(electronic whirring)
Are you needing a better way to manage all of your tasks?
Are you needing a to-do list solution that really works for you?
Well, in today's video I'm gonna show you five different ways to create a custom to-do list right here within Trello.
And we're gonna start simple and we're gonna work our way up to something that I call the Ultimate To-Do List for Trello.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And we're gonna start with the default here.
Default
When you open up or start a brand new board in Trello, most likely you'll have these three lists waiting for you: To Do, Doing and Done.
And that gives us a great way to work through sort of a Kanban style method of dragging things through the process until they are complete.
Now you can add due dates if you want to keep yourself on task but, you know, a pretty simple way to get started here with managing your tasks within Trello.
Why don't we turn it up a notch and go to level two.
Grouping
Those of you who may be familiar with the book Getting Things Done, also known as GTD, know that it can be helpful to group certain tasks together.
So, for example, if I've got something here like Review customer feedback survey.
Let's say that's something that I'm gonna do at my computer. I'm gonna add a label. I'm gonna add a label called Computer.
And you can see here that I've already pre-created a number of labels. I've got about five here: Email, Phone, Errand, Meeting, and Computer because what I wanna be able to do is quickly identify things that are, for example, all of my phone calls, so I can get them all done in roughly the same time within the same batch of time and then move on to something else.
Search Cards
So let's group a few of these here.
Workout at the gym, well, that's certainly an errand. I'm not doing that at the office.
Hire new staff, that's gonna be a phone interview, so I'm going to say two there.
Decide on a website budget, that's a computer related.
Redesign website.
Call long-lost friend. Yeah, that's definitely a phone call so I'm gonna put that as a phone call there.
So the nice thing here is that as I go up to show Menu, I can choose the Search Cards option.
And let's say I just want to work on the things that are at my Computer. I can select that label and now everything else is hidden.
So for the next half hour or next hour, whatever that bulk of time happens to be, I can just focus on these three areas.
If I'm done with that, I can go back here and let's say, hey, I've got a few minutes to make a few phone calls. Let's go to the Phone and now I can focus on just these tasks.
So the combination of adding different labels and then using the Search Cards option to filter things out can be a great way to up your productivity.
Subtasks
Now I'm just gonna reduce these labels. I'm gonna minimize these labels, if I click on them, just so we can focus more on the tasks.
Why don't we step it up a notch once again and something that you may need within your To-Do List system is the ability to add sub-tasks, right?
So, for example, Review customer feedback survey. Maybe there's a few different things that I need to get done here.
Well, if I open up this card, a great way to add sub-tasks is to add a checklist.
So if I add a checklist in here and I'm just gonna call this one Sub-Tasks for our example. I'm going to say Add.
Now what I can do is I can add a bunch of smaller tasks within this. I'm just gonna use a few examples, just so that we have a few to look at here.
So let's say that there are three sub-tasks that I need to complete for this particular task. I can come in here, I can list them and I can start checking them off.
And the great thing is is that on the front of the card, you get a nice little icon that shows me, hey, I'm 2/3 of the way done.
When I'm, you know, all three done here, I can then move this over to the Done list but I'm still not quite finished here.
If I go back in here and I finished task number three. Hey, that's great! I get that little green label and now I can move it over here to Done.
But let me show you one other thing that you want to keep in mind with using the task or the checklist function.
Let's say as I'm working out these tasks I realize that task number three is actually a bit bigger than I thought. This might have some of its own sub-tasks as well.
Well, don't forget that you can break out anything within a checklist. So if I come over here and select the three dots, I can say Convert to Card.
And so now when I go outside of this card, here you can see task number three is now its own task, its own card within this list.
So some things that can start within a checklist if it's a sub-task, for example, you can break it out to its own task if necessary.
Projects
All right well so far we've only been working with three different lists here but why don't we add something else, which I think is very valuable, and that is a Projects list.
So I'm gonna add a new list and I'm going to bring it all the way over here to the left-hand side.
