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Boomerang: Never Forget to Followup on an Email

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today I want to talk to you about my favorite add-on for email which makes followup so easy we're going to be looking at a product called Boomerang

About Boomerang

now Boomerang makes its product in a few different flavors here we see Boomerang

for Gmail but it also makes their product for Outlook as well although this says Outlook classic they also make versions for Office 365 and for outlook.com but because I'm a Gmail user we're going

What is Boomerang

to be looking at it from the lens of Gmail the functionality is essentially the same no matter where you use it but we're just going to look at it from a Google perspective so what is boomerang how can it help you well one of boomerang's main features is the ability to snooze a message and you may see this in other email clients as well such as inbox by Gmail there's many other apps that also add this feature as a part of their email management Suite of tools

Snooze a Message

and what does snoozing a message mean well it means if you receive a message

and you say to yourself you know what I just don't want to deal with this right now can you remind me later or can you bring this back later that's the whole idea of the name Boomerang you can select a time frame that's appropriate for you and it will return that message it will show up as an unread message back into your inbox but the feature I

Followup

I want to show you the follow-up feature in Boomerang because I think it's so, so powerful.

Once you've installed Boomerang with your email client, you're going to see a little bit of an addition at the bottom of your composition window or composition box.

Here, we see the blue send button, which is still Gmail, but you'll see down below, with the Boomerang add-on, you have this "Send Later" button and a new checkbox.

Let me give a scenario that I'm sure you're familiar with.

You're asking a question of someone, or you're making a request, and you need an answer.

You want to make sure that you follow up with this person sometime in the future if they don't answer because the question is that important.

So what do you do?

Do you send the email and then go to your calendar and write a follow-up event?

Do you make sure to follow up with so-and-so on this date?

Do you go to your to-do list and make a task for a few days in the future to ensure you follow up with so-and-so about this item?

Well, with Boomerang, you don't have to do either of those steps.

You don't have to get your to-do list or your calendar involved.

At the bottom, we have this checkbox called "Boomerang this."

If I check this box, it says "Boomerang this in 1 hour if no reply."

That means that this message will return to my inbox and show up as an unread message.

That will be my trigger that I have still not heard from this individual.

Now, 1 hour in this fictitious case is too soon, so Boomerang gives you the option to select from a variety of different defaults.

There's also a little pop-up calendar where you can pick a specific date and time.

But for this example, let's say it's two days.

I really want an answer within two days.

I'm going to select two days.

The second drop-down also gives you a few different options:

• if no reply
• if not clicked
• if not opened
• and regardless, which is basically all of the above.

I find that "if no reply" satisfies my needs in almost all cases.

I want an answer, so I don't care so much if they opened or clicked or what else they did with the message—I really want a reply from this individual.

So if I go ahead and hit send, what's going to happen?

If this person replies to my question within two days, that's great—nothing else happens.

I will not have this message returned to me.

But if there is no reply given within this time frame, it's going to show back up in my inbox as an unread message.

Then I can take the next step, maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's a second email, but I am automatically reminded.

This is fantastic for follow-up, regardless if you're messaging with people within your own team, within your own company, or if it's potential clients or people that you don't know so well.

You can choose a time frame that's appropriate for that message or appropriate for that person you're corresponding with and automatically get those follow-ups built into your email client.

So whether you're a Gmail user or an Outlook user, try out Boomerang and make email follow-up easy and simple.

Trol is one of my favorite tools for managing projects and managing tasks whether I'm just managing my own personal to Do's or if I'm working and collaborating with other team members. But one of the best ways to use Trello and to add information to a Trello board or to respond to comments on Trello is to use your own email client.

And today I want to show you two different ways that you can use email so that you can both add new information, maybe it's an email, maybe it's an idea that you have while you're replying to email, and give you a way how you can respond to comments for questions that other people that you are collaborating with on Trello.

How you can use your email to do just that. There's so much you can do without even having to jump in to the application itself. So first, let's start with using the email, the unique email address that each Trello board comes with.

