18 | How to Use Trello to Organize Your Business -

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

There was a point where I reallyyyy didn’t like Trello. It took me 3 tries to finally “get it” and that was after trying out some other tools too and ultimately coming back to this one.

But hey, at least I figured it out because now I can share with you allll the different ways you can use this magical tool to help you organize your business, and that’s what we’re covering in today’s episode.

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Join the waitlist for Level Up Your Biz with Trello

▶ Listen to episode 4: How To Prioritize Your Weekly Biz Tasks

▶ Listen to episode 11: Using Strategic Systems to Reduce Your Overwhelm

Connect with me:

Website | FB Group | Instagram

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Introduction

You may be surprised to hear this, but there was actually a point where I really didn’t like Trello. It took me three tries to finally get it. And that was after trying out other tools too. And then ultimately coming back to this one, for the reasons I’ll be sharing in this episode. But you know what?

At least I figured it out because now you get to learn all of the different ways that you can use this magical tool to help you organize your business. And that’s exactly what we’re covering in today’s episode. Are you ready to get your biz organized? I’m pretty sure you are, so let’s jump right in.

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner.

It’s your time to shine! So let’s get started.

My History with Trello

Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, episode 18. Did you know that at one point I really did not like Trello? If you’ve been around me, you’re probably shocked to hear this because I have been recently known as like the Trello person because I use it for everything.

But yeah, it was my very first project management tool that I gave a try and I could just not figure it out. I mean, I was trying to transition from my paper and digital planners over to some tech system, which tech and I like we don’t get along. We don’t always get along.

So I really struggled with all the bells and whistles that came with Trello. But then I tried Asana and ClickUp and those just made my brain hurt even more. Not because they’re not good, but because of how my brain functions.

And so I decided to eventually go back to Trello because out of the three, it was the most visual of the project management tools that I had tried. And I am such a visual person. I am a visual learner.

And so after months of trying to figure it out and trying to do some Trello skeleton templates or putting them to use, and they just still wouldn’t click with me.

I finally figured out how to make Trello work for me and my business. And I know that I can help you too. And I am so incredibly passionate about sharing all the different ways in this episode.

Ways To Use Trello to Organize Your Business

So in the previous episode, I introduced you to what strategic systems are and why you need them. But in this episode, I’m revealing the different ways on how you can use Trello to organize your business.

And if you’re a current Level Up Your Biz with Trello student, but you haven’t gone through the entire program yet, keep listening because I’ll highlight which of the Trello systems to dive into, depending on which of these you’re trying to do. So let’s go ahead and just dive right in.

Stores all your business information

The first one is it helps you store all of your business info. And I’m talking about everything. And let me tell you, before I moved all of my business information into Trello, I had nothing. I had nothing saved anywhere.

So can you imagine how many times I had to go back and find my branding and find where all of my links are, and find my branded templates and all my canned responses and my brain dumps and my ideas and bucket lists and the list goes on and on.

But literally you can store all of your business information in one place in a strategic way. And if you’re a student, then go into the Business Hub template because that is the one that’s going to help you do this.

Plan and schedule your tasks

The next thing that you can do inside of Trello is to plan and schedule all of your tasks. And I’m talking about everything. When I said that Trello is the only tool that I use for this, I mean it.

I went from paper planner to my Google calendar, to the Microsoft To-Do List, to my notes app, to finally learning and mastering and understanding the magic of Trello.

So you can plan and schedule all of your tasks, like your weekly planning tasks or your monthly planning tasks. All of the tasks per project. All of the tasks, I’m talking about everything. Okay, there is not like a single task that you can not schedule inside of Trello and just make it super easy for you to actually follow through on it.

And for my Level Up Your Biz with Trello students, if you go into your Weekly Planning Trello board and your Email Marketing Planning Trello board, these are prime examples of how you can really use tasks and planners to schedule. all the things for your business. Okay.

And for my non-Level Up Your Biz with Trello students, go back to reference episode four. In episode four, I am talking about how to schedule your weekly biz tasks not necessarily inside of Trello, but you can do all of that, everything that I mentioned inside of Trello for sure.

