I’ve got a couple of Substack publications because I’ve got a lot to share, I think! Substack itself is good in the sense that you can schedule posts, but I wanted a planning tool so I could quickly draft titles and checklists for each post. Previously I’ve tried Notion, which is a great tool, but I found it a little advanced for me. If you know Notion, then you’ll know it’s a powerhouse and offers so much more than a Kanban-style board.
Only last week I was searching the App Store on my phone, looking through productivity tools. This is actually a habit of mine as I frequently search for better ways to organise and plan. This is when I saw Trello and, if I’m being honest, it took a bit of scrolling to find it as it’s 150th(ish) in the App Store charts and I don’t usually scroll that far down. After checking out the description and screenshots, I thought I’d give it a go and see what it’s all about.
After downloading Trello I was initially a bit confused with how it worked. It has a modern and simple UI, but there are tabs along the bottom, including Boards, Inbox and Planner. I did my research as I wanted to learn what these were without assuming. Here are my learnings, which will hopefully help you too.
Boards - here you can create an individual board for each of your projects. In this case, I’ve created a different board for each of my Substack publications to keep their posts separate.
Inbox - this is a really neat feature. Inbox allows you to drop anything quickly into the app so you can pick it up later. Perhaps you’ve got a quick idea or want to drop in a link to a website, you can add it right into Inbox. Inbox is separate from your boards, but once you’re ready to work on something in your Inbox, you can move it right into any of your boards. It’s a place where you can jot down things for any of your projects, then move them into the relevant one later.
Planner - if you’ve added a scheduled date to any of your tasks across any of your projects, these will appear in a schedule/calendar style view in Planner. For me this is great because if I have posts scheduled across each of my projects, I can see them all together in the one place.
Admittedly, I’ve only been using Trello a week but it’s really working for me right now, and I’m excited to see how easy it makes managing my Substacks in the months to come.
For each of the boards, which are split by my different Substack publications, I’ve created the same 3 lists within them: Idea Bank, Drafting and Queue. Any post ideas I get are put into Idea Bank, when I’m writing them I move them across to Drafting, and when they’re scheduled to go out, they go into Queue. Finally, when a post is published, I simply mark it as Complete in the Queue. You can customise your own system for tracking and preparing posts, and make it work for you. Note that this is how I use it with Substack for planning my content, but there are so many use cases out there for Trello, including:
Content Planning - it doesn’t matter whether you use Substack or another CMS. You can plan any content here.
Event Planning
Habit and Goal planning
Meals and recipes tracker
Small businesses
Trello is well established, so it has different features, including the ability to add to your Inbox by emailing from the email address associated with your Trello account. There’s even a Google Chrome extension so you can grab details of a web page and pop it straight into your Inbox.
I hope this post helps anyone looking for a new planning tool. Keen to know if you’ve used Trello? If not, what is your go-to planning tool?