Trello Unveils AI-Powered Features to Streamline Personal Task Management

Trello's new update helps you manage Slack, email, and everything else

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. Trello is launching several new features this week, all designed to turn the Atlassian-owned app into something like a universal to-do list for everything in your life. By integrating with Slack (and soon Teams), email, and Siri, the company is hoping it can help you put all your important stuff in one place - and then use Trello's organization tools and a little AI to help you get it all done. Trello originally became popular because of its structure: Kanban boards are powerful and flexible enough to contain almost any kind of project and system. That part doesn't need to change, says Guarav Kataria, Trello's head of product. "It's just that there are too many things in too many places. You're in email, in Slack, all the social media places and numerous other work tools... and then when you're running or walking, you probably get ideas in your head." So now, there's a new Inbox column in every board, which you can dump things into from all over the web, to be organized later. Kataria's insight is not new -- from Slack to Dropbox to Notion to Google, everybody's trying to solve the too-many-tools problem by adding another tool. Trello's way of solving the problem is not to integrate with a million other apps or try and help you Do More Work inside Trello itself, though, but rather to just more easily get everything in one place. Forward an email to Trello or save a message for later in Slack, or just tell Siri what you need to get done, and it'll add it to the inbox. It'll also summarize the message in the card, plus add relevant due dates and sub-tasks. Making capture fast and easy was the key to the whole design, Kataria tells me. Since this is Atlassian we're talking about, there are also a couple of Jira-specific integrations, but for the most part Kataria thinks summarizing the thing and linking out to it is all you really need. And he says that between your email and your messaging app, you're covered on just about any kind of task. "We are not trying to become an uber project management tool," he says. "It's just that we can make an individual user more productive by bringing their action items into Trello, and organizing these action items." In addition to the side-scrolling boards, there's also a new calendar view in Trello, called Trello Planner, which you can use to schedule time for all those emails, Slack messages, and tasks. (Time blocking is a huge trend right in productivity nerd circles.) Tasks you add in Trello sync back to your calendar as events, too. The new features are in beta now, and rolling out to all Trello users in April. Kataria frames the new features as the beginning of a more AI-focused Trello, but also a return to what made the app a success in the first place. "The focus is homing in on an individual user's productivity problems, not their company's project-organization problem," he says. "We are trying to simplify Trello." Like so many productivity tools, Trello has become complicated and bloated as customers have demanded new features; now it's trying to get back to helping you manage your life. And all the apps that come with it.

