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Trello?
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Posted by Ken
Feb 28, 2014 at 09:38 PM
Hi Everybody,
I am still recovering from an almost total organization breakdown these past two years (based mostly on health issues that have required almost full time attention), and so many tasks to address, that I am feeling a bit paralyzed any time I try to organize the tasks or even try to accomplish a few. Thankfully my calendar/event notifications continues to work, so that is one organizational tool that does not need attention. Tasks and projects, however, are a completely different story. I moved from Ecco to Toodledo a number of years ago, and while I admire its features (and miss Ecco), it just is not a program that I want to open and use. It is not necessarily Toodledo’s fault, but I need help at both work and at home, and was doing a bit of CRIMP research last night in hopes of finding something that might motivate me on the home front.
This morning, I came across Trello, a program that I initially dismissed last night. After more careful examination, I found that it offered simplicity and flexibility to somewhat customize how it can be used. In the same way that Ecco allowed you to customize your tabs, Trello, to a lesser extent (and emphasis on the “lesser”), gave me that feeling that I could somewhat alter it to better make it work for me, as opposed to the other way around. Then, I thought more about it and wondered if it was really just a more graphic version of a task manager like Toodledo? To some degree, this is probably true, but if the interface is more appealing, does it really matter?
I would be curious if anybody is using Trello, or a program similar to it? I do not necessarily need collaboration tools, but if I could get my wife to find it useful, I imagine that it would be useful for projects that we are working on jointly. Any thoughts?
—Ken
Posted by Garland Coulson
Feb 28, 2014 at 10:23 PM
I like Trello, but I found it was lacking a few features I needed like the ability to track time and to see late tasks across multiple boards.,
I went through weeks of research, using free trials of all the project management tools recommended to me and the one I decided on was teamwork.com. I am not affiliated with them, I just found they had the right balance of ease of use and affordability.
Having said that, I often get my coaching clients to use Trello during our coaching sessions because it is so easy to use.
Posted by Ken
Feb 28, 2014 at 10:58 PM
Garland Coulson wrote:
I like Trello, but I found it was lacking a few features I needed like
>the ability to track time and to see late tasks across multiple boards.,
I was also concerned about the time issue and not being able to see late tasks across all boards, but I was willing to give it a try because it is simple, yet useful. Some simple programs just lack any useful features, and are more like electronic post-it note applications. And, its android application seems fast and easy. I am willing to try it for a bit, knowing its limitations. Time will tell if what it lacks becomes a problem.
—Ken
Posted by tightbeam
Mar 1, 2014 at 12:00 AM
I use Trello for a few very specific purposes, for example, I organize the books I publish in four columns (Potential, Progress, Pending, and Published). It’s a nice, at-a-glance view of the titles in my catalog, and I can easily move cards from one column to another as books move through the production cycle. The back of each Trello card is sufficient for a few notes or comment. The due date feature comes in handy to advise me when I have to begin prodding an author for output.
I’d use Trello for other things, but the dealbreaker (for me) is that I can export data only as a JSON file. Useless. I did find a plug-in that enables export to a spreadsheet; that’s nice, though what Trello needs is plain text or Word export.
Given the lack of export options, Trello isn’t an integral part of my workflow - it’s just a nice little adjunct, where I can organize certain types of data visually, with little overhead. I could probably do the same things on the desktop with Notebox Disorganizer or Pigeonhole, but I like having Trello at my fingertips no matter where I’m working.
Posted by Ken
Mar 1, 2014 at 04:24 PM
Garland Coulson wrote:
I like Trello, but I found it was lacking a few features I needed like
>the ability to track time and to see late tasks across multiple boards.,
I was playing with Trello a bit last night and found something intresting about the color/label tags. While the six colors tags are constant throughout the boards and organizations, the labels that you can assign to each color are controlled at the board level. So, red can mean “priority” in one board and “next action” in another. Convenient, but it can be confusing if you give a color a different label in each board. But, you can globally search Trello by either label or color, and this is very handy if you choose to give one color a general meaning regardless of label. So, for example if red is always items that are needing immediate attention, then just seachnfor the color red. Alternately, if you need to search a board or a group of boards that share a common label associated with the red color, but may be different from other red colors, then you can search by that label instead of the color red. Very flexible and very handy. So, while Trello only offers minimal date-based actions, it does allow a way to globally find things like urgently tagged cards.
—Ken