Use Trello to Organise Your next Project or Essay

Trello is a great tool which allows you to organise your things visually and easily. It’s great for managing things from parties to essays. In this post, I will be showing how I use Trello to write my essays, and to manage my projects.

My essay board (click to enlarge)

Trello is a great visual tool. I have a blog post outlining it here. I use it for the things I need to do in games to writing essays.

In this post, I will show you how I use Trello to help me write essays. You can find the board template I use here.

Firstly, I will outline my tags. The red tag is called ‘important stuff’. I tag all the really important cards with this. The green tag is my ‘from evernote’ tag. I tag all the cards which have automatically come from Evernote with this. I use IFTTT to automate this. The orange tag is ‘todo’. I tag all the todo cards with this. My final tag is the purple tag, and this is titled ‘research’. All my research cards get this tag.

The first list I have is the ‘Important stuff’ list. This is the first list I have, and the first card on it is the project outline (what I need to do). I have put the due date of the essay on this card, as well as a picture and the essay document, which I have put on Dropbox. I then have a card with a link to my Evernote project notebook, so I can quickly switch between the two.

The essay outline card. You can see the document attached to the bottom of the card.

My second list is the ‘Incoming’ list. This is the list my IFTTT automated cards go to, and where I dump cards which I will sort later.

The third list is the ‘To-do’ list. This list is pretty self-explanatory. I put my tasks here. They often have checklists inside them. I love using the comments bit to attach links to other cards, so I can quickly jump back and forth between them.

One of my to-do cards

The next list is one of my most important; it’s called ‘Essay structure’. Each section or paragraph of the essay gets its own card. On that card is a description of what I need to do, along with a checklist of what I want to include in that paragraph. I find this really helps me get all the things I want into that paragraph. Each card has a deadline on it too, and this is when I want to finish writing that paragraph. At the top of the list is the paragraph structure of the essay, with the document attached to it.

My next list is the ‘Research’ list. Cards here have research on them, and they often have links to Evernote notes.

The final list is the ‘Done’ list. On this list, all the cards I don’t need anymore, or tasks that I’ve completed go. On a weekly basis I archive all the cards on it.

Once again, you can get my template board here. You can get a Trello account here, or you can read a Trello overview post here.

I hoped you enjoyed this post, and thanks for reading!