Trello, the perfect tool for productivity

With the increasing seniority in software development, comes up with multiple tasks to manage. I used to struggle between different meetings, completing my tasks, addressing the team’s issues and ad hoc productions bugs. Time used to fly like anything with very less productivity.

Some startups I worked with, did not have a proper tool for bug tracking. They used to create tasks in Google Document or assign bugs on Slack. This created a lot of chaos with no visibility on my work progress. End of the day I did not get the satisfaction of the work being done. I could not get positive answers to my questions -

1. How did I spend my 8 hours of work?
2. How much time did I spend on solving a colleague’s issue?
3. Did I pick up any impromptu task which hindered my planned task?
4. Did I create the technical document which was pending from many days?

With very few tasks inlined with the schedule, I had to work overtime to meet the deadline. This was ruining my time, causing a lot of frustration.

That moment I realized, I had to organize myself. Initially, I started with paper-pencil and prepared my TODO list. But, that added challenges of maintaining the paperwork.

I started browsing tools to maintain a todo list. And started with three of them Asana, Wunderlist, and Trello. I used each one for 2 weeks. Then, I decided to go with Trello. The sole reason being its simplicity.

Trello has concepts of Boards. A board can be for your team, your feature or your personal work. I created a few boards like Work, Open Source, Blogs, and Interview.

Board

Each board had 3 lists -

1. To Do
2. In Progress
3. Done

For my ‘Work board’ I added two more lists ‘Adhoc’ and ‘Adhoc Done’. These lists would track impromptu issues like production bugs, customer issues which had to be resolved ASAP.

Work Board

To each list, I added a card which included due date and checklists.

Adding Due date to card

Adding checklist for a card

For my ‘Work board’ card, I created a checklist like adding unit test cases, adding automation tests, edge cases for the feature. I updated the checklist depending on the progress of my work. This helped me to get an idea, if I could complete my work before the deadline.

The best thing I liked about Trello is drag and drop feature of card .

Impact on Work

After 2 weeks of experimenting with Trello, I started using it daily.

If I had missed some edge cases, I would add a comment in my card. This helped me to think in more detail. At the end of the day, I would take a look on my Trello board and check the progress of the day. It helped me identify the major problems in moving my work forward.

In a month, I was able to make a lot of progress in my work.

1. Started thinking more about edge cases, during planning.
2. Improved task estimations.
3. Had a set of checklists ready for a feature even before I started working on it.
4. Prioritizes my tasks and started saying NO to low priority Ad hoc tasks and meetings.
5. Finished my tasks during working hours ultimately getting my personal time.

I hope this article helps you increase your productivity.