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Comment by dabernathy89 | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted to like Trello, but i'm never sure quite how or what to use it for. It doesn't work well for me for project management, since you can't create tasks with due dates or assignees. I'm not sure how folks get around that.

edit: I was thinking of checklists, not cards.

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Our vision is that it gives a group of people a shared perspective. It puts you on the same page. That could be your fiancé and your mother-in-law planning your wedding or it could be your HR team trying to structure your employee onboarding process.

It's not a project management tool anymore than it is a bug tracker or a crm or an applicant tracking system. People use Trello for all of those things but at its core, it is just a list of lists.

The power comes from understanding how that metaphor can help provide structure to some process that you have. (Trello comes from "trellis" - a structure to help plants grow).

Check out trello.com/inspiration for some examples. It's a bit like explaining to someone what a spreadsheet is before they have seen one and why they would use one. Once you grok it, it's very powerful.

The way I do it, if a checklist gets heavy enough that I need to start assigning ownership for each item with a due date, that means the checklist needs to be broken out into cards. There's a one click feature for this so it's very quick to accomplish.

I think of Trello these days like an orchard of ideas. I plant a few idea seeds by rapidly sketching out cards, and some will grow checklists as I copy paste bullets from notes etc. As the checklist items grow in complexity, they fall off the tree and are planted, and so on..

If you're a PMP used to Gantt charts and such, I'm sure that system sounds like some hippy dippy BS, but it works very well on a small scale with a small, mixed-discipline team.

> since you can't create tasks with due dates or assignees.

You can do both.

Is that new? Unless something's changed recently, the only way I knew of to do this is a hacky workaround:

http://help.trello.com/article/942-assigning-people-and-due-...

No, they’ve been available for (at least) 3 years: http://blog.trello.com/due-date-notifications-list-move-and-...

That link is referring to checklists. You've been able to assign people and due dates to cards for a long time.

Sorry, this was about a year ago when I was researching different options for project management, and I forgot that it was the checklist feature that I was thinking of.

Ah I see what I was remembering now. It was checklists that I wanted to be able to assign, not cards.

It's more of a to-do list on steroids than a project management tool. I also tried to fit it in my workflow, because I like what they are doing, but ultimately decided it wasn't for me. I think it's okay if it doesn't work for you, not every tool is for everyone. Asana for example takes a different approach to the "to-do list on steroids" idea that may work better for some, but neither approach is better or worse than the other in my opinion, when it comes to services like these what works and what doesn't is a very subjective thing.

You absolutely can create a card, assign a user to it, and give it a due date... I'm pretty sure that functionality has been there for a while.

The functionality is there. You can label cards with people and set a due date. There are free plugins that allow to set a time estimate on the cards and compute the total for a column.

Still, I don't think I want to use Trello on my projects (I use it in some projects for customers). I can't articulate well the reasons but the general feeling is that if the project is not trivial you start having too many cards and the columns get too long and you start losing stuff. It's not for long living projects, where you need to store information that let you tell who decided what and why two years ago. It's better suited for short bursts of activity and to dispatch tasks to executors. Probably one project manager to assign tasks and developers to report on their accomplishment. It could be a good tool for that.

As an example of what it shouldn't be used for: bug tracking. We are creating cards for bugs on a project but Trello cards are not well suited for that, neither to input bug reports nor for managing them. To be fair, I bet that Trello didn't design for this use case. That someone is using it for this maybe means that it's appreciated beyond its limits.

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