The app that makes me productive, focused & stress-free - Trello

so one of the things i think really stresses me out is the feeling that i have tons of stuff that needs doing but i don't have a really clear picture or idea in my head of what all that stuff is you know i'll throughout the day have emails coming in i'll have bills on my desk ready to be paid i'll have essays that need to be written chores to do washing to do birthday cards to send videos to make and invoicing to sort out all of this stuff will be like accumulating in my head and just making me more and more anxious that i'll inevitably forget to do one of them and i end up feeling insanely guilty when i forget to do one of these things or just a bit disappointed in myself because i've left something to the last minute that slipped my mind and therefore not been able to do a great job but my trello system allows me to get all of this stuff that's going on in my head out and into one neat organized place and although i'm going to be talking about trello in this video because that's the tool i personally use all the ideas principles and tips i'm gonna be sharing will apply no matter what system you use [Music] there's this idea of flow which i first came across in a matte developer video and it's pretty similar to what a guy called cal newport describes as deep work it's this state where you're fully absorbed by the work that you're doing so you're really unaware of anything else that's going on around you and studies that i came across in a book called the rise of superhuman by a guy called stephen kotler have shown that this state of flow can increase productivity by up to 500 percent increased learning by 230 and increase creativity by 700 percent you're in the work and have a level of focus that produces exceptional results at least for me i found that i'm never able to enter the state of flow where i'm fully absorbed in my work when there are other distractions coming in like notifications popping up on my phone or especially when there are other pieces of work that i kind of know i need to be doing floating around in my head and that's why i find trello so powerful i write down pretty much every single thing i need to do and in trello it's organized by priority and when it needs to be done and that gives me this mental clarity so that i'm not focused on what needs to be done but on just doing it and doing it well and i think what makes people stand out in any field whether it's academia or in the workplace is this ability to get to the crux of issues to truly understand at the core what is going on and i think this is only possible where you enter this state of flow or the state of deep work where you're really grappling with these ideas and at least for me trello is the only way i've found to be able to kind of clear my mind of all the stuff that needs doing and enter this state where you're able to truly think about things at this deep level now this video isn't sponsored by trello sadly it's just a tool that i use every single day and that i love so much so that i've created a skillshare course sharing how i created my own trello productivity system so that you can build a very similar system for yourself so if you're interested you can follow the link in the description to get your free skillshare trial and to do my productivity trello course [Music] so how come i recommend using trello rather than other personal organization tools like notion or clicker i also use other tools like notion and click up but when it comes to having all of the stuff going on in my life in one place trello i found is the easiest to set up and also one of the easiest to use as far as i'm aware trello is the og kanban board and for me it has the best user experience of any kanban board available and most importantly it's not got more features than we need to keep our lives in order there's a swedish notion of la gum which i'm almost certainly saying wrong it means like not too much not too little like just right and i think trello has this it avoids the overwhelm of having tons of features at your disposal which i think is a downfall of some other tools so i just want to share four principles that i've been keeping in mind as i've built out my own trello setup and that you can implement in your own organization system wherever that is so first up is to compartmentalize your life and in trello i like to have different lists for each of the different kind of categories of things i have going on so that studying when i was studying work kind of my business and side hustle on youtube but also like personal life social life and other people's birthdays for example to-do lists at least for me often just become one long list of everything i need to do at work and so trello gives me the opportunity i think to include non-work stuff these things that really matter and i think it can feel odd to feel like you're building a system around like making sure you call your parents or meeting up with friends but these things do often slip back when we're really busy with work and these things fundamentally matter more than any work ever will and then when you have kind of more habit-oriented focuses so like running for me for example that sits within the general to-do list i think it's important that you kind of build in medium-term goals within trello to keep it on your mind when you're looking at trello so for example doing a 10k for me but i then accompany that with another habit tracking app i personally really like done to make sure i'm continually working towards that goal so second is to break tasks down and unlike for example with like apple to-do lists where you can't have this hierarchy in trello you can have one task and then you can split that down into subtasks one of the biggest causes for me of procrastination is feeling like there's tons to do on a task and so the ability to break that down and really kind of build in low hanging fruit that i can really easily accomplish is a massive motivator to get started and i also try to make sure that the first items in this sub to-do list are really easy to complete so it might be just having a call with someone to chat through our initial ideas or reading an article set up within your system you need some form of prioritization so for me this means having a priority list with to do list items that i either think really need to be done or that i want to focus on in the next two weeks roughly i personally think that around two weeks for a priority list is about right because it means that i'm not looking so short term that i can't really make progress with the stuff that i want to do but it's also not so far out that like tons of stuff is likely to come up that means that i actually need to completely change the stuff i'm focusing on within trello you can also use labels and due dates which we explore much more deeply within the course the other thing that i really love about trello is that i personally like to have a physical to-do list each day in my filofax and trello allows me to take things from this priority list and put them into my to-do list each day and then physically cross them off with the paper i just like the feel of and yeah for me that's the system i like to use and finally i think that any good digital organization system should have some kind of automation one of the great advantages of using a digital solution like trello rather than pen and paper is that you can have the computer do all kinds of clever stuff for you so for example i have trello for tasks that i do regularly automatically populate the sub tasks that are relevant for that task and there are also some other really cool automations within trello that we go into in much more detail in my skillshare course so again if you're interested in trying out your own trello system you can find a link in the description to sign up for a free trial of skillshare and from there you'll be able to access the course for free [Music] you

Channel: Liam Porritt

Views: 37,934

Keywords: stay focused, Trello, productive, productivity, how to stay focused, how I study for 10 hours, deep work, liam porritt, best productivity apps, productivity apps, to-do list, to-do list app, to-do list notion

Id: n5d8phK34Bo

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021