The Productivity Tool that's not Just for Nerds and Car Manufacturers.
When my agency started using Trello a few years ago there was a collective but silent groan from the creative department. It was clearly an attempt to once again streamline the workforce by cutting back to one sole project manager who was brand new and right out of college and had no idea what she was getting into. The magical elixir that would make this miracle happen was Trello, the free online Kanban software for tracking projects. We had a quick lesson in Kanban, were given accounts and logins and assigned cards which we then promptly ignored, because, bite me.
Not me, of course, I jumped in and tried everything out, slapped some stickers on my cards, used labels, but since my work was too simple to really make Kanban more than an extra step that I kept forgetting to take, I eventually lost interest, and others must have as well because the system failed to catch on.
Recently I revisited Trello on my own, wondering if this could be a way to keep track of the massive mental load of parenting. The answer was a resounding, "YES." I can assign tasks to Dad? YES! I can let my 11 year old set up her own homework goals? Yes! I can keep track of PTA obligations and who those people were? YES! I was off to the races.
Trello is now the control center of information in all aspects of my life, but it was particularly useful when it came to organizing my post-holiday elimination diet called The Clean Cleanse. I know, I'm crossing the streams, here. Can a diet promoted by Gwynneth Paltrow have such a nerdy manifestation? Turns out, yes, it's a perfect tool for weekly meal planning, when you are the kind of person who needs to plan everything or you will definitely go off the rails and eat an entire box of girl scout cookies if you found it in the back of your freezer by chance.
And the diet is no joke, it requires a lot of self control and, for me, lifestyle changes, and being able to plan my meals a week in advance was a game changer. Especially since I was also cooking for my kids and they had to have real food and packed lunches as well. So I set up a weekly diet meal planner and immediately started making photoshoots of my recipes and It turned into this Pinterest-style project. If Pinterest let you drag and drop your recipe-pins into different days of the week, that would be this user experience.
I made the first week a template on Trello that is available to anybody to use. Feel free to download it here. If it's helpful, I'm thrilled.