Whether you think you Gan or think you Gantt, you're right
Plus my Trello book club is launching! You in?
Lots of exciting news today so I’m jumping right in!
🌮 Gantting in Trello
🗞️ Trello book club launch!
🛎️ The quickest way to get to a card
💡 Make Trello do your chores (almost)
💪 Fancy checklists 💅
⚡ [PREMIUM] Visualize when you have too many cards
🌮 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 delivered a training on Trello this week, and my client absolutely wanted to view his projects in a Gantt form, with all bells & whistles (critical path, milestones, etc…)
My go-to solution used to be Elegantt… but it's "elegone" :(
TeamGantt seems a pretty capable solution, especially since the client budget is not too limited as long as the solution is worth the investment.
What are your takes ?
Many thanks in advance
~Eric BOUCHET
Hey Eric!
I’ll admit I haven’t played around with many Gantt chart Power-Ups in Trello, but I have played around with Placker (a great capacity planning and reporting tool in Trello) and they have a Gantt Power-Up. I’d definitely recommend checking that out. It’s a really nice Gantt view that includes resource management, using milestones, setting dependencies and showing the critical path in the Gantt.
Inside Trello you can see and update dependencies from your card in Trello directly, and view other attributes about a card:
Placker also lets you integrate with multiple boards, so you can keep cards separate for those doing the tasks, but then combine them together when you’re doing capacity planning.
The attributes that are used to plan the cardscan I also like that all attributes can set and updated directly in the cards in Trello, that can help with planning:
I haven’t used TeamGantt, though it does seem to have a lot of similar features on the Gantt chart.
Next to the Gantt chart, Placker gives teams powerful tools to manage their work effectively across boards, you can set up card mirrors and parent/child cards, sync cards to google calendar or create reports directly from Trello.
Btw - I asked Placker about their features to make sure I gave the most accurate response here, and they were willing to offer an extended trial to my readers! Use the live chat on placker.com and mention the How I Trello newsletter and they’ll sort you out with a 30 days trial.
Want to submit your question? Maybe it’ll be featured next week!
🗞 New(s) and Links
I’m launching a book club for my Trello book! 👏
I’m testing a new product offering: a cohort-based Trello book club where we’ll dive into my Trello book, Supercharging Productivity with Trello. Starting in July, each week, we’ll go through a section of the book and meet on Zoom.
I’ll answer your questions about the section, guide a discussion to help you take action and get the most out of the content, and even share some bonus info that I would have shared if I had unlimited pages while writing. :)
The best part - I’ll charge for this in the future but this first round is free to join. All you have to do is purchase the book and send me a copy of your receipt (still counts if you purchased it ages ago, and doesn’t matter if it’s ebook or print!).
🛎️ Trello Tip of the Week
Did you know ever Trello card has a QR Code? If you want to share a way for people to quickly access a card, such as a reference card with information about something, go to SHARE and choose the QR code option. Download that and you can print it and put it in a physical location, or use the screenshot and incorporate into digital materials. It’s a great way to help people quickly access important cards without having to remember which board to go to, or find a specific link!
💡 Use Case Idea
Keep track of your chores in Trello!
I think my least favorite part of chores is remembering when to do what.
Okay no, it’s actually cleaning the shower. Nobody likes doing that.
But my second-least favorite part is definitely keeping track of when the last time I did something was and when it was time to do it again. I tried reminders on my calendar, but those don’t really work, because sometimes I ignore them… or I do them a week late. And then two weeks later, I can’t remember if I actually did it or not.
I created a Trello board to help me solve this.
You can see each list is a frequency, like daily, weekly, etc. I created automation that sets the frequency number of days on each card, based on which list the card was added into.
I then use automation to click a button when I’ve done a chore, which then sets due dates and labels, and updates a custom field to keep track of when it was last completed. (I walked through a lot of this automation in my Automation Live Learning a few weeks ago, so definitely give that a watch if you’re interested.)
If you want to copy the template, this is one of the templates my Premium Subscribers have access to. If you’re not a Premium Subscriber yet, you can become one for just $9, check out the templates, and then cancel if you hate it or don’t find the value! (Promise I won’t be offended 😃)
💪 Featured Power-Up
I just discovered Deeplists, which seems to be a fairly new Power-Up. If you like checklists, but wish they did a bit more, you might be interested in this.
Although the UI is a little clunky, I like what they’re trying to do here. You can make checklists with subtasks and descriptions (for instance you can use text to have a section of a checklist within a checklist) and you can assign multiple people to an item, AND a priority level.
I also like that you can see the checklist items on the front of the card (but imagine this can get out of hand if you have a lot of items 😂)
Unfortunately, you do lose access to being able to view these items in the calendar view OR on your trello home view. So if you’re interested in style and customizability this is a great one. If you’d prefer to have it integrated with other aspects of Trello, you’ll want to use the built in Trello checklists.
Special shoutout to my premium sponsors!
Thanks to:
Mike Day - Dreamsuite Mike
🎉 New Website 🎉
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Btw, haven’t gotten a copy of my Trello book yet? What are you waiting for?
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