Organising the chaos… hello Trello

In my newly created bullet journal I have a page dedicated to blog ideas for September. Regular readers will know that I currently only write two blogs per month but it’s a step in the direction of organisation and this post is about the first of those ideas, sharing how I’ve recently come to start using Trello and how it is helping to improve my organisation as a new (and likely to be very busy) academic year kicks off, so ‘hello Trello’.

Earlier this summer I wrote about my experiences of being a long-time user of Things and a more recent regular user of Evernote. I concluded that both had a role to play in my day to day productivity. Over the summer however, my Evernote lists have been getting longer and longer and regardless of how many notebooks, stacks and tags I create I often find it difficult to locate what I’m looking for and resort to search. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I like lists and the search function results doesn’t seem like a proper list to me. Then I saw a tweet that called out Trello as being the ‘list of lists‘ and it grabbed my attention. I had downloaded Trello a couple of months previously but didn’t get around to doing anything with it. Since I had  a paid version of Things (no free version) and a subscription plan for Evernote I figured a free tool would have its limitations.

Enter versus.com, a website that visually displays the features of products in all sorts of categories so I decided to give it a go to compare Things, Evernote and Trello. There were no surprises in the results and it was certainly useful to help me figure out where Trello might be of value particularly in relation to the use of attachments and images. Before long I had created boards for my reading lists, upcoming module preparation and even planning tasks for my local Tidy Towns group.

As a practicing project management professional for many years I was used to a variety of software products (think Microsoft Project, FastTrack Schedule, OmniPlan) to manage projects and did not believe that Trello was a productivity app that could be used for project management purposes. Perhaps it isn’t suitable for major projects, but for my current purposes and planning my personal projects that are scheduled for the next academic year it fits the bill nicely.

I will always have use for Things since it is an ideal task list with recurring schedules to remind me when household chores are due, when PDUs are due to be reported and the log book search feature goes back 10 years of my life. Evernote, on the other hand, is great for saving recipes, saving screenshots of library book chapters (just like photocopying in the library back in the old days, right?) but not as a task list.

As a newish convert to Trello I still have lots to explore but would love to hear any tips and tricks from fellow Trello users, students and teachers alike.

Until next time,
Sandra

Featured image courtesy of Pixabay