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Why search operators are better than advanced search

Are you struggling to find that very important email? Do you waste a lot of time trying to search for a message that you know is somewhere within your inbox?

Well, in today's video, I wanna show you how to use Gmail search operators so you can become an expert at finding any message that you want. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And you're probably already familiar with the search bar here at the top of Gmail where you can type in simple words and we can just hit enter, for example, and find any message that has this word in it. And of course, we can use email addresses as well.

Now, you may also be familiar with the advanced search functionality here which gives you a lot more options. However, this advanced search can still be limiting depending on what you are after.

So, I wanna show you some basic search operators including some more advanced ones so you can find exactly what you're looking for. So let's go up here to our search bar, and I'm gonna search for this email address, Scottfriesen@hotmail.com.

Now, here what my results are showing are every single message where this person or this email address is included. So whether they sent it, whether I sent a message to them, all of that information is showing up here.

And that's why we see a whole section here that's labeled me.

Search From a specific email address

Because these are emails that I have sent to this email address. But that's maybe not what I'm after, I wanna see what is something that he has sent me.

I wanna see just the messages that are from this address. So all I need to do is go to the front of that email address and type in from: and then put colon and hit enter.

And now you can see that my results are quite a bit different here. Now, I don't see any of these mes, I may have replied to this message here but I am only seeing messages that have been sent from this individual.

Now, you're probably already saying, well, Scott, can't I do that here within the advanced search? I could just use this frontline.

Yes, you can, however, if you want to get more advanced and a little more granular, you're gonna want to use these search operators. On top of that, it can be a little tedious to use this menu here if you have to go and search for the different categories and okay, where do I go next in terms of what I want to search?

Once you get adept and more comfortable at using these search operators, you may never wanna go back to the advanced search dropdown. So, in this case, let's say that I want to find the messages

Search After or Before a specific date

that have been sent from this address, but only this year in 2021. Here you can see in these search results, I'm getting everything back.

I've got all of the messages that have been sent from this address. So, another operator we can use is after, and we just continue on, a space after the email address, I'm gonna say after: and then colon.

And now all I need to do is select what date. Well, if I want it to be this year, I'm just gonna type in January 1st, 2021 and I'm going to hit enter.

And here you can see my results are now updated. I'm only seeing messages in which this person has sent me after this particular date.

And the great thing about search operators is that you can continue on and on to get more and more granular. So let's take a look at some other ones that may be helpful for us.

We've already looked at after a particular date, but we can also change this to before. Those are two very common ones.

So, let's say before 2021, I'm gonna hit enter. Well, I'm obviously gonna see the results that were obscured or that were hidden from us just previously.

So you can choose these very specific date ranges if you know for certain, oh, I'm certain that he sent me this message sometime last year, for example. So after and before can be very, very helpful.

Using OR as a search operator

But let's clear this out for a second and let's take a look at another search operator, which can be very, very helpful. So once again, I'm gonna type in this email address, a test email, by the way, Scottfriesen@hotmail.com.

But I also want to see messages that include someone else. And that's where we wanna use the operator OR.

So if we use the operator capital O capital R, we can now add other operators into the mix. So in this case, I wanna see all the messages that include this email address but also this other one, this Gmail address.

So, I'm gonna hit enter now and we're gonna see quite a few results here. You can see in the top right-hand corner it says we're viewing one to 50 of many.

If I go over, we can see that there's actually a total of 53 messages that either contain this email address or this email address.

Using AND as a search operator

But what if I want to see any messages that include both of them on the same message? Well, in this case, what we'd want to do is change our OR to AND.

So if I hit AND and hit enter here, so now our search results have been limited to just one message, why? Because this happens to be the only message in my account where both of these email addresses are included.

If we open up this message, and we may have to expand this here, you can see it was sent by this Gmail account. But if we come down here and hover, we can see that this message below was sent by this Hotmail account.

