Productivity Hacks — Part II (Phone + Trello)

Really enjoyed writing Part I of the Productivity Series, as I keep giving everyone the same tips. Now, I can help them with the initial setup and then refer them to the article for more details. Saves me time + gives everyone more detail and screenshots.

Once again, let me know what you think and if you have any cool tips and tricks.

— I’d love to learn from you!

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Content

Part I - Gmail & Slack

Part II - Phone

• Shortcut @@

Part II - Trello

• Structure
• Labels & Due Dates
• Card Repeater
• Goal setting + Tracking

Part III - Google Sheets > Excel

Part IV - Quality enhancing Productivity Tools

Part V - Speed enhancing Productivity Tools

Phone

Shortcut @@

How often do you type your email address on your phone?

Let's say about twice a day (that's on average probably low) - sign up somewhere, send your email address to someone, log in to another place - you do it all the time.

How long does it take to type an email address on your phone?

I, literally, just timed myself (and I consider myself a fairly fast typer) - it took me 8 seconds. I thought that was long, so I did it again and got it down to 7 seconds. So - for a conservative argument's sake, let's say on average it takes you 7 seconds to type your email address - which means:

You spend 1.5 hours a year typing your own email address on your phone

It's not huge, but considerable - well, I have a tiny little trick for you and you can use it for any other abbreviation you can think of (your own address, your full name, your date of birth, your credit card number, your parents' birthdays, other addresses, etc etc).

General -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement

Replace '@@' with your Email

Why?

You will never type '@@', but now you can use double @ and your phone will automatically replace it with your email address

-> Instead of 7 seconds in now takes you 1 second - DONE - 1.5 hours a year saved.

...now, you can think of lots of text replacements for all things you'd like to replace.

Trello

Structure

I love Trello to organise my work To-Do list. Trello also does a great job at showing you how you can organise your To-Do list - here is some great inspiration from the Trello blog.

1.Organise from Right to Left

• DONE - week of [Day] [Month] list
• WEEKLY GOALS List
• TODAY To-Do List
• UPCOMING - with Due Dates (sorted by date - the soonest due date at the top)
• PROJECTS - by your big Quarterly Goals

Step #1 - Logging In

When you first log in you want to:

• be reminded of what's Important - Weekly Goals
• see what you need to get done Today - Today's To-Do List

Step #2 - What else have I got on?

You then quickly skim through "Upcoming" with cards appearing in Red/Yellow to see what else you need to get done today/tomorrow.

Step #3 - Other big upcoming deliverables/planning?

And THEN you go through all your other big deliverables on your Quarterly Goals, which you can then slowly start dragging to the left to Upcoming.

So the Dragging Order is:

Quarterly Goals -> Upcoming (by date) -> Today To-Do -> DONE

Right to Left

Pro Tip:

#1 - Create another Trello Board "DONE - [Your Name] [Company Name]

#2 - Every week click on the top right of the list and move the list to your "DONE" board

#3 - Preparing for your quarterly/annual review go through your DONE list and you know exactly what projects you worked on and you won't ever forget a great or bad task you did, which is going to help you in your feedback discussion

Note: If you really want to Geek out, then rearrange your DONE list before you move it every week with your biggest achievements at the top (and drag your weekly goals in there too), so at performance review time you can identify much faster what your big milestones were.

2. Use Due Dates & Labels

Use Due Date to indicate Urgency

Use Labels to indicate Importance

Every task card you have should have a 'Due Date'. The card will turn Yellow the day before it's due and Red on the day it's due. It's an easy flag of what you need to get done.

As we all know the Urgent things are not necessarily the Important ones! So use Labels, which are larger than the Due Dates, to immediately signal you the Importance of a card. I would recommend - Label Red for Super Important, Orange for Important.

Both, Due Date and Labels, will give you a great visual signal of your most important and urgent tasks on the first glance on your Trello board.

Pro Tip: If you have spare capacity - tackle the Important cards before they are due.

3. Card Repeater - let Trello work for you

On the free version of Trello you can enable up to one Power-Up. There are a lot of awesome Power-Ups, but being restricted to only one is kind of awesome too because you don't go overboard with way too many tools which you forget and don't end up using.

My favourite is the Card Repeater.

It does exactly what the name implies - it repeatedly creates the same card.

How to best use it?

#1 Set up a list "Recurring Cards" all the way to the right of your board (so it's usually out of sight)

#2 Create a card which you recreate on a daily, weekly or monthly basis

#3 Activate the card repeater and specify when it should create the card and on which list

Success - this card will now be copied and recreated every week on your Trello

What do I need this for?

Every job would have a different use case for this - I use this for example for

• monthly budget reviews (to remind me to get this done)
• weekly recreation of Trello cards to track my time (more on this below)
• weekly goal setting

I'm sure you will be able to think of many more processes which you do on a weekly or monthly basis.

4. Set Goals + Track against them

#1 - Install Scrum for Trello

#2 - Set Goals - Every Sunday / Monday sit down and write down your biggest 3-5 weekly goals. Create a card for each one of them on the WEEKLY GOALS list.

#3 - Estimate Goal time - Estimate the hours you will / want to dedicate this week on each goal and put the hours against each card as [8] for 8 hours (this will show as pale blue).

#4 - Track your time - At the end of each day approx estimate how many hours you've spent working on each goal against each card as (8) for 8 hours (this will show as dark blue).

#5 - Review your weekly effort - Each Sunday check - Have you spend as much time as you wanted on your goals? Why was that? Did you get sidetracked? Do you need to change your processes? / priorities? Did you underestimate another goal? etc. etc.

#6 - Improve - Gradually, get better at goal setting, being realistic and scheduling your own workload whilst keeping yourself and the team aligned with realistic deliverables.

This is a super simple way to:

1. Track your weekly hours
2. Make yourself accountable for your goals

You can then every week truly reflect on what happened, why it happened and improve in estimating your next week's plan.

Pro Tip: Add to that Edrolo OS and you'll have a career/life - changing process in place. Ask me about that if you don't know Edrolo OS - I might blog about it at some point.

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What did you think? Was this useful?

Do YOU have any other tricks you use?

Any requests of what I should cover in future parts?