This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is #BalanceForBetter. Whether it’s work-life balance or working towards a more gender-balanced future, we can all attest to the power of staying balanced. With this in mind, some of us are surrounded by women who rock our worlds by making the balancing act of life, work, and even side hustles look easy when it most certainly isn’t.
For International Women’s Day, we’ve highlighted four “everyday” wonder women and non-binary heroes that inspire us and others around them to #BalanceForBetter and how they use Trello to crush their daily and lifetime goals.
Meet The Everyday Wonder Women
Shindy Chen
New York City
Founder, CEO, Author + Master Trello Board/List Maker, Sharer, and Lover
💰💘Fun Fact: I have a #1 Amazon Personal Finance Bestseller and another Amazon Top 10 Adult Romance Fiction novel.
In 2016 I started Scribe, a content agency. The first year my clientele was built on my personal network: We started with Ernst & Young and late-stage fintech startups like Clarity Money and Vestwell. Today, we also count Goldman Sachs and Sarwa, the "Betterment" of Dubai, as clients, among others.
We use Trello to manage ALL of our internal as well as client work. Each week, our "Scribe Deliverables" Board helps keep us organized and on top of all of our simultaneous projects. Meanwhile, we've established client-specific boards that keep track of our deliverables.
For example, for content work, we'll have cards representing each blog or work item. Each card is complete with due dates, meticulous checklists, document attachments, links and more. I also use Trello to manage personal and Scribe admin and have used it to track book marketing efforts. It's an essential tool and I can't live without it.
Scribe's fully-distributed team is comprised mostly of females from diverse backgrounds; I'm proud to give these strong, hardworking women the opportunity for challenging, rewarding, and remote work—work that also gives them the freedom to pursue their ideal work/life balance.
I'm also a member of the Female Founder Collective, an invite-only community of female founders started by Rebecca Minkoff; the group supports each others' businesses through awareness and promotion of female-owned businesses.
I also regularly participate in Summit Series meetups focused on female empowerment, such as collaborations with Dreamers x Doers and The Assemblage.
Jamie Kramer
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Human Resources Assistant for the City of Windsor
📚🏆Fun Fact: I read on average 200 books a year. I'm also one of the youngest people at the City of Windsor to win the Rookie of the Year award.
I work as a Human Resources Assistant for the City of Windsor and am responsible for all matters relating to diversity and accessibility after having presented a Diversity and Inclusion Initiative to City Council, receiving approval and endorsement.
In my job, I am working to create a more inclusive and barrier-free work environment for women and non-binary persons, especially those who are racialized or fall into another marginalized category.
I use Trello to assist with my job on the day-to-day—with teams and boards for each stage of the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, I use it to organize my tasks, thoughts, and stages of development. With Trello, I have been able to implement over half of the action items in just under six months.
It is important for me to use my role and position to support other women and build them up. I have created Employee Resource Groups for those who are marginalized, including LGBTQ+ & Allies and am starting a networking program in March 2019 called Ladies Who Lunch to bring together women throughout the Corporation to discuss their goals, aspirations, and obstacles within the Corporation and their personal lives.
I volunteer with hEr VOLUTION, a non-profit that assists young, marginalized women in gaining more understanding and training in STEM programs by fully immersing them in development and coding. Further, I volunteer with The Foundation for Student Science and Technology as a Research Mentor helping young women transition from high school to university by writing their first research paper with guidance.
Moreover, I am a member of the Board Nominating Committee for the Human Resources Professional Association that aims to ensure the best candidates are putting their name forward to act as Board Members. Part of this role is to develop a strategy to engage more women and marginalized persons in completing the application process.
I work every day to ensure I create the best space possible for women and non-binary persons in my life, at my workplace, and in the broader community.
Cole Brown
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Development Team Lead at a Digital Marketing Agency; Asexual Activist
🎲Fun Fact: She’s a Game Master for a D&D campaign she runs for 6 kids ages 6-8 in downtown Vancouver.
I am writing on behalf of my partner, Cole Brown. I think she is an amazing woman who deserves a hell of a lot of credit for everything she’s accomplished and for everything she continues to do. She’s very driven and goal oriented and has a lot of great systems in place to help her achieve her goals, and that’s why I am writing in today.
Cole builds a plan at the beginning of each year and then incrementally makes progress towards her goals. The progress she makes is significant and noticeable. It’s really nice to be able to pay attention to progress so that you can celebrate it appropriately.
She has a Trello board for each major project. Project tasks and deliverables are captured as cards and organized by column to represent a category (e.g. delegated/todo/research/etc). There is one special column that contains a few special cards and inside of the special cards are checklists: these checklists are the high-level overview of a project, and then are turned into cards when they’re ready to be actioned. It’s pretty cool.
But even better is how she runs her day to day life. She has a Kanban-style setup, with columns for today, tomorrow, this week, etc. A Power-Up called Butler is configured to progress tasks down the “timeline” of columns as they become more relevant/urgent (based on due date or other factors).
Cole has been an advocate for asexual communities for a decade. She regularly gives talks at universities and is a board member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). Cole is also actively involved in local Women in STEM events and programs and has also helped run a very successful Civic Tech community meetup group.
Sarah Hoban
Arlington, VA, USA
Global Project/Program Manager and Strategy Consultant
🎧Fun Fact: I have my own podcast!
I celebrate women in project management through my blog and podcast, The Stealthy Project Manager, and offer tips for aspiring and current project managers to become more productive and fulfilled in their careers.
In 2018, I crushed my productivity goals with Trello! I used a Trello board to keep track of my writing goals, review my weekly progress, and adjust my strategy, as needed, to stay on track. Last year, I exceeded my goal of becoming a published author and speaker by publishing 26 blog posts on project management and launching my own podcast in syndication with the blog.
I contributed my first guest blog post on another site and it ended up winning an award! I also spoke at a conference on the topic of project management and productivity and interviewed with two external podcasts. In the process, I doubled my goals for social media followers and email subscribers.
Trello helped me find a home for the myriad of ideas and articles to read that come to me throughout the day. In addition to serving as my "ideas inbox", Trello housed my annual goals. I could return to the board at any time to see them front and center—which also helped me think of ways to cultivate weekly habits that supported making progress against these goals. I held a weekly review using my Trello board to make sure I didn't fall behind!
Up, Up, And Away!
Love to scuba dive? Stay-at-home mom? Your dog-walker? Being a wonder woman doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, and that’s ok! Know someone (perhaps even yourself?) that you’d like to nominate?
Share your wonder women story with us by filling out this form:
Good or bad, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter (@trello) or write in to support@trello.com.
Next: Women Who Code, FTW: How This Non-Profit Empowers Teamwork With Trello
