How to Use Trello for Personal Productivity (+ Bonus Shortcuts)

as entrepreneurs a harsh lesson we all have to learn at some point is that anything that we don't have a clear system for anything that's not systematized will basically fall apart and not be done properly and that's also true for productivity whether it's productivity in a team or just your personal productivity in today's video I want to help you with this I'm gonna show you how to use Trello but I'm not just gonna show you how to use Trello and what it does I'm gonna show you how to set up a specific system and how to use it like a productive badass so we're going to be using the app called Trello which you can use on the web as well as on your mobile and we're gonna start with this blank Trello board right here now just a quick note I'm gonna show you how to set up a personal productivity board right here and as I'm doing that I'm gonna show you the very basics of Trello I'm not gonna spend too much time on that but if you're already a pro at using Trello you can skip ahead in the video to the part where I start talking about the really badass stuff I'll put a timestamp for that in the video description on YouTube and in the blog post on the active growth blog so that let's get started we have a blank board right here and we can first add lists here the list we're gonna add we're going to add one called brain dump and then when I hit enter it goes to the next one right away then we're going to add to do then we're going to add priority these are just the titles of our list and then we're going to have today waiting and done those are the lists for personal productivity board now we can click in here and create a card this is a card and each card can hold descriptions tasks links and all sorts of stuff so the card basically tells you here is the thing I need to do note that the card can contain a checklist so this is not like a to-do list app where each item or each card would be one thing to do it's more like each card is a project the project tank and a to-do list and it can contain descriptions and more the idea is that you create a task you describe what this task is about you maybe add a checklist with things that need to be done that can be checked off over time and so on and importantly this is the key with Trello this card is somewhere in a process and the generally the cards will move from left to right through your process so here's where we get straight into the personal productivity setup the brain dump column is the first column and basically anything that comes into your mind that you want to process at some point goes in here okay anything any thought that comes up oh I should write a blog post about this or oh I should get some groceries or whatever goes in brain dump this is for further processing then what happens is the from the brain dump you go and process these cards and sometimes this will just be a note you know write blog post about X to get to the next step I'm going to process this so I'm going to then add a description for example of what exactly I want to write maybe create a checklist link it to some tasks whatever and then when I have that then I'm going to move it into to do so now the task is ready to be picked up and done stuff in brain dampers just notes stuffing to do is ready to be picked up and worked on next we have a priority color so this is how we distinguish between just stuff I want to do and stuff that needs to get done soon you can also call this column this week right so we have this week and today about priorities here's an important tip on how to use Trello if we have multiple items in our to-do item item two item three one of the best things about Trello is that you can use this to prioritize your work you can say you know what item three is the most important thing I need to do in my to do this I'm gonna move it to the top right an item this item here is the second most important thing and in general you can always show off all your you can always look at your list here always look at which thing is the most important and you always work from top to bottom so even in your brain dump you can do this and sometimes you know okay here I have some ideas that need to be at the top I should process these soon and some other stuff doesn't matter that much right so you're always going through these always checking are my cards in order so from the to-do list the next step is the stuff goes over into priority so this is stuff that you want to get done soon here's a tip for priority set a date so you can do this by adding a due date and you can set a day and time and this is the critérium for moving something into priority so once it goes into priority it needs to have a deadline all right and then today this is your todays list of stuff to do so again you might have multiple items in priority sorted by priority you say okay today I have time to do this and to do this and these are my daily goals next up we have two more columns waiting what does waiting mean well sometimes you work on something and you get to a point where basically your work is done and you have to wait for something else to come back so maybe I have written all the content for a blog post and it's basically ready to publish but I need to wait for the designers to send me the designs I told them to do to go along with this post so it's nothing I can do here I'm not gonna leave it in my today column or in my priority column because there's nothing I can do so I'll just put it into waiting I will add a comment whenever I put something into waiting a lot a comment saying waiting for design and maybe link to you know link to a task link to a folder where the designs will be saved something like that so that whenever I'm looking in the waiting column I can see what I'm waiting for I can follow up if this stays there for several days and nothing happens and then finally the final step in the process is that something goes into the done column and that's where stuff is finished now the reason I have a done column because what you can do is you can actually just archive it so it's done we click archive and it disappears from your board the reason I have a done column is because this allows me to do a weekly or