How Trello Power-Ups Boost Productivity Among Remote Teams Amid Covid-19 Lockdown

Over the past couple of months, the novel coronavirus pandemic has been soaring across the entire world, which has compelled various countries to go for a nation-wide lockdown. This has also resulted in companies pausing their operations from their physical offices and asking employees to continue working from home as a part of keeping the employees safe and ensuring social distancing. 

In the wake of remote working, organizations are facing challenges in the daily management of projects, especially companies and managers that are handling large teams. Although working from home allows employees to choose their own working hours and there is no one looming over their shoulders, it does add a lot of productivity issues due to technical glitches, fluctuating W-Fi speed, and additional housework. 

According to a recent survey conducted by EY, COVID-19 has been identified as the biggest concern, since 70% of the organizations experienced a fall in productivity due to continued remote working. 

Staying on top of work, managing projects, and collaborating with team members remotely can be frustrating amid this lockdown. However, with the right tools at your disposal, things can become more streamlined and easier, which can help boost the productivity of your team. Thankfully there are various task management and project management tools like Trello, Jira, Asana, Zoho Projects, etc., that allow teams to collaborate and manage work easily. 

Of all these task and project management tools, Trello has grabbed a lot of attention with over 50 million users worldwide, thanks to its simple and easy process of managing and tracking project tasks.

What is Trello?

Trello is an easy-to-use project management tool to organize and track tasks for teams and individuals with a drag and drop functionality. With an easy learning curve, this Kanban-style project management tool imparts limitless possibilities to simplify project management by creating Boards, Lists, and Cards, which gives full visibility of tasks, automates workflows, and rearranges them as priorities changes, enhancing the overall productivity of team members. 

Caption: Task organization on Trello Board with Lists and Cards

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Although there is a huge array of add-ons and features in Trello that make remote working easy, the ones that are taking productivity to new heights are Power-Ups. 

What are Trello Power-Ups?

Trello Power-Ups is a fancy term of extensions or you can say Trello utilities, that allow you to integrate different applications like Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce, etc., to workflows based on projects. These Power-Ups add functionalities of different applications to your existing workflow boards and cards, enabling you to perform tasks quickly and efficiently.

There are various Trello Power-Ups that help companies and teams to ramp up their workflow management, collaboration, and task tracking, increasing the overall productivity in the remote working setup. 

Among the wide range of Trello Power Ups, here are the top four Power-Ups that sport impressive functionalities that will help you achieve enormous productivity even in your remote working environment amid this Covid-19 lockdown.

Caption: Trello Power-Ups

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Top four Trello Power-Ups to boost productivity

1. Calendar Power-Up

Calendar Power-Up lets you visualize the cards with the task due dates in a weekly and monthly view so that you do not miss out on the important tasks and set the work priorities for yourself and your team. Be it organizing a content marketing calendar or planning a sales meetup, this Power-Up lets you plan, schedule and arrange things by dragging and dropping cards. Plus, it lets you import important dates and plans on your Trello calendar to the third-party calendar for better management of tasks with an i-Calendar link.

Use Case:

Calendar Power-Up allows you to set up availability on the calendar directly from the cards. This can help your teams to set up meetings accordingly, which also helps you avoid unnecessary pings and video call requests, improving your overall productivity.

2. Slack

Another Power-Up that can boost team productivity is Slack. Slack makes it simple for you and your team to communicate and collaborate on cards and boards of important tasks. In a remote work context, Slack allows getting updates and conducting quick chats related to particular tasks by attaching Trello cards to Slack conversations via Direct Message and Channel. Moreover, by letting you set up reminders for teammates, there are no delays in the project timeline.

Use Case: 

Suppose, a team member tags you on a project other than your ongoing project, you can click the Slack button to remind you of that task after a specified duration ranging from 3 minutes to 30 days. This helps you keep your productivity intact for important projects without letting you miss the lesser important tasks.

Caption: Slack Power Up

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3. Card Repeater Power-Up

This Power-Up lets you automate repetitive tasks enhancing your productivity. You can do this by setting up a schedule of tasks on a card and the Card Repeater will automatically copy that tasks for the specified time so that nothing falls through the crack.

Use Case:

Card Repeater can be set up to create automated workflows of sending a newsletter every Wednesday, without the need to create new cards every week. Thus, with this power-up, you can focus more time on important work, without the need to organize and sort the repetitive tasks.

4. Zendesk

This Power-Up allows you to obtain the Zendesk support tickets directly on your Trello boards. It also helps your customer service teams to attach views to check summaries and stats related to a particular support ticket right on Trello, enabling easy tracking and quick escalation of issues.

Use Case:

By attaching “Views” to Trello cards of tickets, agents can filter “Open Tickets > 24 Hours” or “Unresolved Ticket” which will directly notify the concerned person on Trello, so they can expedite the solution of those tickets, increasing the productivity of all the team members.

With these Power-Ups, you can not only drive more efficiency to your tasks but also leverage Trello a little extra to explore new possibilities beyond the basic features. 

How to Add a Trello Power-Up

While you now know these Power-Ups, a lot of you might not know how to add one to your Trello boards. So, here are quick steps you can follow:

Step 1: Open a web browser and go to www.trello.com

Step 2 Sign into your Trello account

Step 3: On your Trello Boards, click on “Show Menu” and look for “Power-Ups”

Step 4: Click “Add” and it will open a list of Power-Ups on the left under different categories

Step 5: Find the Power-Up you want to add from the list and click “Add” to add the respective Power-Up

Step 6: Boom! You are ready. Start using the Power-Up right on your Trello Cards

Wrapping Up

While you and your team are trying to adapt to working from home routine amid this lockdown, Trello Power-Ups can help you make the most of your time, for they help you and your team to be productive and collaborate effectively outside of the office. We have just listed four of them, but there are hundreds of Power-Ups to explore that can suit your needs. As you just saw, getting up and running with Trello and adding Power-Ups is a cakewalk. Who wants to add more tasks to their list of existing remote tasks anyway? So, start using Trello Power-Ups and boost productivity like a pro.