Useful Productivity Website: Trello

I’m really enjoying Trello.com at the moment.

The story behind the site is that the people at FogCreek built a tool so the people in their teams can see at a glance what everyone is working on. They then decided it would be a good idea to make it available to everyone else!

The basic idea is the system is made up of three things.

Boards – a collection of lists – a board can be an abstraction of a specific project. A project folder if you were doing this without a computer.

Lists – a collection of cards – imagine a stage in a process (e.g To-Do, In Progress, Complete) -  Think of it as a piece of paper if you were doing this without a computer.

Cards – an activity of work – a specific something that needs to be done – an entry on your piece of paper if you were doing this without a computer. What’s really good about cards is they start as just a title but if you drill down you can add as many or as little details as needed (comments, work complete, embed pictures and videos)

Sounds simple enough? Hope that makes sense!

You create a series of lists – add some cards and then you can shift those cards between lists as work gets done.

So here’s a simple example of how I’ve been using it.

I’ve got a board called WORK

On this board I’ve got three lists.

To Do   -   Doing   – Done

I add things I need to do into the “To-Do” list. If i need to add extra details I can but generally the title is enough.

Initial card creation.

Card in more detail. You can add pictures, video, text. Assign team members or categorise with colour labels.

As I start to work on a specific item I drag it into the “Doing” list. I update the list if needed if it’s a work in process and I’m not completing it straight away. Obviously once the task is complete it’s dragged into the “Done” list.

Dragging to the Doing list.

Nice and simple. It’s just me using these but I can see it getting really powerful when a group of people get involved. Especially when assigning a task to someone is as simple as dragging their avatar onto the card.

So how’s this different to other collaboration applications?

Everything is so easy. Data entry consists of typing and pressing enter. You can fire off a series of new entries really quickly. There is no constant clicking ok / save every time you do anything. You can enter a little or as much detail as you feel like. Very importantly – it just works.

Finally you can use it on just about any device you like. I’ve been using it on my TouchPad in the office instead of keeping lots of paper lists hanging around my desk. Also because it’s web based if I think of something I need to do it only takes a second to get onto the site and add something new. It’s then available everywhere I’ve got a web browser.

Sign up is really easy too. You can either create an account on the site or sign in with an existing Google account.

The Trello homepage gives some really good usage examples.

It’s honestly worth spending ten minutes taking a look – it’s free!

Creating an Activity Log with SharePoint

I was reminded of an old Notepad trick on LifeHacker yesterday.

Basically if you create a new text file, add .LOG as your first line and then save the file, every time you open it after that the date and time is automatically added for you.

LifeHacker then suggest you can use this as an activity log to help keep you focused on productivity. At the end of the day you can take a look and see what you’ve done with your time!

It also suggested that you added a shortcut to your taskbar so you can get to the log really quickly.

I’m all for improving productivity but decided I could improve on this a little so created something similar in SharePoint.

On our companyweb site I also have my own site that I use for testing things out and keeping track of information specific to myself (http://companyweb/andy) so this seemed the perfect place for it.

First thing was to create a new custom list called “Daily Activity Log”

Adding it to the quick launch bar means I can get at it quickly while on my site.

One new list!

Next I created a new standard view

From here I made my new view the default view, displayed only the "Created” and “Title” fields (in that order) and set the sort order to “Created" and Descending (newest on top)

Scrolling down the page I set the filter options to only show the entries for today.

After that I clicked the NEW button to display a form so I could fill out an activity entry.

You could also rename the “Title” field to something more useful but I haven’t here as this post will be long enough!

TADA!

I now have a complete list of entries from today and the “created” field gives us the same timestamp effect we had in notepad.

To mirror the LifeHacker suggestion I then created a new shortcut on my desktop.

The target is:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://companyweb/andy/Lists/Daily%20Activity%20Log/NewForm.aspx”

(This path will be different if using the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer on a 64-bit operating system)

You can get the URL by clicking the NEW button and copying the URL from the address bar.

