Using Trello for Organization, Ministry, Work, Life
This is a post about using the web application Trello for managing a lot of big picture and detailed todo lists. It is quite a nice product for a lot of things. I started using it during the first 2 days of it’s existence, and it immediately caught my eye. It was a solution that I started recommending right away in various contexts, but I was still using Nozbe for my personal “system”, and wasn’t ready to leave that app behind until April of this year, when I decided I wouldn’t pay that much each month for a sloppy experience. I’ve tried to adopt many different project management tools over the years. I like many of them for many different reasons, but lately I’ve landed on using Trello for personal, business, family, and ministry projects.
Trello is not perfect at everything, but it’s good enough to be used in all of those areas of my life. And everyone in all organizations can join the website for free, which is something that the highly specialized GTD style tools can’t say. The value of universal participation far outweighs the value of a more focused or powerful user experience. The fact that it’s free even for the administrator is unbelievable too. I hope we get the chance to pay for the service in some way in the future, rather than the company turning to an ad based revenue model.
Part of the joy of Trello is that it’s very free-form and flexible. It’s designed to look like a bunch of index cards on a white board. This is a concept that seems pretty easy for people to pick up. The real happiness appears when you realize how easy it is to drag the icons representing your friends, family, and coworkers onto the tasks that you feel like they should be responsible for.
My System
So, here’s how my system looks right now. I’ve created 3 organizations, one for me and my wife, one for my team at work, and one for the ministry I serve in at church, Celebrate Recovery.
Home
I have only one board under my family organization right now “@Home” you may recognize this as a GTD context. It is. Mostly. I’ve thought about adding a board called “@Errands” and including a list for each store like Groceries, Hardware, Pharmacy, Walmart, Target, etc. I haven’t done that yet, because it’s convenient to see every home related task on a single board. It’s a balance between focus and convenience. The more general the boards, the easier to find the task you should do. The more specific, the easier it is to focus on related tasks and ignore extraneous things. Assigning tasks is pretty simple. We each put our ideas on the board, and assign ourselves to them, and move the cards between the standard lists: “To Do”, “Doing”, “Done”. But, I’ve added a list on the far left called “To Plan” and one on the far right called “Icebox”. This helps a bit to focus on things that are actively needing action right this moment in the To Do list.
Ministry
I serve alongside a group of 15 other people who all work together at making Celebrate Recovery happen each week. There are a wide variety of roles and responsibilities in this ministry. So far we’ve coordinated everything on paper at our monthly meetings, and last year added an email list serve through Groupspaces. Now we can add another level of formal information tracking to your system. Trello is great at managing nested arrays of data, not just projects with tasks, once you understand that it start becoming an attractive tool for many problems. So, not only do I use it to organize a specific project, like a missions trip, or a special anniversary service, but we use it to organize a board for each weekly meeting, and the monthly leaders meeting agendas.
When it came time to organize the weekly meetings and track who is doing what each week, it wasn’t clear how to do it. I considered Planning Center Online, but it was too focused on Church services worship teams, not for our ministry meeting format. I thought about creating events in Groupspaces, and asking people to sign up for the event and choose the checkboxes for their area of responsibility or spot in the rota. And, we’ve tried a shared Google calendar, which doesn’t really handle multiple simultaneous events terribly well, and not everyone had a calendar app or would know how to import the iCal file.
So, I create a new board for each weekly meeting, about one month in advance. The boards are copied from the previous week, so we get a template to start with. Each board has several lists: Unowned Ideas (usually empty), Before and After (setup and teardown, coffee, cooking, AV), Child Care, Announcements, Large Group (teaching, worship), Small Group (rotating leader slots). This allows for more than 20 cards to be organized into sensible categories, and gives us a place to make comments about specific upcoming events, and it acts as a central reference point about who is doing what each week.
In our group we have 14 of our leaders signed up and able to access Trello. The can use their computers or the smart-phone apps. It’s always ready when someone has a question about planning, and it’s a great place to capture tasks as we talk about them during a meeting. I can now follow a conversation during a meeting and type in ideas on our board, then before we move on from that conversation I try to record who is going to “own” each item on the list. This helps people track what they have signed up to do. Although, for me, the better I track all the things I agree to do, the busier I get. I should be able to look at my Cards summary in Trello and say “Nope, I’m too busy”. :-P
Business
The business side has been up and running the longest and is the most hands off. In the team I work with, we don’t really track our specific development projects in it, because there’s already a bunch of tools that the corporate Project Managers use instead. We use it to track high level things, like which team member is working on which enhancements or projects. And, we also track which changes are on deck, in development, in testing, and when they got deployed in which release dates. This is probably the most common use of this tool, it was made by a company who mainly builds software for development shops. One other creative use is to track our outages and “significant impacts” on our website. We create a new list for each month, and record each incident as a card, with a color coded label for the cause. This could have gone on a shared calendar, but it’s really easy to see a lot of time compressed into a single view this way.
In Conclusion
It’s free, and very usable. Getting people to actually adopt any project management tool is going to be much harder than setting up a system in Trello.