Getting Organized with Trello

Ages ago I was organized on an imitation Palm Pilot. (I forget the brand but it was basically a cheap clone.) Well, we have all moved beyond that. The other important buzzword was “groupware”. Chandler looked promising but it died. I tried lots of other solutions but each seemed to have a problem. Wunderlist was the last I played with and then the devil (Microsoft) bought them.

I have other tools I use for lots of things but what has been missing is a simple tool to organize lists and, the important part, share them — primarily with my daughter. I somewhat by accident found about about Trello. It is looking like the missing tool.

It is a commercial product but it has a choice with less features that is free. For what I want to do it seems to meet my requirements. The site explains what it does so I am going to just offer the basic ideas.

  • You can create boards which are independent areas.
  • Each board can hold multiple lists.
  • Each list holds cards.
  • Attachments, comments and due dates can be associated with cards.

The good news is this is all pretty basic and easy to understand. You can then add due dates and subscriptions but that’s about it. Within the lists you can use drag and drop to move things around and other “it just seems logical” things. It is all web based so you can access it with any browser.

I wouldn’t use it for a big software project but for general organization and small projects it seems fine. And as it is so intuitive it is more likely to get used by the less-geeky.

One comment
  1. I order a lot of things on-line with four possible shipping destinations. I used to keep track of them in Gmail using labels but this has never been great. I am now using Trello. By being able to add comments and attachments, I think this will be a better choice.

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