Tracks your progress

The other thing that you can do is track progress. You can truly track your progress or status so easily in there. So many different ways that you can do this.

You can do this like workflow style, where you’re dragging and dropping the different steps. You can do this through labels inside of Trello, where you are assigning a certain label that says completed or in progress or whatever that is.

Follow-up tracking

You can do that inside of Trello for your clients follow up. Like right now, I’m in the middle of also planning a summit so I’m using it to track my speaker follow-up.

Course completion tracking

And you can do this to track your progress with courses. Did you hear me?

I know that one of the biggest things that people struggle with is the fact that they get all these courses, especially when there’s so many bundles out there. And then you have a really hard time implementing them.

Well, Trello can actually help you reach the finish line of every single course by helping you keep track of progress inside of Trello.

And that is exactly one of the boards and the systems that I teach you inside of Level Up Your Biz with Trello because my goal is to really help you get organized and get all the things that you’re learning implemented. Because if you don’t implement and you don’t take action, then guess what? Nothing’s going to change.

One thing that I have seen and one of my very favorite quotes that I’ve seen recently is nothing changes if nothing changes which means if you’re not implementing or taking action, then nothing will change.

Visibility outreach tracking

The other thing that it helps you track is like visibility outreach.

So if you’re pitching yourself to podcasts or bundles or summits, you can also keep track of that as well.

Create visible workflows for task management

And like I mentioned, you can do this through workflows, oh my goodness. Workflows is like the best thing ever.

I 100% wish that I had learned about workflows sooner and Trello just makes it so, so, so super easy to make workflows as a beginner, as someone who is incredibly visual. I am such a visual person. I need prettiness and the images and maybe you got that by my brand and style and colors and all that.

But workflows and having visible workflows is incredibly helpful for a visual person. And not just a visual prison, anyone really.

But workflows are essentially anything that will help you run your business. It’s that task breakdown of a bigger project or a bigger task or a bigger plan. And then you’re kind of breaking it down into smaller steps to create kind of like a checklist, but it’s really a workflow. But it’s very, very similar.

So different workloads that you can create include Content Planning. So for your blog posts, your YouTube videos, your social media, your podcast episodes. All of these are their own unique workflows, their own unique planning systems because they all function differently.

And so that’s why I’ve said in previous episodes where it’s so hard for you to just plan everything out of a single planner. You need multiple planning systems in order to run your business.

You are wearing multiple hats after all. You are the CEO, you are the content creator. You are your social media marketing manager. You are your copywriter, right?

There’s so many different titles that you have and so you should really see it as if they’re all different people and they would not pass around the same paper planner. Right.

They would each have their own planning system. And that is what workflows can help you with including for sales funnels, launches, evergreen funnels, and one of my current favorite, because like I said, I am in the middle of planning my own summit, so summit planning.

Whoa, that one has been huge. That is such a huge project with over, I don’t know, I think it’s like over 400 tasks and summit planning alone has like 20 plus workflows. So can you imagine. And I am not behind. I’m actually ahead of my planning.

Anyways. And then if you’re creating courses or printables or any type of digital products, those are other types of workflows that you need to create that Trello actually really helps make it super easy for you.

So those are some examples of visible workflows that you can create for your business. Of course, the list is way, way longer depending on what you have going on, on what you do, but those are just some examples to kind of get you thinking of the different types of workflows that you could implement.

Can act as a digital notebook

Lastly or not. Lastly, actually second to last. Helps you kind of use it as a virtual notebook. And what I mean by this is I used to be a paper person. Okay. Like I still have my sketchbook where I’ll kind of have to like scribble some notes around, but for the most part, Trello acts as a journal, especially for my brain dumps.

And especially because you can pull it up on your app where if I go lay down on my bed and then I’m like, oh, I got an idea. And instead, like, what I used to do was like, pull it up on my notes app and then I would write it down in my notes app and then be like okay, tomorrow morning, I’m going to transfer that note onto my planner.

Did that happen? No. And my notes app also was incredibly disorganized so trying to find that note that I saved last night without a title, because it was, you know, 11:00 PM at night and I had it as a random and fabulous idea and now I don’t know where it is.

