Tool Mentor: Trello |  |

Tool: Trello

Relationships

Related Elements

- Daily Planning
- Sprint Planning

Main Description

Trello is a powerful tool that can work as a personal to do list or a powerful project management system to coordinate and assign tasks to everyone in your company. It can make light work of organizing your projects, but it can take a little bit to get up to speed. We're here to walk you through how to use it.

Trello is a powerful tool that can work as a personal to do list or a powerful project management system to coordinate and assign tasks to everyone in your company. It can make light work of organizing your projects, but it can take a little bit to get up to speed. We're here to walk you through how to use it.

Of course, you can use Trello however it makes the most sense for you. For example, you can use it to organize your projects around the house by which room they're in, sort recipes by what goes into them, or manage all the pieces of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There's virtually no limit to what you can do with Trello.

For the most part, Trello uses common terms that you'd recognize from any other productivity suite. But there are a few terms that we'll define and explain before we dive in.

Kanban: Kanban is a project management system invented by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno. In Kanban, each list is a phase of production. A simplified version might be a To Do, Doing, and Done list. However, you can customize this to any workflow. For example, if you're producing a video, you could have Research, Writing, Shooting, and Editing lists for each video in a series to move through. You can make your boards as simple or as complex as you like. Trello doesn't require a Kanban-style approach—you can use the app for simple, unrelated lists if you prefer—but Trello lends itself to the Kanban system very well, so it's worth considering.

Boards: Trello organizes all of your projects into separate groups called boards. Each board can contain multiple lists, each of which has a set of tasks. For example, you could have a board for the books you want to read and are reading, or a board to manage the content you're planning for a blog. You can see multiple lists within a board all at once, but you can only view one board at a time. It makes the most sense to create new boards for separate projects.

Lists: Within a board, you can create an unlimited number of lists that you can fill with cards for specific tasks. For example, you could have a board for creating a website, with separate lists for designing the home page, building features, or writing copy. You can also use lists to organize tasks by person they're assigned to. Or, lists can work as phases of a Kanban system. Tasks you're working on move left to right from one list to the next as pieces of a project move through the pipeline.

Cards: Cards are individual items on a list. You can think of these like supercharged to do list items. These should be specific and actionable. You can add descriptions of a task, comment and discuss it with other users, or assign it to a member of your team. If it's a complex task, you can even add a checklist of sub-tasks or attach files to the card.

Teams: Within Trello, you can create groups of people called Teams that you can assign to boards. This is helpful in large organizations where you have smaller groups of people who need access to certain lists or cards. Create a team of a few people, and you can then add that team to a board with just a couple clicks.