monthly review of what did I get done this is useful for your personal productivity as well as for working with teams so you can review what has the team done have a discussion with everyone about it ok so that is our personal productivity setup right right there right we have brain dump to do priority today waiting and done now what's important is the way you process this there are two rules for this first in your today column you have to clean that up every day so either the night before you plan your tasks for the next day that's what I recommend you do or in the morning you plan your tasks for that day and in the evening you have to clean it up so if you haven't finished something then you can move back into priority or maybe it goes into waiting or whatever it is but don't carry today tasks from one day to the next like always clear out your today column before the next planning session from what am I going to do so even if you are working on it has to take several days you would put that in with whatever other tasks you're working on that day and maybe you can finish two of them and then you clean out the today call them again before you start adding new items in your next planning round the second rule is that you have to periodically go through your brain dump and done lists and clean those up as well so I recommend a brief weekly review and the more intense monthly review where you go through your brain dump you kick out some stuff that's been sitting there for weeks that's just not gonna happen you go you look at your done list you look at what can I learn from this what did I do well what they've done do so well and then you clean it out and you can do this by going to archive all cards in this list so once a week you can do that this works great for your own personal productivity and if you want more content on this let me know for now I just want to leave it with that and I encourage you to get started with this set up a board like this start working with this this also works great for working with teams and to go through some of the great tricks and shortcuts you can use here in just a second let me populate this board with a few items then we'll look at some of the really cool stuff you can do in Trello all right now we've got some more stuff on this board and pretty soon if you start following this process your board will fill up even more so if you work with a team of people and they all work on the same board which is generally a good thing but it can also lead to a lot of chaos so let me show you some of the shortcuts to use to make Trello much faster to work with and to make organizing your board much more effective so first of all if I create a new task create a new task or card then you can use shortcuts the first thing is when I hit enter it will automatically open a new card to create so I click out of it and then I hover and now comes the good stuff I can hit space to assign this to myself to automatically assign this to myself I can hit a to assign it to other people so here I'll get a list of everyone who's on my team in this demo it's just me I can hit L to give it a label and you can name these labels anything you want they will be tagged with these labels in the view here I can hit D to set a deadline right away in the calendar and I can hit C as we saw before instead of going opening and hitting archived can just hover over something and hit C on the keyboard to get rid of that item to archive that item so those are some of the most important shortcuts specifically the way I work with this is that I create my new task create task I click out of it I assign it to myself usually or I sign - whoever else I'm creating this for I hit L I give it the appropriate label and I hit D and add a due date if I already know when this is supposed to be finished and right away that is so much more information you know without even having to open a task this is also great when you're brain dumping several things but you already know okay this is a this is a blog post as a specific label I know who's gonna write this and I roughly know when it's gonna be published you can really quickly brain dump some things that are going to be more than just labels floating around and this becomes really important when your board gets busy the best key the very best shortcut in Trello is cue when you hit cue it shows you only cars that are assigned to you so this is great for working with teams where you can quickly look at what is my stuff on this board you can also ask your team to do this on the regular make sure that their cards are in the right places basically a weekly cleanup or some such thing now you can also get to this from the menu and filters and here for example if I say I only want to see the cards with the green label gives me that filter this is super important working with filters is an absolute must for working with Trello because it allows you to really work this board and really put in everything you're working on and the filtering allows you to kind of clean up and see through the chaos and more easily prioritize what's going on and what you need to be working on all right so there you have it that's a quick tour of how to use Trello how it works of how to set up a personal productivity board and of my favorite shortcuts and ways to use the features in Trello I try to keep this as short as possible and like I said I encourage you to get started with this and then you know set up a board like this and then if you have questions or you want more tips let me know so I work with Trello a lot I have a lot more tips and strategies where this came from and if you're interested in hearing them just leave a comment below and let me know if you have specific questions that always helps so if this is something you'd like to see more of just let me know and I'll create more Trello guides in the future thank you for watching I hope you found this useful I'm Shane from active growth and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: ActiveGrowth

Views: 173,597

Keywords: trello, productivity, getting things done, GTD, entrepreneur, software, tutorial, apps, online marketing, Shane Melaugh

Id: WZwOAMpkPQo

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018