---
title: "37: How I Use Trello to Manage Tasks and Todos"
id: "5165"
type: "post"
slug: "trello-task-management-037"
published_at: "2017-12-11T03:42:46+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-11-07T15:51:57+00:00"
url: "https://johnpoelstra.com/trello-task-management-037/"
markdown_url: "https://johnpoelstra.com/trello-task-management-037.md"
excerpt: "How I use Trello to manage my tasks and to-dos: one task per card, a simple board, forwarding emails to cards, and using due dates."
taxonomy_category:
  - "Podcast"
taxonomy_post_tag:
  - "trello"
---

[Skip to the content](#site-content)
[John Poelstra](https://johnpoelstra.com)

### Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

- [One Conversation](https://johnpoelstra.com/)
- [Podcast](https://johnpoelstra.com/category/podcast/)
- [Coaching for Directors](https://johnpoelstra.com/coach/)
- [About](https://johnpoelstra.com/about/)

 Toggle search field

- [One Conversation](https://johnpoelstra.com/)
- [Podcast](https://johnpoelstra.com/category/podcast/)
- [Coaching for Directors](https://johnpoelstra.com/coach/)
- [About](https://johnpoelstra.com/about/)

# [37: How I Use Trello to Manage Tasks and Todos](https://johnpoelstra.com/trello-task-management-037/)

This episodes looks at how I use Trello to manage my tasks and todos.

[https://media.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/content.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/JPS037-Trello-to-Manage-Tasks.mp3](https://media.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/content.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/JPS037-Trello-to-Manage-Tasks.mp3)

Podcast: [Download](https://media.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/content.blubrry.com/johnpoelstra/JPS037-Trello-to-Manage-Tasks.mp3)

Subscribe: [Apple Podcasts](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-john-poelstra-show/id1130635146?mt=2&ls=1#episodeGuid=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnpoelstra.com%2F%3Fp%3D5165)
 | [Android](https://subscribeonandroid.com/johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)

## Highlights

- Trello might not be the right tool for you, and that’s okay
- My morning routine on the iPad, including images from Unsplash to recenter me
- A simple Kanban-style board: To Do, Today, Next, Backlog and Done
- One task per card
- Turning emails into cards by forwarding them to the board
- Reviewing what I finished each week, then archiving it
- Using due dates and reminders for things like changing the oil
- Filters and calendar views to see what’s coming up

## Resources Mentioned

- Using images to restore or recenter you
  - [Sustaining Your Peak and Avoiding Burnouts with Brad Stulberg](https://awesomeatyourjob.com/164-sustaining-your-peak-and-avoiding-burnouts-with-brad-stulberg/) podcast interview with Pete Mockaitis
  - [Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Performance-Elevate-Burnout-Science/dp/162336793X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506210106&sr=1-1&keywords=peak+performance&linkCode=ll1&tag=poelcat-20&linkId=52ae8cda668aa518f29f1960a7d1fe5a) (affiliate) by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
  - [Reflections on the Book Peak Performance (028)](https://johnpoelstra.com/peak-performance-book-028/) by John Poelstra

- [Enable Your Board of Advisors & Fight Your Inner Critics (032)](https://johnpoelstra.com/inner-critics-crew-032/) by John Poelstra
- [Kanban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board)
- [Task Tracking That’s Not Overwhelming or Depressing (023)](https://johnpoelstra.com/managable-task-tracking-023/)

## Related Episodes

- [How I Get Organized When I’m Overwhelmed (118)](https://johnpoelstra.com/get-organized-overwhelmed-118/) — how I use Trello when I’m overwhelmed
- [Plugging Leaks to Focus and Execute (66)](https://johnpoelstra.com/focus-and-execute-66/) — managing my tasks in Trello to plug focus leaks
- [Ruthless Prioritization (4)](https://johnpoelstra.com/ruthless-prioritization-004/) — the Post-it approach for short-term tasks

## Credits

- [Hallon](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Christian_Bjoerklund/Skapmat/christian_bjoerklund_-_skpmat_ep_-_01_-_hallon) by Christian Bjoerklund
- [Cold Funk](http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100499) by Kevin MacLeod

All songs licensed under [Creative Commons](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

## Transcript

*This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.*

Today I’m talking about Trello and how I use Trello to manage my daily to-dos. This came up with a recent client that hadn’t used Trello before, and we were looking for a way to capture to-do items for them, maybe in a potential way that we could collaborate together, that I’d be able to help them review their to-dos and what they were doing. And so this podcast just kind of gives an overview of Trello, how I use it.