When you click show menu, you're going to get a variety of options here. And I'm going to go to the main menu just to show where you need to go because you're going to have to hit the more option here. Under more, you'll see options such as settings, labels, archived items.

And roughly halfway down, you'll see the email to board settings. If you click on that, you'll notice there's a big long, doesn't look very friendly, email address here. You don't have to worry about all the random numbers and letters here.

This is the unique email address for this Trello board. So if I send an email to this address, it's going to show up here on my Trello board. Now you can copy and paste it directly from here, or you can select this option to email this address to the email that's associated with your Trello board.

They also give you the option to generate a new email address. Now you may be wondering, why would I want to do that? Well, if you're collaborating with others, and perhaps there's someone in that group who you no longer want to have this functionality or give this access, you can always generate a new address in the future.

But if you're working just, you know, just for yourself, if it's just a personal Trello board, you'll never really need to use this option on your end. Now, the only other decision you need to make at this point is where are your emailed cards going to appear first?

You need to select the list that you want it to appear in. So for myself, I want it to appear in my first list, notes and ideas. And the only other thing I have to consider is do I want my new emails, the things that I forward to my Trello board, do I want them to appear at the top of that list or the bottom?

Am I going to select bottom? That's the default option here. I don't have to do anything else here. I can close this window. I can minimize the menu here. And now when I go to my email and let's say I've got an email here from someone, it's about a conference.

It's got some information here, you know what? I'd like to consider that. I'm not gonna reply just yet. I'd like to throw this in my ideas list. Well, all I need to do is select forward. Find that Trello email address here. I've saved it here as part of my contacts.

It's my Trello board. I can add some more messaging to it if I want to, but I'm just going to forward it as is. I'm going to hit Send. And now I'm going to jump back to my Trello board. And look at that. Almost immediately, it's arrived in my notes and ideas list at the bottom, like I specified.

The subject of the email is in the top. And if I click on it, I get all the information of that email within the description. So the contents of the email are going to show up under the description. The subject of the email will show up at the top.

And of course, I can always go in and edit this. I can change this now if I don't want to leave the default email subject header. But what I love about Trello is that it keeps all of the links, it keeps all the information.

And here we see a link to the conference. I can click on that right away and see the information that my sender wanted me to see. Now you can forward emails that you come across to your Trello board.

But you can start a brand new email as well. Let's say I've got an idea while I'm in my email inbox. Find that Trello email address. I'm going to say, you know, new project idea. Remember, this is going to be the title of the Trello card.

How about refreshing the log web page? Alright, I'm just going to hit Send on that. And again, jump back over to our Trello board. Immediately, it shows up there. There's the subject heading. I open it up and there's the question.

It shows up in the description. Any other information in that email is going to show up here. Now yes, it's also going to bring in an email signature into the description area as well.

You may not always want that information, but it may be helpful depending on if you're forwarding that information or if you want to remember where that idea, where that information was coming from originally.

So find out your unique email address for your Trello board, email to board settings, and start forwarding or creating new emails and sending them directly to Trello.

Now, the one other email-related item I want to show you today is responding to questions or comments in Trello using your email client. So you may realize if you have notifications turned on, you get updates from time to time in your email inbox, especially if someone is asking you a question.

So here's an example where I've got perhaps a teammate, and they're wondering what the status is of this particular project. And they've said, hey, have you called this person yet? If I go to my email inbox, look at that, I got a reminder earlier today telling me that I've got this question in Trello.

Now I can click on this link and go directly to that card. I could click on this link, which is the name of the board, and go directly to that Trello board. But depending on what I'm doing right now, I probably want to stay, or I might want to stay in my email inbox.

I want to continue replying to emails and reading unread emails. I don't want to jump into Trello right now, but I would like to answer this question. Well, you can either select this link, reply via email, or if you use an email client such as Gmail, which already has your reply text box already open,

I'm just gonna reply like I would any regular email. Yes, I will call her later this afternoon. I hit Send just like a regular email. I'm gonna go back to my Trello board just to see what happened there. And look at that, immediately it's replied under the comments section.

