Trello: My Go-To App for Keeping Life Organized and Dreams Alive

Every single morning for the past four years I’d wake up, launch my browser and, like instinct, open and view my Trello boards.

It’s one of the few apps I’ve habitually used for the majority of my working life. I use it for everything and anything that requires focus and organization: travel plans, building this blog, the online store to pair with it after, and personal projects dating back to 2014.

Trello and I have gone a long way back (August 2013), and it continues to be my go-to Kanban app when I need to visualize any journey from start to finish.

It’s seen me through the ups and downs, have stood by as I tried other productivity tools, from GTD to Gantt to project management to other Kanban apps. But no matter how colorful or robust the competitors were, I always came back to Trello for

• Simplicity
• The ability to customize my boards
• Power-ups
• Card features (checklists, attachments, reminders)
• Comments
• Labels
• The wonderful feeling of moving a card from Working on this to Done
• The complete absence of annoying banners or flashy buttons to subscribe to the higher tier plans

Fast forward to today, and I thought it’d be nice to do an appreciation post where I share some of my daily boards and the nice changes added to the product.

How I’m using Trello today

Trello keeps me on track of what I want to achieve long-term, where I want to go someday, and what I can do to sustain my happiness.

In the board above, I brainstormed and turned family goals, travel destinations, game marathons, and to-be-read lists into cards. I’ve even added a list for de-cluttering my house—something I’ve been trying to do for the past six months already.

This board has in a way become my life guide, the reminder I need to work hard and transform these dreams become a reality.

Diwa Daily was the fruit of the many days spent planning and working on each project phase on Trello. The board looked way different when the blog launched, especially after I’ve built the online store to pair it with. After a year, this is what it looks like now.

From the left are four lists dedicated to my editorial calendar for Diwa Daily:

• DD Blog for topics
• Year-end blog audit for posts I’ll be editing at the end of the year
• In-progress tasks for the blog
• Scheduled and Published lists for finished posts.

Next to that are three other card lists for the online store:

• DD Store for new cards
• In progress (DP) for what I’m working on, and
• the Done list.

I can’t wait for the day Trello will allow sections within boards—the ability to group lists into a section or collection within a single board. It’d be great for boards where there are multiple lists related to different aspects of the project, but you don’t want to put it in another board if they’re related to the same brand or project.

Trello, if you’re reading this and have reached this part of the post, I hope your Product fairies will consider this feature request someday! ??

What’s new with Trello

I’ve seen how Trello’s grown and changed over the years. After the Atlassian acquisition, Trello has introduced significant changes, big and small, that have made it even more interesting and fun to use.

The new Home view shows you what task is up next and which tasks have received recent comments. It took some time getting used to, and it sparked conversations about how to use it to gain more perspective about the projects you’re working on (especially those you share with others). I don’t use it on a daily basis as I prefer to see my Boards list first, but it’d definitely come in handy if there are more projects where collaboration happens on a daily basis.

Board descriptions are another cool feature that I welcomed wholeheartedly. It gives you space to add context, such as what a board is for, why it was created, and how to use it. It’s even more useful if you have other board members who are new and would like to know what the board’s about.

And for a nice refreshing look, Trello rolled out with new fonts for cards and lists. I like it so much I rammed the refresh key as soon as I saw tweets about it.

I hit refresh and @trello changed fonts! Woah, I'm liking this. ?

— Brian Jackson (@brianleejackson) May 10, 2019

Anyone can use Trello for just about anything they want to see to completion. I’ve used it to organize work-related projects, the editorial calendar for this blog, collaborations with fellow writers, travel plans, birthday celebrations, two online stores, and digital products I was able to earn money from.

My only wish is that Trello continues to support individual users who use the Kanban method to visualize and manage their work. So many software companies focus their efforts on building features for teams and business, which I understand since that’s where the profits come from. But this shouldn’t mean pushing the rest of us out the door.

Trello Gold is the individual’s ideal way to give back and support Trello’s development. You’ll get 250 MB sized attachments, three power-ups instead of one, and more customization options. I’ll be subscribing come April 14, 2020 as I’m making this the day all my other subscriptions renew. Hopefully it won’t phase out to make way for the Business and Enterprise plans. ?

Thank you, Trello and the team behind this great product, for everything—the tools to flesh out an idea, keep track of what’s next, and for the boost of dopamine when a card goes into the Done list. It has truly kept my life organized and my dreams alive.