Hopefully it works in this audio format. You can’t exactly see the screen, but if you do go to trello.com, I think you’ll find it fairly straightforward to use. And hopefully what I share here will Either encourage you to try it out or maybe tweak the system that you’re already using. In general, I don’t usually give advice as a coach. I’ve mentioned this a few other times.

As I get into certain areas though, like say Trello, if I’m working with someone and they want to explore Trello, but they haven’t used it before and I have a lot of experience with it, It is something that I’m gonna share and I’m gonna teach on. Trello might not be the right tool for you. You gotta decide that for yourself. But hopefully this will give you an idea of what it can do, and then you can, you know, pick out the parts that work for you. I’m also playing with the idea of expanding my coaching, the type of coaching I do, to include maybe some type of task management, accountability, check-in, review kind of thing.

Trello would be a fantastic tool for this because given the sharing abilities, we can be virtually looking at the same thing and, you know, maybe reviewing the week that’s coming ahead. In fact, I used to do this with a friend. We would meet every Monday, or I think it was, yeah, we’d meet on Monday nights virtually and review each other’s boards and challenge the amount of work that we had committed to for the coming week, maybe do a review of what had happened in the previous week. And so this might be something that people are interested in doing with me. And if you are, just let me know.

So this process I’m going to talk about today, I don’t always use it. In fact, like a lot of the stuff I talk about on the podcast, Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. I often will embrace a particular tool or process for a period of time, and then it just kind of drifts away or falls away, or I stop doing it. Just because I talked about something a year ago doesn’t mean I’ve been doing it for the last 365 days. In fact, there’s probably a pretty good chance that I haven’t at some point.

Strangely enough though, this Trello process is the process that I keep coming back to. And I recently came back to it in a big way in that I bought a new iPad, the, the lowest, not the Pro, but the, I think they called it the 2017 model. I bought it because the aging iPad 2 I have just could not keep up. And over time, the price on the iPads has come down too. So it wasn’t that bad.

Anyway, it’s been surprisingly worth it. It’s exceeded my expectations in terms of how much I use it. It’s fast. I think it’s about $330 and it fits really, really well with my morning routine. It’s kind of like an all-in-one package for the morning routine.

It’s kind of an all-in-one package because I have like a morning affirmation that I’ve written that I’ll read. That’s in Dropbox as a PDF. I might be reading books on Kindle, PDF. Occasionally I might read something from the Bible. That’s an app.

RSS feeds. And then I’ve also taken to an interesting exercise that ties in a little bit to the Board of Directors Inner Critic podcast. I also have a series of images and pictures that I look at sometimes that I’ve collected from Unsplash. And I stole this idea from the Habits— Ooh, what was that episode? The one The one extreme— well, I’ll have to link to it in the notes.

It was one of the previous podcasts I did on a book that I read about habits where they talked about looking at pictures of nature. And so I have a whole folder of pictures and sometimes I look at pictures. Anyway, I love it that it’s all on this one device. I keep it handy, sit down with my cup of coffee and look at it. The other thing that can be part of, that’s often part of kind of the last part of my My morning ritual, again, every morning is a little different, but I kind of tend to do these things.

I’ll look at Trello because Trello kind of has, if it’s super important and it needs to get done, it’s in there and it’s in some kind of order that I’m used to and that is there. A couple of things about this iPad that I’ve been very intentional about and have not been disappointed about whatsoever. I don’t have a calendar on it. I don’t have email on it. Actually, I take that back.

