What is Trello? Is it a techno-socialist utopia, or a bureaucratic nightmare ?
Well it can go either way, but I think its the best way to team up on projects and keep track of where everything is at in a transparent way.
Here I provide some illustrations as to how I use Trello in order to collaborate with teams on projects, making decision making easier and more transparent, and keeping myself well organised and on track.
An example project
Click the image of the example board to enlarge
This is by no means a full tutorial, but just some highlights worth pointing out. Its satisfyingly user-friendly software that can be accessed in your browser as well as desktop and mobile apps. So jump in and give it a go – here’s a link to the example board.
An example task
Clicking on any of the ‘cards’ or tasks will open a window that shows more detailed information.
What else can it do?
A few more useful highlights
- Make boards public, private, or share them with your teams
- Label and filter cards
- Respond to comments by email
- Create new cards from your modern email app such as Airmail or Spark
- Choose from sweet backgrounds
- Export a snapshot of the board as a CSV for use as a contract, or to migrate to another service.
- Use Zapier or IFTT to connect your board with any other online service!
Whats the sting?
Trello is a freemium app. The free version is really awesome and allows you to have a . In my example I’ve used paid features
- Harvest integration for tracking time
- Custom Fields for displaying ‘Estimated Hours’
Other cool paid integrations include
- Repeating cards for reoccurring tasks
- Calendar view of cards
- So many you can’t even count check them out
Is this going to come back to bite me in the ass?
Trello itself is proprietary software so their security policies are hard for people to verify. I haven’t actually read their privacy policy in full but the company behind it (Attlassian) could read your data. The data is encrypted in transit and at rest though so it would make it difficult for other actors to access your data.
Is this the future?
If you liked this introduction and you want to find out more please contact me to request an invite. By requesting an invitation from myself you’ll help me cover the paid features of using this app.
Do you have alternative tools you use to manage projects? Do you use Trello but with a different workflow? Are you stuck and need a tip? Leave a comment below!
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