So that is why I do all of my brain dumping inside of Trello, because it’s already in a specific spot, in a specific system where I don’t even have to look for it because it’s there and it’s connected from my phone to my desktop, which is amazing.

You can also use it for note taking. So whether you’re taking the notes directly inside of Trello, or if you are linking to like a Google document. I do both ways depending on what the information is, but you can do a lot of note-taking. You can add a bunch of stuff in the description of the cards, which is what makes it incredibly, incredibly helpful.

And if you’re a student, if you go into the Master Task List, the Business Hub, and the Course Completion Tracker, these have really great examples for how you can brain dump and how you can note take inside of Trello.

Helps with goal setting

And lastly, you can also use Trello for goal setting. So this one is pretty huge, right? Because goal setting is actually kind of like step one, like step one, before you do anything, because how are you going to plan or strategize if you don’t even know where you’re going?

So goal setting is what helps you with that. Goal setting is what helps you know exactly where you are trying to go.

You can do goal-setting for all the periods. So for your monthly goal planning, for your quarterly goal planning, for your annual goal planning and Level Up Your Biz with Trello students, you have the Annual-at-a-Glance Planning Board, which covers exactly how to do this so be sure to go check that out.

Using Trello with Your Team (Or Future Team)

So these are all the different ways that you can use Trello for your business. And. If I’m being honest, this is not even the full list because Trello can become your centralized system that’s like the keeper of all things.

And this is including if you plan on hiring for help at a later time, whether it’s a VA, an OBM, or if you just plan on outsourcing any single part of your business at some point.

Because having systems in place and yes, even by having them inside of Trello is something that truly does help you know exactly what you should be outsourcing to start with, and be able to keep track of what all the different supporters of your business are doing or working on.

And look, listen. I know that there are some people out there that say that at some point you will outgrow Trello because this is a tool that’s great for solopreneurs. However, there are enterprises working inside of Trello.

And I currently do have a VA that supports me. I just recently hired an OBM and occasionally I hire out some graphic design work and all of that is managed inside of Trello.

Every single person that has helped me with my business has had their tasks assigned to them inside of Trello. And that is how we will keep track of everything that they’re working on, everything that has been assigned to them.

That’s where we’ll talk about the specific task at hand or where they’ll let me know when something is done or when they’re working on something. It’s amazing to see what and how you can manage your business inside of Trello.

And don’t worry. This is a tool that can definitely continue to support you as you grow your business. So you can definitely do all of your strategic planning and organization inside of Trello, even if you do plan on hiring out at a later time.

About Level Up Your Biz with Trello

And listen, you don’t have to go and create these strategic systems from scratch because my program, Level Up Your Biz with Trello, takes care of that for you. Inside, I teach you how to create these strategic systems in a way that’s going to work for your brain, your business and for you specifically. And yes, I’m giving you the customizable, plug and play Trello board templates, of course, but it is so much more than that.

I am teaching you all about how to plan and organize in a way that’s going to allow for things to happen because things always come up and you’re going to be able to add flexibility into your planning, while knowing where everything is at all times.

My goal is truly to take away your overwhelm by managing all of the different moving pieces from your online business, in a way that’s going to allow you to feel more confident that no matter what happens, and no matter what curveballs life throws your way, you’re going to be able to pick up right where you left off and know exactly what you need to do, and where to find everything.

Plus my students have definitely started seeing results in getting time back in their day, simply by implementing one of the strategic systems included.

So, if doors are not open right now, they are opening up very, very, very soon. So stay tuned and be sure to join the waitlist, cheerstoblogging.com/waitlist to be notified as soon as they are.

Episode Wrap-Up

But you know what I’m actually curious. I want to know what your current relationship status is with Trello.

And that’s okay if you don’t use it, or if you haven’t tried it before but I am curious on what your current relationship status is with Trello. And which of the ways that I mentioned in today’s episode, are you most excited about trying?

So, you know the deal, take a screenshot of you listening to today’s episode, tag me @cheerstoblogging and let me know.

Thank you so much for listening to Cheerful Productive Chats with me, Lucy Reyes. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoblogging.com/18. And before you go, make sure you subscribe wherever you’re listening so you know once the next productive chat is released. Talk soon and cheers to your productivity and success.