Free Online Project Management Tools · How To Use Trello

Do you wish sometimes had more overview and a more uncluttered view altogether about the projects you are running:

• Who’s working on it 
• Who’s doing what
• What has been done 
• What is going on

And maybe you also get a little stuck in all of your to-do lists your action items. 

You don’t know what is going on at all.

If so, then this video will help you out a lot.

My name is Olaf I’m your ToolFinderr.

Today I’m going to talk about Trello. 

Well, as you see here, Trello helps teams work more collaboratively and get more done. And for me, this means project management around the world. 

Because wherever you are everybody can use Trello:

• It’s very easy to use
• It’s very insightful 
• Uncluttered
• Easy

Let’s find out about Trello.

00:52 Why did I need Trello · Free Online Project Management Tools

Why did I need a Trello in the first place? 

For my website SneakerWijzer which is a comparison website for sneakers, I needed a platform to communicate the progress with the development team. I had a couple of developers working on it.

First, we started communicating through emails, Excel lists and stuff like that. 

Didn’t work very well. Until we migrated to Trello. 

From that moment on things were a little easier or better yet: a lot easier and a lot clearer. 

For Shopify, I needed a collaboration tool to communicate with virtual assistants. Because if you hand over some work, or you delegate it to your virtual assistant, it is also very nice to know what they are doing, what they are working on and where they are at. 

For my legacy SEO clients, I needed a tool to keep them updated on improvements of their ranking the status of link building and stuff like that as well. 

First, of all, I came across Trello for my sneaker website. But then I started to use it for all my other projects as well. And from that moment on I was hooked. 

Whenever I’m doing a project, it might be just a:

• Solo project for me 
• Project with VA’s
• Project with a whole team

I use Trello as my go-to project management tool.

02:19 What is Trello · Free Online Project Management Tools

But what is Trello? 

It’s an easy but powerful project management tool. And if you’re self-employed, you might say. Okay, I don’t have projects I’m only by myself. But still, you will have some projects going on.

For example, if you are a marketer you are working on an e-book. Or you’re working on a funnel. You’re working on I don’t know what. 

But everything you do can be translated into a Trello board. I will show this to you in a moment. 

Trello’s visual project board can be used for anything. Solo projects or big projects don’t matter. And it’s a great way to get rid of all your action item lists as well. 

There is an integration with Outlook as well, if you still want to work with Outlook as your task manager or to plan some stuff in your calendar. No issue at all. 

And it’s one place for all of your projects. You can have as many boards as you like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a solo project or a project with a thousand people on it.

03:26 Features Trello · Free Online Project Management Tools 

Let’s take a look at the features. 

Trello is a very visual tool. It’s drag and drop. 

And most of the tools I was used to before using Trello were a lot of text and many different things going on on my screen. And I started to lose grip very fast and very easily. 

With Trello, it’s uncomplicated. It’s just a workflow that you see on your screen from start to finish. And within the cards that you put on your boards is all the information. You can store it wherever you want. 

We will see in a couple of minutes how this works. You can organize your tasks and track your progress. 

You can communicate within Trello by sending a notification to someone. And that notification will be sent within Trello but also via email. 

It’s a Kanban-style board, which is related to agile and methods like that. It’s not a completely agile software program. 

But it uses the uncluttered stylish drag-and-drop visual representation of Kanban. It has integration with Outlook if you want to use that. 

It has also built-in workflow automation with a Butler, which can make of stuff easier. And especially if you’re a heavy user this will save you a lot of time. 

It comes with apps for android and iPhone. And with that, it’s a very complete tool.

05:02 Benefits Of Trello · Free Online Project Management Tools

Let’s then go over to the benefits.

These were the features, but what are the benefits. 

It’s a very user-friendly tool. It’s much easier than Jira or another let’s say wiki type of software, programs and tools I’ve used in the past. 

Although it’s very easy, it’s not limited. That is a great thing about it. 

It’s uncluttered and easy to use. So, in one glance you can see what your project is doing, where you’re at and what needs to be done. 

Trello offers great searching and filtering options to filter out the tasks and stuff that you need.

And also, it has a big archive for cards that are already done, or for some other reason are archived. But you can still find them through the menu. 

It’s scalable so, as I mentioned, you can have as many boards as you want, and as many cards as you want. There are no limits to the information you can store in Trello at all.

It is a huge time saver. We are into productivity secrets after all. So, for me, the most important factor of Trello is the fact that it will save me time. And time means money. 

06:16 Everything In One Place With Trello

Because all you need is in one place. All the information regarding for example software development that you’re doing is in one board on Trello. And you can find it by searching for it. 

In one big overview you see what is happening in the project and everything gets organized. This means no balls get dropped. 

You can put stuff in that is in the workflow, but you can also put things in that are for example ideas or things in the icebox or other projects to be done in the future. So, you don’t lose any information. 

It’s cheap, free actually. There are paid plans and paid options, but I never needed those. And I’m using Trello for years now, and I never needed to pay a dime for Trello. 

That is also a nice feature. 

If you are a bigger organization, and you need multiple people working on projects it might be useful to have an upgrade. But that is up to you entirely.

07:23 Trello Tutorial · Free Online Project Management Tools

Let’s see what Trello is.