So yes, they are both included, they are both involved in this particular message. Again, just very quickly I'm gonna change this back to OR just so you understand the differences here.

Now, every other message that we're seeing except for the one that we just saw, which is also going to be included here are from either of these two but there only happens to be one where both of them are involved at the exact same time.

Search for a particular Label

So here's another drawback of using the advanced search is that one of the options that it doesn't give us is how to search with a particular label or search for a particular label. Now, it's true we could use our labels here on the left-hand side, I could just click on URGENT and I can see all of my messages.

And what you will notice is if you come up here to the search bar when you click on any of these particular labels, it is actually including these search operator up at the top in the search bar.

So let's say we wanna go beyond just what's urgent, we wanna see what is urgent and maybe that is created or that has been left behind in the past. So here we're gonna continue on and I'm gonna type in before and I'm gonna just put a year before 2021.

I'm gonna hit enter and now we can see I've got a lot of messages that are actually quite old but they are still labeled urgent. Again, I can continue to add on and add on and add on to the search bar to be more granular in terms of what I want to find.

Let's say I want to see, well, is any of these from this Hotmail address that we were looking at before? And yes, actually most of them are, it looks like in this particular case.

How about the other individual that we were looking at, this other test account from Gmail? No, so I don't have to worry if I thought that message was in this label or in this area or before 2021.

Now, you can start to see the layering effect of using these search operators. A few other things that you can do beyond the advanced search, here we do have a Has attachment checkbox.

Search for a specific Filename

So to see if something has a particular checkbox, but what if we know what that attachment actually is? So in this case, we can use an operator called filename: and I'm gonna type in PDF in this case.

And you can see I don't have many messages with a PDF, I only happen to have this one at the moment. What if I know it has a particular JPEG image in it?

I'm gonna type in that file name and now I've got these three results here waiting for me. So if you know the file name, the file type, or the file extension, this can be another great way to zero in on what you are looking for.

Now, another complaint that many people have

Search Anywhere including Spam and Trash

when they use the search bar up here is that the results are typically limited to just messages that are either in their all mail account, meaning either in their inbox or one of the labels that are listed here.

Now it often includes things that have been sent as well. But what if you want to make sure that this keyword or this particular message is anywhere, including in spam or in your trash bin?

Well, in this case, what we want to do is we want to use the operator in.

So let's go back to our example of searching for messages from this Hotmail account.

And if I hit enter and I'm just gonna hit one more over, you can see I have a total of 51 results or 51 messages that are bringing back. However, if I continue on and say in

and hit enter, let's go over and see what my total is.

My total is now 56, so why has it changed? Well, if I come back over here and scroll down, you can actually see that we now have a few messages that have this trash can beside it, meaning that these messages are actually currently located in the trash.

Remember, your standard search is only going to limit it to things that are not in trash or not in your spam folder. But if you add in, it will bring back absolutely everything.

So if you wanna make sure that something isn't getting lost or if you haven't missed something in the trash, in can be an absolute time-saver.

Search for CC or BCC

The last one I wanna share with you today is CC or BCC. So for example, maybe I just wanna see the things that I or someone else have been copied on, maybe they were not sent the email or they were not appearing in the to field.

So in this case, I'm gonna stick with this sample email here and in this case, I gonna say, actually we need to put this at the beginning, my apologies. We need to put it at the beginning.

Now, you're gonna see all the messages where this person has been CC'd. And this is something I created just a moment ago just so you can see this, that this Hotmail account he was CC'd on this message that's why we're only getting one result here.

Now, if you'd like to see the full list of search operators that you can use with Gmail, I'll include a link to this page so that you can experiment and find the search terms and even the filtering options that you need to find the messages that you want.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. If you wanna learn more about using filters and labels here within Gmail, I recommend that you click on this video right here.

And if you have further questions about using Gmail and search operators, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

My experience as a Trello consultant

Do you use Trello for your business? If so, I hope you're not making any of these seven mistakes.

