Tag: Trello

  • Taking the stressful edge off of November

    Taking the stressful edge off of November

    After 22 years as a student or professor on semester systems where fall semester runs mid August to mid December, I feel pretty confident saying that November is the most stressful month in this semester, and possibly the entire academic year (April, the spring parallel month, is also a contender). Early in my career as…

  • Systems versus Tools

    Systems versus Tools

    Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between systems and tools. This is partially because of the Organize Your Language Teacher Life course I’ve been working on, as well as my own recent decision to make a major switch to the digital tools that support my own planning system. With digital tools in…

  • Using Trello for Future Plans and Project Limits

    Using Trello for Future Plans and Project Limits

    In my post on using Trello for Home Management, I mentioned I had a future section of my Trello board that was likely deserving of its own post. Since 2020 is drawing to a close, and December is when I start thinking about plans for the upcoming year, I thought I would dedicate this last…

  • Using Trello for Home Management

    Using Trello for Home Management

    Although I’ve written before about how I use Trello to manage my academic work, travel, large events and projects, and teaching, I realized I’ve never written about using Trello for home management, even though this is arguably the most complex area of my life in terms of managing projects and tasks. So, in this post…

  • Trello Templates for Repetitive or Recurring Tasks

    Trello Templates for Repetitive or Recurring Tasks

    I am a longtime fan of checklists, especially for repetitive types of things like packing, teaching prep, weekly planning, etc. Recently, Trello added template cards, which as the name suggests allow you to create new cards from a template, rather than a blank card. Trello cards also allow you to add checklists, which means that…

  • Trello for Travel

    Trello for Travel

    As a general rule, I enjoy traveling, and obviously I chose to make the majority of these trips. However, I’m less thrilled about the logistics of traveling, such as packing, purchasing flights/hotels, arranging entertainment, etc. These have gotten even less thrilling as I have to pack and make arrangements for more people and spend time…

  • Back to School Preparations

    Back to School Preparations

    So, back to school . . . This has always been one of my favorite times of year, so probably not that surprising that I ended up as an academic :-).  Since the public schools in Albuquerque start August 12, and my university classes start August 19, I basically consider the beginning of August the…

  • Organizing my work with Trello

    Organizing my work with Trello

    I’ve written previously about how I use Trello to organize my teaching and large programs/events, so in this post I thought I’d take a look at my Trello “Workbox”, which is the overall system that links these together at work (I use similar boards/boxes for home and dancing). I call it a workbox as I’ve…

  • Using Trello to organize large events and programs

    Using Trello to organize large events and programs

    Last Fall, I wrote about how I use Trello to organize my teaching. Another area I find Trello very useful for is organizing large events or programs, in my case dance competitions and our summer Arabic STARTALK program. Although a dance competition and a summer program for middle and high school students seem like very…

  • Using Trello to Organize Teaching

    Using Trello to Organize Teaching

    Trello is my favorite digital organization tool, and I use it to organize basically everything in my life.  It essentially consists of “cards” that you put into “lists” on a “board”.  I make a board for each class I teach where the lists are the weeks of the semester (including the week before and after) and…