Trello Productivity Tip: Use "Board Velocity" to Get More Done

this video is about one factor that can make or break your productivity when you're working either alone or with a team using Trello or any system like Trello hello I'm Shane from active growth and a lot of questions came in when I made my first tutorial on how to use Trello to become more productive and many of those questions can be answered with this one factor I want to talk about today that one factor is board velocity so if we look at a Trello board right here the key to working with Trello is that we process that things move through a process we want stuff to move through this board from left to right until it reaches done which means that we dump stuff into the first column it gets processed and we move it into the next column it gets processed either by ourselves or by someone else and moves to the next stage it gets prioritized it goes on our to-do list it goes and then finally it reaches the end of the board at some point and board velocity is the speed at which stuff moves through your board what I have loaded here is the personal productivity board that I set up in my first tutorial but this is true for any board whether you're working on your own personal project or you're working with the whole team what matters is that you have a process where stuff moves from left to right and stuff is sorted in order of priority from top to bottom in the different lists and there has to be a certain speed a certain momentum at which stuff moves through this board because a stagnating slow board will kill your productivity and a lot of this is psychological if you're basically looking at the same board every day and nothing ever moves it doesn't feel like you're getting anything done and that makes you basically it doesn't motivate you to get stuff done it gives you the feeling that you can't actually get stuff done it gives you the feeling of being stuck this is a large psychological factor is a huge difference between working on a board that has good city where stuff is moving or working on a board that is stagnating now what does this mean that means that this board velocity thing is also the answer to a lot of questions I got about what goes in a card and what goes on a board so the question is you know do you have a separate board for each project a separate board for each client is one client one card how do you do this and the answer is it should be determined by board velocity so I want to choose a task size that makes sure stuff keeps moving so let me give you two examples right if I have a single card here that's a project that says redesign and rebuild entire website and it's big website even if we break this down into milestones and checklists and stuff which is good this can give us some sense of progression right as we as we complete tasks here we get some sense of progression but if we have a task of this size and let's say it goes into priority or it goes into today and it goes into in progress basically this is gonna be here probably for weeks right rebuilding and redesigning a whole website probably a multi week project so that's just gonna be stuck there and every day you're grinding through parts of this task so that is too large of a project for one card and what I would do is I would break this down into chunks and make sure that you have individual cards for this project and you could for example use a label right hover hit L to assign a label so you could assign this a label that identifies it as this project the website rebuilding project and you have individual cards where each card has a number of tasks in it that are that make logical sense together and that can be completed in one day or less and that way you can move stuff through the board on the other hand the other extreme is if we have a single card here where the task is had a featured image two blog post well how long does that takes it's like 30 seconds right open the blog post upload an image done that's too much for a single card because then you're just even though that would make you know if all your tasks cause is small then everything moves quickly but you'll have thousands of times create chaos so this size of task belongs in one card along with other checklists so the card might be finished this blog post and one of the checklist items is upload a featured image so this is basically what you want to keep in mind for deciding the size of the project that is represented by one card like I said before I try to aim for one card should take a day or less to finish so it can keep moving through the board there's also a powerup you can use to assist you in this so if you go to the menu here there so-called power-ups which are like add-ons for Trello you can search here for aging card aging here and what this powerup will do is it will create an effect that basically the older the longer your card has been stuck in the same place and hasn't been moved or processed the more it'll start looking like it's aging kind of gets crumpled up and rusty and this gives you a visual representation of whether stuff is going stale on your board or not so this is a powerup you can activate and use to make this immediately visible right what's stuck on your board and what's moving keep in mind that on the free version of Trello you can only have one powerup per board so if there's something else that's more important for you to use then you'll use that or you have to upgrade to use more than one so that is the principle of board velocity and that's the one thing that I recommend you go and do right now is basically go and look at your board and look at what is the size of these tasks any task that has either been stuck somewhere for a very long time break it into smaller tasks and any task that you see that is too big or too small either consolidate them or break them apart this is something that takes a bit of practice but you will get used to it right if you work with Trello if you work with this system and you keep card velocity in mind then after a while it basically comes naturally to you because you know what size of task will take how long to move all right so after a while you basically barely have to think about this anymore and you'll just kind of get a feeling for the size of task to put in a single card alright I hope that helps you become even more productive with Trello and as always if you have questions about this if there are other tutorials or the things you'd like to see tutorials on how to do with Trello just leave a comment below and I will happily keep making these tutorials as long as they keep being useful for you

Channel: ActiveGrowth

Views: 15,100

Keywords: trello, productivity, to do list, task management, project management, personal productivity, personal development, habits, board velocity, motivation, flow, psychology, Shane Melaugh, tutorial, getting things done, work, kanban, time management, projects, skills, more time, better work, speed

Id: HqiwMOWJcIs

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018