Overwhelmed? Get a Trello board!
I could leave it right here and be done, but for the sake of this post looking really weird in the editor if I do that, I’ll elaborate.
I can get pretty overwhelmed by life. I have lots of hobbies, I acquire new ones regularly and have little to no influence over which one grabs my intention at any time. I also am a full time university student studying a fast paced, ever shifting field at a university that has deemed me competent enough to handle myself without my consent, in the middle of a pandemic. And that’s without taking any worries or heartbreaks about friends into consideration. So yeah, life can be overwhelming.
I’ve worked with to do lists and step by step plans before and I can already recommend that. Just putting all the things flying in your head down on paper so that you can be sure nothing will slip your mind already eases the anxiety a lot, even if the list is three miles long.
But a Trello board takes the minutia with which you can micromanage your panic to a whole new level. The picture below is a generic screenshot from Trello itself, because bold of you to assume that my Trello board is organised enough to ever see the light of day.
A here is the board name itself. Doesn’t matter much except in it’s potential power to make you chuckle whenever you remember it exists.
B is a list. These are categories that cards can be moved into, such as “Doing”, “Done”, “Blocked”, “Need Help”, “Mom, please pick me up”, you get the picture.
C is the core of the entire concept. The cards. These detail what the task is, and most importantly, what criteria need to be fulfilled to consider it complete. You can do all kinds of fancy shit here, add pictures, add links, add people, and also pretty importantly; add tags. With tags you can sort cards into further categories across boards. May I recommend the wonderful “This card is not complete” tag? Love it.
And D exists I guess. If you want to do some increasingly fancy shit with your board or add people to mess it up for you, go here.
Anyway, Trello has been the saving grace of my life over the last weeks and if I tell my friends they nod in that way that means they’re thinking “Oh, that’s so you, you’re such a producer at heart, like your dad” and while they’re not wrong, I do not need to be confronted like that. So here goes.
Linda Effinger 