Now anyone else who has access to this card, anyone else who is on this card can see my reply, and I didn't have to jump into my Trello board. I didn't actually have to open up Trello to make use of this functionality.

So if you get questions or if you have updates that are coming through your email inbox, make use of the reply feature. Just reply directly like you would any other email, and get to know your unique email address for your Trello board so you can quickly and easily add things to your board.

It's very simple.‍

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Decisions, decisions, decisions.

We all have so many important decisions to make. Well, today I want to share with you a tool to help you decide which project or idea you should pursue next.

As you can see here, I’ve created a little Excel spreadsheet, which I call the Decision-Making Matrix. This particular matrix is based on one developed by Chris Guillebeau in his book The $100 Startup, and I’ve found it to be a very useful tool as I decide which project or idea I should tackle next.

It doesn’t matter if you’re making decisions for your organization, your team, or even personal decisions—this tool can come in very handy.

So, how does the Decision-Making Matrix work?

You can see on the left-hand side, I’ve got a selection of hypothetical ideas—these are things that I’m considering pursuing, but I’m not sure exactly which one I should tackle first. Where should I put most of my effort right now?

The Decision-Making Matrix helps us add quantitative data so that we can get a score—a point total—that can help us decide which task or project we should tackle next.

At the bottom of my spreadsheet here, you can see I have some definitions of the four different criteria that we’re going to run these ideas through.

1. Impact is defined as how much of an impact this project will make on my business and customers. All we need to do is plug in some numbers between 1 and 5. A value of 1 means little impact on my business or customers, while a 5 means a huge impact.
   • There are a couple of different ways to go about this. You can give each one a subjective number, say, this is a 4, that’s about a 4, and this is a 3. But what I like to do with the matrix is to use a stack ranking approach. I look at how many ideas I have on the left-hand side (in this case, I have five), and I make sure that each value from 1 to 5 is represented in the Impact column.
   • This way, I avoid ending up with scores that are too even, and I compare the ideas against one another. This approach works well if you have between three and six different ideas. You could go beyond 1 to 5, depending on how many ideas you’re evaluating.
   • Let’s start with Impact, and I’ll randomly throw in some numbers here for this example.
2. Effort is defined as how much time and work it will take to create the project. It’s important to note that the numbering system here is different from the other three criteria. A value of 1 means a ton of work, while 5 means almost no work.
   • Why is that? We want to pursue the project that gives us the highest score at the end of this exercise, so we want to prioritize projects that take less effort but yield great outcomes. Therefore, less effort (closer to 5) is rewarded.
   • I’m going to plug in a few more numbers here. Again, this is just a hypothetical example.

Before I add values for Profitability, here’s another tip to make this tool really useful. As you can see, the values are summing up in real time, but I’m going to hide that column.

Why? Because I want to be as unbiased as possible as I go through this exercise. I might be biased towards one idea, and if I see that it’s only one point behind the leader, I might intentionally give it a higher score in Profitability or Vision than it deserves. By hiding the total score, I ensure that the final score will be a surprise and more objective.

3. Profitability is straightforward—how much money will this project bring in? I’ll plug in a few more numbers here.
4. Vision is something we often forget when evaluating our projects or ideas. We tend to focus heavily on Profitability, which is important, but Vision considers whether the project aligns with our overall mission and vision.
   • A score of 1 means not close, while a 5 means very close. Let’s plug in some numbers here as well.

Now that we’ve given everything a quantitative value, we’ve run it through four sets of important criteria. Let’s go back and unhide the total column. Now, we have some total scores.

Looking at this, we see that Sales Training and Hire More Staff are tied with a score of 15. This doesn’t mean I should pursue both tasks simultaneously, but it gives me some great food for thought. These two are probably much more important and impactful to my business than the other ideas on this list, so I should seriously consider pursuing one of them immediately.

It’s also helpful to look at the ideas that didn’t score as well. In this case, both Customer Conference and Build a New Product scored a 9. You might want to review why that is—perhaps the Impact was minimal, or it didn’t align well with your Vision.

