For several years, I used Trello for editorial projects in my work as an editorial project manager. I like how it enables me to literally see the whole project at once as cards laid out on the screen. And I like how I can quickly drill down through the layers of the project to access whatever information I need.
But I didn’t find Trello entirely intuitive at first, and it took me a while to optimize how I use it to manage editorial projects. In this post I’ll share what works for me as an editorial project manager of books and encyclopedias. There is also a free template that you can import into Trello as a starting point for your own editorial projects.
How Trello works
Briefly, Trello allows you to organize your work on boards. Each board contains lists and each list contains cards. Within each card, you have a whole host of options for adding information, including checklists, labels, due dates and people tags.
There are paid plans, but I find the free plan has plenty of functionality for me. There are also many free power-ups (i.e. tools that add functionality to your cards or boards, or just make them more snazzy). For example, Card Priority allows you to sort cards by priority (unsurprisingly!) and Card Aging shows visually when you haven’t looked at a card for a while.
Not sure whether Trello is right for you? Check out my guide to choosing business management software for your editorial business.
Existing editorial templates in Trello
Trello offers its own template Editorial Workflow board, but this is more of a commissioning or content management tool than a tool for production project managers, like me. It is based around having one card per piece of content, which works well if you’re dealing with lots of discrete chunks of content (like online articles) or a whole publishing programme (where you’ll have one book per card). If that’s you, then you might find Trello’s board suits you well.
However, this high-level view doesn’t work for me as a production editorial project manager, because I need more detail. Essentially, instead of having one card per piece of content, I need one board per piece of content. Over time, I’ve developed a board structure that I find efficient and intuitive. Let’s examine how it works.
You can access the free Editorial Production Project Management template now if you’d like a visual reference as you read through this post. Get the template
Organizing your Trello editorial project management boards
How you organize your boards (I think of this as their logic) is fundamental to making Trello work for you. There are three major components of this logic:
- your list titles
- your card titles
- your label names
When all three are optimized, your boards should be clear, simple to navigate and easy to use.
Choosing your list titles
Much like Trello’s Editorial Workflow board, I use stages as the names of my lists. My template starts with Pre-project and proceeds through Copyediting and four other lists to Project close.
Having the lists in the order the stages will occur helps me to focus on the more urgent issues, which appear leftmost on my board. As I complete a stage, I either archive the cards in its list or move them on to the next list, depending on whether they have any open issues (I’ll go into more detail about this below).
Note that it’s important to distinguish between stages (lists) and tasks (cards – see below). For example, your Copyediting list will probably have a card (or cards, if there are multiple components) relating to the actual process of carrying out copyediting. However, it may also have cards for things like copyright clearance, style sheet updates (if you’re managing multiple copyeditors) and freelancer bookings.
Choosing your card titles
When I’m deciding on my card titles, I try to think about what is likely to work best for the project. Experience helps here, and you may need to go through a process of trial and error, but essentially I try to have one card for each major task.
For example, for me, an unhelpful card title might be ‘Bookings for copyeditor Susie’, because then I’d need a card for every freelancer I worked with (and potentially also cards for each non-booking-related aspect of my interactions with Susie). I’d quickly have an overwhelmingly large number of cards on similar topics. Instead, I will usually have a card called ‘Freelancer bookings and payments’ and use the checklist area within that card (see below) to track the status updates, purchase orders and other activities I need to fulfil for the freelancers I manage.
The Editorial Production Project Management template suggests some card titles, but you can adapt these to your own project and add any extras you need.
Using labels
The third and final major component of the logic is labels. These are custom tags (you can have anything you like) that are attached to cards. They appear as little coloured bars above your card titles. You can edit them by going to the menu (the three dots top right of the board) and selecting ‘Labels’.
Labels are the least important part of your board’s logic, and indeed you might have cards with no labels at all. However, they can be helpful in enabling you to quickly see interrelationships between cards and filter to find all the cards that are affected by a particular issue.
For example, let’s say you’re managing a book on charity legal guidance. Part way through your project, it’s agreed that a large new section has to be added to reflect the introduction of a new law. This development is likely to have implications across multiple cards (for example, freelancer bookings and permissions clearance), so you might create an ‘Affected by new content’ label and apply it to all the relevant cards.
