All right, let's do some questions. I'm gonna do something new. Why don't we start with a call? We usually start with written questions. Let's actually start with a call. I saw one I liked from Alex. Let's see if we can find that one lurking in there, Jesse. - Yep, here we go.

- Hi, Cal, my name's Alex. I listen to your podcast often. I've tried to follow your advice and get all of my important information out of my inbox and into some sort of trusted system, task list, et cetera. Here's the problem. You do that, you make up a task list, but there's more granular information that you need for each task than you're gonna put in a task list.

And where that granular information lives is in the email trails that gave rise to the task. So you're going back to the emails anyway, and you're still living out of the inbox half the time to try to figure out what to do. What's your advice on this? Really appreciate your help.

Love your podcast. Thank you. - Well, Alex, this is where Trello is gonna do a lot of good for you. So there's three reasons why I like using Trello when it comes to organizing obligation. I like that I can have different boards for different roles so that you don't have to context switch between different professional and personal roles.

You can just be looking at obligations that has to do with what you're doing right now during your day. Two, I like the categories. Categories are everything. Things I don't know what to do with, things I'm waiting to hear back on, things I'm gonna bring up at the next staff meeting.

You can have such creative categories. It really helps organize this information. But the third thing I like about Trello, and this is very relevant for your issue, is the cards can hold large amounts of information. This is how you get relevant information out of emails and into a more trusted system, is you put them on the virtual back of Trello cards.

So when you click on a card in Trello, you can flip it over, and on the back of it, you can add notes. And I will just copy and paste emails, text of emails out of Gmail right onto the back of a Trello card. And if there's a thread of emails that are relevant, paste one, put a few horizontal dashes to divide, paste another, a few horizontal dashes, divide, paste another.

You don't have to format it nice. Don't waste much time. Just get it all in there. You can attach files to these cards. So people are passing back and forth drafts of the report that you're working on, attach it to the card. That's where it lives. It lives in Trello.

You can even put checklist. So maybe I'm looking at a thread of emails about a visitor coming, let's say, to campus, and I'm in charge of their visit, and I've been doing a back and forth with someone about what do I need to do? What do I have to arrange for this visitor?

I might extract out of that exchange a list. You can do checklist on the back of cards in Trello. One, two, three, four, five. Or you can actually check things off and see where you are. That third benefit of Trello is a huge one. Because again, what it allows you to do is that when it comes time to work on a certain role in your life, so your role as manager, your role as copywriter, whatever, you go to that board, and all you are seeing is information related to that board.

And you see everything you need to do under the categories to capture where it should live into your current scheme of obligations. So the zeitgeist there is really clear and instantly graspable. And all the information you need for the various things on this board are attached right to those cards.

No need to load up email, no need to see completely unrelated requests, no need to induce those cognitively devastating context shifts. So that's why I'm a big fan of Trello. Other tools can do this well. I'm not sponsored by Trello, I don't have any skin in the game. I met once, I believe, the CEO of the company that bought Trello and expressed my admiration, but there's no formal relationship there.

If you have another tool that does those three things, that's fine. I mean, you can simulate this in something as simple as a Google Doc. I've seen people who do this, different docs for different roles, different bolded headings for different categories, bullet point tasks below it, information just indented and pasted right underneath the corresponding task.

People certainly do this. One group that does this for sure is developers. We talked about this in a past episode. We were talking about plain text productivity, but we mentioned that the original term life hacking came from this idea, it was Danny Lewin talking about it, that developers would put everything in their life in one big Emacs file, just with indentation and numbers.

Everything going on, everything they had to do, just indent things, have all the information. So you can do whatever tool. I just think Trello or Trello-like tools make that easy. But the key is, Alex, out of your inbox. Get the information out of there and into a system that does not force you to have to confront everything else just to work on one particular task.

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