At first, you start a board as they call it. You create a board for any project, give it a name and invite your team members. For example, we are going to launch a new business, and we are going to add some lists to it. 

The list is nothing more or less than a type of workflow. For example, the workflow might be these are the things we want to do. And these are the things we are doing as in currently working on. 

Done would mean these are the tasks that have been done and are finished. 

And what you do is:

• you add a list
• you create steps in the workflow
• then you can start filling up those lists

So, for example in this case we already opened the bank account, and we already wrote the business plan.

We are busy building the Facebook page of the website, logo design, and we signed an office lease. 

And the things we have to do later would be hiring an accountant and apply for a loan. 

08:32 Trello Boards And Cards

So, in short, you create cards for tasks to complete or information you want to organize.

If you went into a card, you would see who are the members of it. What would be the due date? And not only the title of the card because that one you can see from the overview. 

So, more detailed. For example, the checklist items. And the communication around this topic.

You can have all the information around building the website on this one card. And finally if you have three steps in your workflow it is easy to drag and drop them from one place to the other. Like this, for example.

If you are building a website, and it has been done, is finished, has been reviewed and has been approved you can drag and drop it from doing to done and that’s it. 

Of course, you could also have the fourth list in this case. 

For example, Ideas. That’s not stuff that is in the current workflow. But those are things that could be done whenever you are ready for it. 

Or some space opens up, or you give it a priority. 

These are the basics of Trello. 

09:47 Trello Reviews · Free Online Project Management Tools

What do people think of Trello? 

Well, as you can see in Trustpilot it has a score of 4.7, which is extremely high for such a big company.

Normally, bigger companies bigger software programs are rarely above 4.1 or 4.2. 

So, 4.7 is extremely high.

And also here in the reviews for small businesses. It gets a rating of 4.5 and at Capterra the same out of 17,000 reviews. 

So, it’s an excellent score indeed.

10:20 Overview Of Trello · Free Online Project Management Tools

But as usual, as you will know by now we are going to have a look at the tool ourselves and try the pudding.

So, here we are on one of the boards in Trello. It’s just online in Chrome. And as you can see, we have the same workflow as most of my boards have. 

So, you have a:

• To-do
• Doing 
• Done 
• Later 

And in this case, we have a couple of team members. 

If you want you can invite other people as well for this board. What happens if we are going to add another card? Let’s say we want to stay on the subject and want to build a website.

We’re going to build a website and if we are going to open this up you would see a couple of things:

• Title
• List  
• Description
• Activities going on
• Options on the right

Let’s say build a modern WordPress website for GRIP with Divi Theme for example. 

In this case, I can add some members to the card, like these. 

And another thing you could do is add a checklist. Because if this is a task like building a website, it’s a pretty darn big task. 

So, it might be divided up into different items. For example, claim domain and the second one would be: buy the theme and then install WordPress and then deliver content. 

You can split up this task into multiple different tasks that you can have as checklists in the system, which is very easy to do. 

You can add as many items as you want and let’s say build the first version and at the end, of course, live. 

13:52 Trello Check List

But there are multiple steps in between. For now, let’s leave it at this. And you can label it so, for example, if you have a label that is called a website you can add this for visual representation.

It’s much easier to see across the board what the cards related to the website are. And it’s also possible to filter your board by this label. That is mighty easy if you just want to see the cards that are related to the website action. 

You can add a due date as well. So, for example, next week, as you can see. And you can add attachments and covers to spice it up a little.  

Of course, you have a lot more options.

But I also have an option built-in in Butler, which is like an automation tool. To sort to do by the due date so if I would do this. Then you would see that. Moved this one to the top. 

And obviously, there’s only one now. But if there are a lot of cards you can just click Sort to do by the due date, which is an advanced feature. And then it will sort your to-do list by date, which can be very handy. 

So, for now, we have things in 

• To do
• Doing 
• Done 

Let’s say we are going to work on the website. I will drag this to doing. 

And you can say right now we already bought the theme, and we installed WordPress. So, now you can see we have two out of five items that are already done. 

This card has descriptions, which is what you can see here. If you are seeing this icon, and it has the due date of September 30th. 

15:04 Trello Communication Options

Of course, there are many more options. But in general, this is what Trello does.

Let’s assume I would like to do something and write to someone about it. You can say okay I will do this. This is one of my team members and I will say hi Rose, what about the content? 

And if I would click this, then she would be notified from within Trello but also via email. But I’m not going to do this obviously for now. 

Let’s close this one. And let’s see what else we can do. Because these are the main steps the most important things that you can do within Trello, the Free Online Project Management Tool. 

On the right-hand side, you have more general options. We have a Butler to automate the cards and stuff that I showed you just now. And we have a calendar that you can use to see where you are at with your project and your cards.

You can search for cards by the label for example. So, this is what I meant earlier. If you click on this, you will only see the building website one because I only have one search result as you can see here. 

If I close this, it will show all my stuff again. And there is an Outlook integration. 

It’s not within the context of this presentation to show it to you, but you can have for example this due date with the time which is on it 3:19 pm. You can add this to your Outlook calendar. And to Google Calendar as well.

I wish this helps!

I hope you liked this presentation and tutorial and I will see you in the next one.

Good luck 🍀🙏
Olaf the ToolFinderr