Deciding whether to use a List or a Board

Question

One of the first things I wasn't about the product was learning. But so far I'm picking it up fast.  Question - when should something be decided whether to be just a LIST or an actual board with more lists within it?

The same goes with having checklists inside of each card. I guess it can get granular is what I'm saying.  I like that within each card, I just have a checklist called, :"tasks" and then there are sub-tasks that I can check off.

What's worked for you?

Thanks

Vongsawat · Accepted Answer

This sounds more like a Discussion than a Question.
But put simply it's scope design.

When you're working on a checklist, you cease to see or think about other cards in the list or the board entire, let alone other boards.
Likewise, when you're moving cards between lists, you are blind to the checklists inside the cards, and the cards that exist on an entirely different board.
And so you establish your scopes to take advantage of that.

For personal boards, I really enjoy the task(card) in to subtasks(checklist) dynamic. But it starts to show issues when you work in a team. Due to so much of the work being 'hidden' at the checklist level.
So we've been trying out breaking tasks(card in List 1) in to bite-sized chunks of subtasks(card in List 2) as a weekly/bi-weekly team activity. Mostly so we can discover insidiously demanding subtasks hidden within a seemingly benign task, ahead of time.
All done on a single board so that everyone is on the same page. But past a certain size that might just become clutter, and so the pre-break tasks might go to their own board perhaps, or the planning board spits out tasks in to each 'departments' boards. etc.

That's how we've been using it anyways. Its entirely up to how you want to structure your workflows.

Mike - Dreamsuite Consulting · Accepted Answer

The beauty of Trello is that it is a blank canvas but that often is its curse, there are so many ways to use it it and it is so open to different interpretations.  It really depends on your use but some reasons I would use a new board would be:

Different context, often involving different custom fields.  For example I would have a clients board, with custom fields like name, address, email, phone, birthday and then have a separate board for client onboarding process, where the custom fields would be more related to productivity and team allocations etc...

To keep things small and modular.  If you think about breaking things down, using multiple boards help to break things down smaller and in turn make those little things a bit easier to achieve

When opting for 1-board per...(team, product, process) approach.

I have made the first option bold as this is the main reason I have multiple boards, it is about having access to the right information.  Also Trello custom fields are ugly and inflexible from a display perspective, on 1 board, if you want to capture lots of info in custom field, it isn't long before it becomes counter-productive