Trello Bullet Journal Workflow
Tags: trello, bulletjournal, tools
Published: 2019-07-08 14:40:22

---
title: Trello Bullet Journal Workflow
published: true
description: Trello Bullet Journal Workflow
tags: trello, bullet journal, productivity, tools
---

I’ve been using a paper [Bullet Journal](https://bulletjournal.com/) for a few years now. After experimenting with a few layouts I settled on a weekly layout that I enjoyed the most. As I’m a person of habit I ended up making a generic weekly layout and had it printed in a book using [Blurb](http://www.blurb.com/). It ended up being quite affordable and saved me the time of drawing lines every week to get my layout set up.

But I kept finding myself not carrying it around with me, just leaving it on my desk. And if I was away from my desk and needed to “write something down” I would add it to my iPhone’s To Do list and then have to transfer it to my Bullet Journal. I really like putting some pen on paper but it was time to figure out something new.

I’ve also been using Trello for quite some time off and on and I took a look at some examples of how others had handled a “digital bullet journal” but it wasn’t quite what I needed so I made a few adjustments to fit my style.

- In the “**This Week**” column I added card for each day of the week and put a color label on it to break apart the week visually. **Update**: I ended up creating a day of the week graphic and adding that as a cover image to more visually break up the layout.

![A cover image on a card helps act as a label/heading](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ukF1N0VkFXEkgJrG5EpgIw.png)



- My “**Long Term**” column is more for non dated to-do items and other random things.
- My “**Future**” column is for next week and beyond cards. When I’m done with a current card but it recur in a week or two I update the due date - And my last change is the column for my “**Google Calendar**” entries. Using [Zapier](https://zapier.com/) or [IFTTT](http://ifttt.com/) I pull in new items from my Google Calendar automatically and sort that column by due date.

![Screenshot of my trello screen](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*6IDX4wRQgTWwkVmSQTF0XQ.png)

- **Update**: I also added a screen shot of my custom labels to more easily identify label colors. And for each IFTTT applet that imports events from each family member’s calendar I also assign an appropriate label.

![Color key](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ZsWdPPeDf4FeM8mwOL_QIQ.png)

My favorite addition so far — I’m using the free version of Trello so I can use one “Power Up” per board and for my bullet journal I’ve chosen to use the Calendar power up. This allows me to view my board in the “**calendar view**” which is nearly identical to what I’m used to seeing in my old paper weekly views.

Anything with a due date shows up in the calendar view on the appropriate day of the week. I can also add cards to particular days of the week in this view easily.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*44yrlfOz1Ttz1sI2VTvQrw.png)

My final (so far) customization is a little more involved. I wanted anything I added to my iPhone Reminder (to do) list to get added to my Trello board. Unfortunately **Zapier** doesn’t appear to have anything that would connect my phone’s reminders to Trello, but **IFTTT** for iPhone can connect your Reminders to Trello. So I can continue using Siri to add reminders which will automatically get added to my Trello board as a new card.

And come to think of it, you could probably just use IFTTT for the Google Calendar > Trello connection as well if you wanted to stick with the least number of apps at a time. But it doesn’t look like with IFTTT you can directly assign a due date and if there is no due date on the card it won’t show up in the calendar view of Trello. You will have to assign it a date in Trello by hand if you are mainly looking at your weekly layout as a calendar. Not a huge deal if you are managing your journal and making sure you are getting things done.