Need advice on PERSONAL use (1 person) of Trello - setup?

[Alan Salls]

I am going to be using Trello to organize my personal life.  I am wondering if I should do everything all on one board, and just have many lists - one for each "topic" like one for a website I need to clean up, one for the organization & cleanup of the domains I own, one for selecting a new church to go to, etc.  Or should I use multiple boards.  It just seems like for one person & no team collaboration multiple boards may be going overboard?  A question about my lists, though:  Is there a way that I can put one list under another, rather than having them all in a horizontal row with a horizontal scrollbar?  Lots of my lists might only have a couple of cards under them, so several would fit vertically under each other.  But is there a way to do that?  Any advice to a newbie from others who use Trello just for personal use would be greatly appreciated!  TIA!!

-Alan Salls

[Caity · Accepted solution]

Hi Alan,

If you find that you need a lot of cards for a single topic, then it might be helpful to have a separate board for that. However, if you only need two or three cards for something, you could have it as a list on a board, or have a board with "To Do", "Doing", and "Done" as the lists, and use labels to organize the themes. Many people use multiple boards for Trello even when just organizing their own personal lives, so if it's helpful for you, I don't think it's going overboard. :)

As for putting one list under another, currently, Trello doesn't support that—however, we're aware of a Chrome extension that allows you to stack or grid lists. While we're not able to endorse any third-party apps (since we don't work with them directly), you can check them out at List Layouts for Trello.

Hope that helps!

[Clay Nichols]

Alan, I've been around and around on this myself.

What I found works is to take advantage of all the "levels" in Trello:

Organization, Board, List, Card

1. Organization = perhaps who you are serving or work, church, home, etc.
2. Board = Goal
3. Lists :  Status of each Task working toward Goal. So then the typical "To do, Doing, Done lists works nicely).
4. Card : Task 

That way, you can decide "OK, I'm working on Goal XYZ (maybe finishing Website for someone)" and pull up that board and see where you are.

[Alan Salls]

It makes sense, Clay, thanks for your input.  I appreciate it!

-Alan Salls