Just not managable

One of my aims for this Blaugust is to spend the time to read and interact with my fellow Blaugustine's blogs, so I've set aside each Sunday post to respond to something that has interested me from other people's posts in the previous week.

One such post was the Rambling Redshirt's one on Thursday about using Trello to manage his blog. Whenever I drop past Tannhauser Gate and check out the site, there's always something interesting going on, so I guess the tools that Redshirt uses much work relatively well, so I thought I'd give it a try this Blaugust for the blog and see how it goes. I'm a sucker for the visual representation that Trello provides, after all.

I've used Trello a lot in the past, in teams and also for my own personal to-do lists. Some of my Trello boards have worked well for a short time. Some never really took off. A couple have done their job here and there. I've generally find that the ones that work are one with just one user, or a very small team in which everyone agrees how to use the tools, but that the format isn't robust enough to stand up as a task management tool for anything on a decent scale. Possibly that's just endemic of trying to task manage teams of volunteers that really don't want to be managed, though, so it's not necessarily the fault of any particular tool so much as the manager himself.

The other problem that I tend to come across with my personal kanban boards is that they inevitably end up looking like my Blaugust one is already starting to:

There's a whole lot on the far-left ,'Ideas' card, and a couple in the far-right 'Done' card -which I'm keeping for now instead of archiving just for the encouragement factor that it supplies to see things ticked off on the list-, but the two operative 'Planning' and 'Drafting' cards generally end up being entirely or almost-entirely empty -I've just added a 'Scheduled' card in the vain hope of working up a backlog, but it's empty too-.

I think this is an insight into the way that I work. I tend to pick a task and then follow it through to conclusion, especially when we're talking about small tasks that are generally achievable in one session like writing a blog post. I value the ideas list and the forward planning that using a process like this allows -I'm using labels for different themes for each day of the week, so even if the card is untitled I still have a vague idea what the post is going to be about-, but the theoretically useful advantage of this sort of work-flow, being able to track tasks over time, just doesn't work with the way that I blog at the moment: I essentially just keep a binary checklist of done/not done tasks.

So maybe the secret to blog longevity is that I need to try to develop a better workflow. Or use a different tool to keep me focused. Or just go back to a checklist. I think I'll keep using the Trello for now, though, so if you have any suggestions for how to use it more effectively or what I ought to be doing differently, drop me a line.