Trello for Personal Use: 5 Key Strategies, Best Templates and Tools to Crush Productivity

What if someone told you, you’ve been Project Managing every day on some level without even knowing it. Think about some of the different tasks that you’ve completed in your life, maybe you planned a foreign trip or a college reunion or even filed your annual tax returns. Believe it or not, you already have got a taste of Project Management through these tasks. These skills will surely help you become a successful Project Manager for any organization.

So, what exactly is Project Management? Project management involves the planning and organization of a company’s resources to meet the project requirements and achieve the desired outcome. Project Management also requires the implementation of knowledge, skills, tools like Trello, and techniques to move a specific task towards completion. In this article you’ll learn how to make the best of Project Management tools like Trello for personal use to eventually achieve your project goal.

So, how can you maximize your chances of achieving your project goal?

There are two things. First, see yourself as a Project Manager. The business world is in great need of folks who are organized, action-oriented, meticulous, and strategic. It’ll really help you succeed, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Managing everything on your own can be tedious, error-prone, and exhausting. This way, Project Management can often be a challenging task. 

Secondly, get your hands on a few Project Management tools that will help you stay organized, manage all those moving pieces, and meet your goal on time. A Project Management tool enhances Team Collaboration, Team Communication and streamlines the entire Project Management journey. In this article, you’ll be taken through Trello, a Project Collaboration tool used by companies to streamline their Project Management journey.

Trello is a simple and easy-to-use Project Collaboration tool that helps you to organize projects and everything related to them into “Boards”. Trello will help you with all kinds of information, like what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and what progress the project is making. You can also utilize Trello for personal use, it’ll help you Organize your Tasks, Set Reminders, Manage Deadlines, and much more.

To have a smooth and hassle-free Project Management experience, it is always desired to make the best use of a Project Collaboration tool like Trello. Some of the key strategies used to boost Trello Productivity are discussed in this article. Later on, you’ll be taken through some of the best templates in Trello for personal use. The article concludes with a peek into the productive tools that you can work with, leveraging Trello for personal use. But beforehand, let’s discuss Trello in brief.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Trello
• Key Features of Trello
• 5 Key Strategies for Trello Productivity
  • Enable Trello Power-Ups
  • Create a To-Do List
  • Eisenhower Matrix
  • Make Use of Trello’s Search Operators
  • Weekly Reviews
• Best Templates in Trello for Personal Use
  • Life Dashboard
  • Daily Task Management
  • CRM & Sales Pipeline
• Best Tools for Personal Productivity
  • One Tab
  • Harvest
  • Hevo Data
• Conclusion

Introduction to Trello

Trello is a Cloud-Based Visual Collaboration tool from Atlassian for managing anything: from a Business Strategy to a Wedding Party. Organize your tasks and projects with Trello. You could utilize Trello for personal use and for a million different things, but some common uses include Content or Editorial Calendar Management, Goal Planning, Recruiting, Product Roadmaps, Cross-team And Departmental Collaboration, and even Brainstorming.

First things first, Trello makes use of Kanban based approach and is made up of “Boards”. Trello helps you to organize your project into boards, which you then break down into different columns and individual “Cards”. In simple words, a Trello Board is nothing but a series of lists, with a bunch of cards attached. With its easy drag and drop feature, transfer cards from one list to another just like that.

There are many different ways you can structure a project in Trello. Trello comes with the most flexible layout and an open-ended way for you to organize any task. So, if you’re a really visual person, organizing your project in Trello is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Key Features of Trello

Trello might be simple on the surface, but there’s a lot under the hood. Trello stands out from other Task and Project Management tools due to a few smart features mentioned below.

