Trello came into my life in 2014 when a project manager from one of our vendors (while I was at Life Fitness) was sharing his screen and by accident, I saw his personal Trello board. I said, “whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that?” And as the saying goes, the rest is history...

Prior to being exposed to Trello, I was using a one page physically printed piece of paper to keep my personal and work-life in order. What year is it?!

By end of the week, that thing had been folded and unfolded so many times that it looked like it had been through the washer or was an artifact from a different era. Sadly I couldn’t find a picture of one of these artifacts but believe me they look like they had been to war…

I made the transition over to Trello the next weekend and haven’t looked back. A few months later, I read the book, Getting things Done By David Allen and really put some “method to my madness”.

Short summary: The GTD method rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items.

A few years after that, I found Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky and found a happy middle ground between the GTD system based on weekly planning and the daily highlight processes Make Time advocates.

Short Summary: Make Time is about creating space in your life for what truly matters using highlights, laser-style focus, energizing breaks, and regularly reflecting on how you spend your most valuable asset, your time.

So why take the time to establish your external brain?

The reasons are many but I’ll make a few statements…

• Get more done in the same amount of time...

• Bring sanity back to your work life.

• Get peace of mind when leaving work.

Below I will go through how using Trello or some other external brain system will make each one of these statements a reality in your life.

Bring sanity back to your work life by creating an external brain

“Your brain was mean to have ideas; not store them.” - David Allen

Your internal brain is the mental space to think of new ideas. Your external brain is the place that keeps everything organized.

An external brain is an organized and reliable system for capturing, clarifying, organizing, reviewing, and executing your “open loops”(undone tasks). Your external brain is the one place to go to find out what is next, what is important, and store the list of items that are “someday maybe” activities.

By using your external brain to store and prioritize your work projects/task you can better identify what is a priority and when you are outmatched and need to reach out for help.

Get more done in the same amount of time by using your external brain to capture to-dos without dwelling on them.

Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed” — David Allen

We have all been in a situation where we get assigned a to-do in a meeting while we were already thinking about something else whether it be the task you were working before entering that meeting, something you need to do after work or otherwise. And now your brain tries to shift to figuring out how you are going to get this new task done. So now you are trying to get two or more things mentally done while your are supposed to be focusing in the meeting.

By having a standardized process to capture new tasks and the status of an activity before you transition you will be able to fully engage in the task/activity/meeting in the moment.

Engaging in the moment... How nice does that sound?

Get peace of mind when you leave work by having a method to identify what you should be working on and when

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. —Mark Twain

There are several thoughts on if ALL of your to-dos should be stored/visible in one place or if you should have different lists for the different areas of your life.

I tend to appreciate some compartmentalization in this area. I have separate boards for work and for personal activities and when project becomes so expansive that it starts to take over one of those boards, it gets its own board.

For example… when I started DeskJockeyChronicles (this blog) the ideas of what to write about came fast and furious but the time to write about them stayed about the same (1 hr/week). So they started to pile up cluttering my personal board which contained tasks/ideas for responsibilities around the house, other personal projects, etc. So... It had to go.

DeskJockeyChronicles got its own board with several different columns to segment the different topics and subtopics I thought I wanted to write about and other ideas/tasks. Then when it was time to write on one of these topics - I will pull it onto the personal board for action.

Bring sanity back to your work life by performing without thinking (too hard)

The beautiful part about leveraging your external brain at the intersection of the GTD system and the highlight methodology of Make Time, you chart your course once a week through standardized systems (GTD) unless something more urgent interrupts that plan then you make that your “highlight” for the day, knock it out (Make Time) and then get back to your normal operations where you left off.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” — Alfred North Whitehead

Why? Is it worth the time?

So with all of this, you might ask… Why? This seems like a lot of work to just get to the work… Can’t I just do the things as I think of them?

Well David Allen and the team at GTD did a study on this. The value of an external brain is measurable. Implementing a productivity system (like an external brain) can improve your productivity by up to 20%.