Trello for the home, holidays and life goals for 2020.
Last year was massive year in the life of Bowen. Two huge events took place.
- February 2019 - My wife and I holidayed abroad with my parents.
- February 2019 - We saw our dream house - put in an offer - Moved into new house in June 2019.
Both events in their own right required a lot of planning, but let me start with the holiday.
Costa Rica was a bucket list destination for us, what with its incredible tropical rain forests, volcanoes, rivers, gorgeous beaches and delightful poisonous frogs, snakes and spiders that are just everywhere. There are also some wonderful noisy monkeys and very slow sloths, but enough about the wildlife.
Planning started in June 2018. I initially started with a Google Sheet setting out the calendar and the places we would be staying at.
None of us do beach holidays - oh no! That would be too simple. Instead everyone likes exploring, walking, hiking, driving, photographing, thus there were many suggestions on where to stay, what to do, how to get there and the Google sheet started to get messy. It is also not great with images.
I introduced Trello and the board was an instant hit, even with my elderly non-techy folks.
Once I showed them how to add cards and drag and drop images, that was all I had to do. Before we knew it we had a fairly good idea what everyone wanted to do and where to stay.
- It was super easy to delegate tasks because each task could be owned.
- Owning a part of the planning made the whole holiday very special, because each of us was involved in everything.
- Communication became easier because everything was added to the cards. It was simple to track what was being said.
- Because everything was there visually in front of us, the excitement grew each day and the six month wait seemed so short.
Of course Costa Rica was awesome - everyone has to go there if you want to experience something special.
Moving home they say is one of the most stressful life events known to man - I am sure giving birth is the most stressful event(s) for a woman, so luckily that evens things out. Oh and death, but no one died in this story.
14 years ago when we moved into our first house, there was no Trello and I recall it being something I never wanted to experience again, so when it came around again both of us were dreading it. Especially since we were well established in our old home.
Fortunately having experienced the Holiday to Costa Rica Trello board, my wife quickly suggested we use it again for the house move (like it was her idea chuckle chuckle) and so we did!
There are a thousand and one things to do when moving home so the biggest advantages of Trello were it's checklists. There are also a lot of people involved in the process, each with their own tasks and status boards, so all I did was replicate this on our Trello board.
From sharks (lawyers) to bankers, mortgage consultants to the DIY teams working on our old and new house, utility companies to every company that had ever sent us post or Spam mail, we had a checklist for them. Slowly over the 4 month period between making an offer to receiving the keys, we checked lots of items off. By the time the move day came along we had everything in place for an effortless move and even the weather knew it had to be sunny. (lol).
Project Home Sweet Home Trello board is still in use today, 6 months later because there are still items that need checking off such as mail re-direction and changing address for the odd company we forget to contact, but looking back at all the tasks and how effortless it was to achieve is a very satisfying.
That was last year!
This year we are hoping for a lot less stressful year and as such I thought it would be a good idea to set some personal goals for myself what better tool is there to help me? You've guessed it!
Trello board Stuff I want to achieve in 2020.
Remember I said Bowen is never idle... well I am sure you can see that is true in this Trello board.
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Mike Bowen
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Head of Process, Documentation and Information Security
Semantic Evolution
London, New York
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