Trello's new AI-powered to-do lists aim to help you stay on top of your work

Trello, the popular personal task manager used by tens of millions around the world, has been an integral part of Atlassian's product family since its acquisition in 2017. But over the past year it hasn't been clear exactly how Trello fits in to Atlassian's strategy for an enterprise System of Work, which is centered on its work management tool Jira. Was Trello still relevant? Now we have an answer, with today's launch of a 'new' Trello designed to help people manage their to-do lists. This marks "the next decade of Trello," says Gaurav Kataria, head of product at Trello. Whereas Jira and the System of Work help manage work across teams and organizations, Trello's role is to help each of the individuals within those teams and elsewhere stay on top of their own to-do lists. He explains: We are at that cusp where Trello is transforming from being a flexible project management tool to really being the super to-do list, or the organizer tool for an individual. And Jira, which is another big, major product, is mature as a project management tool... As we plan out the next decade for Atlassian -- and not just for Atlassian, as we think about how people work over the next decade -- individual productivity will be a separate category, or separate set of experiences, from project management. Jira is going to be the project management tool, and Trello is going to be the individual productivity tool. There's no change to Trello's visual approach to task management, which is a digital version of the Kanban methodology of jotting down tasks on color-coded cards, arranging them into lists, and then moving them around and checking them off as they progress. Instead, Atlassian is adding elements that reflect how the world has changed since Trello was created 14 years ago -- the massive proliferation of online tools and apps, along with the rise of AI. Its thesis is that AI can help Trello users organize and prioritize tasks in a world where the number and variety of tasks they have to keep track of has grown massively. Kataria says: To think through what's important, how things are connected, or what should happen first, is where human insight and human creativity comes in. We can use artificial intelligence and the Trello interface to play to our strengths as humans. Trello is a very visual tool. It's that metaphorical canvas or the placemat where we can organize our active ideas and organize our mind. Trello really helps us do that. The new features, which are currently in private beta and will start becoming available from April, use AI to capture tasks coming in from sources such as email, Slack messages, Siri voice notes or Jira tickets, and extract key elements such as due dates, action items and priorities. The user can then drag-and-drop them from a new Inbox into their to-do lists in Trello boards, where they can add their own labels, checklists and automations. A new Trello Planner connects to calendars in Google or Microsoft Outlook so that users can drag-and-drop tasks directly into available time slots. The calendar integration is bi-directional and can be linked to multiple calendars, so that users can link their personal as well as work calendars into Trello. Kataria says: The framework that we are using to help people be more productive is capture, organize and then get stuff done. If we can make the process of capturing things a little bit more seamless, a little bit more intuitive, then we will solve the problem of things slipping through cracks... Organizing is also important... That's where the beauty of the human mind comes in, and our human creativity comes in. We decide what's important. AI doesn't decide what's important. We decide, we make that decision. Then the third aspect is actually getting stuff done. Bringing in the calendar experience is really bringing that methodology that nothing is slipping through the cracks, things are nicely organized and prioritized, and then time can be set aside on the calendar to get it all done... By bringing that calendar view inside Trello, we can help people plan their day in a more hour-by-hour fashion, and because Trello is very visual and very tactile... this drag-and-drop experience helps you organize information in that same visual way. Whereas Trello was previously promoted as a project management tool for teams as well as individuals, the new strategy puts the focus firmly on helping individuals manage their own work. The insight here is that this is a dimension that's missing from tools that focus on teamwork. Kataria says: Sometimes the way I organize the information in my head is different than how a company organizes the information. He gives the example of Trello being used in conjunction with Jira by a manager who wants to keep a close eye on work that's being done by some interns under their care. Behind the scenes, a JQL query will select the specific tasks they're working on from various Jira projects. He goes on: It's not a Jira issue that's assigned to me. I just want to keep an eye on these intern projects, because I'm supervising their work. I can create a nice list inside Trello that gives me the real-time status of what's happening in Jira on those four or five different projects, or those four or five different work items. I can see this information in Trello, and I can organize this information in Trello... Whatever my mental model is, I can make it reflect that mental model on my Trello board. So the value of Trello here is that it fits to your individual style and preference, but the information can be pulled in from any place you like. With Jira, it's a seamless integration, because both the tools are within the Atlassian portfolio. Adding yet another app as an antidote to application sprawl may seem counter-intuitive, but Atlassian argues that Trello's ability to bring together this individual view of tasks that may be spread across many different applications meets an unfilled need. He explains: Often times, when people say there are lots of tools, they want to create a tool that can get rid of other tools. You may have heard this expression, 'One tool to manage the work in all the other tools.' Our insight is actually a little bit different. Our insight is that we don't think we can get rid of other tools. There is a reason people have to use Salesforce and Workday and Slack and email and Microsoft Teams. We don't think Trello replaces any of the other tools, and Trello does not replace any application from that perspective, but it is your individual or personal view of what needs to be done and a mental tracker of all the things... Where Trello is uniquely good is, it helps people organize their thoughts in the way their mind thinks. Colors play a very important role in Trello. The spatial organization of information plays a very important role in Trello. [It] is about what we, as humans, think about organizing the information in the world or connecting the dots in the world. Trello is really connecting those dots and prioritizing those things, without getting rid of other tools. The other tools will remain. Trello is just a nice way to seamlessly organize all of those things. As a Trello user myself, I can see the logic of what Atlassian is proposing with these new features. Making it easier to add tasks and having the ability to drag-and-drop them into my calendar makes it much more attractive to put more of my tasks into Trello, because it reduces the overhead of keeping track of them. It also carves out a distinctive role for Trello that doesn't compete with or overlap with Jira, which Atlassian now wants to be the primary tool that teams use for managing shared tasks and projects. But can it succeeed? To-do lists are an essential part of organizing an individual's work, and one of the challenges is keeping them as simple as possible to manage. Whether the new Trello can achieve that will depend a lot on how effective the AI is at converting incoming tasks from other applications into meaningful Trello cards that are easy to act on. I'm intrigued, but will want to see this in action before reaching a verdict.