New power-ups and best annual Trello practices!
Plus, streamlining boards, setting custom fields from email to board, and more!
Happy Thursday everyone! I had an absolute blast in the South African bush last week and now I’ve been in Cape Town for a bit before heading back to the US this weekend. (Also glad I wasn’t flying US domestic yesterday morning…. hope none of y’all got caught up in that!)
But enough about travel… let’s talk about Trello.
In This Edition
Saved filters power-up just launched
Setting custom fields from Email to Board
How to do yearly planning in Trello
A power-up that’s like spotify wrapped… but for Trello
🌮 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,
How many power-ups should I have on my board? There's a lot that look really interesting to me and sometimes I get overwhelmed with how many options there are.
Thanks,
All Powered UpDear All Powered Up,
I get a lot of folks asking about Power-Ups because they’re freaking amazing. They literally give your board super powers. It’s fantastic! But like Uncle Ben said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” (And someone who also said - “There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing!”)
I recommend to start slow and only add power-ups as you need them. Just because you see something new and shiny and you’re like “oh maybe one day I’ll need that!”. Take a note of the power-up, and then wait until you actually DO need it, rather than adding it to your board straightaway.
Also, do your research and ask around. If you’re trying to accomplish a specific thing, there might be one power-up that does the job rather than you needing to piece together five different power-ups! (That’s where I recommend asking Dear Taco, or posting in the Atlassian Community and asking for advice.)
Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!
🗞 New(s) And Upcoming
🚨 New power-up!! Saved Filters just launched. Save queries, so that you don’t have to open the filter and create your criteria each time.
🛟 How To and FAQs
8 top Trello Power-Ups to streamline your board (Zapier blog)
💡 Use Case Idea
Annual planning (basic)
As you’re thinking about what you want to focus on this year, since you’re reading this newsletter, I assume there’s a good chance you want to use Trello. And while I do a live stream of my whole process each year, with my vacation it’s taken me a bit longer to get to that, but I’m going to give you a sneak peak of a simple version of Annual planning in Trello, in case you’ve never done it before.
Ever year I add some more improvements to it and it’s really cool to see how far it’s come over the years! But if you want to start with something short, sweet and simple, here’s what I recommend.
ONE BOARD
You might be tempted to create a board for multiple projects and areas of your life. I recommend trying to keep it in one board until you truly can’t handle it in one board AND/OR you have a fantastic handle on Trello automation and feel comfortable making rules to sync and move cards around.
USE LABELS FOR CATEGORIES
When I first started using Trello for annual planning, I created labels for each priority “category” in my life. Things like…
Relationships
Career
Travel
Financial Growth
And when I added new tasks, if I didn’t have a label that related, that was a good hint that I probably shouldn’t be adding that task to my board and spending energy on it.
ONE TASK, ONE CARD, ONE WEEK
Create a “Backlog” list and then add a card for everything that comes to mind about what you want to do. You can also prioritize and shift back later, but get everything out into the open. Once you do that and decide which things you really want to focus on, break each task down into smaller tasks and no task should take more than a week to complete. For instance, if you want to write a book this year, don’t make one card that says “Write book”. Make several cards for this giant project, such as “Create outline”, and “Write draft of chapter 1” and “Review draft of chapter 1”, etc. Take as many cards as you need.
This advice should get you started, but if you want to see last year’s version of my annual planning, check out this live stream. And be on the lookout for an invite to this year’s live stream of my current process! (Will likely be setting a date for that in next week’s newsletter!)
⚡️ Featured Power-Up
Since we’ve just entered the new year, it seems we’re all thinking about what we’ve done in the past year and wondering where it went and what’s on deck for this year. Since I keep all of my work in Trello, it’s easy to manage this and get a report on what I’ve accomplished with the Annual Report Power-Up for Trello. It’s FREE and really fun. Think Spotify wrapped, but for Trello.
Give it a try and see stats about what you’ve done in Trello for the year!
That’s all for this week! I’ll be back in the states next week and getting back into my normal rhythms so expect more great content coming your way soon!
Btw, if you’ve found this newsletter useful, I’d be really thrilled if you’d share with your friends! I still get excited every time I see a new subscriber join!