[Trello Holiday Calendar] Day 15: How to better visualize work using board filters and views

[#1]

Back again with another Trello tip! ✨ 

Does your board look a bit like this?



When you’re faced with a wall of cards on your board, you might find it hard to understand where you need to be focusing your efforts, the board becomes a pain to use, and cards start to become stagnant.

In this post, I’ll be going over some different ways to view this board to ensure everything is kept up to date, things don’t become overwhelming, and our team avoids missing important deadlines.

How to see what projects and tasks are due soon

Trello’s Calendar Power-Up or the Calendar View available on Trello’s Premium plan allows you to see all cards and checklist items that have due dates on a calendar view. You can switch between a monthly or weekly view to focus in on what's coming up in one particular week.

How to see what’s coming up soon for a particular team

If you just want to focus on what one particular team is doing, you can filter the calendar view by opening the filter option in the top right of your board. In this example, I’m using labels to tag the related team, but you could filter on multiple members as an alternative.

How to see all cards and checklist items assigned to you

Are you being assigned to a bunch of cards and checklist items and just want to see in one glance what's assigned to you? Simply filter on cards assigned to me while the calendar view is open to just see all cards and check items assigned to you. Pro tip: use the keyboard shortcut “Q” to easily filter on your items.

Getting a “big picture” view

Trello’s Timeline View or timeline Power-Ups like Planyway as shown above allow you to see at a high-level how things are progressing over a period of time. If our cards have both start and due dates, we can see when things should be expected to start, when they are due, and how things overlap.

From within the timeline view, you can group your cards by member, lists, or labels, and filter specific cards as well. In the above example, I’m using labels to relate cards to the big milestones we’re working on so that way I can group cards by milestone, and each card colour relates to a team.

Bonus: saving filtered views

Is there a filtered view you need to be viewing regularly? Let’s say the first thing you want to see when you open a board is a calendar view of all the cards and check items assigned to you? Easily navigate back to this view by bookmarking the URL. When opening a view/filtering your board, you’ll see it generates a unique URL that you can come back to. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can save the link to your shortcuts.

Would love to hear if you have any other ways to visualize the information on your board, or if you have any questions! 😎

[Craig Willson (AppFox)]

These views are awesome @Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows, thanks for sharing! They will definitely help keep on top of tasks and projects when working in teams or across a lot of work items :) 

[Brittany Joiner]

One of the things I love most about Trello... being able to keep everything in one place and zoom out to see the whole picture but zoom in to see what you need most! Thanks for sharing these @Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows !

[Marjorie]

Man, I like that calendar view.

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@Craig Willson (AppFox) yes, I think so too! I personally love using the calendar view to help cut out all the noise and just focus on what's important.

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@Brittany Joiner happy to share all the tips! So important having the ability to zoom in and out; it's so easy to get stuck in the weeds and forget to look at the bigger picture, but also important to focus your mind on several tasks at a time to stay productive! 🧠

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@Marjorie same! Love using the calendar view. I'm using my calendar a lot more when organising my daily todo list. Especially helpful to sync it with my Google calendar to see my meetings as well. I find using my calendar to timeblock helps me focus a lot better!