Personal Scheduling With Trello: Unito on Unito
Productivity matters to me. In order to achieve peak productivity, I organize just about every aspect of my life. Between my work at Unito, my personal blog, and the occasional side project, there’s a lot to keep track of. That’s led to a heavy reliance on work management tools.
On Sundays, I try to plan my whole week in advance. My role often means I have a number of tasks spread across multiple projects. Every week, I need to go through it all and find my high-priority tasks so I can schedule them.
Recently, I started using Unito to centralize all my weekly tasks on a single Trello master board. Here are four tips for doing this yourself.
Organize tasks across boards and projects
I always have lots of projects going on, so my tasks were scattered across multiple work management platforms, like Asana and Trello. I even used notebooks to keep track of some tasks, which meant that some fell through the cracks—hello missed income tax deadline.
The first step to setting up your master board is making sure the boards and projects you’re drawing from are properly organized themselves. I use Asana for all my work tasks because that’s where most of my collaboration with other teams happens. Then, I also have Trello boards dedicated to my side projects, such as my personal blog and my book notes.
With Unito’s workflow designer, I can map out my workflow visually. That way, I can get Trello cards from every board I’m part of back to my master board.
Consolidate tasks into a single list
With Unito flows, I can consolidate all my synced tasks and cards into a single Trello list. For this workflow, that’s the Task Backlog list. This allows me to get an overview of all my tasks, work or otherwise, in a single place before scheduling my week. From there, I can move the cards over to each day as I schedule my tasks.
With Unito’s mapping features, I could set this up in multiple different ways. I could map the “To Do” list of my Blog Trello board to a list called “Blog” in my master board, so that all my blog tasks appear in a single list, and replicate that mapping for each other project. That way, rather than having my master board set up with the days of the week, I could have multiple lists representing all my projects. Mapping allows you to customize the flow of information to match your workflow.
Use labels to mark and filter tasks
Because all my tasks are consolidated in one list, I needed a way to differentiate them from each other. As you can see in the above screenshot, you can automatically apply labels to a task when it comes from a specific board. So tasks from the Newsletter board can get a green “Newsletter” label, for example.
This isn’t the only way you can use labels. Say my Blog board was full of tasks, not all of which I consider high-priority. If I were to set up a flow with default settings, every single task on that board could get carried over. To keep my master board a high-level overview, I can set up a rule to filter tasks with a certain label. So if I applied a “high-priority” label to a card, it would get synced to my master board, and other tasks would be ignored.
Edit and close tasks from one board
I use Asana for all of my work tasks, as well as some of my personal tasks. But having to change between two instances of Asana constantly was frustrating. The same can be said of having to flick between multiple Trello boards. Having a single master board to see all my high-priority tasks isn’t just great for organizing my week; it’s also a great place to leave notes and change due dates.
Because all my cards are synced to other boards, any changes I make in the master board are reflected wherever that card lives. If I add a note in a card’s description, say a reminder to ask a colleague for clarification on a work task, it will get synced over to the corresponding task in Asana. No matter the platform I’m working on, I can be sure everything’s up to date.
Better scheduling with Unito
Now that I have this master board set up, I’m already tinkering with ways to improve it. I’m looking at ways to automate my process, like automatically archiving cards when they get carried over to the “completed” column. I’m also planning on setting up my Unito flow so only Asana tasks marked as high-priority are moved over to Trello. This will help me keep the backlog under control.
As it stands, this master board has helped me improve my productivity and organization on a week-to-week basis. If you want a step-by-step guide for creating your own, check out our webinar.