Hello, everyone Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress and I have provided Trello consulting for the past five years and I have literally laid my eyes on thousands and thousands of different Trello boards.

So here in today's video I wanna show you the seven most common mistakes that I see my clients using and showing you solutions.

Using Trello Lists for Individual People

So you can fix each one. The first one has to do with using our lists and far too often, I come across teams and businesses that are using individuals for their own list.

Here in the first half of this board, you can see that we have a task list and in progress and complete, some standard things that many boards contain but if we move over to the right-hand side, we see things like Kristi's list, Brian's list and sometimes there's several, maybe a dozen of lists moving out here, all with individual names.

Now their intent is good in that they're trying to keep things organized that if Kristi is assigned something, we can move it over here but that sort of defeats the purpose of the workflows and the different stages in which Trello is so good at.

What we really should be doing is using this member assignment as you can see on these other cards so that we can assign members directly to specific cards regardless of which stage they are in.

The other thing you want to keep in mind is that if you or other members of your team need to see specifically what they are assigned we can come up here to show menu and we can go under search cards and filter things just for ourselves.

So for example if I just wanna see the cards that are assigned to me I can click my username and now I just see the six cards that I have been assigned to.

I can now work in this mode. This is more than just a view.

I can work and edit and move these cards around if I need to and whenever I want to, I can click X up here and go back and see all of my cards at once.

So I would strongly suggest that you avoid using individual lists for individual members of your team. Take advantage of Trello's use of a Kanban board and make use of the stages.

Poor Use of Trello Labels

The second mistake that I see far too often is not using labels effectively.

Now, here in this demonstration board you can see that I have several different labels.

One quick tip is that if you click directly on the label itself, it will expand and show you the name of that label that can often be very, very convenient so you don't have to remember the different colors and what they associate with but far too often I come across boards and teams that are not using labels at all or at least not very effectively.

Labels can be so helpful here within our Trello system and one of those reasons is that we can use again that filtering capability to narrow down and zero in on certain types of labels.

So I'll often ask my clients to see what would make the most sense for them to segment or break out their Trello cards on a given board. How would they like to see it maybe from a reporting standpoint or would other members of their team like to see that information?

If we go back here to search cards, you can see at the very top we can filter by either one or more labels.

Do I just wanna see my new projects? No problem, I can select that.

Keep in mind, you are not limited to just the first six or so colors that Trello provides you here.

If you need to, you could actually have several green labels which may represent the exact same geographical area but you can give each of those labels a different name.

So you can have as many labels as you need as long as they have distinctive names.

No Trello Backup Plan

Now, the third problem that I come across very often here when it comes to using Trello is the lack of a backup plan and although Trello is a trusted name and service things can go wrong.

Whether it's your fault, or if there is some downtime with Trello how about you add someone new to your team and they start mucking things up here within your Trello board and you wish that you could go back to the way it was set up a week ago or maybe just certain elements.

Well, one way that you could do so is come up here to show menu, select more and we could copy this board.

We could select copy and give it a name with a date perhaps so that we know when this board was copied but the problem with this strategy is that it's a manual process and either you or someone else on your team is gonna have to come in here and remember to copy this board every Friday and give it a name and then that's going to stack up in your organization and count towards your boards here within Trello as well and what if the mistake was made just two days ago.

You don't wanna go all the way back to last Friday. What if you wanna go to a particular point in time?

Well, a much better solution is to use a power-up called Backups by Rewind.

If you go to the power-ups menu here within Trello and just type in back or back ups, the very first selection will be back ups for Trello.

Now, backups for Trello is designed by Rewind which is the same organization which creates backups and on-demand recovery for products such as Shopify and Quick Books Online.

The great thing about Rewind is that it backs up every single aspect of your boards.

In fact, the list includes boards, lists, cards, checklists, custom fields, labels, and attachments.

