The Best Way to Manage a Shopping List on Your Phone

I love the feeling of writing lists on paper and then crossing things off. I also love being paper-free and using apps to help me be more productive. In this post I’ll go through an app I use to easily create a master grocery shopping checklist on your phone – even if you’re a paper person!

Trello

Trello is an amazing productivity tool. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend watching this short introductory video to get an idea of what Trello can do. It’s free to join.

Trello provides a way to organize tasks. It also allows you to share information with others. You can share different information with different groups of people based on your needs.

For example, you can have a “board” that only you can see, another board that you share with your husband, and another one that’s shared with your work team. We have a board that I’m calling “Household” that’s shared between my husband and I. This is our place to share information that’s relevant to both of us.

Lists and Checklists in Trello

The grocery shopping list is something that’s nice to have shared in a household so people can add items as they run out or think of them. On each board in Trello, you create “lists”. On each list you create “cards.” Cards can represent individual tasks. For example, you might have a list called “Tasks” and then each card on that list is a separate task.

Within each card you have the option to create “Checklists.” I really like the checklist feature and this is what I’m using for our grocery shopping list. On our Household board, I created a list called “Recurring.” Cards on this list are things that we do on a routine basis. For example, I have a card called “Weekly” and on that card I created a checklist for tasks that we want to do weekly.

I also created a card on this list called “Shop.” You could call it Grocery Shopping or whatever you like. I decided to keep it more broad because some items I might order on Amazon, some come from Target, the mall, etc. This list is one place to put everything we want to buy that we want each other to be able to see.

My Master Grocery Shopping Checklist in Trello

When you create checklists in Trello, the default name is Checklist. You have the option to rename checklists and can also create mutliple checklists on the same card. I used this feature to categorize my items based on where they’re found in the grocery store. Here are my checklist names:

• Babies
• Household
• Pantry
• Fridge & Freezer
• Produce

These categories are organized based on how I shop at our local grocery store, but they’re general enough to be able to easily see what I might need in a certain category when I’m somewhere else like Target. “Household” is anything non-food that doesn’t fit into another category (cleaning supplies, toiletries, stamps, etc.). I used “Pantry” to describe the non-perishable section of the grocery store.

Besides being able to categorize items, the other reason I’m really loving the checklist feature is because you get to check off a little check box and it strikes a line through the item and grays it out. But you can still see it! I obviously just went grocery shopping when I took these screenshots.

If I buy laundry detergent, I get that satisfying feeling of being able to cross something off a list, but then I don’t have to re-write or re-type “laundry detergent” every time I run out. It’s already there on my checklist. So when I realize I’m running low, I can just hit the checkbox again in the app to uncheck it and make the item active again.

I am really loving this system. We have tried other systems in Evernote and Trello but this one has been the most user-friendly for a paper person like me. Recently I was writing sticky notes everywhere when we ran out of something, but they were getting lost. I’m also not walking through the store with a pen and my sticky note or paper list, so I had to mentally go through the list about 50 times throughout my time at the store to see if I was forgetting anything.

This Trello checklist is working for me. What’s do you use for your grocery shopping checklist? Do you use your phone or paper?