I’ll provide a link in the description below to this Excel spreadsheet so you can download it yourself. Try it out and plug in your own data and ideas. Check out the Decision-Making Matrix to help you make more productive decisions.

Whether you use Trello for team collaboration or for your own personal projects, adding checklists is a great way to enhance your use of Trello.

Today I want to show you how to add checklists and how you can repurpose those checklists, especially if you have a process that you want to replicate if you want to repeat time and time again.

So to add a checklist, simply click on a Trello card and on the right-hand side, under "Add," you will see "Checklist."

Here you can give the checklist a name, or you can go with the default. I'm just going to go with "Default Checklist" for now, and you can see a checklist appears below the description area.

Now I can just start typing the steps or the process that I want to follow in my checklist. Just by hitting Enter, I can add the items in my checklist.

If I'm unhappy with the order that I've displayed them, it's just drag-and-drop. I can reorder my checklist any way that I like. I was happy with my initial order, so I'm going to go back to that.

And immediately I can start using this checklist. Let's say I've already contacted the client, and I've made the appointment. You'll see Trello gives you a nice visual indicator here at the top—a percentage of the amount of things that you've completed within this checklist.

This comes in very handy, especially when you have a very long checklist. Let's say you have seven or perhaps even more items in this checklist. It also gives you the ability to hide completed items, which is great. It can keep your display here on the Trello card nice and clean.

In parenthesis, I can take a quick glance at how many items I've already checked off. But if I have a lengthy checklist, I can just see the things that I have yet to complete.

Now when I close this card, you can see there's a nice visual indicator on the front of the card as to how many things I've completed, how many are yet to complete. There's a little checklist icon followed by a fraction—two out of three are complete on this card.

Now when I complete everything in this checklist, not only does the status bar go to green and show 100%, but on the front of the card, it gives me a nice visual indicator. It changes to green, and here you can see the contrast between a card just above, which is not yet complete, and the one that is 100% complete.

So again, I can take a quick glance and know that I've completed everything in that process.

Now let's say the checklist that I just created is something I want to replicate. It's something I want to use again. So I've got another new client. When I click on that card, let's say I want to add that same checklist.

I hit the "Checklist" button, and below there's a "Copy Items From" option. Here I can see I've got two different checklists. I've got one I created called "Meeting" under my potential client card, and here's the one we just created called "Checklist."

If I select that one and hit "Add," boom, I've got the exact same process. The exact same checklist appears on this card. I don't have to re-enter anything. I don't have to start from scratch. Immediately I can start using the items in this checklist.

One last feature that I love about checklists in Trello is that if I copy this card—maybe there's another part of this card that I want to replicate—if I go and copy this card, you'll notice that I've completed two out of three.

If I hit "Copy," let's say I'm going to call this one "New Client Three." It gives me the option if I want to keep the checklist or not. I'm going to say yes, I'm going to say "Create Card."

It properly resets the checklist. Here you'll see I'm now back down to zero out of three, which I believe is the right functionality. I don't want to copy the steps here. This is a brand-new card. This is a brand-new process or project.

However, I'm using this card, and I want the checklist to be reset, and you can see I'm back down to zero. I can now follow this process in the order given.

So again, whether you're collaborating with teams, maybe you're using Trello for your own to-do list or for your own personal projects, add checklists. It's a great way to add more functionality to Trello—a great way to manage subtasks as well.

It's very simple.

I teach people and organizations to be more productive. But what exactly does that word mean: productivity. I find that most people feel it means getting more things done in a shorter amount of time. But I don't particularly like that definition. That puts too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on quality. You see I think the best type of productivity is about getting the right things done, not just about getting more things done. Let me give you an example.

Example

At the end of your work day, let's say you have two employees approach you.

The first one proudly says that they had 27 things that they crossed off of their to-do list.

The second one says that they only crossed off 3 things off of their to-do list.

Now which of these two employees was more productive?