So you can have the security of having someone either new on your team or maybe even you make an honest mistake and like to go back and revert to a prior iteration of that board, you can do so with Rewind and it will do it on a nightly basis.

So you don't have to remember to do something manually.

If you'd like to learn more about backups for Trello be sure to see the link in the description below.

Too Many Trello Notifications

Now, the fourth mistake that you may be making here within Trello as it pertains to your teams and your business is notification overload.

As you start to add members of your team, as you start to add due dates you're automatically going to start receiving email notifications and far too often people are receiving too many notifications at a given time.

The negative consequence is that some members of your team including yourself may start to ignore all of those email notifications.

So a better solution is to change the frequency of those notifications.

If you come up to the top right-hand corner and click your profile picture and then come down and select settings, you'll have the opportunity to change your notifications.

If you want to, you can allow desktop notifications but the one that we're gonna focus on here is this first one, change notification email frequency.

Now by default, Trello sets this to instantly meaning that whenever a change is made to a card that either you're assigned to or that you are watching, you're gonna receive an email notification.

But the one that I prefer and that I recommend to many of my clients is to change this to periodically and what that means is that it's going to send a summary of all of the changes that have taken place within the past hour.

If there's something that pertains to you, something that you're assigned to or that you have been watching, it's going to summarize all of those notifications in a single email.

Let me show you how that looks in my inbox.

So here within my inbox, I've received a notification telling me that I have three new notifications on this particular board and when I open up this email it tells me here's what I've missed.

Here are the three distinct and different changes.

Now you'll notice that each of them includes links to both the cards themselves but also the boards as well.

So I can come in here, review this email and say, okay none of this is really terribly important.

I don't need to reply or respond or maybe just one of them is but the important thing is, is that it's come in a single email, it's not clogging up my inbox and I can deal with it directly here.

Not Viewing Trello Across Multiple Boards

Now, fifth on our list of mistakes that I see far too often is not seeing the bigger picture.

Chances are that you're managing much more than just a single board and so are members of your team.

So how do you stay on top of all of the cards that are assigned to you and all of the things that are happening across multiple boards?

Well, the good news is that Trello has introduced some new views.

If you come up here to the top left-hand corner and we go all the way to the bottom, we're gonna select open work space table.

Now this is actually going to open up in a new tab.

What it's going to do is actually display our board in a different view.

So here you can see we've got a much more column and row vertical view of the same board that we were looking at here.

Cards, lists, labels and members and the great thing here is that we can actually change and edit these things on the fly.

If I need to add myself or someone else to this card I can do so, if I need to check this task off I can do so right from this screen but this still doesn't solve our problem about seeing things across multiple boards or does it?

Here in this long dropdown menu, we can select add boards and here I'm gonna select my Scott Demo Board.

So now if I scroll down to the bottom you can see I've brought in additional card information to this view but the great thing is, is that now I can start to filter and interact with this data across multiple boards.

Now I can always add more boards if I want but let me show you some of the capability here.

Let's say I want to just see the cards that are assigned to me.

Well, here you can see I'm assigned to two cards on this other board, in addition to the cards that I'm assigned to on this blue board.

Maybe I want to scratch that. Maybe I just want to see the things that are due or that are overdue, what are the things that we're behind on?

Well, we're behind on a few things in both of these boards.

You can get this view across two or as many boards as you would like in this space and if there's a particular view or filter that you like you can always bookmark this view so you don't have to come back and reset the settings.

A fantastic way to see the bigger picture across multiple boards.

Description Field Overload

Now, number six on our list can certainly cause you a major headache and that has to do with filling up the description field with so much information that it almost becomes useless.

Now don't get me wrong, the description area within a Trello card can be very valuable where we add links and as much data as we like but what if there's some things in here that are especially important, things that other members need to see right away or that perhaps we even want to be able to filter by for example, in this description you can see we've got things like, this will be a live broadcast, it will be a duration of 45 minutes and we need a half crew size.

