Project management app Trello has grabbed millions of users with its basic drag and drop lists. But that surface simplicity masks powerful hidden features, and we’ve gone deep to bring you time-saving Trello tips and shortcuts.
Pick a philosophy
Trello consists of boards, lists and cards, and there are dozens of different ways to combine them – it might take some trial and error to settle on a system that works for your needs.
The basic choice is whether to focus each board on overall projects, or individual tasks. Some people use different boards for different clients, for instance, while others use lists to create separate to-do lists for each day of the week. A common approach is to make each task a card, and then drag it from list to list as it moves from ‘to do,’ to ‘in progress,’ to ‘done,’ – that way you get a sweet dopamine hit at every stage of the process.
For teams, a project-based approach offers a good overview of what stage a particular project is at. At WIRED, we create a Trello card for each article and then move it through the process from idea, to commissioning, editing and publication. Another way of achieving this goal is through labels, which can be used as a status indicator or to mark cards as belonging to different departments, or the colour-coded due dates function.
Focussing on projects doesn’t mean you can’t also use Trello as a to-do list. One powerful feature that often gets overlooked is Trello’s checklist function, which can be added to every card. If each card is a project, you can add a checklist underneath it and tick off each item as it gets completed. You even get a green percentage progress bar that fills in as you clear each entry – it’s deeply satisfying.
Master Trello keyboard shortcuts
If you’re still using your mouse, like some sort of neanderthal, are you really being productive? Trello has a vast array of keyboard shortcuts that can shave seconds off your organising. Hardened Trello veterans will already know that pressing Q brings up all the cards you’re responsible for, but you may not know about some of the others.
B opens the boards menu and lets you search instantly, while F lets you easily filter cards. Pressing D opens the due date picker for each card, and you can edit a card without clicking on it by hovering over it and hitting E. Pressing the space bar while hovering over a card will add or remove you from it. The keyboard can also be a navigation tool – you can scroll around with the arrow keys, and hit J and K to move to the card below or above your current selection.
If you’ve got a lot of lists in your board, and a mouse that doesn’t side-scroll, you can move laterally by holding down the shift key in conjunction with the scroll wheel, or by clicking on any empty space on the board and dragging left or right.
Embrace power-ups
There are a huge array of custom add-ons and power-ups for Trello, some of which require a premium subscription. But the best one is free – the Calendar power-up lets you view all of your cards by date, so if you’ve used the due date function you can see exactly when certain things are going to land.
The Card Repeater power-up automatically takes recurring tasks, while Map allows you to add locations to your cards and view them all on a map, like a television detective trying to solve a series of murders. Other useful additions include the ability for team members to vote on particular cards – handy if you can’t decide where to go for the Christmas party – and 'card aging', whereby cards that have been opened for a while will start to fade, offering a stark visual reminder that you’re neglecting that important task.
Integrate everything
You can link Trello up to pretty much everything. Hook it to Slack to get automatic reminders of when your tasks are coming due, or to Google Drive to attach documents directly to cards and see real-time previews.
Each list has a unique email address, so you can forward stuff directly to your to do list, or use a Gmail or Outlook plug-in that gives you a Trello button right in your inbox. If you have the app, you can share voicemails, photos or emails direct to Trello with the standard share function on iOS and Android.
You can drag and drop all kinds of files on to cards. In OS X, you can attach a screenshot directly to a Trello card by hitting command-shift-4 to take the grab, and then hovering over the card and pressing command-V.
Other power-ups let you view the results of SurveyMonkey polls directly from Trello, or start video conference calls straight from Trello. With a bit of fiddling and some IFTT (If This Then That) magic, you can even ask Alexa to add items to your Trello board – perfect for creating a shopping list on the fly.
Stay informed
If you’re just using Trello for personal admin, notifications may be a feature you’re unaware of, but they’re a powerful one. By adding yourself to a card, or clicking ‘watch,’ you can get notified every-time someone adds something to it, or changes it. You can also subscribe to entire lists or boards, and Trello also includes the option to switch on desktop notifications, although that could be more distracting than useful.
Avoid these Trello mistakes
It can be tempting, when faced with a big project, to immediately create a Trello board for it, but you risk falling into the productivity trap of spending more time dragging cards around, colour-coding tasks and reading articles like this one than actually getting any work done.
We recommend sticking to as few lists as possible to avoid endless side-scrolling - and make use of the ability to add labels to cards, or assign cards to individuals – to break them up into different categories that way instead.
If you’re using Trello to help manage a team, it’s important to be clear about what the rules of engagement are – how to use each list, what the different labels mean, and who is responsible for moving cards. Maybe even make a card spelling out what to do and what not to do. Otherwise things can quickly spiral into exactly the sort of chaos Trello was designed to avoid.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