I have one email account that I use to email myself essentially to get things onto the iPad really easy if it’s on email. But in terms of checking regular email accounts, I can’t. Social media, Facebook and Twitter, not on there. I don’t want to be distracted. I’ve turned off the news on the iPad and some of the other stuff that they try to push your direction.

This is primarily an organization device for me. So Trello and then reading. And I’ve got one game, which was probably going to get deleted because then when my son wants to play games, uh, there will be no games on the iPad to play. And I have found this to be awesome in terms of considering social media reading. I just, it’s, it’s a distraction.

So what I, what I do is when it comes to social media is I will read that on my laptop and then I will save interesting articles from Twitter or from Facebook. I’ll save them to Instapaper and— oh, that’s another app that is also on my iPad for reading. I don’t tend to read that in the morning as much. That’s more of an evening reading.

So in terms of tools, there are other tools that can do exactly what I’m going to describe here. You could use Post-its and a piece of paper. Or a desk or some type of flat surface. I really like the visual aspect. I love the way that you can drag cards.

I, yeah, I love that it’s not too cluttered. And there are other tools like Asana has Kanban. So this, the whole overarching concept behind this is, is a system called Kanban. I won’t go into what that is here, but I’ll link to something maybe in the notes about what it is if you want to know more. So Asana has implemented the similar thing, and I find it to be horribly clunky.

I do use it with one person I do client work with, and I can tolerate it, but I think Trello, Trello is the clear winner if you’re looking for kind of a card Kanban system like this. Also, what I’m gonna describe here is really just for solo use. So, you know, the example I’m giving here is how I manage my to-dos and stuff. You could easily mold and change this though if you wanted to work with a partner or someone else. So everything in Trello, there’s 2 components, and if you can get these components straight, you’re gonna have no problems at all using Trello.

There’s lists, which are columns, or you could think of them as swim lanes. They’re vertical swim lanes. And then there are cards. And a card goes in a list and you can have— so it goes in a column. So you can have multiple cards and multiple columns, but there’s a one-to-one relationship between cards and columns.

So a card can only be in a column. You could create copies of the card, but that card can only live in one column at a time. I recommend 4 columns. Backlog, stolen from software development. So that could be to-do for, for most humans.

So there’s a to-do column, a next column, and a today column. And then some people like to have a done column. So they like to have kind of a collection of accomplishments where when a card is complete, it goes into the done column and they can see all the things that they’ve accomplished. I’ve played with that for a long time. It doesn’t do anything for me.

I don’t care about it. It doesn’t help me. So when I’m done with a card, I just dispose of it, but we’ll talk about that in a little bit. So quick overview of how these columns or lists work. The backlog or to-do is, are things that need to happen.

These are things that have not started yet. They need to get done eventually. Next is kind of an on deck. So these are the things It’s kind of a holding place for the things that I think that I need to work on next. And then today is, these are the cards that I am going to work on and complete today.

They don’t always get completed in a day or in a day as planned. That’s okay. But for me, the focus is these are the cards that matter today. A 5th column that can be helpful is a list of primary projects or goals. In other words, these are the key bigger purposes that you are trying to achieve through the tasks that you’re working in this particular board.

My recommendation here is not to have any more than 5. 3, I think, is ideal. You get anywhere past 5 and it just starts to become overwhelming and you see it and you’re just kind of, It just, it just becomes too much information. So an overarching goal or project that you could be working on is, uh, maybe you’re expecting a baby and so you need to set up a nursery or a room for the baby. That could be an, you know, that could be a big project.

Finding a new job, launching a new website, something, something Bigger than a task that’s probably going to require multiple tasks or cards and has some type of completion to it. Although I suppose completion isn’t a total hard and fast requirement, but, um, I suppose it could be, uh, an ending thing too, like maybe professional development or increasing my coding skills or something like that. This 5th column, if you have it, is, you know, maybe the title of that column is goals or big rocks or whatever the term is that, that works for you in terms of these kind of overarching projects that you’re working towards. The cards in this one, in this column, they don’t move, unlike kind of how we’re going to talk about some of the other Other cards and other columns. So now I’m going to talk about the centerpiece element of Trello, and that is cards.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting things done with cards. My recommendation here is to keep it really simple and not to take advantage of all the possibilities that Trello gives you. So keep it really simple. First thing, one task per card. Yes, you can create checklists and you can do all kinds of stuff.

