Organize your emails with color and collapsible lists in Trello
Collapse, expand and color-code your lists in Trello! Learn more about how to organize your inbox in Trello with these useful new features.
Trello has introduced a much-anticipated feature – the ability to natively collapse and expand lists on your Trello board! This has a lot of potential to be a useful tool for organizing your shared inbox in Trello, helping your team to streamline your board and focus on the task at hand.
Plus, the latest update also includes the ability to assign colors to your Trello lists, adding an extra layer of organization to your workflow, alongside existing card labels and Trello custom fields.
Before we dive in to the benefits, let’s take a quick look at how the new features work!
How to use color and collapsible lists in Trello
How can I collapse and expand lists in Trello?
Collapsing and expanding lists in Trello is a built-in functionality. To use it, just click on the ‘Collapse list’ icon at the top right of your Trello list.
Collapsing a list nests it vertically between your other Trello lists, getting it out of the way so that you can see more of your board, without hiding the list entirely. When you want to work with your list again, simply click the ‘Expand list’ icon to open it back up.
How can I change my list color in Trello?
To change list color, click on the list settings icon (three dots) at the top right of your Trello list and select your desired list color. List colors also work in dark mode!
A screenshot of a Trello triage board with collapsed lists and list color applied
How to organize your emails with color and collapsible lists in Trello
Managing your team mailbox with the Email for Trello Power-Up allows you to use all of Trello’s powerful organizational features for your emails, as well as your daily work tasks! And being able to collapse, expand, and colour-code lists brings a whole new level of organization to your inbox, helping your team to focus, prioritize and ultimately get more done.
Focus on what’s important
Collapsing your Trello lists serves a simple but essential function – just getting stuff out the way! Sometimes seeing every task and email in your team’s workflow can be a little overwhelming. This is especially true if your Trello board contains lots of information that’s important to other team members but not necessary for your tasks, or if you just need to block out visual noise and focus on a few tasks at a time.
For teams working with email in Trello, collapsing lists can be useful for:
Keeping low priority email out of sight until you’re ready to deal with it.
Organizing different kinds of email. For example, directing newsletters into lists that you can collapse until you need to reference them.
Maintaining an streamlined email workflow that works for everyone, even if your priorities are different across the team. For example, if certain emails are not relevant to your work right now, it’s easy to tuck them away and keep your board tidy, without compromising on detail for someone else.
Triage tasks effectively
Collapsing and color-coding your Trello lists are two useful ways to help your team visualize their priorities, which is especially important for email and task triage.
Collapse less urgent lists so that your team can resolve or escalate high priority queries more quickly and effectively.
Change the color of your lists to work in sync with your priorities. For example, red for high, orange for medium, and blue for low priority work.
Use list colors in automations to make sure nothing gets overlooked! For example, when a card with the red ‘Urgent’ label is added to any list, change the list color to red. You can target any list by using the wildcard value {*} in your Trello automation.
Find out more about how to set up a triage board in Trello.
Keep your board organized
Previously you might have kept your Trello board overly simple so that it fitted visually on a single screen, but with collapsible lists you can now be more granular, without needing to scroll a lot horizontally! Collapsing lists makes organizing your emails easier, allowing you to:
Hide lists that you don’t use regularly, like ‘Waiting for Customer’, ‘Monthly Newsletter’ or ‘Follow-up’ lists.
Narrow the scope of visible emails without needing to archive cards or spend time creating filters.
Collapse, expand, and color-code your Trello lists
Enhance your Trello experience with collapsible and color-coded lists! Streamline your team email workflow, focus on priorities, and keep your Trello board organized.