If you think it's the first one, you need to dive a bit deeper as into what did those activities involve.

If most of those 27 to-dos included email, short phone calls, and other menial tasks, it would be hard to argue that they were the more productive individual.

Especially if the second employee, the one who only had 3 things checked off, really pushed things forward.

If they really brought a lot of value to their big projects or to their teams.

In that case we would clearly state that the second employee was the more productive individual.

Conclusion

Remember, any fool can be busy. You don't need an education or experience to be busy and therefore have a lot of things on your plate or get a lot of things done.

But to be a productive individual, you need to be able to get the right things done.

You need to be able to focus and achieve your most important work. So remember the true definition, the best definition of productivity to ensure that you get the most out of yours and your organization's day. It's very simple.

Do you know what gets in the way of you having the most productive day possible?

Distractions!

And do you know what's really distracting?

Little red badges on your iOS device.

These are intended to be helpful, to tell you something that is within the app by just glancing at your home screen.

But more often than not, they just pull your focus away from more important things and they tempt you to click on the app more than you actually need to.

Here you see my mail app.

It has a little red 3 telling me that I have 3 unread emails.

Here I have my Sunrise calendar app telling me I have 21 events scheduled for today.

That's a lot.

I think that's actually the combination of all of my shared calendars than just the events for today, 21.

Well, both of these numbers I feel are useless.

They're not helping me in any way.

They're only tempting me to go click on them more than I need to when I should be doing something more productive.

When I should be doing something more important.

So to turn these badges off, you select Settings and you're going to select Notifications.

Under Notifications you're going to find a full list of all of your apps that allow some type of notification.

I'm going to find my mail app and there is the badge app icon.

And I just toggle it, turn it off.

Let's go back and find my calendar app.

Badge app icon, I want to turn that off.

And when I return to my home screen.

Viola!

It's nice and clean, nice and crisp.

I don't have any stupid red badges trying to distract me, trying to tempt me to open up that app.

Now, you may have an app where those red badges are helpful.

A text app or some type of messaging app.

It may actually be helpful if you've missed something and you want to be notified of that just by glancing at your screen.

But I find in most cases, in the majority of cases, they are actually just pulling you away, they are more of a distraction than actually being helpful.

So go into Settings, turn off the badge app icon and get rid of those red circles.

It's very simple.

If you're considering using a desktop timer in order to make your workday that much more productive, I would strongly recommend the Scirocco Take a Break app.

You can find it at Download.com and it is a free app.

Here's a look at what the interface looks like.

You may be familiar with the Pomodoro timer technique, where you select a specific task or a specific project and work exclusively on it for 25 minutes or some other predetermined time.

And the Take a Break app is ideal for this type of work.

Here you can see I've already set it for 25 minutes, I can start it, minimize it, and now I can focus on my work.

I can focus exclusively on what I want to for the next 25 minutes.

It minimizes to my tray in the bottom right corner I can see a little green light which tells me that it's working and that it's actually running.

And if I hover over it, it will actually tell me how many more minutes are left.

But for the most part I don't really care about that.

I can put my attention elsewhere and when the timer is up, it will gently remind me by popping the dialog up in front of me.

Now you can customize a lot of different components of the Take a Break timer.

You can add a sound when the timer is up and you can customize your default time limit.

Selecting the options and preferences menu gives me all of the full features of the application.

Here you can see I can designate the default time limit, I can specify the amount of time that I want to break for.

I can set a snooze time so when the timer goes off perhaps I want to be reminded again in 2 minutes or some other specified time.

And I can choose to snooze forever or I can set a limit.

Sort of discipline myself as to when I should be taking my next break.

There's a few other features that you can toggle on this window.

Security, what happens when you take a break.

Do you want to lock your workstation or start a screen saver.

There's a number of other visual alerts you can add including custom sounds and even what the tray icon looks like.

But for the most part this is a very, very simple application.

I can edit my default time if I like.

Let's set it for something really short just so you see what it looks like when it comes

Off.

So, I've set it for 7 seconds, I'm going to start it.