One task per card. You’ll thank me later. And if it takes, you know, as you’re creating the task, a card for a particular task, if it’s less than 2 minutes to do that task, stealing from David Allen, just do it. Don’t even bother creating the card. Just get it done.

So you might be wondering, you know, checklists, why not add a checklist or why not use them. My experience is that you can’t see the checklist. You have to go into the card to see the checklist, whereas a particular task that belongs to a card, you can see on the face of the card itself.

And I find that things like checklists and some of these other features, even labels, which is more of an advanced feature in, in the context of what I’m presenting here today, I think some of this stuff can just become a big fat distraction. So keep the cards simple. The only time a checklist I’ve seen be useful is when you’re doing a workflow that’s repetitive. For a while, I’ve used it for podcast production with clients where maybe we’re sharing the same board And for each episode of the podcast, the same, say I have to do the same 10 tasks and another person has to do 10 other things. And so in that case, we’ll create one card that’s a template.

We’ll create the checklist. So the 10 items for me, the 10 items for them and whatever else. And we’ll use that card as a template and we’ll simply copy that card for each new episode. And then that card will float through the process, and then each of us will check off that the respective things that we’re working on are done. In that case, it works really well because both people can kind of see where things are at, and the card just kind of, you know, works its way across the board.

But in general, for just regular tasks, I think it’s better to have the tasks at the card level. So cards being the most important building block, or the kind of the The central artifact of a Trello board. Use cards for everything. I like to use a— I kind of think of each card for a particular task as a little filing cabinet. So if maybe my wife and I have a card that says spring, you know, plan spring break, we might put in that particular card, we might Have, like, we might paste in the reservation confirmation numbers.

We might dump links to different things that we’re researching there. There might be a checklist in that case, but generally it’s— generally it’s, it’s, again, you can geek out on making this thing super complex. So you have lots of boxes to check off and everything’s tracked. Or you can just kind of do the common stuff, common sense stuff that normally works for you. So if we are taking a trip out of town, we are normally going to fly there, stay in a hotel, and rent a car.

Those are pretty easy to get. And based on the way we usually split it up, there’s no need to create a checklist that says buy tickets, book hotel, book rental car. We just sit down and do it all at once and we’re done. So That would be an example of where creating a checklist doesn’t make any sense for us. But again, a single card for something like this can be a great place to store that information that’s related to that task that needs to get done.

Sometimes I’ll just create a card for something that I need to do. Like for instance, oh, I need to create a new page on my website to get better analytics on email signups. So I have a card that says set up thank you page. And connect to Google Analytics. Well, inside that card is a link to an article I read that explains how to do it.

So when it comes time to do that task, I don’t have to go looking through my bookmarks for that article. The link is already going to be in the card. So use these cards, use cards as a dumping ground in a good way. If it’s something that needs to be done, I offload it out of my brain into a card and goes into the to-do column. I don’t generally stick stuff directly into today or next.

But that’s not out of the question either. And the other thing I like to do too is any task that’s an email is to turn that email into a card as well. Again, if it’s just a quick reply, reply and be done. If it’s a longer-term task or project, turn it into a card. The easiest way here is to take advantage of the feature of being able to email cards to boards.

I’ll link to an article that explains, you know, how to get the email address for your board. I like to set up a simple address entry in my email client. And then whenever I want to forward an email to the board, thereby turning it into a card, or just create cards from email, I don’t want to open Trello, then I can do that as well. So what to do with the Done cards? Or let me back up just a little bit.

So the idea here is that as you’re doing this brain dump of things that need to be done, they’re going into the To Do column. So, and if you want to kind of visualize this in your mind, working left to right. So on the left, the left far upper left part of the board is going to be to-do. The next column or swim lane is going to be next. The next one, again, moving left to right is going to be today.

