Pick one thing, not everything
The most common way people fail at this is starting with "my entire life." Don't.
Pick one real project with an end: a launch, a client, an event, a house move. Something where you'd notice if a step got missed. You can add more boards later — you almost certainly will — but the first one has to be small enough to finish.
Step 1 — Make the project
Sign up, click New project, name it after the actual thing. "Website relaunch," not "Work."
If your team already has an organization set up, attach the project to it and everyone inside can see the board immediately. If you're not sure, leave it personal — you can move it later and nobody sees it in the meantime.
Step 2 — Dump everything
Open the board and add every task you can think of into To do. Speed over neatness. Half-sentences are fine. "Ask Maya about the photos" is a perfectly good task.
Aim for fifteen to thirty. If you stop at five you probably haven't emptied your head yet — keep going until it feels slightly ridiculous. That feeling is the point: it's all the stuff that was quietly costing you attention.
Got the list somewhere already, in a spreadsheet or an old doc? Use Import and drop in a CSV or Excel file instead of retyping it.
Step 3 — Owners and dates on the top five
Now go through and pick the five that actually matter this week.
For each one: assign a person (one person, not "the team"), set a deadline, and mark a priority if some are genuinely more urgent than others. Deadlines default to today, so you're only ever changing the ones that need changing.
Leave the other twenty alone. Undated is fine. They're captured, which was the whole point.
Step 4 — Add the fields your work actually needs
This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that decides whether your team still uses the board in a month.
Look at a card and ask: what does someone always have to go and look up before they can do this? A client name, a room number, a programme, a branch, a language, a budget code. Add those as custom fields. Field names you've used before are suggested as you type, so the vocabulary stays consistent instead of drifting into six spellings of the same thing.
Step 5 — Move exactly one card
Drag one task into In progress. One. Then finish it and drag it to Done.
That's the loop. Everything else in the product exists to make that loop less annoying at scale.
What to do the next day
- Open the board before you open your inbox. Twenty seconds is enough.
- Move anything that's finished into Done. It's satisfying and it keeps the board honest.
- If something's been sitting in In progress for three days, either finish it or move it back. A card that's "in progress" forever is a card nobody owns.
- Comment on the card instead of sending a message. Six weeks later, the context is still attached to the work rather than buried in a chat thread.
If it doesn't stick
Usually one of three things:
The board is too big. Split it. One board per project beats one board with ninety cards.
The columns don't match reality. If your work really has a review step or a waiting-on-client step, say so instead of pretending everything is binary.
It doesn't speak your language. Back to step 4. A board full of generic cards feels like homework; a board carrying the details your team actually asks about feels like the place work lives.