My Time Management Strategy (or Why I Love Trello)
If you love find out about time management strategies, but are not so keen on watching videos - I’ve had it transcribed.
I’ve edited it down to be a more user-friendly to read (in other words, cutting out a lot of the waffle!)
My Time Management Strategy (or Why I Love Trello)
I often get asked about how I organise my time. I am a mum to twin toddlers, I work from home and I started this new business idea earlier this year.Want to know how I can help you? Read here to find out how to build your own website, here to get started with Pinterest marketing, and here if you need some help with list building!
And in spite of all those obstacles, juggling work with babies, I’ve managed to make quite a lot of progress.
The reason is - or my secret weapon if you like - is using Trello boards. There are other tools that you can use, but I think the idea is a sound one. In essence, it’s about just getting everything out of your brain, getting it onto lists and not letting yourself be interrupted when you’re working on a particular task.
You need to find a way to focus your time, know exactly what you’re going to be working on for any given amount of time, and when your brain interrupts you, you need somewhere where you can quickly just dump all those ideas to come back to later.
Because multitasking is not good. You might feel like you’re being productive, but you’re not, you’re just going to be scattered.
How I Use Trello Boards
I thought I would share my Trello boards. It's always a work in progress - I'm not saying this is perfect - but this is where I'm at and how I manage my time.Jumping into my account here, I have a really quick overview. All I’ve done at this point is colour code two things.
- The things that are blue are to do with my actual business
- The orange boards are client jobs.
These personal boards are ones that are just for me. You can create team boards, and you can share your boards with other people. So at this point, on this project, I’ve shared this board with my client.
My other shared board here is with Ira, who’s my VA. We’ve got some ongoing weekly tasks that she does for me, and then in here is where I upload the tasks that I’d like her to do as one-offs. When she’s finished them, she moves them across to this finished task board. Then once I’ve checked it, I just archive it.
To move stuff around is really easy, you literally just drag and drop. When something is finished, I click on that little icon that says ‘Archive’ and it will disappear.
That’s kind of a quick overview of how it works.
How I use Trello to get stuff done
Quite often I might just have a half hour window here or there. Some days my kids go to daycare so I have a five hour chunk, which is amazing, (and it goes way too quickly).These boards are my ideas dump boards, and my main one here, Your Web Toolkit, that is my website.
I’ve created these separate lists, so when I’m busy doing something else and an idea pops into my head, I just quickly write down a task and add it to this board, and onto one of these lists.
Every now and then I go back in here and I just have a look and see if any of these ideas are any good. Some of them I can just look at and say, “I don’t even know what I was thinking”. It obviously wasn’t important, it was just my brain being crazy at that moment and I can delete it.
Other stuff is like, “Yep, need to get this done, cool, leave it in there, I’m going to do add it to my to-do list at some point.”
The board for my website is my main one, this is my ideas dump.
Then I’ve got this one here called Daily To-Do List, and this is the one that I use to get stuff done.
Today is Tuesday, this is my to-do list for today. It’s a mix of client work and business work, and at the beginning of each day I write down the tasks that I would like to complete for that day.
I don’t always get through it all, so I’ll do what I can, and then if I need to move something to the next day I just drag it across.
Once it’s done, I archive it away.
The beauty of how this works, is that if I’m in the middle of doing something, and an idea comes to me, I can just really quickly click here say, “Ooh, I have a great new idea”. With a couple of clicks of my mouse, I then file it away in my ideas dump board.
It’s not something I’m going to deal with right now and it’s not something I need to think about right now. But what I have done is take note of it and put it on the relevant board so that then when I’ve got time to think about the big picture again, that idea has been captured.
It frees up my brain right now to continue doing what it was I was in the middle of doing.
I think we can all relate to that, right? That you just constantly interrupt yourself, and it’s just awful, it’s the death of productivity.
How I Use Small Chunks of Time to Create Big Progress
For me, as I mentioned, I have to fit all my work around my toddlers. So they might go down for a nap, or my husband might take them out for a while. I just have these small little pockets of time where I try to be as productive as possible.If it’s just half an hour or an hour, I know there’s no point tackling something too big, because I’m not really going to get very far with it.
I periodically go through my main ideas board here, and get rid of anything that’s irrelevant or doesn’t make sense.
I then try to break down the big tasks into smaller tasks. A lot of this makes sense to me just when I look at it. I feel like I don’t need to break it down visually anymore. But you could colour code this kind of stuff too, and work out what might be a fifteen minute task, what’s a half hour task, what’s an hour long.
If you do have something big that you want to complete, break it down into smaller chunks. That way, if you have fifteen minutes here or thirty minutes there, you can do one piece of that bigger picture.
And by chipping away at it like that, it will get finished.
Make what you’re doing visible so you feel like you’re ticking stuff off. Maximise your time by making your big tasks into smaller and smaller tasks, so that they become actionable things that you can feasibly get done and you don’t get overwhelmed.
Okay, that’s an overview of my thinking, more than exactly how Trello works.
I don’t use it for anything too complicated, I know it’s a powerful tool and there are all other sorts of things that you can do in here. There’s a calendar function, you can work with teams, people use it for quite complex aspects of their businesses.
I just wanted to show you how you can use it just to help with some time management and to keep you moving forward in your business, because I know that we’re all juggling so much stuff that it can be hard to get things done.
Cathy is a graphic and web designer, who helps online entrepreneurs and small business owners with their online marketing and design. Through bespoke projects and training for DIY efforts, she aims to help her clients grow their businesses in a reliable and affordable way.
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