And then the column after that is going to be done if you have a done column. So some people like to drag these done cards into the done column. And then at a certain point, maybe it’s Friday afternoon or the beginning of the week. They like to look at that list and reflect on them and see what they learned as a result of the things they did this week and then get rid of them. As I mentioned a little earlier, I just simply throw them away because that process, at least to date, doesn’t do anything for me.

So when you get rid of a card, you click on— the way you delete a card is you click on archive. After you have archived the card, you can delete it. If there’s a card that I might want to search on later that I want to show up in a search, I will not do that final step of deleting the card. I will just simply archive it. But 9 times out of 10, I simply delete the card because I don’t want to see it again.

In terms of usage, this is one thing I just love about how Trello works. I’ll use the, at least on Mac, there’s an app. So there’s a Trello app now. I’ll use that. I’ll use it in a web browser.

I will have it on my iPad. It’s also on my phone. So if I am somewhere and I think of something I need to do, I just simply create a card using one of my devices. And occasionally if I’m standing in line waiting for something, I might pull up Trello on my phone and just kind of look at the to-do column and see, okay, what needs to be done today? Or let me just remember, let me just make sure that I’m focused on what I thought I was going to do today or what was most important.

Speaking of that, the process I generally use here is to try to look at the board the night before. So I’ll just kind of clean things up, drag things around. I’ll scan the next column, what the today column— did anything today that didn’t get done need to be done tomorrow? I’ll leave it there. And I’ll typically drag cards around between the today column, the next column, and the to-do column.

Occasionally, things just get all clogged up and the today column will get way too deep. The next column will get really, really deep. And then I’ll simply select the option that says, move all the cards in this list to another list. And I’ll just essentially flush them all. So I’ll just take all the cards in today and maybe throw them in the backlog, or I’ll take all the cards from today and move them into the next column, or I’ll take all the cards in the next column and just put them all into the backlog.

Column. So I have 2 clean columns, Next and Today. Then I’ll do a quick scan of the to-do list. And for things that I know have to happen today or tomorrow, I’ll drag them into the to-do— into the— I’ll drag them into the Today column. If I know they kind of need to happen fairly soon, they’ll go into the Next column.

And if they need to happen sooner rather than later, I’ll drag them to the top portion of the list of the to-do or backlog column so that when I go looking for those next things that need to happen, they’re there. And so having done this the night before, the next morning, I’ll open the app quickly, look to see what’s in there, remind myself and confirm what I’m going to work on and go about my day. Sometimes in the middle of the day, I’ll also check in and look at it. And sometimes I’ll use this as a reference to just keep, to create a written to-do list, like on paper, whether it’s a big piece of copy paper or a planner that I use occasionally that I really like. I’ll use Trello to help guide and narrow the things that I’m going to work on, write them on a piece of paper, and then I don’t have to look at Trello and be potentially overwhelmed with all the things that are there.

A couple of other things that are really useful and helpful with this system are due dates and reminders. Each card can get a due date. You can only assign one due date per card, which again, this is another reason for one task per card, because if you have multiple tasks with multiple due dates, you can’t do that because you can only give one due date. To a card. So again, with one task, that one task has a due date.

What’s it going to be? When’s it have to be done by? Sometimes I set these for way out in the future. So I have, like, I’ve recently started keeping track of changing the oil in the car or getting the tires rotated and balanced. And I know that happens roughly every 6 months or so.

So I have a card and I just keep reusing that card and I just keep bumping the due date. Forward on it. And then I’ll also add notes like, oh, you know, tires rotated at this amount of mileage on this date. So I don’t ever have to go back and look at my calendar or wonder when did I do that. It’s just, I just do a search for the change oil card and there it is.

So to get notifications when things are due, you want, what you want to do here, the simple, you can subscribe to individual cards. I find the easiest way is just to subscribe to the board. It’s a little buried in the menus, but if you go to Show Menu and then More, you’ll see something that says Subscribe with like a little eye. You click on that Subscribe, you’re subscribed to that board, and anything with a due date or a reminder or notification in it, you will get an email for. There’s also the ability to filter.