And something that is often missing is that as we go about planning our day, we start to analyze and prioritize all the things that we would like to get done here.
However, often what we get done or where we focus our attention is not necessarily in line with the projects, the big goals that we should be accomplishing.
So let me just add a few here. I'm going to say Project 1 and Project 2, just for example here.
So not only am I gonna have them listed here in my Projects list, and, yes, you will definitely have more than two projects on the go at any given time.
Not only can I just reference it and look at it. So when I'm looking at the things that I wanna be doing today or that I should be doing this week, not only can I look over here but we wanna go one step further and actually connect some of these tasks to these projects.
So I'm going to open up Project 1.
And let's say that some of the things that are already in my to-do list are related to Project 1.
What I can do is go over here and select Attachment.
I'm gonna select Trello.
And you can see that it actually has some of the most recent cards that I have selected or viewed.
So let's say Review customer feedback survey is one of those tasks. Hey, now it appears here within this project.
Let's do it one more time because there's probably more than one thing that is related to this project.
Now I'm gonna go over here and I'm going to say, "Well that new book is also related to project number one."
So now I have both of those tasks listed here. You can see on the front of that card, on the front of my project card, you can see that there's two things.
I can see that there are two tasks assigned or related here, and when I open it up, not only do I see a nice preview of these two but if I click on them, it takes me directly to that card, directly to that task.
So it's a great way to create those relationships between your daily tasks or your actionable tasks and the overarching project.
And keeping track which one of those are related to this given project. All right so we added one more list here.
Notes Ideas
but I'm gonna actually convert this one last time.
We're gonna add two more lists, and we're gonna see if that's gonna help us be that much more efficient.
So the first one that I'm gonna add is called Notes. Sometimes I call it Notes/Ideas.
And I gotta add one more here and it's called Waiting For.
Okay, I'm gonna put them in a few different places here. The Notes, I'm gonna bring all the way over to the left, just to the left of Projects.
And my Waiting For, I'm gonna put here between Doing and Done.
So let's start with the Notes/Ideas. Often we don't think of Trello as a good note-taking tool but remember all of these cards.
Let's just put in a test card here, for example.
All of these cards give you the ability to attach documents, to attach images, to have full comments, and if there's other people involved, such as a meeting agenda, you can include that here as well, whether it's checklists and due dates, it's a great place to add all of those notes, especially here in the Description area.
And remember many of the notes that you take will never become a task or become a project but if they do, how easy is it to just drag it over into the Projects list.
Or if it's a task to just drag it over into your to-do list. You've already got all of that information, you've got everything that you need within that given card.
And remember you can also forward your emails directly to this list.
So if you come across other ideas or valuable pieces of information, you can forward that directly here into your Trello board.
So I think having a Notes or an Ideas list is a great idea.
Now moving over to our Waiting For list, I'd like to have a Waiting For or a Pending list, it could be called Pending if you like, somewhere between the Doing and Done list, because, let's be honest, sometimes you're working on something and it's simply out of your hands for a period of time.
So let's say Hire new staff.
Let's say you're still waiting for more applications to come in. There's really nothing you can do at this given point. There's nothing you can actually do except for maybe just wait 'til the end of the week or whatever that timeframe is for those applications to come in.
So I think it's nice to have that separation between things that you can actionably do here and things that you can review maybe at the end of the day or from time to time, see if you need to give someone a nudge, maybe you're waiting to hear back from someone, that's a great thing to put in a Waiting For list.
And either it may return back to the Doing list or when it's finished you can move it over to Done.
So I think the Waiting For list is a great one as well.
The List
The list or I should say the board that you see here is something that I refer to as the Ultimate To-Do List for Trello.
And if you don't want to waste your time building out this list yourselves, you can make a copy of it.
Please see the link in the description below, so that you can create your very own copy of this Trello board, and then you can do whatever you want with it.
You can add other lists, you can change the labels, you can do whatever you want to help you stay more productive.
Well, thank you so much for watching today's video.
I hope that you leave me a comment and if you have any further questions, let me know down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
