misspelling customer names on their coffee cups smart goals need to be specific measurable action-oriented realistic and timely andy currently has two of them getting accepted into an art school and achieving 1 000 instagram followers my smart goal is to get to 1 000 subscribers by the end of february help me achieve it by pressing subscribe if you haven't yet it's free and a great way to say thanks if this tutorial is helpful to you so far lastly andy's vision for her artistic career is to become a famous artist whose art is displayed in galleries around the world so that she can share her message of world peace good luck with that andy ikigai is a japanese concept which is the intersection of what you're good at what you love what the world needs and what you can get paid for andy believes spreading love through art meets those conditions and is thus what she's defined as her ikigai one of the first lists we created was the inbox list inside of the runway board this will become the central location for any new raw input to be entered whether it's a quick reminder about buying apples or a life-changing business idea whatever seems relevant capture it into here for later processing your head is a great place for generating ideas but a lousy one for keeping them the key here is to make capturing easy no matter where or when let's go over all of the ways in which cello enables you to capture the first way is obviously by just adding a card to the board manually press add a card jot down your thoughts and press enter or click add card on mobile you can add a card manually in two ways the first is to open the app and pressing the green plus button in the bottom right corner from there press card select the runway board and inbox list and you're good to go once you've set up your board and list it will stay put on that setting regardless of previous submissions effectively you've made the inbox your default capture list here you can make this process faster by adding the widgets to your home screen which lands on the same entry menu enabling you to easily add cards to your inbox on the go including pictures taken from your phone many apps have a web clipper of sorts to capture items you find on the web for desktop this works a bit strangely as it's not a browser extension but rather a specific link you have to save as a bookmark to find this link navigate to trello.com add dash card save the link it tells you to in your bookmarks and then press that whenever you're on a website you'd like to save to your inbox from there select the runway board and inbox list to save that webpage for mobile this is a bit more intuitive as you just have to use the social share options to save it as a card using the trello gmail add-on allows you to forward emails into your trello inbox just install it authorize it and then you'll be able to select any email and forward it into your trello inbox if you don't prefer add-ons go to the runway board menu and select email to board settings you'll get a unique email address which you can save to your favorite contacts and email items straight into the inbox list by setting up auto forwarding rules in your mail clients you can also auto populate your reading lists for example using this technique with your favorite newsletters now that we've got a good understanding of how trello works and got the main boards and lists all set up it's time to get to work and take this thing for a test drive let's start simple by taking an item from the inbox and just moving it around in the runway board if this is a standalone task we don't need a project for it anyway let's say that andy needs to take out the trash inner studio lots of paper scraps and paint tubes that need to be recycled probably by clicking on the pen we'll rename the item to take out trash then we'll drag it by clicking holding and moving the mouse into the my tasks list now that this item is in the right list we can apply some labels to it just press on the card and on the right hand side under add to cart select labels we'll select next assume it takes 10 minutes doesn't require much energy and indicates to be performed in our studio if you're on trello premium you could even add the location here which will render a map view now we have our first fully processed item sitting in our my task list ready to be performed and it takes out the trash which means this task should be marked complete to do so all she has to do is move the card again from my tasks to the next list named completed since it's no longer actionable though the labels need to be removed which can be done by navigating to labels and unselecting any active ones okay okay i know what you're thinking that was quite a lot of work for just marking a task complete fortunately we don't have to do this all manually trello has an automation feature named butler which is nothing short of phenomenal in its capabilities let's first see it in action and then i'll show you how to build one of these yourself for example andy may have another standalone task named write birthday card for mother we move the card into my tasks and apply the next writing 5 minutes and medium energy labels andy wrote the card and wants to now mark it complete instead of manually removing the labels though all she has to do is press the card and on the right hand side under automation press the button with a check mark watch what happens here saw that the labels were automatically removed and the task was moved to completed plus the title change to indicate that as well the use for this will become apparent shortly so how does this work to create this feature on the board press the automation button and select buttons and then go to cart button in here you can set up a name for the button and what pressing it should do by pressing edit i can show you exactly how this one works you can name it anything but i a simple visual representation of a single checkmark emoji at the bottom you can select various actions to be performed upon clicking the button i selected three number one move the cart to the completed list number two remove all labels from the card and number three rename the cards to completed card name using this exact syntax takes the pre-existing card name and adds whatever you write to it then you just need to save it and you'll see it as an option on every button in this board for actions others need to perform you can add whatever it is you're waiting for as a separate card in the third parties list and adding the tag containing the name of who or what it is you're waiting for let's assume that andy is waiting for gonzalo's review of her painting so we add that as the title label it gonzalo and waiting for for agenda items with gonzalo in other words things andy may want to talk to him about we can add those to a separate card and label it just gonzalo now that you know how to process individual items let's look at the bigger picture here and assume a more filled up system so we can dive into filtering to fill up our task list some more let's pull the completed action out of there and move them back into active tasks with their associated labels first next let's go to our project board and see if any items in there are next actions we have two open projects with associated actions but we don't see them in our runway board yet let's fix that let's take the item write application letter template we'll select it and