As a family of creators, we have tried several tools to help us wrangle our ideas and keep us sane. Some tools look promising but may be overkill for a small team of two - at most three including our daughter. I would love to be more organized, so I'm always looking for solutions that will help us organize our thoughts and tasks.
One tool that I find very useful is Trello. Trello is a website that is a Kanban board that may sound familiar. It is used a lot in the software deverlopment industry to manage tasks. Basically it is a board that has columns with notes that represent a task to complete. The columns are marked sometime as 'Backlog, ToDo, Doing, Done, Review." The backlog represents all the tasks that need to get done. The ToDo is the current tasks that are in scope. As you are assigned a task, you move it across the board until it is complete.
We take this concept and apply it to our writing business. We have several boards that contain tasks that we need to do. The Writing board will have writing tasks while the editing board contains writings that are ready to be edited.
Each task is a card that has more details when clicked. You can set a due date for the card, add more notes, even add a cover to make the card stand out more. It really is pretty powerful and useful. To add a card, just click “add another card'.’ To move a card, click and drag the card to another column. It is very easy to get up and going in no time.
The biggest downside to Trello is that is a website so you need Internet access which is probably not that big of a concern. Still, if you are without Internet for whatever reason, then your workflow could be disrupted.
Another struggle - at least for us - is that we don’t always reference it like we do the paper version that stares at us every day. It is easy to forget about Trello for months and then so much maintenance has to be done to get everything current that it can be overwhelming.
All things considered, I still believe Trello is a great companion tool for writers because of its flexibility, ease of use, and price. Trello has both a free and pro version.