Building Better Habits Using Trello
Lauren Rad is the senior writer here at Myrth. From time to time, she’ll pop in with a personal blog post. This month, she’s sharing about how a popular project management tool, Trello, has helped her build good habits.
I'm not a terribly organized person.
Scratch that. I am a chronically disorganized person. I've spent much of the last 35 years trying to figure out how to be more organized, with varying degrees of success, and it feels like as soon as I get one system in place, life happens and that system stops working so well.
But you may have seen that I'm on a mission to build good habits this year. Part of building good habits is being intentional about them, and it's hard to be intentional when you're disorganized. I was juggling so much in my head that I’d forget my plans for new habits almost as soon as I made them.
Enter Trello.
I was scrolling through Instagram stories one day when I noticed that one of my favorite women entrepreneurs mentioned she uses a Trello board to organize her weekly activities. I was curious, so I did some more exploring. I found a course online that promised to teach me how to use Trello more effectively, and I figured, well, what do I have to lose? So I signed up.
Now I'm a convert, and with the zeal of the convert, I need to tell you about how great this system has been for building new habits.
See, Trello is now where I keep all my checklists for building habits. I like checklists for a couple reasons. First, I struggle with remembering multi-step processes (to the point that I sometimes forget to shampoo my hair before putting in conditioner), so I use checklists a lot to make sure I cover everything. When I want to start a new habit, adding it to my checklists turns out to be a great way to use habit-stacking and increase my likelihood of success.
I also get a little hit of happy brain chemicals when I cross an item off my checklist, which means that if I have a list, I’m more motivated to finish the things on it.
The problem with checklists for building habits, though, is that they’re easy to lose, and if you have them in hard copy format, you have to rewrite them all the time. That little bit of friction there was sometimes enough to keep me from making a list at all.
If you're like me and find yourself highly motivated by checking things off a list, but you lose track of your lists easily and hate having to write up the same list over and over for daily tasks, using Trello might be a great option. I have checklists for morning and evening activities, so that when I want to stack a new habit on top of others, I can just add it to the checklist. I’ve also got a board full of tasks that repeat each week, which I can then copy over to my list of stuff to do on any given day.
In other words: do all the set-up once, reap the benefits of good checklists for months on end and benefit with better habits.
It’s been really helpful in my journey toward developing better habits, especially during this somewhat chaotic season of covid-19 closures and schedule disruptions. If you’re hoping to add some structure to your days, too, it’s worth giving this a try.
Have you used project management tools like Trello to support your habit-building journey? How did it work for you? Drop a comment below and let us know.
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