📆 This week in Trello
Managing multiple boards, AI in your boards, finding archived cards, and making Trello do your chores (almost)
Happy Thursday, everyone! How’s everyone enjoying Atlassian Intelligence? If I’m honest, it’s very cool, but like every other AI tool, I keep forgetting when to use it 😂 Need to work it into more of my routines. Would love to hear how you’re all using it! Drop a comment or reply back if you’re up for sharing.
In This Edition…
🌮 View all your boards in one place
🗞️ Atlassian Intelligence is in Trello!
🛟 Bring back those archived cards
💡Handle chore charts with auto-magic
🌮 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.
Love your case studies - they give great examples and ideas to incorporate Trello more into my workflow. I don’t share my Trello, just use it for project management and simple data bases. My challenge is in workflow. I’ll have 4 or 5 project going at the same time with a board for each. I don’t work on one project, then the next, but on tasks in each during a day. When I do my weekly planning and daily tasks I would have to cycle through the boards to find “what’s next”. My workaround is to sync Trello with a task manager and create the filters/dashboards I need in the task manager for planning and getting things done. With all your Trello boards, now do you manage your day to not miss something without going through all the boards?Hey there! Honestly, samesies. I have a few boards I collaborate with my partner or coworkers, but for the most part, I run solo. And I’m glad you asked how I handle multiple projects because my workflow has changed the most over the years.
The world is your oyster, and that’s exciting and overwhelming.
There are pros and cons to all the ways you can organize. For instance, I’ve been all about keeping everything in one board for most of my Trello career. I would use lists or labels to indicate which project a specific card was related to, and I would even use Power-Ups like Hello Epics to organize relationships between cards. And this is because I just wanted ONE view and one place to see all the things I needed to do.
But then that board got crowded, and Trello improved their views, so it made more sense for me to branch out. If you’re already using Trello Premium, use Trello’s Workspace Views.
This lets you combine cards from multiple boards and view them in a table or calendar view. This is a great way to see “what do i need to do today” when you have cards on multiple boards. Use the Calendar Workspace View if you are using due dates to schedule cards, or use the Table Workspace View if you sort what you need to do by lists (you can make a filter to say only show cards in “Today” or “This Week” or “To Do”… whatever list(s) you want!)
Another solution I use is Akiflow. And you’re thinking, “wait you’re the Trello girl!” and yes I am, but I can’t convince everyone in my life to work in Trello, or even on the same board, so I love using Akiflow because it has integrations with Gmail, Slack, Notion, and Trello (and other tools) so that I can easily collect tasks from any of those places in one inbox, and then use their fancy keyboard shortcuts to plan it out and see how it fits alongside my calendar.
I know you’re probably not looking for another tool, but if you are, you can watch this video I made explaining Akiflow and how it works.
PS - if you’re interested in Akiflow, reply back and let me know. I have a code for 30% off but I can’t share it publicly.
Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!
🗞 New(s) And Upcoming
Atlassian Intelligence is being rolled out for Premium and Standard users!! Do you have access yet?
Want to be more productive? The Warri Atlassian Community Events group is hosting a free virtual event on Oct 17th, all about Time Management & Task Prioritization Strategies. Of course, they’ll be sharing some pro tips about doing that with the Atlassian suite of tools!
🛟 How To and FAQs
This is your periodic PSA: if you’re missing a card, you can easily find and un-archive your archived cards! I made a video because I’ve seen lots of folks asking lately.
How to check for duplicate existing cards when creating a card
💡 Use Case Idea
Do you ever feel like you’re playing whack-a-mole with your chores? I do, and because of that, I constantly feel like there is some chore that I need to do, and I lose track of the last time I did it.
Did I wash the sheets last week? Or was that two weeks ago? Should I deep clean the dryer lint tray once a month or once a quarter? And when on earth did I last change my air filter?
I’ve mostly managed these tasks with calendar reminders and Trello cards before, but the problem with calendar reminders was that it was too hard to track if I actually did the thing, or just saw the reminder. And with Trello cards, it just got out of hand to build recurring cards because then when I forget, I’d have ten cards reminding me to dust my living room… but when I finally got to them, I wouldn’t need to dust my living ten times!
So, instead, I took a different approach this time. Rather than creating a recurring card that spawns on a set interval, I created lists that represented the frequency with which I wanted to do chores, cards for chores, and then I built automation to sort it all out.
It looks like this:
I have a Daily list, but I think it’s overkill, and the weekly and onward stuff works better.
Important things to note about this:
There is only one card for each task. It’s not copying a card each week/month, etc. Everything is happening on just one card.
Last Done custom field tracks when it was last completed. I’ll show you my rules in a second, but I use automation to set this custom field when I do a task, so I can always see when this task was last completed.
Frequency custom field keeps track of setting the due date. Again, this is heavily used for automation, but this field is for how many days I can go between doing a task. This is useful for setting due dates automatically, as you’ll see with my rules in a second.
Labels for helping visualize what’s completed. Since cards never disappear when completed (because I need to see them when I want to do the task again), I had to take a different approach to clarifying what was done. I use automation to add a label to a card to indicate it was completed (and also to move it to the bottom of the list). I also have other labels appear when a card is nearing its due date.
If there’s interest in this, I’m happy to make a video walking you through this board, and there’s a bit of automation going on behind the scenes, but if you want the cheat sheet, here are the rules that I use:
Set the frequency field for cards added to lists.
Handling labels
Complete a card and reset it
If you want a deeper dive into this, add a comment or reply back, and I’ll make sure you’re the first to know when I make a video on this!
Also, if you’re a premium subscriber, you’ve got access to this template board in our workspace!
Special shoutout to my premium sponsors!
Thanks to:
Mike Day -
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I'd love a video on setting up a board for house hold chores!