A couple of days ago, I opened an email from Marina de Giovanni and hopped on to check out her 5-Day 2020 Goal Setting Masterclass. In one of her videos, Marina talked about Trello, so I went and checked it out, then researched other similar software and apps that offered similar functions for managing and organising projects, like Asana, Jira and Monday: https://blog.bitsrc.io/asana-vs-jira-vs-monday-vs-trello-project-managment-in-2019-b09526c1adcc. In the end, I opted to go with Trello to trial their free version.
Having used it for the last 24 hours, I would say that this was the missing link that I’d been needing to get things done. I’d toyed with the idea of putting every task for our house building project onto an Exceel spreadsheet, but it’d somehow felt archaic and clunky. Listing things in my journal wasn’t enough, as it meant I still needed to communicate each task to my partner. Slack was all over the place.
Where had Trello been all my life?! Now, all I have to do is share my Home Build list and personal board with my partner and hey, presto! he has immediate access to my to-do list and, more importantly, he’s on the same page when it comes to seeing what we each need to do next, in terms of finishing building and decorating our main house!
Colour-coded labels on each task make it easy for us to identify which task is allocated to whom (he’s green and I’m yellow).
And crucially, assigning deadlines ensure things get done.
The great thing with Trello is that it allows me to add comments onto each task, so for example, if I had a list of websites with door handles and stops that we need to choose from, it let’s me add them to the task. It also allows me to create a checklist, if the task itself needed to be broken down into smaller steps.
Lastly, the biggest plus, I think, is being able to create different boards visually, allowing me to see each area from an overview perspective. Most of us are visually-oriented, with minorities who are predominantly kinaesthetic, tactile and auditory in terms of how they take in information (https://blog.edmentum.com/kinesthetic-visual-auditory-tactile-oh-my-what-are-learning-modalities-and-how-can-you-incorporate).
I’ve even set up a Family/Household Management list on the board. No more excuses now!
I would say that in terms of to-do lists, ticking things off gives me immense satisfaction, in addition to seeing the list (sometimes) get shorter progressively! (Hey, I know it’s an illusion, cos the list is never-ending, but at least it makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere each day, incrementally).
Here’s to ticking through 2020!
