I'm halfway through Curtis McHale's book on turning your freelance career into a viable business and one thing that has become clear through reading it is my lack of progress on products and projects. Given that I only use a single list for everything, sometimes projects and ideas get skipped at the bottom of the list. It's the out of sight, out of mind thing. If I'm not reminded of something on a regular basis, I usually forget about it.

In order to make better progress, I'm going to start using Trello for managing projects and future products. I'll still stick a high level task on my master list relating to the project, but all the details for it will reside in Trello.

The reason I picked Trello for this was my familiarity with Kanban boards and some experience I picked up working in an agile team a couple of years ago. Basically the idea of Trello is that you move cards (or tasks) across the board from left to right until the card is complete. In my case my this will be features, bugs, marketing and admin tasks.

Cards move through the following lanes that are typical of Kanban boards:

• Backlog - All cards start here. Cards are prioritised on a weekly basis with the next card to be done located at the top.
• Analysis - We do some background work on the card. What does it involve?
• Development - Let's implement this thing with some nice tests and code.
• Testing - We test it out in a secure environment.
• Deployed - Once it's tested and ready, we ship the code for the rest of the world.

Moving cards across the board is a great way to see progress being made, and also with work-in-progress limits, I can stay focused on one or two tasks at a time.

Also I'm currently using Trello with a couple of clients for project management, so the switch from their projects to my own when things are quiet is easy to do and I'll already be familiar with the Trello environment. Seamlessly moving from client work to my own work is important. I don't want to have to adjust too much to a different workflow.

My grass roots approach to work still stands with just a master list for capturing everything and scheduling actions in my calendar. I'll capture a high level description of the project in my master list and defer the details down to cards on the Trello board. Any work I do will be blocked off in my calendar as just "Project X Work" and then when it comes to actually doing that work, I can pick up where I left off on the Trello board. When time runs out, I can leave a note on the card where I left off and move on without losing my place.

It all sounds well and good in theory, but putting it into practice over the next few weeks might not yield the positive results I'm hoping for. Still, I've got to give a try though, right?