My annual planning Trello boards are lookin' good 🔥
Come check them out tomorrow in my livestream!
Heya! We finally made it to February, and no one is more shocked than I. It’s Mardi Gras time in Lousiana, but it’s always Trell’o-clock time for me. 😄
In This Edition
Livestream tomorrow! I’ll discuss how I’m doing my annual planning boards in Trello this year. You can get a notification when I’m going live here.
When do you have too much going on in one board?
Add story points to your Trello cards with this power-up
Buckle down and focus on your tasks with Centered
🌮 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,
Based on your experiences, when is it a good time to realise a board is too big and you need 2 or more to get the job done??
~ Fun Man AndyHey Fun Man Andy!!
This is a great question and one I get asked a lot. There’s one OBJECTIVE rule for this, and then several subjective criteria you can use to decide.
Objectively, if your board is moving slowly and you have hundreds of cards in your board, then it’s time to figure out a new structure. (Not sure how many cards you have on your board? Use the List Limits power-up and add a limit to each list and it will show you the count of cards in each list.)
Subjectively, you might also consider expanding your boards when you feel that you’ve got any of the following:
too many people operating out of one board (people are moving the wrong things around, or no one can find their cards)
too many labels (lots of labels and not consistently being used)
or the cards depict different items (ie, some cards are tasks, and some are contacts).
If you find any of those things are happening, you might want to consider moving into multiple boards! If they’re not but you still think you might want multiple boards, well, go for it! It’s a bit of a style preference sometimes.
Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!
🗞 New(s) And Upcoming
🎥 Livestream alert! Join me tomorrow at 10:30 CST! (You can subscribe here to get a notification.)
The old card description editor will be sunset at some point over the next couple of months. No official date has been announced yet, and at the moment, you can still use the old editor by disabling the new one at trello.com/your-username/labs. But since this will only work for now, I’d encourage you to use the new editor and get comfortable with it! 👉 Learn how the new editor works.
Noticed that your linked cards are opening in a new tab? It seems to be a bug for some users, but it’s been reported, and Atlassian is looking into it!
🛟 How To and FAQs
Use automation to change a card’s label from “next week” to “this week” on Sundays.
See all boards in a Workspace’s due dates together in one calendar
How to change all the names of profiles and workspaces and usernames in Trello
💡 Use Case Idea
Annual planning! Keep track of everything you want to accomplish for the year and then track progress across those goals.
I like to organize my year with a backlog of items and then do a weekly planning process where I review my tasks and queue things up for my sprint.
I’m not going to go into too much specifically with this right now because I’m going to do a live stream tomorrow and tell you all about it :) If you can’t make it, save the link because the recording will be there afterward!
🤔 Britt’s Pick
I’ve been using Centered this week to help me focus and get things done. It’s an app that sets some background focus music, then tracks your activity and gently nudges you if you start using an app that distracts you. It also periodically just encourages you when you successfully stick to the task at hand. The best part is you can select various groups to join, with different coaches giving those nudges! (My personal favorite is Cassidy William’s group - Freakin’ Nerds.)
Try it out, and let me know what you think. If you use code BRITT20 you can get 20% off your membership, whether you subscribe for a month or a year.
I made a video about this if you want to see what it looks like in action.
⚡️ Featured Power-Up
I was looking for something lightweight to keep track of story points on tasks in my board and then quickly aggregate the amounts so I can see how many story points are in each list or assigned to a person.
Screenful has many power-ups— and an all-inclusive app that does a lot of things (you’ll hear me talk more about them over the coming weeks and months)— but the Card Size by Screenful power-up was exactly what I was looking for allowing me to add points to a task quickly, then see totals across the board.
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