Trello is a tool for managing projects. It’s very, very simple. It’s web based, and it also has lots of apps and it’s, you can get apps for your phone and your, for your your PC and for your iPads.

What it does is it allows people to manage very big projects and work out who’s responsible for, for doing things. It’s a great way of project management and you’ll find quite a lot of marketers are using Trello at the moment. It’s something a load of them have picked up on recently.

You know, it’s really, it’s come from a, a sort of software development environment where people use it there. And people often use it in sort of situations where they’re doing agile development and they need to make sure everyone’s working on something and things are done.

It’s a great personal effectiveness tool. You can manage your own personal productivity.

But it’s not the only tool that you can do a Kanban on. There are, there are purpose built combine tools. They’re fine. And you know, I’ve tried them all out.

I like Trello at the moment just because so many of the people are using it that I can actually, you know, I can be quite comfortable that it’s going to be around for a little time yet.

It’s got amazing connectivity to other apps. So it talks to my Google calendar. It talks to Evernote. It’s got every connection to every conceivable cloud storage. So you can bring in files from your various, you know, from your Dropbox or Google Docs or anything like that.

And it’s just very good being in the background to remind you the things are going to be done. You can tag things on which means that you can see different kinds of jobs are in there.

I put things are administrative, you know, I give them little tags or if it’s a, a piece of business development, or if it’s a piece of research, something like that, I can take things up in a different way.

Using tags in Trello to manage projects

Think about the different areas of business that I’m involved in. So, I’ve only got five tags and every job falls into one of those five. Sometimes a job is in three of those five areas. So it has three tags attached. So I can see that it’s, it’s a, a piece of work that has, you know, impacts on several things I do.

But I would limit your use of tags. And don’t have one called miscellaneous because that will just, you’ll just use it as a dumping ground for things.

I think you have to work out whether something is really your job, and if you fits really outside of what you do, you have to look long and hard about whether you should be doing that.

And again, that’s a real hard ask because it’s not natural to say, Oh, I’m not doing that. It’s not my job. But some things are, you know, perhaps something for a member of staff to do, or actually it’s something for one of your managers to do. And that’s a great way of, of working that out and I’ve used it very effectively to make sure that what I’m doing fits within my remit.

And if it’s not within my remit, I then work out really who should be doing it. And sometimes my boss doesn’t agree, but you know, those are the odd occasions rather than the rule.

A couple of top tips for using these various systems, particularly Trello.

Integrating other software

There’s a service called Cronify which is an an app or a service. I think it’s probably the best way to describe it.

That connects different apps, that where there is a calendar element. So quantify your, any calendar link up with Trello.

Trello has a can, can update your calendar, but its own services isn’t particularly fast. I think, you know, there’s quite a lag in my only do once a day quantify does it instantly. So things will tend up in your calendar instantly if you’ve, if you’ve put a time related element and then Trello, the other thing is pay for Trello.

You can have a free version, which is great to learn how to use it. But I pay for Trello because you get these things called power ups and these are these extra services that you can connect. So they allow you to continue now, connect your cloud storage, Evernote, and a whole series of other apps.

And it’s, it’s worth  it for those because it just makes access to these things far, far easier.

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