How I Use Trello for College or University

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll explain how you can set up Trello to organize your tasks and projects for college or university.

I’ve been testing out a bunch of project/task management systems and am currently using two systems in parallel to organize grad school — Trello and Todoist. Both of them are great, but different.  In this video, I'll tell you how I organize school with Trello.  

Trello is a great app.  I have a couple of videos on Trello basics and how I use it if you are interested.  As I’ve said in other videos, Trello is incredibly versatile — sometimes it feels SO versatile that you don’t even quite know how to get started.  Which is why is it nice to hear how someone else uses it for a similar purpose so that you don’t have to start from scratch.

So, I’m in grad school, for the second time, this time getting a masters in social work.  I’m in a part-time, partial distance learning program and am taking three classes this semester.  Because of this, my set up is going to be a little simpler than it would be for those of you who are taking a full load.

Again, if you are new to Trello, I recommend that you go back and watch my overview video to get a sense of what Trello is and how it differs from other organizational systems.  In my experience, college professors have to be fairly organized.  You generally get a syllabus at the beginning of the semester where they have planned out the entire class for the whole semester, generally by week.  When I get all of these syllabi, I take several hours to transfer all of this planning information into Trello.  I have created a board called Grad School.  I don't make a new one every semester, I just clear out all of the info from previous semesters by deleting or archiving it so that I can start fresh.  So, here is my more or less empty board.  You'll see it isn't entirely empty.  That's because I do have a 

• General info list - that carries over from semester to semester.  My general info board contains general school information like the school year calendar, classes for my curriculum, links to important school websites, and a calendar for the semester with week numbers.  The information contained here is school wide and doesn't necessarily change every semester.  Next, I create a list called
• Class info - this is and every other list from here on out will be specific to the current semester.  I've created a card for each of my classes and chosen a label and color for each one.  For example, my Disorders class is label 3 and is orange.  When working with Trello for the browser, you can use a shortcut to add a label.  So, I can hover over the card and hit the 3 button to toggle this label on and off.  Each of these cards is used like a note to store information about that class.  For example, again in my Disorders class, I have info about my professor, her contact info, the TA, the textbooks, the weight of assignments, students in the class, and I also included the syllabus as an attachment.  It's quick place to go to quickly locate the information I think is important for each class. 
  Papers and Projects - each class has at least one major deliverable due for the semester.  Some have more than one.  I create a card for each major assignment and tag it with the correct class label.  So you can see I have one deliverable for my research class, one for disorders, and 2 for spirituality.  Within the card, I assign a due date, and then put in as much information as I have on the project.  I will also attach an instructions document if I have it.  I also may start a task list that starts to break down what I need to do to get started on this assignment.  The next list I have is for
• Class Weekly Assignments list - most of my professors have their classes planned out week by week in the syllabus.  You have a fairly good idea of what reading is required, what assignments are due, and what projects you should be working on week by week.  I SO appreciate this level of detail and planning.  I do have one professor who likes to spring things on us each week and that is NOT my preferred method.  Okay, so you can see that for each week, I have a card that is labeled by class.  For example, again for my Disorders class, I have a card for each week with an orange label.  For the week starting October 2nd, the card's title tells me what the topic of the class will be -- in this case, "Disruptive, Impulse Control, and Behavior Disorders" -- I love this class, honestly.  Within the card, I created a check list with each of the things I need to do this week.  I need to read Ch 10 of the Corcoran and Walsh book, Read the chapter of the DSM5 on Conduct Disorders, Read Ch 7 of the LeCroy and Holschuh book, submit a critical thinking discussion post, AND take an online quiz.  So, I create a card for each week for each of my classes.  This takes some time, but doing it all at once means that I don't have to do this administrative work every week.  Okay, so that is one list for each class, with one card per week. 
•  After this I have three more lists:
• Tasks for the Week
• Today's Tasks and
• Done

These are action lists. As a note, I usually put the Done list to the far left which is against Trello and kanban convention (it is supposed to go on the right), but it works best there for me.  So, here's how I use this board.  Each Monday, I take some time to plan out my entire school week.  I open the weekly assignment card for each class for the week and look at the tasks.  Then I convert each of these tasks to a card.  You can do this by clicking on the dots to the right of the task.  This card will be created and put at the bottom of the list.  Once I've created all the cards, I scroll to the bottom of the list, label each with the correct class label (it's fast to do this with the keyboard shortcut) and then move each over to the "Tasks for this week" list.  I do this for each class.  Now I check into my big projects and assignments and see if I need to move over any of those tasks to start working on this week.  Once I have all of the cards of what I need to do this week in my This Week list, I can plan out how I'm going to attack this work.  I'll drag and drop to reorganize the cards into the order in which I'll do them.  I move some cards into my Today's Task list.  And then I start to work through them.  As I complete each task, I drag it into my Done list.

In addition, I have added the Calendar Power Up so that for the cards where I have assigned due dates -- like for my big proejcts and papers, I can click on the Calendar view to get a time centric view of when they are due.  It's super easy to add new tasks as they arise.  For example, for my discussion board posts, I almost always have to post an original submission and then respond back to the post of a couple of my classmates.  I'll add the task of responding to others and maybe even assign it a date.  

Trello is easy to use, beautiful, and works on lots of different platforms, so that I can always access my assignments wherever I am.  I love the ability to drag and drop to reorder my workflow throughout the day and week.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!