Recently I’ve been working on a number of personal projects including my own website. As a one-man-band on these projects I take on a lot more roles than I would usually, from designer to backend as well as server configuration on top of my usual front-end stuff. With so many tasks to take care of its easy to lack proper organisation and I often find myself starting tasks that I only finish weeks later.

I’ve therefore been looking for a project management tool suitable for these kinds of projects. At Abacus, our tool for managing projects and their issues is jira. It’s a great tool for large scale projects with lots of users, however it would definitely be overkill for my personal projects. I’ve therefore been trying out Trello.

Trello is a free and simple piece of software that helps you manage projects of any scale. There’s a mobile app which, despite some flaws, in general exposes a very clean and simple interface.

Lists, cards and checklists

The way you organise tasks in a Trello project from big to small is with lists, cards and checklists. I use lists for high level tasks like ‘automation of deployment’. A card within that might be setting up continuous integration. A checklist for that could be to spin up a dummy vm mirroring the live environment.

Merits

This single biggest merit of the process for me is the granularity of checklists. They help break big (and potentially daunting) tasks into small, manageable pieces. Providing that your checklist items are as granular as possible, they also give a fairly good indication of how complete a given card is.

Another merit of Trello is its flexible terminology. Rather than having software specific language like sprints and builds etc, Trello’s terminology lends itself to being used for all kinds of tasks from home DIY projects to holiday planning. Whilst this may be too methodical for some, I’m forever making notes and checklists for personal projects so I definitely see myself using Trello for a wide array of jobs.

Conclusions

Whilst I’ve not had any experience of managing team projects with Trello, I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a tool to manage personal projects.