Planning your trip with Trello

No matter how many trips you take, actually planning it will often be a very long and frustrating experience. Add to that trying to plan a trip between multiple people and it just gets that much more complicated. Izabella and I always travel together so at minimum there are always at least two people involved in the trip planning process and even that can get difficult with regards to who is responsible for what and what progress has been made on different tasks such as booking hotel rooms or buying train tickets. One way that we have managed to improve our planning process, and keep most of our sanity, is by using an awesome (and free) project management tool called Trello. 

Why Trello

With many different To-Do list and project management apps, it can still be very difficult to see all the work that needs to be done and also what the status of that work is when you just have long lists of tasks. Trello helps to fix this problem by applying Kanban principles, which focus on visual management of tasks as well as limiting the amount tasks that are getting worked on at any one time. It is amazing how much easier it is to manage the different things you have to do when you can actually see it all laid out in one place and divided into different categories so that you know what still needs to be started, what is in progress, and what has already been complete. Below we have created a very high level overview of a process that travelers can use to help reduce much of their stress when planning a trip. This by no means covers all the features that Trello has and this process can easily be modified and adapted to fit different needs for different travelers.

Create your account

First thing you will want to do is head over to the Trello Site and create an account. This is a really easy process and when your account is created you should be able to make your first board. After you have set up your account you can also go ahead and download the mobile app from the IOS and Google Play app stores.

Setting up your Board

In Trello, a new project is referred to as a board. Here is where you will place all the tasks associated with a particular project, or in this case a trip, that you will be planning. You can create as many boards as you want if you want to divide up the different portions of your trip into different mini projects (such is Rome, Amalfi, Venice, Florence for example). For our Italy trip, I simply named the board Italy 2017 and will be doing everything on this board for the sake of this example.

Adding Columns and cards

Once you have created your new board, you will have to add columns. You can name and use these however you want, but typically the columns will be used to demonstrate where a particular task is currently at. With this in mind, a simple and effective way to set up the board is to have three columns: To-Do (one for any tasks that haven't been started), In Progress (one for tasks that are currently being worked on), and Done (one for tasks that are completely done). These columns will vary depending on your process and planning style but this is usually good enough to at least get started. For our board, I have added one additional column (Use During Trip), for cards that will contain attachments such as boarding passes or hotel reservations that I will want to refer to during the trip. 

Once you have your columns set up, you will create cards for the board that will represent tasks. These will be any and all work that you need to complete in order to get your trip ready. Need to book flights? Thats a card. Need to set up a tour in Rome? Thats a card. The idea is to be able to see all the things that need to be completed in order to get ready for the trip. So now you can sit down with whoever you will be traveling with and start to add a card for everything that you will need to do. 

Assigning Cards

One of the biggest problems when planning a trip is that it becomes hard to tell who is taking care of what or what progress they have made on the things they have decided to handle. This can lead to confusion, frustration, and things falling through the cracks. To avoid all of this, Trello allows you to invite as many people as you want to a project and then assign them to specific tasks. You simply click on a card, click on members, and select the person who will be taking care of that card. If you want to see all the tasks that are assigned to a specific person in a project, Trello offers many filtering options. If one card requires many things to be done, you can add multiple members and whenever a change is made on the card, anyone who is assigned to it will receive a notification of the changes.

Adding Checklists and Due Dates

There are many tasks during planning that will be big and require multiple steps to complete. One way to handle this in Trello is by using the Checklist feature to list out any subtasks that need to be complete. In our example here, we have a book hotels task, but we will be in many cities so I have added a checklist to show which cities we will need to book hotels for. You can add multiple checklists to each card and use that to track progress within a specific task. 

For tasks that have specific days they need to be completed by, the due date feature will be very helpful. When a due date is getting close, Trello will notify the owner of the card so that they are able to complete their assigned task on time. ​

Adding Attachments

As you complete tasks, there will very likely be many documents, screenshots, and other attachments you will want to keep track of. Thankfully, Trello lets you attach files from your computer or your favorite cloud storage services directly to the card they are related to. So when we finish booking our flights, we will save a copy of the boarding pass as a pdf and then attach it to that card so that we can quickly find it if we need it for any reason.

Monitoring Progress

As I mentioned earlier, one of the best things about Trello, is the ability to visually see all the tasks that need to be completed and also to see what progress has been made on them. If you set up your columns similar to the way they are set up above, you can immediately see which things have been complete (Done column), which things haven't been started yet (To-DO column), and which things are currently being worked on (In Progress column). This really helps to show if you have too many things that haven't been started and you are falling behind. Or it can help show if you are trying to work on too many things at once and not making progress on any of them (this would be if you have tons of cards in the in progress column). The idea behind Kanban and Trello, is to help people focus on a task and move it through the different stages and work on getting things complete instead of getting overwhelmed from working on too much at once. 

Email directly to cards 

Nowadays, whenever you book something online there is always a confirmation email that you receive afterwards so that you know everything was completed. However, searching through your inbox can be a pain especially if you need to find something like a hotel reservation confirmation quickly. The best way to handle this? Simply forward the confirmation email to the card in Trello that you were using to track hotel booking. 

Each card has it's own email address to make forwarding to that card super easy and can be accessed via the steps in the picture to the picture above. 

Save for offline use

A great feature that was added fairly recently to Trello, is the ability to view boards and cards offline through the mobile app. In order to have all of your vital cards available regardless of connectivity you will need to make sure to "star" the boards you want available by clicking on the little star icon next to the title of the board. 

Final step: enjoy the trip!

After you are done with all of your planning and you have made sure your trip board is set to be accessed offline you should be ready to go! Having all of your relevant trip documents and schedules organized in one place will help you avoid any headaches during the trip and hopefully by using an app like Trello, you and your travel partners have managed to avoid hating each other before the trip has even begun.

If you have used Trello for planning before let us know! And if there is another app you prefer to use we'd love to hear about it!