I love a good sticky note.
An array of colored sticky notes with project tasks written on them, slapped up on a whiteboard so they can be arranged and rearranged in a just-right, logical order sends shivers up my spine. (Did anyone else just get chills?)
You can imagine then, how a kanban-style organizing system (à la Trello or Asana’s Board Layouts) might make me giddy. It’s like paper-free sticky notes on steroids. Moving cards (as they’re called in kanban) around is almost as gratifying as getting to strikethrough a task on my electronic bullet journal.
So today, I’m going to walk you through how I use kanban-style boards to track my ideas and fuel my blog content generation system.
What in the heck is kanban?
Let’s start here – mainly because I honestly don’t exactly know myself – I just like to bandy about cool-sounding words sometimes – so I’m going to do a little shallow research for both our benefit.
Kanban originated as a Japanese manufacturing system, a way to ensure just-in-time production at Toyota. In other words, they developed it to make their processes as efficient as possible while making sure that they always had the just right amount of parts and inventory.
Without getting into too much detail, it works on the premise of bins that represent a process and moving parts – or cards that represent those parts – through those bins to ensure that the process pipeline always keeps moving and gets replenished in a timely manner. (Keep in mind here that I sucked at my Operations Management classes in Business School many many years ago, so this is a very simplistic interpretation of a sophisticated system.)
Kanban has since evolved to be used for all sorts of project management-type tasks, most notably in the software development field.
But where I glommed onto kanban was when I started blogging…
…for my business as well as helping my clients get organized in their own blogging endeavors.
I am a huge, huge, huge proponent of using Microsoft’s OneNote (and this may sound like I’m digressing here, but I promise I’m not, so bear with me for a few paragraphs).
I stumbled across OneNote in 2014 and it was a literal life changer for me.
Before that, I had a paper notebook and Microsoft Word and a journal and a voicemail box where I left myself reminder messages and my online calendar and a little task app called Toodledo (which I still use to this day, just not quite as extensively), etc., etc., etc., to manage all the disparate goings-on in my personal life and my business.
But OneNote changed all of that.
In OneNote, I had discovered a note-taking app that thinks like I think.
And suddenly, I had one place that brought all of those odds and ends together into one neat, well-organized, and colorful application. Someday I’ll share my wondrous OneNote bullet journal with you, but for right now, let’s just say that almost my entire life is crammed into OneNote, and I am forever looking for new ways to use it.
So when I started blogging and coming up with all of these awesome ideas to blog about, of course they immediately found their way into OneNote.
They started out being collected on my weekly bullet journal list, but that was largely too scattered to easily keep track of.
Then they became their own standalone Page in my Business Hub notebook. But that ended up being an awful lot of clicking to jot down a quick idea and pretty rapidly became tough to sift through.
So then they migrated to their very own colored Section in that same notebook where I had an Ideas Page with little notes, initial thoughts, and resources pertaining to the idea. Each blog post ended up with its own page as it got written. But I encountered the same problem there – tough to navigate, tough to hone in on what I really wanted, really tough to keep organized and keep track of.
OneNote was letting me down. (Turns out, OneNote isn’t perfect for everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.)
So what’s a girl to do?
Enter Trello Boards
Trello was my gateway drug to a kanban-style system that helped me organize all my blog post ideas and easily track and develop them as they progressed from idea to draft to actual blog post.
I had to dig back through a lot of old emails to track down the person who put me on to Trello and the kanban-style of system for collecting ideas and shepherding them through a tangible process from creative spark to actual blog post on my website.
Turns out it was Kara Benz of Boho Berry, and she spills the beans on how she leverages Trello for her editorial calendar. (She’s a lifestyle blogger who is just chock full of fun ideas and inspiration. A lot of my bullet journal learning came from her as well.)
So Kara lays out a system of blogging ‘bins’ (or lists as they’re called in Trello) which basically equate to the status or stage of a blog post – whether it’s just an idea or whether it’s been assigned and is being actively developed into a blog post and then actually been published.
Each idea/blog post has it’s own card in Trello that migrates from list to list as it progresses through the publishing process. And each card holds critical details about the post, and you add to those details as they move through the stages.
It might start out a rough blog post topic with a few sentences about the point you think you might want to make and a link to another article or resource that sparked the idea in the first place.
Then it moves to “In Progress” and gets a target due date and a category and perhaps a more refined title and maybe you’ve already found an image you want to use, so you attach it to the card so as not to forget it when you’re ready to publish.
If you’re really fancy, you’ve got a strategy laid out for which types of blog posts go live on your site and when so the cards in you list are in some semblance of a logical order and you’re just pulling from the top of the list each time you sit down to start work on a new one.
And the day you hit that big blue PUBLISH button in WordPress to schedule it to go live, you drag your Trello card over to the Published list, add the official link to your shiny new blog post, and pat yourself on the back.
Here’s what my Trello Editorial Calendar looks like. (I’ll get to why I’m not using this anymore for myself, but when I start helping a client lay out their own content generation strategy, this is still the system I use for them because it’s so easy to understand and work with and stay organized.)
And then there was Asana, and it was good
During the course of a lead generation webinar I took about a year ago, I learned about a brainstorming exercise called the 10×10.
It’s a really fun exercise, and if you ever doubt that you’ve got things to write about, hit me up and I’ll help walk you through it because it pretty quickly makes it clear that you’ve got ideas out the yin yang, and it helps you focus those ideas around specific topics that your target audience is interested in.
So the result of this exercise is a big matrix if 10ish topic areas and around 10 specific blog post ideas for each topic. Thus, my Trello system pretty quickly wasn’t doing the trick for me any longer in terms of being able to contain and easily shift and organize all of my ideas. One or two or even three columns worth of ideas just wasn’t cutting it.
So comes Asana to the rescue.
I’ve tried Asana for regular project management and have to admit that I only use it sporadically. I think it’s a fantastic tool but haven’t quite found my groove with it in that realm yet.
But where it really shines for me is in helping me manage this gigantic bucket of blog post ideas and keep them sorted, organized, and moving through the cycle from idea to draft to published.
I pulled techniques for this system from a few different places, one of which was Whitney Ryan’s Blog Planning Made Easy Challenge.
My system ended up looking nothing like what she outlines in her challenge, but it got me pointed in the right direction for developing something that I enjoyed working with (so I actually use it), was easily maintainable, and more importantly, helped me actually get my blogging done.
So with all that build up, here’s a quick walk-through of what my systems looks like today and how I use it.
My system is still growing and developing as I’m refining my blogging process. Systems are good that way.
Now for the big finish…
Things that I do that you might find useful (or might be able to adapt to fit your own work style):
- Have an idea bucket somewhere that’s easily accessible all the time like if you’re in the middle of reading an article on LinkedIn or you’re out for your morning walk. When inspiration strikes, have a consistent place/way to capture it.
- Create a process for regularly reviewing your idea bucket and then pulling out one idea at a time and moving it through your system from idea -> draft -> published.
- Moving something into the published bin is a huge accomplishment. Find a way to celebrate!
Hopefully you’ll snag an idea or two here that inspires your own system (because systems are fun and make running your own business so much easier).
