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The Ultimate Guide to Trello: Creating a Family Schedule

Welcome back to another installment of the Ultimate Guide to Trello Series! In the previous articles, we have gone over the Trello basics and how to plan out your week.

In this article, I am going to walk you through setting up a family schedule in Trello! This is a fantastic way to stay on top of your family’s obligations. You can either use this schedule for yourself or include your spouse or older children in it as well.

As I’ve mentioned in the previous articles, I love using Trello for planning and scheduling because I can access it from any of my devices. The drag and drop functionality also allows me to rearrange these schedules in a split second!

So let’s get started with setting up the family board!

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Creating the Cards

For this example, I am going to create a board for a family of 4, a mom, dad, son, and daughter.

The first card you are going to want to create is a general activity card. This is where you will put everything that needs to be assigned to someone to do, i.e. take out the trash, get the car serviced, etc.

Then we’re going to create a card for mom, dad, son, and daughter. This is where we will put tasks specific to each person, i.e. school recital, soccer game, birthday party, etc. This is also where you will move tasks that are assigned to them from the general activity board.

And finally, we’re going to create a general schedule board. This is where the family activities will go, i.e. Grandma’s Birthday party, church luncheon, etc.

Adding and Labeling Activities

As you can see in the example, I already have a few activities entered in the general activities card (All Activities). If you aren’t sure how to add a card to a list, refer to my introductory post.

Most of these are person specific and could be added directly to their card. Or you could add them to the general activities list, label them, and move them over. You can choose whichever process makes the most sense to you.

With the way my brain works, I prefer the latter. Moving things through a simple, logical process helps me lock them into place.

So I am going to enter them into the general card first, and then label them.

The next step would then be to move each activity to the appropriate list.

Assigning Due Dates

In addition to know who needs to do what, we also need to know when it needs to be done.

As I mentioned in the weekly planning article, I like to write in the time in addition to adding a due date. This is because you won’t see the time in either the board or calendar mode, so adding it in makes it easier to see what you have going on at a glance. Since this is organized by person, not day, I’m also going to write the day of the week.

So this is what the board mode will look like after adding those all in:

And then, since we added all the due dates, this is what it will look like in the calendar mode (you can read more about enabling the calendar mode here):

Assigning Family Members

And finally, if your family is also on board with using Trello to stay organized, then you could add them to this board as well.

I go over assigning members in the introductory post, but you first need to make sure that they all have their own Trello account.

You would then add them to the board.

Once they are on the board, you can assign cards to them. In this case, you would assign the dad to the board meeting card and the car service card. Or, he could add those cards so everyone else is aware when he is going to be in the meeting and when he will need to car to get it serviced.

If your kids are old enough, you could also include them in this. You could assign them to their doctor’s appointments, so they know what time and day they are. And then they could add any school or extracurricular activities they have so that you are aware of when they are.

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Do you use Trello to stay on top of your family’s schedule? Let me know in the comments!

And stay tuned for next week where we’ll talk about using Trello for your editorial calendar!