Trello Techniques

Best practices after several months of Trello use.

Common board structure

Common boards I recommend, left to right.

  1. To Do list contains cards waiting in the work-pipeline.
    Sometimes I use a variant with multiple To-Do lists by separating it by purpose, like: To Do / Content, To Do / Site, To Do / Server etc.

  2. Doing is a list for current tasks.

  3. Done for finished tasks. Archive them after couple of months or couple of hundreds.

  4. Notes / Info contains permanents notes, manuals or informations that are useful to keep forever.

You can create optional Ideas / Prepare / Postponed list that is usually placed fully-left, before To-Do list, and that contains ideas, usually a pile of garbage, that is postponed, delayed, just an idea and etc.

Good practices

  • Everything is written in English. It’s the only language that all team members are required to know. Writing meaningful sentences in description and using markdown for formatting is highly recommended.

  • Card title should fit in one line. For a more detailed task description use, you guessed it, description field.

  • About card members: you’re probably using it wrong.
    Every card must have at least one member - the user responsible for that card. If you want just to be informed about the card, and you’re not doing any related work, don’t become member and just subscribe to that card; you’ll get notified when something changes.

  • When marking card as done, write a comment containing word “Done” and besides a concise explanation about the work done. Everybody will know who did what and when. Only at the end, move that card to list Done.

  • Only a member can archive a card.

  • You never delete a card that had some activity (comments). If there were no comments, maybe the card shouldn’t have been created at first place.

Bookmark your searches

Option Saved Searches is only for paying customers. But you can achieve similar results by using browser bookmarks.

The base URL is https://trello.com/search?q= on which we append search queries to.

  • I’m working on what, across all projects?
    @me list:Doing / URL

  • What Maria (example) is working on?
    @Maria list:Doing / URL

  • What are my unfinished tasks?
    @me -list:Done -list:Info -list:Idea / URL

  • My active tasks only in project XYZ?
    @me board:XYZ -list:Done -list:Info -list:Idea / URL

In search results, Trello will return both normal and archived cards. Also, if you need a to search for an exact phrase, use double-quotes "some phrase", just like in Google.

Extra Tip: When you are inside Trello, you can now get to the search box just by hitting slash /.

So, go ahead and create your own Trello bookmarks.

date 01. Jan 0001 | modified 29. Dec 2023
filename: Tip » Trello Techniques