How the Great Joiner Migration Happened (Aka, How I Used Trello for My Big Move)

[#1]

Moving sucks. 

I don't think anyone would disagree. When my husband got a new job, I was thrilled. And then I instantly panicked. See, generally my mind moves about a thousand miles a minute. But suddenly it went into overdrive and started moving 47 million miles a minute.

All I could think of was a million things that I had to do. We had to find a new place! We had to decide what area we'd live. We'd have to change our budgets. We'd have to sell our house. We'd have to switch over addresses on all our paperwork. We'd have to find a new veterinarian!

Before letting myself get too carried away, I immediately picked up my phone and created a Trello board.

I called it "The Great Joiner Migration", and I made the background the Grand Canyon, just because that looked way more exciting than the small town in TN that we were moving to. 

I created a list for each major task that was part of the move. 

1) Finding a place to live

2) Selling our current place

3) Moving day logistics

4) Getting settled in the new town. 

**(LOL at the question mark next to finding a gym)

As i thought of things that I needed to do for the move, I just added a card under the appropriate list!

Some features that I found particularly useful...

The Checklist Feature

If you've ever moved before, you know that there's not really any such thing as a "simple task". Everything has about 39 complicated pieces to it. It's not just simply "turning on the power at the new place". It's getting the right forms of ID, finding out the hours and location of the place you need to go, and doing it at exactly the right time.

The Custom Fields Feature

When I was looking for a place to rent, there were so many pieces of information that I wanted to be easily visible. I wanted to be able to compare price, if something was a house or apartment, and the number I needed to call to set up a time to tour it.

The Labels Feature

I found labels helpful for labeling a task as not started, in progress, or done. (Also made it really easy to filter my board so I could see completed tasks disappear, but still be accessible if I needed to look at something on them.)

It was also helpful for the list of places I was looking at to clarify if I had a tour scheduled, or if a location had been ruled out.

For the most part, I kept my board simple, but it still did the job perfectly and helped me to keep my sanity. I loved having the Trello app on my phone as there were many times I thought of things on the go that I needed to add, or wanted to update.

If you're moving and want to try a similar layout, you can check out my template/example board here.

Anyone else ever used Trello for the biggest project of all - a move??

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Awesome post Brit! Wishing you all the best on your move :)

[A.]

I like the idea to use labels to mark the status of a task, especially because of the filtering options! Thank you for sharing. :)