Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Web-based project management platforms like Trello can be awesome for tracking all your tasks. However, without a strategy to rescue you from the tension between short-term tasks and long-term projects, you’re likely to miss your goals.
Using the approach below will help you balance these two types of tasks, especially if they span a wide range of projects, clients, timeframes, and levels of urgency.
Start by organizing your Trello boards in a way that makes sense for you or your business. As a freelancer and small business owner, I’ve split mine out by project — individual clients, future ideas, my side business, and general life-related tasks — each one containing groups of related tasks.
Each board is organized by projects or themes, and each list is organized according to Eisenhower’s Principle for task management (see this post for how to use Trello to assign priority).
“Great,” you’re probably thinking, “now instead of one huge cluttered list I now have tasks scattered onto a bunch of boards I can’t see all at once. How do I know what to do?” Enter the “Weekly To-Do” board.
This board siphons tasks from the rest of your boards and will serve as your only actionable task list — putting the things you actually need to do front and center while hiding the clutter. I organize mine with a Today list that I update each day from my weekly tasks based on priority and estimated effort:
Or if really like to plan out your week in detail, you can organize it by the day:
Now to populate it, I recommend using the Getting Things Done concept of the weekly review. Every Monday morning, block off an hour in your calendar to go through each of your Trello boards and adjust task priorities and deadlines as needed. Then focus on the top one or two rows in each list.
Determine which tasks to move to your Weekly To-Do board based on their importance and urgency, then open each card and click Move.
Select your Weekly To-Do board and then whichever list is appropriate for that task, then hit Move. And voilà! That task is now ready to be acted on.
Once you’ve done this with all your boards, you’re ready to hone in on your clutter-free action list and get shift done!
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