Why I keep switching between Trello and Asana
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve made a project board in Trello, felt like it was working fine, then suddenly something about it started breaking down. Usually for me it’s the view getting too cluttered. You start with one simple column for To Do, another for Doing, and another for Done. A week later you’ve added columns for Waiting on Feedback, Needs Review, Blocked, Maybe Someday, and now the idea of dragging a card across six columns feels heavier than just writing the thing down on paper.
Asana can feel cleaner for this kind of mess. Instead of a giant board full of pastel colored cards competing for my attention, Asana lets me put the same items in a list view where I can collapse sections. The list view is the only reason I switch back sometimes. That said, Asana likes to sneak in due dates that I didn’t mean to set. You type in something like “fix draft tomorrow” and suddenly an automatic due date is applied. Cue a bunch of red overdue notifications when you weren’t even using dates. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
What really pulls me back toward Trello is speed of setup. It takes about 30 seconds to make a Trello board, add a couple of lists, and dump cards onto it. Asana, no matter how streamlined, always feels like I’m filling out a form whenever I make a task. Name it, assign it, pick a section, maybe a date… it feels like housekeeping instead of just moving work along.
Setting up a simple task workflow in Trello
If you’ve never touched Trello, here’s what happens step by step. You create a board, give it a name like “Client Outreach April,” then immediately you’ve got one empty list column. Click Add List twice more and you have three: To Do, Doing, Done. Now click the plus icon under To Do and add your first card like “Send follow up email.” That card is just a box that you can click to open and add details inside—checklists, attachments, comments, etc.
When you drag the card from To Do into Doing, it literally moves with your mouse across the screen. People like this visual movement because it feels like progress. Same when you pull it into Done. It’s the simplest metaphor for progress: left to right.
But here is where the board starts to get messy. If you click inside the card to set a due date, then forget about it, Trello starts screaming with red overdue badges. Cards also have “labels,” which are colored tags you can assign. Add too many labels, and you end up with a pack of rainbow flags on every card that mean absolutely nothing at a glance. I’ve had boards where every single thing had three labels and even I couldn’t remember what orange vs red signified. The fix here is to only use labels for truly broad categories—like identifying whether something is urgent or low priority—but never for small distinctions.
Working with sections and lists in Asana
Asana calls its main structure a project. Inside a project you can switch between board view (cards that look similar to Trello’s) and list view (rows with checkboxes). I almost always start with list view because I like indenting tasks to make sub-tasks. For example, I’ll make a section called “Landing Page Updates” and then under it add “Gather copy from client,” “Fix mobile responsiveness,” and “Upload new hero image.” That way I don’t need five different lists on the board. I can collapse that entire section when I’m not working on it, which cleans up the chaos.
The checklist-like feel in Asana sometimes turns against me. You know when you mark something as complete but it doesn’t actually disappear unless you filter the view? I’ve had projects where 50 crossed-out items just sit there, haunting the screen. My workaround is always to hit the Filter button and hide completed tasks so only active ones are visible.
Asana also takes keyboard shortcuts seriously—tab N makes a new task, tab P sets priority, etc. But honestly, unless you memorize them, you’ll constantly end up typing into the wrong field and noticing your task name got replaced by “high priority” or something random. Learning the shortcuts saves clicks but also introduces this danger of making invisible changes without noticing until later.
When Trello works better for quick projects
If I just need to keep track of tasks for the week, Trello wins every time. There’s no setup friction. I open the board, add three lists, and type. Done. Usually I’ll have a board called “This Week” and then start Monday by writing down everything I need to knock out. Halfway through the week the Doing list will be a swamp, but at least the tool didn’t slow me down.
Trello also has a powerup called Calendar that shows cards with due dates plotted across a calendar view. Honestly I find it slow to load, but when it works it makes short term planning very visual. The problem is if you add the Calendar powerup and forget to pay attention to the badge limit, you can hit a wall where Trello says “Board has too many powerups” and blocks you unless you upgrade. Asana never pulls that stunt. Gotta admit, having to pay just to turn on Calendar can feel stingy.
Where Asana handles teamwork stronger
Asana gets me when the project involves more than one or two people. The whole Assign To field makes it clear who is doing what. In Trello you can add members to cards too, but in practice half the team ignores it. In Asana, you can set a task “Draft copy” and assign it to Alex, and then Asana automatically pings Alex with an email. This enforcement is helpful if your crew tends to forget what’s on their plate.
Comments also sit better in Asana. In Trello, comments on a card just pile up at the bottom, and you only see the newest one. Asana threads them in a way that’s easier to read, and each time you get tagged you get a notification that doesn’t feel so hidden.
But then again, Asana suffers from that every-notification chaos where even minor changes swarm everyone’s inbox. Teams either love it or spend weeks tweaking notification settings until something reasonable emerges.
Hidden frustrations nobody tells you
With Trello, my hidden frustration is how unreliable the search is. You type a keyword for a missing card and sometimes it just won’t appear, even though you know you created it. You end up manually scrolling down a huge list to find the thing. Another issue—the mobile app—where dragging cards is way less smooth. Sometimes you misdrop a card and it lands in the wrong column, then you don’t notice until a week later that “Send invoice” was stuck in Done even though it never got sent 😛
Asana hides a different kind of pain. Data export. Try extracting your projects into a spreadsheet and Asana spits out a download that makes sense only half the time—columns don’t match what you expect, subtasks get scattered as separate rows, and I still don’t have a clue where comments go. Trello at least gives you a straightforward JSON or CSV export if you’re on the right subscription.
Which one actually keeps me consistent
Here’s the thing: I bounce between both because each one solves a different slice of my attention problem. When I’m dragging my feet on small tasks, Trello forces movement because sliding a card feels fun. When the work is larger and involves a team, Asana pulls me back because the responsibilities line up more clearly. Certain weeks I literally duplicate the same set of tasks in both apps just to see which sticks better. Not exactly efficient, but hey, it beats forgetting a deadline.
If I absolutely had to pick one, and only for lightweight tracking, I’d stick to Trello. It’s messy, it’s overly colorful, but it’s fast enough that I don’t resist using it. The minute I start needing dependencies, milestones, or serious reporting, then and only then I crawl back to Asana.