Minimize it to the tray and now I can focus on my most important work.

When that timer is finished, I receive a simple dialog box.

Here I can choose to snooze and remind myself again later.

You can see the helpful text shows me that it's going to remind me in 2 minutes if I select this option.

I can take a break and here is my default break time, 5 minutes.

I can get up and walk away from my computer.

But if not, I don't have to and I can simply restart my timer.

Once again, it'll restart to my default amount which is 25 minutes and I can focus on the next task.

So, the Scirocco Take a Break timer.

A fantastic, simple, easy, and free tool for adding and improving your daily productivity.

It's very simple.

Trello is a fantastic application for managing your personal projects or your personal to-do list.

But Trello really flexes its muscles when you start to get other people involved.

When you collaborate with a team.

You can add members to a Trello board so that they can contribute to this board, so that they can comment, they can access all the information as a part of this Trello board.

To add members, select the Show Menu link in the top right-hand corner.

Here you'll see the Add Members function.

Now you can start out by typing in someone's name to see if they already have a Trello username.

You may have collaborated with them before in the past.

But if they don't, that's fine.

You can just add their email address and select Send and Trello will send them an invitation so that they can access this board.

Now this can become a little tedious if you are inviting multiple members, a large number of people to this board.

You see this Add Members field will not accept multiple email addresses.

You have to do them one at a time.

So recently, Trello added a new feature: an invite link.

Down below you'll see this link says, "Invite people by giving them a special link."

By clicking this, you'll get a unique link which you can copy and then paste in your own personal email.

Here I've setup an email that I'm going to send to my team, about 12 people: "Hi everyone, I've just created this new board to help us manage our new project.

Please click the link below to gain access."

Now when they receive this email and click the link, they will immediately get access to that Trello board.

So a great new way to invite a large number of people to your Trello board.

It's very simple.

We all want to feel confident that we're working on the right things right now. One of the best ways to do that is to perform a weekly review.

WEEKLY REVIEW

Time set aside just for you to make sure that you're working on your most important tasks. So here are my 3 steps to an effective weekly review. Number 1: Review your past.

Review Your Past

Open up your calendar and take a look at your last 7 days. Go through each and every meeting or event that shows up on your calendar to see if it triggers follow-up items or new tasks that you should be working on right now. Perhaps you attended a meeting on Tuesday morning but you forgot to follow-up with the client. By looking back at your calendar, you can make sure that you haven't left anything in the past.

You haven't left anything behind and that you're caught up to the present. Step number 2: Be in the present.

Be in the Present

The best way to do that is to do a mind dump. What's a mind dump? Get anything that is on your mind. Anything that's worrying you, any issues and export it somewhere else. You can write it down on a piece of paper, in a notebook, you can use Evernote or Trello, whatever tool you use to capture your ideas. I want you to export it from up here and get it off of your head. Number 3: Look forward to the future.

Look forward to the Future

Again we want to go back to our calendar and review the next 2 weeks out minimum. Go through each and every meeting or event to make sure that you know of every upcoming deadline, every major presentation, any travel that you may have in the near future. What do you need to be thinking about right now? What tasks do you need to be doing right now to make sure that you're prepared for your future? So, weekly review: Review your past, be in the present, and look forward to the future. It's very simple.

Chel is one of my absolute favorite tools for staying productive.

Whether you're working with an organization or a team, or if you want to use Trello for your own personal use, there are just so many flexible, different ways that you can use the Trello application.

Now, Trello is most commonly used for project-based work.

Maybe you're keeping track of a process and you want to move something from left to right.

Maybe you want a lot of people engaged, and you want people contributing and commenting on a particular project or process.

Well, today I want to show you how to use Trello for your own personal to-do list.

I don't think a lot of people consider Trello as a to-do list manager, but I personally feel that Trello is the best to-do list manager on the market.

I'm going to show you why.

Today I've just created a very simple Trello board.

