Google Calendar + Trello = The Ultimate Productivity Combination ❤
Laozi, a Chinese philosopher who is credited to the development of the philosophy of unity of the universe once said, “Time is a created thing. To say, I don’t have time is like saying I don’t want to.” Being a self-employed person, a YouTuber, a teacher, an author, a mentor, a student, a friend, and having a family, it is absolutely important for me to be on top of my schedule. To better manage my time, I use two tools Google Calendar and Trello. In this blog post, I will highlight how I personally use these tools.
Trello, developed by the software company Atlassian, is a Kanban-style application used for making lists and tasks. It is used by many organisations, and independent workers to be on top of their work.
One can create a “board” in Trello that can be private for your own work, or public if you want to share it with your team. You can create “lists” in that board and enter “cards”, which are basically the list of tasks to do. A list can have checklists as well (the example is the first card in the list titled todo, GWA Unterrichten).
On my work board, I create five lists: todo, doing, done, on my mind, comments.
- The first list is “todo” list. Whatever comes to my mind that I need to do in the coming future, I put it there every night before I go to sleep. The reason is that I plan my next day the night before.
- The second list is “doing” list. I drag the cards from the “todo” list to “doing” list, as and when I start working on them. As long as they are worked upon, they always stay in the “doing” list.
- The third is of course “done”. The moment tasks are finished, I drag the cards to the done list.
- The fourth list is “on my mind” list. I put everything that I would like to take up in future on this list. For example, right now I am planning to start a German grammar series on YouTube, as well as making a Shiny Dashboard about Rural Health Survey 2019 in India. The target I put is to complete the tasks in the next three months.
- The fourth is the “comment” list. Everything that can’t be done by me, but is dependent on the work I need to do with others and it’s under non-urgency is put up here.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free calendar service provided by Google for all its users. After Gmail and YouTube, Calendar is the app I use most of the times. As highlighted above, every night I make my calendar for the next day. After looking at the “todo” list and talking to the relevant people whom I need to work with, I plan the tasks. I also ensure to keep a lot of free space in order to accommodate urgent tasks. Some of the tasks that I need to definitely do as a part of family duties like cleaning, or entertaining my family, I do not block time for them.
When I need to plan studies with other people, I first talk to them about their time and then send them a calendar invite after planning the event with them. For example, I have a German learning group.
After Google has launched its free video calling conference services, Google Meet, I organise most of my conference and group learning with Google Meet. The calendar automatically generates a Google Meet link, which can, if the organiser wants, be disabled.
In most of the cases so far, I always make time for everything. In case, I am not able to do so, I either delegate it to the person who can do it better than me, or I stretch the duration of period to complete the task at hand.
In this post, I highlighted how I use Trello and Google Calendar to enhance my productivity and be true, loyal, and disciplined to my schedule, friends, and people. If you have any questions regarding productivity and how you can manage your day better, let me know and I would love to talk to you.