Um, you can also find that in the menu. The filtering is pretty good, but it’s kind of quirky when it comes to due dates. I always have to kind of goof around with them to kind of click on the one that I want because you can’t create custom filters when it comes to due dates. But still, it’s a nice way to just kind of quickly see, oh, what stuff is overdue, what stuff is coming due, what stuff is due today. There’s also the calendar power-up.

So you can do a calendar view of things that are due and coming up. It sounds really great in theory, and I’ve looked at it a couple of times and I just never, never use it because I’m just, because I’m usually relying on the email alerts or the board alerts saying, you know, something’s due or coming due or the order of the cards and what’s in the today column. So there’s some closing thoughts here. Don’t get carried away with the power-ups and the add-ons and all the integrations and all the stuff you can do. I guess unless that’s fun and you think it’s a good use of your time.

This is the bare-bones approach that I take to using Trello to managing my to-do stuff and what needs to happen. I do have boards split. So I have a— I do split the boards though. So remember how I mentioned, you know, 3 to 5 projects? So I have one board that’s just home stuff and my wife and I share that.

That board’s totally separate than from like my daily personal board. And then I also have a separate board that is for Red Hat stuff. So that’s a nice way to kind of keep things separate and within their kind of jurisdictions. So I’m curious if there, what else you all would like to know. If there’s something that you would like to know, you want me to review your board, Uh, do some coaching around maybe your board and things that aren’t getting done, or anything else you’d like to explore, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can figure out.

#### John Poelstra

John Poelstra, CPA, coaches directors in finance and software. Certified and trained by the Co-Active Training Institute, he has coached for more than 10 years, with over 520 clients and 3,150 sessions, including people at well-known Fortune 100 companies. In over 30 years of professional experience, he spent 25 in technology and finance: software testing, project management and team leadership at Red Hat and Dell/EMC, and finance as a bank auditor at Wells Fargo and a CPA at Grant Thornton. He hosts The John Poelstra Show podcast and is based in Portland, Oregon.

[Author archive](https://johnpoelstra.com/author/john-poelstra/)
[Author website](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-john-poelstra-show/id1130635146)

December 10, 2017

[Podcast](https://johnpoelstra.com/category/podcast/)

[trello](https://johnpoelstra.com/tag/trello/)

[Previous post](https://johnpoelstra.com/coaching-session-agenda-036/)
[Next post](https://johnpoelstra.com/taking-break-self-employment-038/)

## 0 Comments

## [Add yours](#respond)

### 1 Pingback

1. [What I Learned in Month #1 of The Experiment (041) - John Poelstra](https://johnpoelstra.com/experiment-month-one-041/)

### Leave a Reply [Cancel reply](/trello-task-management-037/#respond)

### John Poelstra

[https://johnpoelstra.com/?attachment_id=3756](https://johnpoelstra.com/?attachment_id=3756)

### Work With Me

I coach directors in finance and software who want to prioritize, delegate, and lead with clarity. Start with One Conversation, a complimentary 60-minute coaching conversation.

[See how I work](https://johnpoelstra.com/coach/)

### Subscribe to Podcast

[Apple Podcasts](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-john-poelstra-show/id1130635146?mt=2&ls=1)
[Android](https://subscribeonandroid.com/johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)
[by Email](https://subscribebyemail.com/johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)
[RSS](https://johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)

### Links

- [About](https://johnpoelstra.com/about/)
- [Coaching](https://johnpoelstra.com/coach/)

### Subscribe to Podcast

[Apple Podcasts](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-john-poelstra-show/id1130635146?mt=2&ls=1)
[Android](https://subscribeonandroid.com/johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)
[by Email](https://subscribebyemail.com/johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)
[RSS](https://johnpoelstra.com/feed/podcast/)

© 2026 [John Poelstra](https://johnpoelstra.com/)
 — Powered by [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)

Theme by [Anders Noren](https://andersnoren.se)
 — [Up ↑](#)