I've got three lists: one titled "Notes and Ideas" (I could use this for brainstorming or maybe notes that I write down throughout the day), a "To-Do" list where I'm actually going to manage my individual tasks, and then a "Projects" list where I'm going to keep track of my bigger projects, taking a look at them at a higher level.

I think it's really important that you separate your to-dos from your projects—they are different, and sometimes our to-do lists look a lot more like a projects list.

A great thing about Trello is that you can have them in front of you on the same page and see the differences between the two, see if your to-dos are lining up with your projects.

In Trello, it is very easy to input your tasks.

As soon as you hit enter, it opens up a new card for you to enter in another task.

So, incredibly easy to capture the tasks that you have added to your to-do list.

And, of course, being a drag-and-drop application, I can rearrange my tasks any way that I like.

Clicking on a task gives me a lot more functionality.

I can add a label if I want to prioritize my tasks.

I can add a due date, which is essential when you are creating or considering a to-do list manager.

Now, at this point, you're probably saying, "This isn't really that different than Todoist or Wunderlist or Remember The Milk or many other to-do list managers that are out on the market."

And that's true—the ability to add a due date or to add a label or priority is pretty standard functionality.

But now let's get into some of the things that Trello can do that most other to-do list managers cannot.

So, I just mentioned you can drag and drop and reorder your tasks any way that you like.

Just that simple piece of functionality is not available on most task lists.

Most task list managers only allow you to sort alphabetically, or perhaps by priority or due date.

You don't have the power to push something to the top unless it has a label or matches their type of default sort order.

But the real power, I find, of Trello is what you capture within the card.

So yes, I already have a label on this one.

I already have a due date, and the ability to add a further description would also be sort of basic functionality for a to-do list manager.

But often, they keep it very, very basic.

So, for example, most to-do list managers only allow you to capture text in the description area or in the notes area.

You cannot add actual links.

Well, Trello doesn't limit you there.

You can add as many links as you want—active links so that you can go to those web pages, make use of those URLs.

Most to-do list managers will not allow you to add an attachment.

If you want to attach a PDF, if you want to attach a photo, if you want to attach an image, all of those things are capable of being added to a Trello card.

Another nice advantage of Trello is that there is the comment section.

While this was initially designed for projects and for team members to comment against one another, I use the comment section to keep track of little things that may be related to that task.

So, let's say, for example, this task has to do with contacting someone—that's the task, is to call Paul and discuss the upcoming meeting.

Well, maybe I tried to reach Paul, but I couldn't get through.

Well, I can capture that within the card itself, can save that comment.

It's time-stamped, so when I come back to this task and I want to know the history of that task or the status of that to-do, I can see it right here.

I can add as many comments as I like and see, "Why have I not completed that yet?" or "What was the last step that I took with that particular task?"

So, a lot of additional functionality.

Checklists, another feature that most to-do list managers cannot handle or do not provide, is adding a checklist within a task.

Maybe you want to add the next step in that process.

So, you know, many, many additional features that you can add to Trello, yet the top level or the high level of your to-do list remains very, very clean, very easy to manage, very easy to see between your different tasks.

The last thing where I think Trello really flexes its muscle in comparison to most other to-do list managers is how it is seamless between its desktop version, its iPad or tablet version, and its mobile version.

I find that most to-do list apps are very strong when it comes to their mobile app, yet when it comes to their desktop, it is quite weak—you are very limited by the amount of functionality that you can do.

Trello is seamless between desktop, tablet, and mobile.

That's really what you want from a robust to-do list manager.

I don't know about you, but I do most of my work on a desktop.

I do most of my work on a laptop.

So I want my to-do list available, and I want to be able to easily update and edit things here when I'm on the desktop.

I'm not going to be sitting at my desk, flipping up my phone every twenty minutes to cross things off or to see what's next on my to-do list.

And Trello has done a beautiful job with their mobile apps and how seamlessly it works with their desktop version.

So, if you haven't tried Trello out as a to-do list manager, I strongly encourage you to do so.

I've provided a link in the description below so you can access Trello and take it out for a spin yourself.

Trello as a to-do list manager—it's very simple.