There is a wide range of digital tools at your disposal, with each offering unique features to fit specific purposes. At first, it might feel good to have access to all these options, up until when all the choices become overwhelming.
In this article, we'll show you how to handle some of your professional and personal tasks with one simple tool (Trello):
1. Brainstorm Ideas
Coming up with the next great idea is crucial for any organization, and that’s why brainstorming sessions are so vital. Ideally, during these sessions, you will gather a group of people around a specific topic or problem to come up with as many ideas as possible, no matter how crazy they might sound. You will then curate all these ideas to come up with potential solutions.
But what happens when your teams work from different parts of the globe? You can use digital solutions like Trello to spark innovation. There are many brainstorming techniques for exploring productive ideas, but here’s a simple one:
First, you will need to send your agenda for the brainstorming session to your colleagues beforehand, and then ensure that everyone has Trello.
Next, you can assign a column to each member to list their ideas on the cards, and add comments where necessary. You can create another column for overlapping ideas.
Once the allotted time for the brainstorming session has elapsed, you can create one last column to list the best solutions through a vote using Power-Ups for Trello.
2. Water Cooler Activities
Suppose you have been enjoying working from home. In that case, there’s probably one aspect of on-site work that you have been missing- the impromptu conversations around the water cooler and other social activities.
Luckily, you can create a virtual water cooler at your remote workplace to improve team bonding and productivity, and create a strong company culture. You can use Trello for all sorts of water cooler activities, including Game club, Netflix club, Bitcoin club, or book club.
If you choose to go for the book club, you can invite a few colleagues, select some genres, like fiction, self-improvement, or horror, and pick out a few titles under each category to read and discuss later.
3. Assign Topics to Content Writers
If you own a blog and work with a group of freelance writers, you will need an effective tool to assign topics and track progress.
Trello is ideal for this task. You can create a board and columns for each writer. Once you have come up with blog titles, make cards and assign them to the respective writers. You can add comments, attachments, members, or due dates in each card containing a blog title.
In addition, each writer can use different color labels for specific activities, for example, red for writing, yellow for researching, and green to indicate the task is complete.
You can create a review column where the writers will move cards once they have finished working them.
4. Prioritization Tool
Chances are, you often struggle to complete all the tasks on your to-do list—there’s just so much to do within a short period. When you find yourself in this situation, the most effective way to use your finite time and energy is to focus on the most important and urgent task.
Luckily, there are many excellent techniques to prioritize your tasks, and you can use some of them on Trello. For example, if you choose the MoSCoW method to prioritize your tasks, you only need to rearrange them into four categories; must have, should have, could have, and won’t have.
Once you do that, you can assign each category to a Trello column and list your tasks accordingly in the cards. Start working on the “must-have” column, and move the cards to the “completed” columns as you finish the tasks.
5. Organize a Party
Now, Trello is not a typical event management software, but you’d be surprised what you can accomplish with it.
Whether it’s a birthday party, or an office dinner, most events have many moving parts to track. And if you are in charge of handling the planning, you want to make sure that you have taken care of everything.
You can use many approaches on Trello to organize an event, and we will go with the simplest one. Create columns for guest list, menu & drinks, activities, doing, and done. Under each column, create cards to represent individual items, and move the ones you complete to the “done” column.
6. Organize Household Chores
Similar to an event, organizing household chores to ensure your home is tidy can be challenging, as there’s so much to do. However, although it is not a magic pill, Trello can help you create more manageable systems.
If you prefer to do specific chores on particular days, you can divide your board by weekly tasks. Alternatively, you can create a checklist for each room and add cards accordingly.
7. Plan Your Meals
What if you could plan a personalized meal schedule and add food recipes from blogs or magazines in one app, which you can access on your smartphone or computer? We bet that would make your meal planning much more straightforward.
Here’s an example: Create your Weekly Meal Plan board. You could add a list of meals you’d like to make for that week in the first column. You can add as many as you can think of.
Next, create individual columns to represent all the days of the week. You can now move the cards from your list of meals to fill out the days. From there, you can add a list of ingredients and recipes to each card/meal.
Trello for Professional and Personal Productivity
You can use Trello to organize just about anything in your life. You can use the templates above as a foundation to create more personalized plans to boost your productivity at home and work.