Two things that help me: “Scrum for Trello” and “Trelabels for Trello” browser extensions.
The first one gives you the ability to easily put estimated and actual times on the cards (and they show and sum up on the board) just by editing the title. So “Do the thing (16) [6]” means you spent 6 hours doing the thing you thought would take 16 hours, and it makes it nicely visible both on the cards and as sums on the column/list.
The labels extension just makes it so that you can actually see what the cards are tagged with at a glance better. It has options for how to display that (I use the Tags mode, but use whatever works for you).
For the boards, they’re more or less just one list for each step in our process, from Todo/Incoming -> Currently working on -> Testing -> Ready for someone else to look at -> Being reviewed/tested by someone else -> to Done. (I added a step that our company doesn’t officially use for the ‘handing off to someone else’ cases, while they have one for ‘on hold’ stuff that isn’t currently relevant that I don’t use, and we have a couple other review steps that aren’t relevant to me, so I don’t include them). I personally also have a “Waiting for” list for cases where I’m waiting for something from someone else before I can move forward with a thing.
I recommend making new boards each month (or whatever fits your cycle) because if you try to use just one, even if you archive all the old stuff, it’s still there in the data, which can make the pages slowww to load and give a bad UX once you have had a lot of stuff on one board, even if there isn’t much there now.
You can fetch the board data (including archived stuff) as a .json file, then parse that and do whatever you need to with it. I used that to write a script to figure out what had been done when, and that was really helpful for awhile. We don’t use it anymore, but it’s an idea of the sort of things that you can do with it. At the time it saved us a couple hours of copy/pasting about once a week. So if there’s any info that you are going to be putting into there and might want in a different format or whatever, that’s worth knowing.
ETA: I’ve also used Trello for things like writing (lists being characters, places, events, scenes, etc.) and playing Microscope. It’s pretty flexible and works however you want it to, for whatever you need it for. I’m kind of a fan. I like things that make complicated things simple.
