How To Use Trello For Your Projects & Organisation

I’ve been using Trello free for a really long time (3 years+) and seriously, I never really realise it because it’s part of my casual blogging routine. I go straight to Trello on the day I decide to work on my website or do SEO and all that social media marketing stuff.

What is Trello?

Trello is a task management tool used for project management, social media marketing, your business, team-related projects or group projects. It’s a flexible tool that you can easily organise information and share with anyone.

You can use Trello for both business/work or lifestyle-related tasks. Personally, I use Trello for more on the blogging or business side rather than my daily routine (I use Microsoft To-Do for my daily to-do’s).

I really love using Trello and it’s so dang easy to interact with. Need to reschedule a blog post? No worries, drag the card to the “rescheduling” board. Sent an email? Done! Add the card to “Archive”. It’s absolutely simple.

Why you should use Trello?

1. It’s great for people who do project management. This tool allows those to achieve projects with a team at any time and anywhere. For example, a virtual assistant or you work for a company. If you do VA, you can just achieve a project and your boss will know once she opens up Trello.
2. Organise your content marketing. If you’re a writer for a blog and/or create social media content such as YouTube or Instagram, then you can use this tool to help you do simple small tasks and goals.
3. It’s pretty simple to use I’m not going to lie.
4. You’re able to sync it with any of your other devices including IOS, Android, or Windows. They have a Trello app for that which can be downloaded on both mobile and desktop.

You can read more pros and cons of Trello here.

In this post, I’ll show you a tutorial on how to use Trello (on mobile) by creating boards, lists and cards. Bonus tutorial on how to customise your board backgrounds and creating labels for your cards.

I’m actually doing this tutorial on my phone because I really can’t be bothered getting up and getting my laptop so… I guess this is a Trello tutorial for mobile.

Overview of Trello (Free version)

This is the overview of Trello (on mobile IOS). It won’t look exactly like this when you start out but when you do use this task management tool for a week or so, you’ll then see a resemblance. On the home screen, you’ll see:

• Starred Boards: If you got a whole bunch of boards, you can favourite the most used boards. These can be featured under the search bar so that you can easily get to them.
• Personal Boards: These are your own private boards that you’ve created.

If you’re planning to use group boards with your teammates, then you will see another board for groups or teams.

Another way to find your boards is by searching the name of that particular board in the search bar (which is on the very top).

The “plus icon” allows you to create personal boards, pick templates and create your group or business boards.

Let’s see one of my own boards for example. Cards are categorised into individual “lists”. As you can see, the list is called “SEO Checklist” and we will get more into the list later on in this tutorial. You can create as many lists as you wish.

Here’s a landscape version on mobile. You can see that I created multiple lists.

Starting a Board in Trello

Let’s rewind and start from the beginning. How do you create your very first board? Remember the plus icon that I mentioned? Click on that (on the top right-hand side) and select “Create Board”.

Here’s where you either pick “card” or “board”. Make sure to select the board.

What you see on the screen:

• Name – The name of your themed board. From my last example, I named my board “SEO checklist” because the theme of the board was to check off my search engine optimization strategies.
• Visibility – Do you want to make the board personal (private) or public (group/team)?
  If you pick private, you can still manually add members to your board and they can view or edit. However, it won’t appear in search engines. For the public, you’re able to let anyone on the internet view the board either with a link or through search engines. This is great if you’re making an email freebie on organisation tools.
• Background – You can personalise your board. I will also go more full in-depth on that later as well.

Here’s what it looks like once it’s all created. Just click on “Create” which is on the top right-hand side and you’ll be on the roll.

It should appear in your “Recent boards” or “Personal boards“. If you created a team board, it may show up on the group boards.

By clicking on the board that you’ve created minutes ago, you should have a “nearly” empty canvas.

How to Delete a Board

If you don’t want to keep a board anymore, that’s totally fine! Here’s how to delete a board in Trello.

Make sure you are on your board dashboard (not your card). Click on the same 3 dots (menu) on the top right and then click on the settings wheel next to the duplication icon.

The wheel should lead you to the board settings. At the very end, you should be able to see “Close Board” and that’s how you delete a Trello board.

Oh no! What if you accidentally delete a board by accident? Or if you need to refer back to past projects?

Don’t fret! You can retrieve your deleted boards. Now the thing is, you’re not able to do this on mobile (which is one of the cons) so you would have to go on your desktop for this method.

(Transitioning to desktop) When you’re at your home dashboard, click on “Boards” which is on the top menu. Then right on the bottom, you should find “See closed boards…”. That’s where you’re able to retrieve all your deleted boards.

Let’s go onto the next step in creating your first list.

Creating a List in Trello

You should have already created your board/s by now. Click on “Add list” to create your very first list.

Add a name to your list. Some name ideas include themes, categories, project names, etc. I decided to put “Create a Trello Board Example” for this tutorial.

Now that you have your list ready let’s add some cards!

