Rocking GTD with Trello | Hacker News Reader

Rocking GTD with Trello

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30 pointsrsobers16 comments

I use Trello as my planning tool but my setup is pretty "light".

I have a "Next" board which is basically my daily TODO list (I mostly use a notebook for this but move the stuff I want to do the next day to Next in the evening) which contains TODO and DONE

I have an "Ideas" board to capture long term/random stuff. The Lists are topics like "Programming", "Writing" etc

Then I have a "Personal" and "Work" board with topic lists to do the midterm planning. The "Work" one has a list for each programming project I work on for example.

I also have a "Self Investment" board that contains my couple of items I want to get better at during the next 6 month (Lists will be something like "French", "Erlang")

I also have a "Books etc" board where I keep track of interesting books ot buy (and track progress of mostly technical books I read usually with chapter checklists). The etc. part is interesting blogposts, youtube videos, TED talks and so forth

Lastly I have a single board "Dissertation" which should be self explanatory :D

I use a notebook to capture stuff on the road, I'm pretty low tech for a tech guy. It's a small one that fits in my pocket and basically I create an entry for each day with my stuff to do. I use the last pages and write in reverse order on them to capture ideas (those are then transfered to Trello and crossed out)

I actually combine this with the Promodoro technique so each entry in my notebook will have a couple of [] that are 20 minute chunks.

I'm always looking for ways to optimize my time management so any suggestions are welcome. I don't really use tags in Trello, I tag my books with them into owned, owned digital and want to buy but there has to be better ways of using tags :D

Interested to see how people rock GTD with Trello in practice - does anyone have a non-sensitive task list they could share?

How do you manage contexts? Do you have one board for work & home? Do you map it 1:1 to your kanban board at work?

I love Trello but I use it for my 40 000ft view of projects — if a card requires multiple steps I tend to turn it into a project in OmniFocus.

Khanacademy has a public board: https://trello.com/board/exercises/4d87e664967a0775082939ab

I use http://chizzl.com/ for this. 'Dead simple, and has the multi-dimensional prioritizing ability to encourage working on the important things.

i still use rememberthemilk for this purpose. once you get used to all the keyboard shortcuts on their site it becomes a second nature to rock your list.. i love that i can "u" to add url, or "d" to add/remove a date.. j,k to navigate, 1,2,3 to prioritize, email into my inbox, and make some of my lists public.

i suppose Trello would be better geared if your lists were shared among multiple people, as that's more of their domain

I like rememberthemilk too. Trello seems to work well for visual people (that's me). As Merlin Mann says, the second your tools start being fun, you've gone too far. The key thing is the process: making a contract with yourself to do the work and then defining small physical tasks that you'll actually do.

I love both Trello and Remember the Milk, using them for different purposes, but keyboard shortcuts shouldn't be one of your reasons for one tool versus the other. Both tools allow you to specify most of the information you want right at construction time (e.g., <N> "Remember the milk #groceries ^Soon ^1" <RET>, makes a new card, labels it Groceries, and puts it at position 1 in the "Soon" list--basically the same as RTM's <C> "Remember the milk #groceries !1" <RET>). Both tools let you search from the keyboard ("F" for Trello, "/" for RTM). Both let you assign due dates from the keyboard, with "D". Both let clear out cards from the keyboard, with "C" for Trello, "XC" for RTM. Noticing a pattern here?

I love RTM, and I think there are good reasons for using it, but keyboard shortcuts shouldn't be one of them.

i guess that depends what is important to you. I highly value being able to skip the mouse. this is also my #1 feature of gmail, and biggest gripe with Outlook (it has most keyboard support but some is missing or hard to remember intuitively). Thanks for the good tip about construction! Often times though, items are managed after creation and that's where keyboard support comes in handy for me.

I think I'm missing something. Most of those shortcuts I gave are post-creation. You can use Trello fully from the keyboard; is there something specific not available that's bugging you?

my bad. not as familiar with Trello but if it has a full navigation support via keyboard than should be as quick to use as RTM. Fogcreek guys are very smart so I'm sure that implementation is a pleasure to work with. Did you switch to Trello for GTD stuff?

what put me off RTM is the list/project management. one list per project is fine but how do you get subprojects? how do you quickly create lists? how do you quickly set a list to "complete"?

never been able to figure those questions out, would appreciate it if you could help me. thanks.

I usually handle subprojects by having tags to go with the list, and optionally using a smart list to aggregate if need be.

so for each project you have to manually add lists? (Settings > Lists > Add List) that smart list is a manual creation as well?

that seems a lot of work compared to e.g. Omnifocus

Anyone who hasn't tried the Trello iPhone app should check it out. It's free and even better than the website version.

Yeah, the iPhone app is sweet. I mainly use it for capturing tasks when I'm not at home. It's nice to finally have one place to put things.

Also on Android.

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