A short how-to by Mark Wickersham describing how he uses Trello as a weekly planner. He explains his board layout (Ideas → Future Tasks → daily columns Tuesday–Friday + Weekend → Waiting → Completed), how he schedules tasks by due date each week, delegates to team members by moving cards to their boards, and uses Trello features (labels, due dates, descriptions, comments, assignments).
I use a tool called Trello and it's an awesome tool. I use it for so many parts of my business and I thought today I'd do a video sharing with you how I use it to plan my week. Now, if you've not used Trello before, it's an amazing piece of software. There's a free version, so why wouldn't you use it? I happen to pay for it because I love some of the extra features, but the free version will do pretty much everything I will share with you in this particular video. So if you've not used Trello before, essentially what you have is you create boards. And boards consist of lists or columns, and within each list or column you create a card. And that card you can attach all sorts of information. And the idea is the cards can move along with workflows and processes. So I have a board that I call my weekly planner. And the board consists of, firstly, my first list is called ideas. So over on the far left is I have my ideas. If ever I think of something that would be a great idea in my business, I just create a little card, add it to the ideas. That way, any great ideas I come up with never get forgotten about. It might not be an idea for now, it's for the future. I put all my ideas for the future in there and then every now and then I will then go and review my ideas cards to see if there's anything there I now want to implement in the business. The next list is future tasks, and these are things that want to be done in the future. And the only difference between the ideas and the future tasks is the future tasks have a date. I assign a due date to them. Sometimes these might be next week, sometimes even next year. So sometimes with annual tasks, for example, from a personal point of view, with my car, I have to renew the road fund licence once a year, the road tax, and so I have a card to remind me. And then once I've done it, I just add a year onto the due date and stick it back in the future tasks. So future tasks are things that have to be done at some point in the future. Then what I have is I have columns for each of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And I also lump the weekend together. And what happens is at the start of the week, I then plan everything that needs to be done at the start of the week. Anything with a due date that's Monday gets dragged into the Monday column, everything with Tuesday into the Tuesday column, and so on. And as I work through the week I work through the cards now moving to the far end. What I then have at the end is two further columns. One is called waiting and the other one's completed. And that's because sometimes I might do a task and it's something where I've done what I need to do for the moment, but somebody else has to come back to me or do something. And so I would put that in the waiting column. It's a reminder, so I never forget that I'm waiting for something it's not completed. If it is completed, I change the label. It automatically puts it to the completed column. And so I can see during the week, it's very reassuring. It's nice to see this building up as I complete and tick tasks off. And then every now and then, a bit of housekeeping, I will delete those particular cards. So at the start of every week, typically on a Friday afternoon or perhaps the weekend, I will then sort, which is very easy to do, sort in, date, order, all the future tasks, and then I will move across all the tasks that are due for this coming week. I will put them into Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or the weekend. And what I love about the system is it's visual. I can now see my full week, and it might well be that I've noticed I've got too much stuff for Tuesday. I can't possibly do that for Tuesday. So I might revisit the due dates and just show a week a little bit different. But basically, I can plan the entire week. I can see visually what needs to be done. Another great thing about Trello is for each card, you can attach so much information. You can have colored labels, you can add due dates, you can add descriptions, you can put comments, have an audit trail. You can assign cards to other team members if you want to. And so one of the things that I do is, within our team, this Weekly planner is a template board. I have my version, but every member of my team also has a version as well. They use the same process, the same weekly planner. And this is the power tip. This is why I do it this way. Sometimes I might have a task on my board, and I'm thinking, do you know, I don't need to do that. I could delegate that to Sarah. So what you can then do is you can move a card to another board. If it's something else I can delegate. I can add notes for Sarah on the card, hit the move button and move it to her board. And then I know that on her board, I will know that that will get completed at the appropriate time. So that's how I organize my week. It's an incredibly powerful tool. Go and check Trello out if you've not already. I use it for so many things, but the weekly planner helps me stay organized.
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