Well, it’s been a week, hasn’t it?
Last week, I published a quick article about Atlassian’s latest vulnerability. Then I went radio silent until yesterday. That was because last Thursday, me and my wife closed on a beautiful new house and had to get on with the process of moving!
It hasn’t all been smooth. For one thing, instead of having the Internet waiting for us, as we had planned, Comcast kept delaying scheduling our technician – likely because they wanted just a few more chances to try to upsell us. So instead, we got Internet here just yesterday. Since the cell signal here is only so-so, some things just had to wait.
Then there was the fact that something is bound to break when you move. So this move was my primary monitor’s turn to break.
But it wasn’t all bad. In fact, one of the bright spots was a Trello board I used to organize a few things – which I want to share with you today. This board helped keep me grounded and sane when it seemed like there were a million things to do and no time to do it all.
Now – this is a “sanitized” version of the board. Even the house in the background? Creative commons image pulled online. I know what kinds of monsters are online, and I don’t want to be doxxed just because of something dumb. So let’s dig into this board!
A Basic To-Do List
So the first few columns are dedicated to a To-Do list. There were many things to do to prepare for the move – honestly, way too much to keep track of manually. So that’s where this board started – to keep track of the status of everything we needed to do.
Trello excels on open-ended tasks like this, as you can attack anything to a card. Need to add a phone number? Good to go. Is there a critical link? Just attach it. Need this task done by a specific date? You can note that too. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes you want a more structured setup for task management – which I’ll go with my namesake, Jira. But for things where I don’t know how they’ll end up and need a massive amount of flexibility, there is no beating Trello.
As for the Individual items – the first few tasks had to do with Utilities. We have our basics: Heating, Water, Electricity, Sanitation, and the Internet. These are the basic needs for any new home, so we wanted these to be ready to go immediately.
But as I stated earlier, getting the Internet gave us a bit of a problem. We had to work to switch providers, which I was already rather upset about. We’ve had fantastic service with AT&T Fiber, and we would be going from that to Comcast – which has provided anything but good service. Then add the needless difficulties they gave us in just scheduling a technician – let’s leave it at I’m not a very happy customer. I depend on the Internet to do my jobs – both my day job and this blog. So having such a pointless delay was not great. But we are past it now and good to go.
The move itself required the remaining tasks. The list included packing supplies and shopping for people to help move. With my recent heart problems, everyone seemed to think it was a good idea for me not to do too much myself. Then there was finding an electronics recycling plant. I had built up quite the backlog of old electronics, and we felt this point was a good time to dispose of them properly. The last item we needed to take care of was getting the old house inspected for Termites and getting a letter saying none were found.
These three columns were honestly one of the most used parts of the board, as they represented a lot of updates and work that needed to be done. But this helped us whittle away the task to make things happen.
Questions to be answered and Comparison Lists
As we went along in the process, a series of questions came up as we went along. Where will we put X, Y, and Z? Which room will be for what purpose? What can we fit here? Unfortunately, we went an extended time without seeing the house again, so these just piled up. So we put them down so we could remember to ask/get them when we went over next. This situation is where Trello worked for us, as we could take pictures and post them to a card, add a checklist to ensure we got everything we needed, etc.
Next to that was another column along the same lines. Again, we wanted to be sure we weren’t being ripped off, so we did some shopping around for movers. And this made us feel the inflation over the past five years more than anything else. Prices were nearly three times what we paid when we moved into the old house! But we got a good price in the end, so there is that.
To Get/Gotten
So – the last two columns were a to-do list on their own. We knew we needed many things for the new house – a list that, for a time, never seemed to shrink. So we put everything here to ensure we didn’t forget an item we’d need. This section kept me up a bit, but everything worked itself out eventually!
Final Thoughts
Unfortunately, today’s post will be a short one. If you haven’t heard, things have been a bit busy here! 😉 But let me know, what interesting projects or tasks have you used Trello for in your personal life?
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