Another major use for labels is to highlight issues. For example, you might have a ‘Stuck’ label to help you quickly see cards for processes that have some sort of problem.
Filling up your cards
Once you’ve worked out the three components of your board’s logic, you can start filling up your cards.
I tend to use the fields within each card as follows:
- Title: short (ideally four or five words at most) summary of the topic of the card
- Description: brief summaries of key decisions made
- Checklist: this usually ends up as the bulk of the card – here I put everything I need to do and verify with others, making liberal use of due dates
- Activity: here I log communications that provide context for the information in the description and checklist – as each comment is automatically time stamped, it’s easy to track back through the detailed history if you need to (this may be unnecessary on simpler projects, but on larger projects I find it can be invaluable)
You can also have custom fields, add attachments (including two-way cross-references to other cards), collaborate with others in various ways, and all sorts of other functionality.
Completing cards and lists
When each card is completed, I archive it. Alternatively, as described above, if the stage ends and there are still cards open (i.e. tasks unresolved), then I move them to the next list (i.e. next stage).
A card might even remain open throughout the whole project, repeatedly hopping to the right as lists are closed. For example, I might have a card called ‘Rights and permissions’ that starts in the Pre-project list (at which point it might contain to-do items such as establishing who is responsible for permissions clearance). It might then move to Copyediting (e.g. with notes on briefing the copyeditor on how to use the list of copyright credits) and onwards to the right. Finally, it might end up in Project close (e.g. with a reminder to hand the final asset log back to the client at the end of the project).
Other cards might only appear in one or two lists before the tasks they relate to are complete and they can be archived. You get the picture – the whole point is that the logic is adaptable.
My top tips when using Trello for editorial projects
If I were to give just one tip for using Trello for editorial projects, it would be to keep your boards as simple as possible. It’s tempting to get too granular with cards and end up not being able to find anything. Better to have just a handful of well-chosen cards per list that clearly summarize the major tasks of your project.
To help you keep things simple, here are six more tips:
- Focus on outputs: don’t include information for the sake of it. If a card won’t help me deliver a requirement for my client or won’t provide a record of a key decision, then I won’t include it.
- Use due dates: if information won’t be relevant for six months’ time, free your brain up to focus on other things by setting a due date on the card or the relevant checklist item.
- Be tenacious with your board logic: I started using Trello to track my business’s strategy and evolution many years ago, but I abandoned my first attempt as it got too muddled. In hindsight, the main problem was that I hadn’t clearly conceptualized how I wanted my lists and labels to relate to one another. Your boards will obviously evolve with time, but try to make your initial system of organization as logical (and future-proof) as possible.
- Keep it brief: another problem when I first started using Trello was that I put too much information in the titles and descriptions of my cards. This quickly meant that I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Sometimes my cards do start out as hideously long brain dumps, but I always slim them down and refine them according to the principles above as their purpose becomes clearer.
- But don’t be afraid to change things up: if your board’s logic isn’t working or you find you need different logics for different projects, be creative and experiment. For example, you might have cards that would be better as labels or vice versa. Your project’s needs should dictate your logic, not the other way around.
- Remember that it won’t organize itself: Trello is just like any other system of organization: put questionable matter into it and you’ll get questionable matter out. Each time I add something to a board, I try to make myself stop and think about whether I’m doing so in the most accessible (i.e. I’ll be able to find it again in the future) and efficient (i.e. not duplicating anything) way.
Once you’ve got your board set up in a way that you like, you can reuse it for all your projects (or perhaps have different boards for different clients’ workflows).
Free Trello template for editorial projects
Trello works for me because it’s scalable to any project size, because it allows me to foreground the most important and urgent information while never losing sight of what’s hovering on the horizon, and because it’s pretty (yes, that is important!). These factors in turn allow me to keep my focus where it belongs – driving the project forward rather than scratting about for information.
If you think Trello might work for you, check out the Editorial Production Project Management template and feel free to liberally customize it to suit your projects. Get the template
To use the template, click on the link above and then select ‘Create board from template’ to add it to your Trello (if you don’t already have an account, you’ll be prompted to create one).
I hope you find the suggestions in this post helpful. If you try out the template, I’d love to know how you get on in the comments!
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