We know would be a whole lot easier to manage this type of information is if you use custom fields.

So down below low here, in this example I've added three custom fields so that we can see is it a live broadcast or not?

It is, well then let's check this box.

What's the duration again, it's 45 minutes.

Well wouldn't that be helpful for others to be able to see rather than have to sift through these several paragraphs in the description and last but not least, we can select a custom dropdown menu and say, it's a half crew size, perfect.

It's a half crew size, now everyone will know and if I close this card, when it comes to custom fields you can even determine what is displayed on the front.

So now everyone can see that this is a live broadcast and the duration is 45 minutes.

In this particular example, I've chosen not to share the crew size that that's something that I don't need to see on the front of the card, but if I wanted to I could do so with custom fields.

Not Using Butler Automation

Last but definitely not least I've perhaps saved the best one and that has to do with not taking advantage of automation.

For the last few years, Butler has been baked into a Trello board and if you're not using automation well you're simply just wasting time.

How often do you have a process in your Trello board where you need to move a card or create a new card and then remember to do stuff such as set the due date for a particular time in advance or assign someone or yourself or add a particular label?

Well, Butler can do this all for you.

You just set it up one time and then that automation will happen the way that you want.

Let me show you a quick example.

Let's say I've got a new card here called new idea and when I bring new idea into the task list, when I bring anything into this task list right here, I want to add the new project label and I wanna set the due date to three days out from today.

Well, watch what happens, if I drag this over here I'm not doing anything else, I suddenly have that new project label and it is now due three days from today just like I said it would but maybe I wanna add something else.

Maybe I wanna make sure whoever makes this move is also assigned to this task as well.

Let me show you how to set that up.

If we come up here to Butler, I'm gonna go over and select my rules in this case and maybe I just want to filter it by the rules that are enabled on this board.

So here's this first one that we just saw in action but let's add something to it.

I'm gonna select the edit icon which is gonna open up my Butler interface here and in this case beyond adding the label and setting the due date to three working days in advance, I also want to add members.

So I want to join the card. Whoever moves it, I want to join the card.

I get to hit that green plus button. You can see it added to the bottom of the actions here and I'm going to hit save.

At this point, we can close the Butler menu.

Now it's not going to apply it to anything that has already there. It has to apply to new things going forward.

So let's say I'm gonna call this new idea two in this case and let's drag it over and let's see if this Butler recipe works.

I drag it over into the list, label, date and perfect. I'm assigned to it as well.

So make sure you check out Butler automations so that you can take full advantage of Trello.

Now, if you'd like to get even more out of Trello be sure to check out this playlist right here and if you're looking for more tips and tricks be sure to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel.

Thank you so much for watching and remember being productive, does it not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

Adding Tasks and Due Dates

Are you brand new to Google Tasks or perhaps you just want a refresher? Well, in this video, we're gonna look at both mobile and desktop and show you everything you need to know when it comes to using Google Tasks.

So let's get started right here within the Tasks mobile app. And you can see here when first starting Tasks, you'll have absolutely nothing here in your initial list.

In order to add a task, we want to select the plus button near the very bottom. And it's gonna open up a small dialogue so that we can start to add our first task.

Let's say I need to email Karen about oh, I don't know, about something. So I've entered in my task here.

Now what I could do is hit save immediately and add this task. Let's hit that and you can see that it is added at the top of the list, but we didn't add a due date.

Now here's the thing. We can open up this task and now start to add further details, but let me show you how you can add those details when first entering in that task.

So I'm just gonna say task number two, in this case, and instead of hitting save, I'm gonna hit these description lines here. This is gonna allow me to add a full description or add other details like don't forget to tell her about the meeting or something like that.

So I've added some details. I can add links. I can edit whatever I want here in the detail section, but I can also continue and add this next icon, which is gonna open up a calendar and allow me to add a due date.

So let's say I want to do it by next Tuesday. I'm gonna say the 11th. Now we're gonna come back to setting a time and repeating a task.

