Creating a book club using Trello

[#1]

Few days back I met a couple of people who had 1 thing in common - we all used to read a lot but due to various reasons have not been able to read much now.

We all decided that we need to do something to keep us motivated to continue our reading streak.

And then the idea of creating a book club was discussed and finalized.

We decided some simple rules for the book club:

1. Each member should read atleast 1 book a month.
2. There will be 1 meetup every month where we all will discuss about the books we have read.
3. Each member will have to present his/ her summary and thoughts about the book in the meetup.
4. .....

Now we wanted everyone to be aware of what all the other members are reading, what are the books in the "To Read" list, which books have been completed by the club till now, how many books each member has read in a month, how many books the entire club has read in a month and a lot more..

And then I decided to use Trello for this.

I have just setup a Trello board for our book club. The board looks like this:

The first list is the "Rules" list.

Here we have written the rules which have to be followed by all the members of the Book Club.

The second list is the "Books to Read".

Here the members will add card for the book which they will be reading/ wish to read.

Each card looks like this:

The third list is the "Read/ Done".

Once a member has read the book, the card will be moved from "Books to Read" list to "Read/ Done" list.

After a member has read a book, he/ she needs to enter the summary of the book in the "Description" field of the card.

The member also needs to log a comment if he/ she recommends the book to the members of the book club.

Once a month we will be organizing a meetup where we will discuss about the books we have read and each member needs to give a speech/ presentation with the summary of the book.

With this setup, we hope we will be able to keep us motivated to read more books and also improve our knowledge and communication skills.

I am new to Trello and I am quite impressed with how Trello made it really easy for us to maintain all the activities of the book club.

We will be starting our Book Club in January, 2020.

If you have done something like this before using Trello or if you have any suggestions or feedback for my Trello board, I would love to have your comments.

[Jimmy Seddon]

That's a very interesting use case.  I never thought about using Trello for something like this!  Great Idea!

[Deepanshu Natani]

This is first time for me too.

I will post another article after may be 2-3 months about our experience.

[DPKJ]

oh wow!

[Tim Keyes]

This is a cool use case for Trello.  Did the other group members have previous experience using Trello and the Atlassian Suite?

[Deepanshu Natani]

@Tim Keyes : They have experience with Jira and Confluence but new to Trello.

But they are all loving trello :-)

[Alison]

I love reading and hearing that you're introducing Trello to other avid readers! One suggestion is to use the spacebar shortcut so users can add themselves to cards. For example, people can indicate what books they're reading (it sounds like people can read different books each month) and that can spark conversations amongst each other. 

or you can use the voting power up so people can vote on their top reads for the year.

[Deepanshu Natani]

@Alison  Thanks for your inputs. This will help :-)

[A.]

This is a great example of Trello's flexibility. It's totally optional, but you could even add images of the book covers as attachments, this way they will show up as card covers and you'll have a more visual experience. But, still, I love the clean view of just the titles. 🙂