• Butler: You can automate all of your tedious work with Butler. Butler is an “automation tool” in Trello that lets you automate a number of commands including card and board buttons, scheduled commands, and due to date commands. You can use Butler to automatically mark cards as finished on a certain date and remove members from a card. And guess what, the automation setup requires no programming skills.
• Labels: Make your Trello Board visually appealing by adding “Labels” to cards. Trello lets you add a pop of clarity by adding color-coded labels to your cards. Labels can help organize projects, prioritize tasks and manage deadlines by distinguishing cards without making them look cluttered. Coming to prioritizing tasks, here’s a thing, you can use labels to designate priority levels of the tasks, so you know which tasks need your attention first with just a quick glance. You can also customize these labels as per your liking.
• Card Aging Feature: The Card Aging feature helps you to keep track of the status of any card. Trello notifies you to check in on neglected cards and highlights cards that you haven’t opened in a while.
• Advanced Checklists: This feature is available only for Trello’s Business Class and Enterprise customers. Every Trello Card comes with a “Checklist” to help you segment your projects into smaller tasks. Advanced Checklists feature lets you add more context to your checklists. Advanced Checklists feature allows you to add “Members” and “Due Dates” to the items in your checklist. On top of this, you will also be able to view your checklist items in the “Calendar View”.
• Power-Ups: Trello allows integration to a combination of third-party apps and services. Power-Ups bring additional functionality and integrations to your Trello Boards. It provides more than 200+ Power-Ups to sync your data across all platforms and to make all essential tools used by companies available in one place. Some of the most widely used Power-Ups are Custom Fields, Calendar, and Card Repeater.

Now that you have a basic understanding of this easy-to-use Project Collaboration platform, let’s have a look at some of the key strategies for Trello for personal use.

5 Key Strategies for Trello Productivity

If you’ve been looking for ways to increase your productivity, stay on track of your projects and make sure that your dues don’t fall through the wayside, you’re just at the right place. Here are the 5 key strategies to look forward to, if you’re looking to leverage Trello for personal use to enhance productivity:

1. Enable Trello Power-Ups
2. Create a To-Do List
3. Eisenhower Matrix
4. Make Use of Trello’s Search Operators
5. Weekly Reviews

1) Enable Trello Power-Ups

Making use of Trello Power-Ups can be a great option to take your productivity to the next level. As discussed, Power-Ups bring additional functionality and integrations to your Trello Boards. Use the Power-Ups to automate your tasks and integrate your favorite apps with Trello.

• Calendar: The Calendar Power-Up lets you see due dates in a Calendar View. You can further filter your cards by due dates in a Calendar View. With its easy drag and drop feature, easily add your cards to the calendar and craft your workflow according to your deadlines.
• Card Repeater: The Card Repeater Power-Up is a huge time-saver if you have tasks in your business that repeat themselves. You can automate the creation of Trello Cards for these repeated tasks with the Card Repeater Power-Up. This Power-Up is ideal for recurring reports and regular content creation.
• Google Drive: The Google Drive Power-Up lets you attach your files and folders from Google Drive directly from your card without navigating.

So, go ahead and make use of these Power-Ups in Trello for personal use.

2) Create a To-Do List

Trello comes to the rescue of people who tend to be forgetful. It is always advisable to create a “To-Do List” if you want to manage your time and tasks in a better and more efficient way. This lets you keep track of every little detail about your daily tasks. Here, you have the tasks that need to be done, the tasks you’re currently working on, and finally the tasks that you have already completed.

Once the list is set up, Trello will serve as a reliable reminder of what needs to get done. This workflow will transform how much you accomplish each and every day. Set up a to-do list in Trello for personal use and crush your daily personal goals.

3) Eisenhower Matrix

A proven productivity technique developed by 34th American President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, this board/matrix allows you to create a system for prioritizing your tasks. You can organize and sort your tasks into four quadrants based on their priority. Just like how we designate different quadrants with the “x-y” axes in Mathematics, here, we have the axes of “Important” and “Urgent”. The resulting quadrants are Important/Urgent, Not Important/Urgent, Important/Not Urgent, and Not Important/Not Urgent. Your tasks are given priority values from 1 to 4 based on the quadrant they lie in.

This will help you focus on the tasks that are going to have a long-lasting effect on your productivity and will help you to keep the distracting tasks to the wayside. So, you can utilize Eisenhower Matrix in Trello for personal use and increase your productivity.

4) Make Use of Trello’s Search Operators

Just like how you use “Shorthands” to note down stuff quickly, make use of Trello’s “Search Operators” to refine your search and save valuable time. Here are a few important Search Operators that will come in handy in Trello for personal use:

• @name – Returns cards assigned to that particular member. To see the cards assigned to you, make use of @me. Type “@” and Trello will start suggesting to you the names of the members.
• board:id – Returns cards within a certain board. You can also search cards with board names by typing the name of the board as “board: board name”.
• label:“label name” – Returns cards with the specified label.
• list:list name – Returns cards within the list with that particular name.
• is:starred – Returns only the cards that are on Starred Boards.