I also changed the icon to make sure it looked different to the main Internet Explorer icon!

I needed to create the shortcut to Internet Explorer as you can’t pin internet shortcuts to the taskbar – Windows tries to pin them directly to Internet Explorer instead.

Once pinned to my taskbar I now have one click access to creating a new activity entry.

To improve on this some more I created another view. Instead of using a new standard view I used my previous view as a base.

I set the name to “Entry History” and scrolled down to the “group by” options and grouped by the “Created” column and set it to a descending sort (newest on top) with a 30 groups per page which effectively gives us months worth of history at a time.

I left the default grouping at “collapsed” but this is just my preference.

I only created this today so only have one groups worth of information.

All done!

This means I’ve got a tracking system for my daily activities where I can easily add entries, view what I’ve achieved today as well as go back and look at previous days.

There are plenty of ways to improve on this further. Some examples that spring to mind.

• You could add a category field if you wanted to track types of activity. You could then create views and filters around these. (You may want to see how many times you made a phone call during a day for example)
• You could add a “minutes spent” field and have SharePoint total up this field. This would let you know how many minutes of productivity you’re getting out of your day.
• You could share the list with a team of people and use the “created by” field to group and filter on usernames so you can see what each person is getting up to
• If you had personal site like I do you could drop the list onto the web part page so the current list is always displayed – dashboard style!

Just a couple there. The whole idea is that it’s quick and easy to use so you wouldn’t want to customise it too much.

Possibly a little overkill when compared to the simplicity of the notepad based solution but once this is setup it’s done and your old data is very nicely tidied away but you still get easy access to it.

Virtual Desktops and Productivity

Sometimes I’ll revisit my favourite collections of applications and utilities to make sure I know what the current features are, see if they can solve any current problems I have, make myself aware of anything new or simply just remind me of something I may have missed before

One of my favourite collections of utilities is the Sysinternals suite (I could write in length about LOTS of the utilities there!)

I revisited an application called Desktops last week and the penny dropped for me in how it could be useful for me having previously ignored it

This functionality isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination and is available natively in “other” operating systems but my point is I figured out how it would be useful for me

The utility creates up to four “virtual desktops” they are completely independent from each other and you run different applications on them.It’s a bit like having four PCs under my desk all running from one keyboard mouse and screen

Because I run two monitors as well I’m basically getting the ability to run eight different applications full screen. More importantly it helps me reduce clutter

There are some apps that I always have open regardless of whatever task I’m actually performing.

On a typical day I could have Outlook open, a couple of browser tabs for our SharePoint site, a couple of tabs for gmail and google reader, tabs for Facebook and Twitter (depening on how productive I’m trying to be)

That’s before I actually do anything, depending on the task I could have a couple of Remote Desktop sessions open, maybe a spreadsheet or word document, maybe a PDF plus additional IE tabs related to the task at hand. You get the idea!

My browser becomes the main area for clutter. I could have 10-15 tabs open and even if run multiple instances the the “inactive” tabs get in the way of the two or three I actually need

Desktops helps me create logical areas for specific tasks.

So now on desktop one I have Outlook open on the left and IE open on the right with various parts of our SharePoint site open in a few tabs

Desktop two will be where I open Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, BBC news, etc open

Desktop three and four then become dedicated to specifics tasks

The other advantage is it can help me avoid distractions. I’ve lost count on the amount of times I’ve been doing something, flipping through tabs and then been off on tangent because I’ve seen a new article in Google Reader for example. By separating these things out it can help with focus (well it seems to be doing it for me!)

You can get the utility from here (which is also where I got the images..)

There are a only two options to set

Your hot keys if you want them and whether you want the utility to run on start-up or not

As well as using the hot keys to switch between desktops you can click the tray icon and get a nice preview

I prefer the hot keys myself

It’s not without it’s faults – a couple of times I’ve tried to open something on one of the secondary desktops only for it open on desktop one. I’m not sure if this is the application at fault or the utility but it’s not a big deal

Now I just need another monitor and I’ve have twelve possible desktops!