Creating & Editing Trello Cards

In your list, click on “Add card”. It will prompt you to add a name for that card. Once you named your card, click on “Add”.

Did you know you can drag cards to different Trello lists? Next to your first list, tap and slide right and repeat the list creating process. This is the reason why I love this tool for organising because it allows you to easily create, drag and drop each card within seconds.

Wasn’t that simple?

How to Delete a Card

But what if I don’t want to keep a card anymore? You can easily delete a card on mobile and desktop versions. Now, this is going to be a two-step process so hang on with me.

Disclaimer: Once deleted, you can NEVER get it back!

First off, click on the 3 dots and then a bottom menu should pop up. Click on “Archive Card”.

Once you’ve done that, your card should say “Archived” under the card title.

Then click on the 3 dots for the second time and then tap on “Delete Card”.

Now that’s how you delete your Trello card out of existence.

(Bonus) Finding Archived cards on Trello

You should know that you can see your archived cards by going to the board settings. Then tap on “Archive”.

Make sure to tap on “Cards” and that’s where you get to see all your archived cards.

Ok, let’s go more in-depth with personalising your cards.

Customising your Cards

You can start personalising your cards. Here’s how to do this from top to bottom:

• Firstly, you can add a description: what is the card about? You can note down any information that is important. If you’re in a group let others know how to start off the project.
• Due Dates: this is a useful tool for any due blog/guest posts or projects. It will send you a notification based on how you set it (for example, you set it 2 days before the actual date). If you finish the project early, you can tick it off to let them know the project is done and also disable the reminder.
• Labels: You can actually label your cards for better organisation. For example, I have different niches in my blog. So I separate the labels to “self-care”, “blogging”, etc. I tag colours and add labels to them to make it easier to write my blog post for upcoming dates. I will show you later how to make your labels.
• Members: this is where you’re able to add members to your board so that they can either view or edit some of the list and cards.
• Checklist: Have something that needs to be checked off? This is great for group projects or even your own project goals. You can add tick off boxes to those small goals and once one completes a task, check it off!
• Add Attachments: Here is where you can add files, photos and links. There’s a lot of options to choose from so take that to your advantage. For example, if you’re doing a group project, let’s say you completed a PowerPoint. You can “Choose a File” and attach that PowerPoint to the card so that way other board members can view it.
  
• Activity: this shows off the history of what has been optimised for this particular card. I don’t necessarily focus too much on this because I use it for personal use. But it’s good for team boards when you want to check out the process of the project.
• Comments: you can add comments to the card to let other members know. Or personally, for me, I use the comment section when I need to take notes down.

Here’s an example of what it looks like when added.

Here’s what it looks like with an image attachment. It will be shown as a “featured image” (which is the one you see on the very top).

If you click on the 3 buttons at the top far right, you can access the options for the cards. If you exit the card, it will also show it for board options as well.

• Move Card: you can move the card to a different list or board.
• Duplicate Card: you can create the same card for personal use or for backup.
• Copy Link: this is how you can share card links with others.
• Stop Watching: you’ll stop following this card or stop getting a notification about this card.
• Archive Card: when you’re completely done with a card or project, you’re able to archive it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “gone forever”. You can still access the archived cards if you need to refer back to them.

Here’s how it looks including the featured image *attached files*. It will show nearly everything that you’ve included in your card except for the full description and comments.

If you want to stop here, you can stop here. If you want to learn more about how to change backgrounds and edit labels, continue on. But before we do that, have you signed up for my newsletter?

Changing Board Backgrounds

In order to change your board’s background image or colour, click on the 3 dots on the top right-hand corner. Then select the “settings wheel” icon. This is located on the very end top right.

In the desktop version, you should be able to instantly change the background when you click the 3 dots.

Now click on “Background” right between Team and Show Card Covers.

Here you got 2 options (if you upgrade to the premium version, you’re able to upload your own images for the background). But because I’m using the free version, I only get two options but it’s still worth it because they have cool splash backgrounds.

Like I said they have cool backgrounds (there’s more if you scroll down). Select one and it will show a tick on the photo. Then go back to the board.

And now it will look like that! You have a personalised board. You can also categories each board as well based on the colours. Since we’re talking about labelling colours, let’s go onto how to add labels.

Adding Labels for Your Cards

As shown previously, go to your cards and you should be able to see “Labels” under the due date. Tap or click on that.

Now when you’re starting new, you should just see the colours only and not the words (for example, the grey one). By tapping on the pencil icon next to a colour label, you should edit it.

Here is the menu where you’re able to edit your labels. First off, add a name (theme, category, whatever you want to name your labels). Then pick a colour for your label from the options shown. Where it says “Slide to Remove Label”, you can delete a label that you ain’t using.

Now that you’ve customised your labels, you’re able to tag your card like this.

Conclusion

You’re done! If you haven’t downloaded Trello already, you should do so by clicking here.

Now you learned how to use Trello and how to create sets of boards, lists and cards to organise your project or lifestyle.

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