Trello is saving my damn life

Seriously. It’s a rare day now when I don’t consult the tortoise shell oracle bones Trello board corresponding to the specific part of my life that needs organizational help.

It all began earlier this spring, just at the wee start of the quarantine, when I noticed my life becoming increasingly (and I do mean increasingly) out of sorts. No manner of post-it notes could comprehend my life. No manner of list-making on paper could properly handle the velocity at which work and casual drip-drops of responsibility were wrecking my sanity.

And so I began to seek out productivity tools to save myself. Somehow I remembered a previous life when I used Trello to organize tasks. It must have been that one failed indie game side project I worked on as a writer years ago – yes! Or was it the last team I worked on, where we used a Trello knock-off called Favro? Either way, I was stirred to action.

I don’t know how to explain it. The idea of using Trello again just felt right. I knew that I wanted a list-tracking tool, which also had a visual Kanban system. I knew also that I wanted to label things and have the power to quickly add and rearrange my tasks at will.

So I signed up again for Trello and dove quickly into the deeper techniques of it. I learned about automation and moreover, that you don’t really need to only have three boards. You can have as many boards as you well please, and you can use Trello cards in the damnedest of ways. I even began implementing an Eisenhower matrix of priority into my Trello boards. I added backlogs for my backlogs. Any system to immediately capture and organize the onslaught of tasks and idea vomit coming in my direction.

I now have separate Trello boards for work and a few different personal projects.

And you know what? I even integrated my Trello boards with a digital pomodoro timer, called Pomello. This way I can track my progress in discrete and manageable chunks, moving things out of my backlog at a reasonable pace and into the done pile.

It’s truly working and I have my sanity back.

Well, except for the fact that I just wrote a blog post about Trello.

Good night, everyone.