1 | 14 | Power-up your Trello dashboard

​Hi there! I'm Marian Knopp, the Online Business Systemizer at marianknopp.com.

The Productivity Tip of the Day™ is: Power-up your Trello dashboard.

This tip is especially for those of you who are using Trello or who would like to try using Trello. I wanted to give you some of my favorite power-ups and maybe encourage you to learn a little bit more about how you can use Trello for your productivity, since it's my ultimate productivity tool and I love it so much. So I want to give some power-up tips for every level of the Trello investment.

A lot of you probably use the free version. Trello is free and you can get so much done on the free version. You can run your business with the free version, believe it or not, and when you use the free version, you can use the power-up of all power-ups, as I like to call it, and that is the Custom Fields power-up.

The Trello free version means you can use one power-up per board, and as I've just said, Custom Fields is the power-up that just rocks my socks. So what you want to use it for, some of the things that I like to use for the dashboard and the workflow that we've been talking about in this series is the start date field. You can add any type of custom field, as the name implies, and you can make it a date field, a number field, it can be a text field. You can do a drop-down menu. It's really cool.

I like to use the date field, and I like to call it my start date because I actually run on start dates, not due dates. Even though there may be due dates in my life, I actually am somebody that just prioritizes based on a number of things, start date being one of them. What's great about this field is especially when I'm making routine tasks and I need to change the start date. So if I have a daily task, then I change the start date to the next day, and if I have a weekly task, then I change the start date to the next week. Then I'm able to sort the list in Trello by the start date instead of the due date, which is not necessarily the best way to go about things. It shouldn't be all about procrastination-driven prioritization. So that's why I love using Custom Fields.

You can use it for so many other levels. I've seen a lot of people do priorities. You can use the number field for rating different priorities as well, or you can even have a drop-down menu with colors and such. But for me, I like to keep things simple, and the thing that I use the most with that Custom Fields power-up is the start date.

The other power-ups that I would recommend are recommended if you are using either Trello Gold or you're up into the Business Class or Enterprise level of Trello, so that requires some sort of financial investment. I won't quote it here because I don't know what it is offhand and it might change, but Trello Gold is great. It allows you to have three power-ups per board, and then Business Class really ups your game because you can have an unlimited amount and there's some things that are native to Trello that just get super amplified like Butler, Butler being one of them.

So Butler is the next power-up that I recommend. You can, of course, use it in the free version or in the Trello Gold version, but it's kind of got a limited capacity in that you can only use it for one card button or one board button or a rule or something like that. If you're able to get Butler to its full capacity, it can be really powerful and can help you sort things and automate things. It's basically the ultimate automation tool in Trello, and yeah, there's just a lot of possibilities with that. I'm the kind of person, like I said before, that I like to see all my tasks in my list, but if you're the kind of person that likes to have cards generated at a certain time, Butler's a great one to do it. There's a few other power-ups that do that, but Butler, you're able to really specify it, and I just love it. I just love it. So that's another one to look into.

Then the third power-up that I'll recommend today is the Board Sync tool, and this is for any of you who are part of a team, you have some people that maybe you're working with. This is great for teams because people are able to operate on their board and do their tasks without having to go to so many other boards to grab things because it allows you to sync or mirror lists, and so you're able to utilize that same card with somebody else because it's on both of your boards. It's amazing. It's wonderful.

So these are things that I only dreamed of when I first started using Trello a couple of years ago, and now it's such a reality and I can't believe it, and it's wonderful. So if you are interested in learning how to utilize these tools more, I'm happy to help. I help clients set their Trello up for whatever their business needs, if they're working by themselves or they're working with teams, and how they can streamline and automate and delegate, and all of those fun things that you do to scale your business and give yourself more time.

Next week we're going to talk about how to amplify your productivity by creating procedures for all of your routine tasks. We've talked about what your tasks may be and what those would entail, but we need to actually start getting down to the nitty-gritty because the true power with outsourcing is providing the right information, and so we'll talk about a lot of those concepts next week, so stay tuned for that.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. I'll see you on Monday.