I used Trello with my web designer last summer to keep track of our progress and shared tasks on that project. And recently I tried it for organizing homeschool activities and assignments and creating a daily plan, but I see endless possibilities with how to use it to use Trello organize life. It’s free, I can use it on my phone or computer and it helps create a visual for accountability and tracking. Below, I’ll explain how to use it and show you one of my boards.

Create a board:

I love that you can create a board for any interest or project. This summer, I’m planning to use it to plan a few different camps we can do at home. But there’s many ways it could be used: goal tracking, a writing project, trip planning, workout tracking, a home improvement project and more. If you have family members or coworkers who are also involved in these projects, you can share the board with them too! My husband and I share the board below, so we can keep track of our kids homeschool assignments and activities. Here’s what our homeschool board looks like:

Each column heading in bold is a “list” (Example: Daily Learning Activities) and then under each list are “cards” (Example: “Math” and “Roll and Record”).  You can add “covers” (pictures) to the lists and to your overall background to personalize it and make it more colorful with stock photos from upslash or your computer. I love stuff like that! For this board, I added a color pencil stock photo as my cover.

When creating a board, you can choose from templates others have created already and personalize them, or you can start completely from scratch. I found it helpful to look at templates others had used for homeschool as a jumping off point, and to see how they organized it, and then I created my own version.

Add Cards:

I added a card for each type of activity or assignment, but also one for each core subject under “Daily Learning Activities”. What I like best, is that I can drag and drop links and attachments from the email our son’s teacher sends each week directly onto each card and it automatically uploads it to the card! You can also move the cards around up or down or put them under different lists. If you want, you can color code the lists too!

Design a workflow:

It helps to keep track of what’s been done and what still needs to be done. I found it helpful to create a list called “Daily Plan” and a list called “Yay! Completed” with a card for each day of the week. Each Sunday, I load the board with assignments from our son’s teacher so the board is ready to go for the week. Then each morning, I sit down with the kids and let them choose their assignments for each subject, along with one household chore, and decide which order they’d like to do those in that day. Then I just drag over the cards to my “Daily Plan” list, and move them into the right order. This gives them a feeling of autonomy and also helps take the pressure off of me to keep them on task. Instead of telling them what to do next, we just check out Trello and it tells us!

As we move through the day, and work through the list, we move the cards over to the “Yay! Completed” list for the corresponding day. This helps us keep track of what we’ve completed, and feel good about our progress! When the week is over, we archive the cards and start fresh. If my husband steps in to help, or wants to talk to them about their assignments, he can check his shared Trello board to see what we’ve done.

I’m excited to try to use Trello in other ways too. Here’s a board I just created to track my daily habits. I still need to add cards to it, but the list framework is there. I love how pretty it looks.

Daily Habits:

I hope this helps you see ways you can use Trello to organize your life! If you’ve tried it, and want to share your ideas for how to use it, post them in the comments below!

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Lauren