Laura and I are not the most organized people in the world. It doesn’t really help that we always like to keep busy, adding more onto our plate. Some part of us can’t think of not doing something… Like deciding to upgrade some of our kitchen appliances, counter tops, and painting cabinets over the next month! (follow our kitchen craziness at michael-laura on snapchat). So with all these things going on, we need to have some semblance of organization.

One of our most helpful tools to keep us on track is Trello, a free online organization software to keep all your to-do’s in order. Trello is super easy to use, and can be used from something as simple as a grocery list, or as complicated as our entire client experience, from first contact all the way through the wedding day and beyond. Trello works by creating boards that we use for different main categories like Personal Goals, M & L Photography, M & L Workflow, Dreams, Duty Day etc, and within that, you create lists. Our lists serve us like a sub-category, for example, under our M & L Workflow, we have lists of new inquiries, current clients, etc, and under our Duty Day we have a grocery list, & a this month’s projects list.

But we are not done yet, Under each list you add tasks or items that you want to do or get, depending on what your list is. And as if you couldn’t get even more detailed, each task can have sub-tasks that make up exactly what that task is. We have some tasks that have 10 or 15 parts, meaning we can get SUPER detailed when it comes to things we need to get done. And not only does this help us know exactly where we are in a specific job for our photography, it also helps us feel more accomplished because we can check off a specific part of one task once it is done (and who doesn’t love checking things off!).

For example, we have a list for every client in our photography board, and under that list, is says all the steps we hit during a wedding process. But for us to finish the task of ‘delivering our client’s images’ we have to go through a lot of sub-tasks like posting a sneak peek, culling, editing, exporting blog finals, email clients after blog, export all finals etc….

From this post, you might think it sounds complicated, but it is just the opposite. You can even make your account unique to your style by uploading background photos for your boards, and you can even color coordinate different parts of lists and tasks!  Go online, sign up, (it’s all free) and get the app on your phone, and just play around. We started that way, and now we use it every day!