Creating Time in Your Week - Trello for Planning

Creating Time in Your Week - Trello for Planning

The most significant obstacle to starting my business has been finding time amongst all the busyness of my week. What I have come to realise is that I need to make time in my week if I am ever going to get my business off the ground. Whatever gets prioritised and focused on will get done. So I have pushed hard to free up time in my week by working smarter and organising myself better. Over the next series of blog posts, I will share some of the ways I have found to work best for creating more time for my online business. 

Let's start with organising tasks. I love a good list! I am a planner and find it helps me get all the tasks and ideas swirling around my head out somehow. I recently discovered the program Trello and have found it so helpful that I wanted to share it with you. Creating massive action lists of everything I want to do enables me to achieve a lot, I don't miss important things, and I can multitask a lot better (for example, batch together all the jobs I need to get done when out at the shops). When I see what I need to do, the less overwhelmed I feel, and the quicker I can work on everything. 

I have found Trello to be so amazing for so many reasons: 

- Trello allows you to create boards for many different areas of your life. Within each board, you can create multiple lists. For example, you can create a list for each day of the week on a weekly to-do board. Under each list, you then add cards for each task that you would like to track. These cards are quite sophisticated as you can add all sorts of things to them – checklists, attachments (such as photos), weblinks, descriptions. I have saved lots of different images and web clippings to my cards. I love the checklists too – for example, I have a card for our swimming lessons each Tuesday that contains a checklist of everything we need to take with us.   

- Trello can be saved as an App on my phone, which means I can be mobile with it and be adding/changing my task list whenever I need to. I can also work on the desktop version at home. 

- It's free! On the free version, you can create up to 10 boards. But I learned a trick: you can create overarching workspaces and then have ten boards per workspace. So as I started to run out of free boards, I made a workspace for 'Business', 'Personal' and 'My Dreams', which meant I could create up to 30 boards. 

- I have created boards for all sorts of things: a massive action list for my business, weekly task schedule for my business, my weekly to-do list, birthdays and Christmas (where each month has a list, and I have added cards for each birthday), kids activity ideas, kids food ideas, household tasks, and goals and dreams for each year. The ways you can use the boards in your own life, too, is endless. 

- I love that I can move the cards around. They are like tiles that can be moved or slotted around within lists or between lists. I find the ease of moving cards around is particularly helpful on my weekly to-do list board. I line the cards up for what I hope to do in a day, but I move them to the next day or later if I don't get to it. So as things change in my week, I am constantly spinning my cards around the board. 

- I still use the calendar on my phone to keep track of upcoming events, birthdays, appointments etc. At the start of each week, I add whatever is in my calendar for that week to my Trello board and then keep watching the days of my Trello board for what is happening next. 

- Cards can be labelled with specific colours. So, for example, anything I need to do out of the house, I will colour red. On birthdays that week, I will make the card pink. Tasks my husband is helping with I label green. Any cards related to family food for the week are labelled purple. These coloured labels help me quickly scan what I need to do, separating tasks. Lists can also be moved easily between boards if something becomes more relevant to another space. 

- I love archiving tasks that are done and checking off items in checklists. Always a good feeling! 

Despite trying many different diaries, planners and online lists and calendars, I found I kept reverting to writing many of my lists down on paper. That was until I discovered Trello! It is worth checking out as I have found it has helped me become super organised, get a lot done, and save a lot of time.