Hello, my name is Dave Kerlin, I'm a real estate salesperson. My question is in regard to the capture and review parts of your productivity system. I know you use Trello and I personally have adopted using it myself, but as the number of Trello cards get bigger and bigger, the list gets longer, I find it difficult to effectively look at them and make decisions about what to do and not to do.

You have alluded to David Allen's system in the past and I'm familiar with his method of capturing things in context categories. Is there a reason you don't create more columns in Trello and use this method? It seems like it would be a more efficient way to review these tasks, et cetera, when doing daily and weekly planning and dealing with a really big list of possible activities and projects.

Love your podcast, it's been so helpful and the time blocking method has helped me immensely. Thanks. So I would do with Trello with card overload, three things. One, more boards. So I'm a big believer in different boards for different roles. You can even have different boards for different projects if it's a major project, but there's something about having a fixed and specific context for the task you're looking at that actually makes it much easier to grok what's on your plate.

And so to have a role for teaching, to have a role for research, to have a role for writing, to have a role for media stuff like podcasting, to have a role for a particular heavy service road, like I'm the director of graduate studies, all those can be different boards.

So that helps. Two is more columns. I think it's fine if you want more columns. I don't like there to be too many because I don't want to fiddle too much. I prefer sort of generic columns things can go into. I've talked about this before on the show. I don't always do a column for each project, for example, but maybe I will if it's a big project that has a lot of tasks.

So you can use more columns if that helps. If you have 30 columns, you're going to have a different problem. But if you want to go to seven columns instead of four, and that makes a big difference, fine. Third, and this goes against Allen orthodoxy, but I do it, is consolidate more on the individual cards.

So a Trello card can actually capture a lot of information. If you're in an Allen mindset, by contrast, every item in your list is a very specific action that requires no further thinking. You can just execute that action. I will often have a card that maybe on the back has a 10 element action list, and three of those things are already crossed out.

So the card is just saying whatever it is, working on getting podcast, you know, uploaded to all the relevant platforms, registered with the relevant platforms, that might be a card. Now on the back, there might be 10 different platforms listed. And in the notes section, I'm beginning to capture notes about the URL and the instructions for doing it for each of those platforms.

And maybe some of those platforms I've already done and some of them are still exposed. And all of that gets visually compressed to a single card. And I know what that means when I see it during a review, like, oh, yeah, I'm working on that. Maybe I should put aside some time to get a couple more of those done.

So that really, I think, makes your deck a lot more shallow, where a lot of things can get consolidated into a single card. So I would do those three things. If you're still overloaded, that might be another issue. Then maybe you're doing way too many things and there's a whole essentialism conversation to have.

Go see Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism, for more on that. But until then, do those three things, more boards, more columns, more on the back of each individual card. That makes a big difference. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (electronic music)