The Board Behind the Bots: How I Use Trello
I’ve talked before about staying organised — or trying to — and the short version is: Trello and vibes. But I’ve had enough people ask me about the specifics that I thought it was worth going deeper. Not as a prescription, because everyone’s brain works differently. Just as a look at what actually works for me, in case any of it is useful to you.
The Basic Idea
Everything character-related lives on one board. I call it Taestation. It covers the full journey from “half-baked idea at midnight” to “published and done” — and everything in between, including the uncomfortable middle ground of “published but needs fixing.”
The board is organised into lists, and the lists map roughly to where a character is in their lifecycle. A card moves from left to right as it develops. That’s the whole system. It’s not complicated. The value is in having everything in one place so I’m not keeping it all in my head.
The Lists, and What They’re For
The Bank is where ideas live before they’re ready to be anything. No pressure, no deadline, no expectation. A vibe, a premise, a name, a scenario I thought was interesting. Currently in mine: a detective with an unsolved case, a paparazzi tsundere who saves you from a car accident, something I’ve labelled “chilli pp sink” that made complete sense when I wrote it. The Bank is not judged. The Bank just holds things.
The reason I have a Bank rather than letting ideas live in notes apps or voice memos or nowhere at all is simple: if it’s not written down somewhere I’ll check, it doesn’t exist. The Bank is the somewhere I’ll check.
Universe lists come next — one list per active universe. Silverwood, Deadfall Saints, Darielle, Verdant Selva, Vitrium & Cenere, Frosthaven, Nocturne & Reveille, and several others. A character card lives in its universe list while I’m developing the concept but haven’t started building yet. This gives me a clear picture of what’s waiting in each world, which matters when you’re running as many parallel universes as I am.
The universe lists are also where I can see at a glance which worlds are getting neglected. If Inferna has been sitting at one card for three months, that’s information.
Working On is the active bench. Right now: Bennett Ballsford, Reid Heller, Eilís Silverwood, Seth Calloway, Kitt, Curtis Pike, Matthew Farrow. Seven characters in various states of construction. I try to keep this list from getting too long — when it has too many cards it stops functioning as focus and starts functioning as anxiety.
Pending Launch is the buffer between finished and public. I use this for characters who are built but waiting on something — a collab partner’s drop, a platform event, a specific date I’ve planned around. Having a separate list here means “Working On” stays honest about what’s actually still being built.
Done is exactly what it says. I do not move cards out of Done. They stay there. Currently sitting at 154 cards, which I know because I counted while writing this and then needed a moment. The Done list is useful not as a metric but as a reminder — on the days when everything feels slow and nothing feels finished, I can look at it and remember that things do, in fact, get done.
To Update is where the guilt lives. Published characters that need work — older sheets that don’t reflect how I build now, bots that underperformed and deserve another look, things that have been quietly bothering me for months. My Viridian Nexus characters are all in here, which is why they’ve mysteriously gone quiet on the platforms. They’re not gone. They’re waiting for me to have the bandwidth to do them properly.
Having a dedicated To Update list means these characters don’t get forgotten, but they also don’t clog up Working On with the weight of “I should fix this.” They have a home. They’ll get there.
On Hold / Nevermind is the graveyard of good intentions. Six cards currently in there, including Lyssianne the Jester Queen, which I still think is a great concept and I’m getting to eventually. Moving something to On Hold is not failure. It’s honesty about what has and hasn’t got energy behind it right now.
Gen To Do is a smaller list for specific additional assets that need generating for already-published characters — NSFW variants, extra scenes, things that didn’t make the original drop. Keeps those tasks visible without cluttering anywhere else.
What the Board Doesn’t Track
Cross-platform status — which version of which character has been updated on which platform — lives mostly in my head, and that is not something I’d necessarily recommend. It works for me because I know my own catalogue well enough to hold it, but I’m aware it’s a vulnerability. If I were starting over I’d probably add a checklist system per card for platform tracking.
The lorebooks and lore documents live in Google Docs and Scrivener, not Trello. The board tracks characters, not lore. Those are different enough things that trying to put them in the same place would just create noise.
Visual assets — images, HTML files, platform-specific formatting — live in folders organised by universe. The organisation makes sense to me. It would make sense to nobody else. I’ve accepted this.
The Bit That Isn’t a System
None of the above tells me what to build next. That decision doesn’t come from the board. It comes from checking in with myself and asking: whose voice do I have right now?
What I mean by that: building a character requires being able to hear them. To know instinctively how they’d answer something, what their silences feel like, what makes them specifically them rather than a type. Some days I have that for a specific character. Some days I don’t. The days I’ve tried to force it because a card was next in line are the days I’ve produced work I had to go back and fix.
So the board gives me the landscape. It shows me what exists, where everything is, what’s waiting. But what I build on any given day is still driven by instinct — by whatever is pulling at me when I sit down to work. The Trello board makes sure nothing gets lost while I’m waiting for the right moment to arrive.
That’s the whole system. Organised enough to track 154 characters across a dozen universes. Loose enough to follow the voice when it shows up.
It’s not perfect. It works.
— Tae