Categories
Asana Productivity Todoist Trello Zenkit

Comparing Trello, Asana, Zenkit and Todoist

These are the four platforms where I have data. I hope to one day move it to a single platform.

Kanban uses the term card, Todoist says task. I use both.

AsanaTodoistTrelloZenkit
Beauty5/10 – has a few backgrounds to choose from. Images attached to cards become small thumbnails.9/10 – An ever-growing number of pretty backgrounds thanks to Unsplash. Attached images become medium thumbnails on corresponding cards.5/10 – has a few backgrounds to choose from. Images attached to cards become small thumbnails.
TagsColored background and globalColored font and global; paidColored background and siloed per boardColored background and siloed per board; can have multiple categories. Can be used to color the whole card. See below.
Descriptions☑️☑️☑️
AttachmentsCan be attached to cards or commentsCan only be attached to comments; paidCan be attached to cards or commentsCan be attached to cards or comments
Repeating tasks☑️☑️❌ – Power-up. Appears on due day.☑️
Reminders☑️☑️☑️ – Added as a separate field, but you can add many such fields
Links between cards/boardsPaste the URL yourself.Paste the URL yourself.☑️ – Add it as an attachment. No URL pasting requiredPaste the URL yourself.

Zenkit does really interesting things with tags that I think are worth addressing in greater depth. You can have different batches of tags. For example, each task might want a group of tags that refer to its location, then a separate group of tags to represent times of day.

It doesn’t make a distinction between a list heading and a category, so you can see the tasks organized by any batch of tags. Let’s expound on the list above with the two batches of tags. Suppose your headings are the classic to-do, doing and done. You created the two batches of tags described above, but the column heads are a third batch. By default, I walk in and see the do-doing-done columns. I can choose a filter and organize it by time of day, then the do/doing/done columns will appear on the cards like any other tag.

Another interesting thing it does with tags is that it’ll let you define a batch that will color the task itself. Again, suppose you want your morning tasks red, midday, orange, evening, yellow, and night, green. There’s a setting where you select which batch of tasks you want to define the color of the cards. If there are multiple tags from that field applied (say something can be done morning or midday), it guesses which color you want.

I think Zenkit is the most interesting, but it’s missing global tags. I recently turned my attention from it to Todoist, which is a little like going from a luxury car to a compact sedan. I may be able to split the difference with something like Zapier or IFTTT.

Asana also has global tags, but there are a handful of features the other three have that it lacks. The one that comes to mind is that you can’t copy lists to other boards, you can only copy whole boards.

The reason I’m so hung up on this global tags business is that I always have like 30 boards going. If I have a couple hours off work during the middle of conventional working hours, I want to easily pull up a list of all the things that can only be done during hours I’m normally working.

Categories
Asana Productivity Trello

Productivity Review: Asana

I almost switched from 💌 Trello 💌 (not affiliated, just a fan) because it has global tags. Board-scoped tags is the one feature that’s keeping me from joining 💑 Trello 💑 in a union of holy matrimony. Ultimately, Asana was missing a lot of features that prevented me from fully embracing it.

What it Has Going for it

  • Covers basic kanban functionality nicely.
  • Aforementioned global and color-coded tags.
  • Can see a list of all tasks assigned to me, regardless of board. This is another thing 🌸 Trello 🌸 omits on the desktop.
  • It has the ability to see something as a board or a list with section headings. Scrolling down as opposed to over (and down) doesn’t really have a specific benefit, it’s just nice to see things displayed the way I think about them.
  • Native calendaring – 💖 Trello 💖 has plenty of plugins for this, but it doesn’t do it on its own
  • You can assign a task to multiple boards.
  • Occasional fun animations when you click done.
  • A nice library of templates
  • Its task notifications are pretty good.
  • Progress view, even at the free tier.
  • No time limit on the free tier. Although I’m willing to pay for a service I love (I pay for 💛 Trello 💛), a limited time trial period is inevitably too short to get a sense of whether or not a service works for me.

What it Lacks

  • The ability to duplicate a list to another board. While repeating oneself is bad practice (particularly in code), sometimes when you’re an end user of somebody else’s software, you just have to accept it.
  • Only a few pretty backgrounds to choose from. 💜 Trello 💜 must have some kind of intellectual property dibs on this.
  • Tag problems:
    • Can’t create a new tag in the app on Android.
    • No list of tags. If I want to see everything in the tag I used for things to be done during work hours, I have to go into a task with that tag, then click on the tag there.
    • Using them is buggy in the app. I once accidentally created two of the same tag (same name, same color). In my browser, I moved everything to one and deleted the other. The app still shows them both and fails silently when I guess incorrectly about which one is still there.
  • App won’t even show a complete list of boards without an internet connection.
  • Sorting options aren’t retained in the app. When you pull up a list, it’s not sorted in any way. It doesn’t want to guess what you want, that’s fine. I sort it by due date and I’m happy. I go away and come back. For a minute, it’s still sorted by due date, but then the list refreshes and returns to unsorted.
  • The ability to use other boards/tasks as attachments.

Not Lacking But Distasteful

  • Boards are default scoped to public within organization.
  • Although it’s theoretically nice that on the website you can change the board sort, it comes at the expense of having Asana alphabetize them.

Conclusion

I’m still contemplating getting a 😍 Trello 😍 tattoo; running out of ❤️ emojis.

Categories
Asana CLI Linux Productivity Programming Ruby Trello

Working with TrelloToAsana

First off, many thanks to goborrega, the author of TrelloToAsana – a ruby package to help users port their data from 🌹💃 💕 Trello 💕 💃 🌹 to Asana. I love Trello (as you may have gathered from the emojis), but the boards are very siloed. I have like 3 dozen boards, I don’t want to have to dig into each one.

There are a few ways to get data between the two, but none were to my satisfaction until I found this package on Github.

I ran into a couple issues and I wanted to save some other folks the time. Many of these issues stem from not being a Ruby developer Thanks to Google University, I was able to develop a sufficient passing literacy.

Some background that may be helpful to non-Ruby devs may find useful:

  • Install Bundler and other dependencies. On Suse the command was: sudo zypper install ruby2.5-rubygem-bundler ruby-dev ruby2.5-dev ruby2.5-rubygem-rails-5_1
  • Install dependencies defined in the gemfile: bundle install
  • To run a Ruby script: ruby [filename]

There seems to be a version problem with the required versions of Ruby and the gem json. To fix that, I went opened Gemfile and replaced where it calls for json version 1.8.1 with 1.8.5. I haven’t seen any negative consequences of advancing it to a later version.

Between the time of the code’s writing and the time I ran it, Asana evidently changed their property id to gid on workspaces, projects and tasks. A find and replace on all instances of .id with .gid fixed the problem. The error was:

/usr/lib64/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/asana-0.10.0/lib/asana/resource_includes/resource.rb:34:in `method_missing': undefined method `id'

It worked like a dream after that.

Having gone to all that trouble, I don’t think I’m going to stick with Asana. There are too many features 💖 Trello 🌈 has that Asana doesn’t. My hunt for a 🌼 Trello 🥰 alternative that has global tags continues.