5) Weekly Reviews

The Weekly Reviews are always useful to keep a track of your tasks. This habit can help you crush your personal goals and productivity, and it is highly recommendable in Trello for personal use.

• You can have a glance and review all your accomplishments for the week. Go ahead and plan out your next week, using a simple “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done” list structure.
• Stay on track with your most important goals with Weekly Review Checklists. Further, work on your mistakes and maintain your work-life balance.
• Apart from work, you can also plan your meals and schedule leisure activities with the Weekly Reviews.

These 5 strategies will surely help you to crush productivity and will enhance your experience of utilizing Trello for personal use.

Best Templates in Trello for Personal Use

Not sure where to get started with your project? Put your ideas into action with templates for Trello. In the Template Gallery, you’ll find various templates for any project, and as you know, it’s always difficult to choose one when you have plenty of options available. Let’s discuss some of the best templates used by the Trello Community mentioned below:

1. Life Dashboard
2. Daily Task Management
3. CRM & Sales Pipeline

1) Life Dashboard

Since we are talking about Trello for personal use, here’s the Life Dashboard template to make your life easy and increase your productivity. Life Dashboard is for your personal life instead of just projects at work. You can set up a backlog of things that you want to accomplish in this quarter or this year. Then you have the “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done” list structure for the week. As discussed in the previous section, you even have a Weekly Review Checklist here, that pops up every week and tells you the things you need to make sure you do to stay on track.

2) Daily Task Management

Daily Task Management template, crafted by Mitchell Fry, utilizes Trello’s built-in automation tool, Butler, to help keep your tasks on track. Every day at 01:00, Butler will rename the “Done Today” list to a new list with yesterday’s date, so that you can keep track of what you did and when you did. A new “Done Today” list will be created as well.

3) CRM & Sales Pipeline

The CRM & Sales Pipeline template lets you build a CRM inside of Trello. You can automate your list, move leads around in between things and you even have a “Dashboard View”. This template makes it very easy for you to manage contacts, whether it’s influencers or just even keeping track of your friends and family.

Streamline your Project Management journey with these easily customizable templates in Trello for personal use.

Best Tools for Personal Productivity

Well, you can also make use of some tools and technology to further crush your productivity. Here are a few tools recommended by experts that will come in handy if you want to enhance your productivity:

1. One Tab
2. Harvest
3. Hevo Data

1) One Tab

It is highly likely that some of you have at least 15 tabs open in your browser. This extension will free you from the distraction of all of these open tabs. One Tab will combine all of your open tabs into just one list. One Tab manages all of your tabs without making them look cluttered and helps you find focus. You can now completely focus on your to-do list without bearing the extra burden of a million open tabs.

2) Harvest

Time Management is quite important in today’s world. Harvest allows you to keep track of the time you spend on each task. There must be some repeatable task in your daily routine, so by keeping a track of the time you spend to complete them each time, you can have a check on your consistency. Make use of the Harvest Power-Up that lets you start timers directly from Trello Cards.

3) Hevo Data

Hevo Data, with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as Trello, allows you to not only export data from Trello & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. In short, you can easily extract data from Trello using Hevo to track the overall progress of your project and optimize it further to get across the finish line. This automation tool can be a huge time saver and is a must-have if you’re leveraging Trello for personal use.

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Conclusion

Project Management is a challenging task, but with a few Project Management tools by your side, the entire journey of Project Management has become flawless. Trello, an easy-to-use Project Collaboration tool, is used by fast-moving companies to transform the workflow process. In this article, you were given a brief but comprehensive introduction to Trello. Some of the most widely used strategies to enhance productivity utilizing Trello for personal use were discussed. You were also taken through some of the best templates in Trello for personal use. The article concluded with a peek into the productive tools that you can work with, leveraging Trello for personal use.

Give Hevo Data a try and sign up for a 14-day free trial today. Hevo offers plans & pricing for different use cases and business needs, check them out!

Do you use Trello? Share your experience of utilizing Trello for personal use in the comments section below.