Is Trello still worth it if I have to pay?
Community Member Mike Day made a great comparison chart of Trello vs the rest of the best. Let's see how it stacks up.
Happy Thursday! There’s a lot of buzz about the upcoming changes in Trello, but I want to reiterate an important message:
You have a couple months to prepare for these changes. April 8th is just when you’ll be blocked from adding new members if you’ve over the user limit, BUT even then, you can activate an extended 30 day trial of Trello Premium (no credit card required), which will give you another 30 days of adding as many folks as you want.
And for folks who don’t need to add any more members, you don’t need to enable that trial until May 20th, giving you until June 20th before the changes realistically will start impacting you.
Hope that gives you some breathing room this week, and I’ve got more details and ways to prepare coming soon, so let’s dive right into the good stuff.
🌮 Wrangling emails with Trello
🗞️ Trello vs the rest
🛎️ Setting advanced permission options
💡 Managing meetings in Trello
💪 Story Points in seconds
⚡ PREMIUM: Sort all lists with a click
🌮 Dear Taco
This is a section where readers can submit their Trello questions, and each week I’ll pick one and answer it! It’s like “Dear Abby” but make it trello. Have a question you want to submit? Share it here.
I'm a podcast producer and strategist. And I'm also a newsletter fanatic. Lately, my inboxs (both Gmail as well as Yahoo) have been really difficult to handle (my own fault due to all the newsletters). How can Trello help me with this?
~D.R.
Hey D.R.,
I relate to the newsletter fanatism. I subscribe to so many, it’s impossible to keep up. I’ve handled this by creating a label called `newsletter` in gmail and filtering all my newsletters to go to that label and skip my inbox, so when I want to go through newsletters, I just go to that folder!
But now you’ve got me thinking about how I could use Trello to do this better 🤔
Check out the Email for Trello Power-Up. You can connect it to your email and forward emails to a Trello board. (You can set up a similar filter as I do with each new newsletter you subscribe to and add a newsletter label, or you can probably do more broad filter magic to include any email containing “unsubscribe”).
This will bring all your newsletters into a Trello board, and you can triage them as you see fit and move them across the board as you read them. Then, archive or keep them. You could also utilize automation to add labels if the newly added card (the email) has specific text, letting you sort your newsletters by categories.
This would be a great way to focus on your newsletters in Trello, so you don’t get distracted by other emails when you want to have newsletter time. Inversely, with the same filters you use to set the newsletter label in gmail, you can add an archive action so they aren’t cluttering up your inbox but are safely stored in Trello.
Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!
🗞 New(s) and Links
How does Trello stack up as a free tool against the others?
My fellow Trello enthusiast
answers this question in his latest community article.Mike goes into much more detail in the article and helps you compare and contrast, but we both agree- that even with these changes, Trello is still the best tool for the money.
Btw, speaking of the new changes - if you want more clarification about the upcoming changes, check out this newly added support doc that addresses some common FAQs.
Mike and I will also be joining the Jira Life live stream later today to chat about some of these changes. Join in if you can, or watch the recording later! (It’s at the same link.)
I’ll also be creating more content to help walk you through the changes and share tips on how you might structure your boards and workspaces to prepare. So stay tuned for more coming soon!
🛎️ Trello Tip of the Week
If you want to restrict what actions people on your board can do, you’ll find some additional control options in the Board Settings menu. Click the three dots in the top right of a board, and choose Settings. You’ll see permission options for commenting, adding members, and even workspace members being able to join and edit.
💡 Use Case Idea
If you conduct regular meetings and use a Google Doc, you might be doing it wrong :)
Using Trello for weekly meetings is a great way to set an agenda, assign action items, and quickly find what was discussed in previous weeks. The Trello marketing team actually does this and created a weekly meeting Trello board template that you can copy and use.
Making agenda items cards lets you assign folks items ahead of time so each person can be prepared for what they need to speak to. It’s also a great way to capture action items during a meeting and automatically make them part of your to-do list!
💪 Featured Power-Up
Ah the classic Trello use case - Kanban! You might find value in utilizing story points in your boards even if you're not a developer. Story points are units of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a task.
Although developers commonly use it, I’ve used it in marketing teams and other teams to track what we’re accomplishing each week and ensure we’re not planning more work than we realistically can handle.
If you want to try it out, Story Point for Trello is a lightweight and free solution! Add it to your board, and with each card, you’ll get a modal to add story points.
You’ll be able to view that on the front of the card, but you can also aggregate story points to see how many you have across all your cards in a list. This is perfect for seeing if you’ve planned too much or too little for the week and comparing velocity week over week.
I also noticed they’ve got a beta feature with reports, so if you’d rather visualize those numbers in a pretty chart, you can do so! I don’t have any interesting data yet, so my screenshot is rather boring.
Special shoutout to my premium sponsors!
Thanks to:
Mike Day -
🎉 New Website 🎉
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Email in Trello
Organize & automate your Email in Trello. Connect any Trello board with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo & more.
Btw, haven’t gotten a copy of my Trello book yet? What are you waiting for?
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