add the labels next writing 20 minutes and high energy now you may be tempted to move this car to the runway board manually or even copying it both of those won't work though if we move it we don't have an overview on the project level of whether or not this is being worked on and what's been done because the cards have been removed from there if we copy it that problem is solved but any status change won't be taken into account if changes are made to any of those two cards so instead what we'll want to do is synchronize the cards this is something we can achieve with a trello power-up named mirror by unito you'll need to create a separate account for it and authorize it for your trello account it's also a paid service though they do offer a free trial once you've set up your mirror power up navigate to the cart from the project board and press it for destination board select the runway and for destination list select my tasks press mirror to initiate now you can see a link to the duplicated card in the runway board let's press it and indeed the task is duplicated perfectly now let's see what happens if we change the time estimate from 20 to 30 minutes we can press the link taking us back to the original project card and after waiting for just a moment it'll automatically update the label on there as well as you can see mirror enables us to duplicate cards and keep them synchronized across multiple boards keep in mind that it will only apply changes that are available in both boards which is exactly why we needed to create the same set of labels for both of these boards previously now that we know how this works let's do the same for the other actions in the project board apply the tax press mirror and sync to my tasks on the runway alright now that andy's my task list is starting to fill up and become more representative of what you may see in your trello system you'll probably have a lot more still the need to organize this all becomes more apparent let's assume that andy is currently in her art studio this means she'll want to see only actions that can be performed in there and exclude all others from you one way to do this is by pressing the filter button and navigating to labels you can get as granular as you want here let's start to see what happens if we press studio it shows two items one action that we can perform now but also another that has a start date set in the future let's filter that one out too since we can't do it now and add the next stack to the filter but now we see every task again that's because we were on any match selecting exact match means both conditions need to be met not just one of them this allows you to get detailed with filtering for example by also taking into account time and energy filters similarly you can also use filters to distinguish between waiting for and agenda items together with their associated third party as well as filtering for the third party only to find potential agenda items for filters you use often i recommend using saved search all you have to do is type in the label you're filtering for in the search field it'll spit out the actions you're looking for and by pressing save this search you can repeat it anytime let's call this search studio with an emoji 2 indicated visually and now we have an elegant way to filter for these actions with ease now let's see what happens to the project view if we mark an item complete let's do that with the find art schools to apply to task all we have to do is press the check mark button on the card in the runway and animations take care of the rest the labels are removed the title is changed and the mirror functionality ensures this is carried over to the project view since the project board does not have a separate completed list the changed title helps us understand which cards on the project have been completed which are next actions thanks to the presence of a green tag and which may be tasked to be added to the runway as a next action in the future due to them not being mars complete but also not having the green next tag you can take these automations as far as your imagination takes you to for example you could build a rule in the project boards that alerts you if a project has no next action specified or automate certain labels to be added to a card over time as you use the system more and more you'll discover where automations can help you save time alright to finish things off let's look at how we can build a personal reference library or a personal wiki as i like to call it here we will store any information that is not actionable but that we want to retain easy access to these could be great articles we've read invoices we've sent chat logs with some company support agent anything how you want to organize your wiki is entirely up to you for andy i've chosen to go with both lists and labels i organize the lists by general topic you can see that she's saved drawing tutorials anything related to art schools and lists containing her favorite quotes the way i've set up labels here is to indicate what type of information it is remember labels are not shared between boards which in this case is good as it means our view isn't cluttered with next time or energy tags that have no place here instead we have a collection of yellow tags for articles images pdfs or videos since labels can be combined you can also go for a label only approach or combine multiple labels on one card trello allows for rich formatting within cards which in this case for example means that a youtube link can be converted into a preview including the thumbnail title and description that's pretty awesome but it comes at a cost as of recording this video rich formatted cards cannot be labeled so you'll have to choose whether just to store the url with labels or a preview without labels you can see the same problem in our not now list with articles or recipes we want to try in the future the urls for the articles are turned into previews with images but we cannot label them by pressing the pen and selecting convert to regular card you can revert the cards to have full labeling functionality but lose the preview and that's it i recognize that this may be a challenging system to set up with all of these automations and all the features you've been exposed to here but i'm confident that through these automations once they are working for you and through you getting used to the system on a day-to-day basis this can truly become a very powerful personal productivity system once you get the hang of the buttons the workflow design the labels and the automations you'll be able to cruise on autopilot focus on what needs to be done while letting the automations do the grunt work for you as you may have seen though trello really is a sandbox so i encourage you in fact i challenge you to make this system better make it work for you by tweaking it in any way you see fit perhaps a different add-on a power-up perhaps different boards or labels use this video as inspiration rather than an exact setup you need to follow by the book so let me know what you think let me know if you have any questions leave them all down in the comments and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 18,447

Keywords: trello, trello tutorial, how to use trello, trello gtd, trello getting things done, getting things done, gtd

Id: PbSsBvpa2t4

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022