Level Up Your Trello: Better Checklists & Multi-Board Hacks

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Okay now let’s jump into Trello!

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🌮 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.

Dear Taco,

I'm using Dashcards for myself and team members in our workspace to track assigned cards however, I've just discovered it doesn't count checklist assigns in that tracker, and currently can't do that either. That's not particularly helpful for my team trying to make sure there on top of all their to do's.

Is there a way in trello to track all the checklist items or do you know if Dashcards plan to do this in the future? I'm trying to avoid introducing another system to just track checklist task as well as their cards, if possible.

Any thoughts on the best approach?

Many thanks!

~Rachel

Hey Rachel, that would be a great features, but unfortunately not a good way that I know of with Dashcards. I know you don’t want to introduce a new system, but I have some ideas, depending on what you’d call a “system”.

Power-Ups

This probably would involve the least amount of changes to your workflow, but there’s an excellent Power-Up I recommend for anyone using Checklists, and it’s called Checklist Summary.

It gives you a handy table for combining checklist items, though I’m not sure it exactly does the “count” you’re looking for.

You might also want to explore some heavier-weight Project Management Power-Ups. I tend to recommend Placker which has a lot of features for helping with more granular project status checking. I’m not super familiar with this specific feature in Placker, but based on this article, I think you might be able to agregate checklist items, and therefore their effort and status by member. Reach out to Placker via their live chat and mention me, and they’ll help you out at possibly give you a discount too 😄

Checklist items 🤝 Cards

This would require a little more setup and configuration, but for people who really determining to stick with “native” Trello AND use checklists, I recommend tying each checklist item to a card. I have a whole video about linking and syncing checklist items to be

This is a little more work to set up, but it gives you the best of worlds with the single view of a card and checklist items (rolled up view of everything in a project), with the task management and accessibility of other features in regard to cards.

Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!

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🛎️ One board or many??

How many cards are too many cards for a board?

Many folks ask me how many cards you can have on a board. The official limit is 5,000. But I can tell you that you’ll see performance issues if you start getting anywhere close to that. Your board will load slowly and it may take a while to navigate between cards.

That being said, I’ve got boards that easily have 1,000 cards on them. The right way to think about the size of a board is not by counting cards (save that for Vegas).

As much as you can, try to operate in a single board. The best way to do this is by utilizing filters! This lets you have everything in a board, but each user can filter to see just their own cards, and/or cards that are due today or this week, reducing all the noise of other cards.

You’ll typically know when you’ve outgrown a single board and need to move into other boards. Here are some clues:

• Your board is loading slowly consistently (not just one day when internet is slow)

• You want to hide some things in a board from some of the board members (ie, you don’t want your sales team to see your finance team items, or you don’t want one sales member to see another sales members leads)

• It’s difficult to find actionable cards, even when using filters

When that happens, you might want to think about strategies for working across multiple boards…

Use These Tips If You’re Working Across Multiple Boards