But in this case, I'm just gonna select done. There's no specific time, it's just gonna be due on that date and now I'm going to hit save.

So here you can see in our list view, we have a separation between those tasks that have an actual due date. In this case, we've just got the one and then the one that has no due date as well.

And sometimes this can be helpful because not every one of our tasks needs to have a due date so sometimes this can actually benefit your productivity, but let's say I want to go back to email Karen and add a due date and maybe some further details as well.

All I need to do is click on that task and now you can see I have access to the details area. I can now come back here and add a date and a time.

So let's say in this case, I want to make sure I do this by the end of the weekend here, I'm gonna say by the end of Saturday, and in this case, what I can do is select a particular time.

Now this can be important because Google Tasks integrates directly with your Google calendar so you can have all of your tasks here that have a due date or a due date and time have it appear on your Google calendar as well.

So I'm gonna say 10:30 AM and I'm gonna say okay, I'm brought back to this calendar screen here in case I want to make this a recurring event, but we're gonna come back to that in just a moment.

So I'm gonna say done in this case, there you can see the date and time, and now I don't have to hit save or anything like that, all I can do is go back to my list and now you can see I've got this little time icon which is beside it as well.

Let's add one more task here without a due date. I'm just gonna call it task number three in this case and I'm gonna hit save just so we can see that separation again because what I want to show you is how you can reorder.

Sorting Tasks by Due Date or Custom Order

Or view your tasks in a different order. So in the bottom right-hand corner, we can see these three little dots.

And the first option here we have is to sort our list in two different ways. By default, it's gonna sort by due date.

And that makes a lot of sense when you're managing a to-do list. But if I click on this, you can see that I can also choose my own order in this case, I'm gonna select my own order.

And what it's done now, it's actually just entered it in from the most recent first to the least recent at the bottom. You'll remember that email.

Karen was the first one, task two and task three is what I entered in later. But let's say that I want task number two to be at the forefront.

If I click and hold, if I'm just holding down with my thumb or with my finger, I can drag it to a new position. Even though that's not due next, it's actually due next week, I can put it at the forefront if I want.

So again, you can move any of your tasks around in the order that you like, but we can switch. We can go back to those three dots and say actually, on second thought, let's go back to date.

Now if I go back and switch again, what tasks will do is that it should return it to the order you last had previously. So it should remember your order, but keep in mind, if you're adding new tasks along the way, it's not gonna look quite that distinct.

Let's go back to the date order and the other thing I want to show you here in this menu is that you can rename your list as well. Here you can see that I've listed it as Scott's list.

What if I want to call this something more like maybe my work list or my business list, for example, so I can do that. I can rename it whatever I want.

And the reason why that's important is that we can be managing more than just one list. Let's go over to the bottom left-hand side of our screen, the little hamburger or sandwich menu here and here you can see we've got the work list listed.

That's what we're working in right now, but I can create a new list. So in this case, I'm gonna say that I want to create something that's maybe a personal list.

These are the things that I'm gonna be working on outside of work. I'm gonna hit done.

And you can see I'm brought to a new list, which is completely fresh. Same functionality is what we saw in the previous list.

So here, I'm just gonna say that this is a family task. Maybe it's a family-related task and I'm going to hit save.

So there I've got one task in my personal list. If I come down to the left-hand side, I can toggle and switch between these two lists.

I can view my work list and I can view my personal list. Now it's important to know is that you cannot have a task that is listed in more than one list.

It is a one-to-one relationship. So I can't have this family task be displayed nor can I see all of my tasks at once.

Now, some of you may think that this is a drawback that I can't just see a master list of all of my tasks. However, I would argue that in some cases, this is a benefit.

Let's just take a look at the example I have here. Things that are relating to work versus things that are relating to my family or things outside of work.

What can be so confusing and distracting is if you have all of these things listed in the same place because usually one of them is winning out or vying for your attention more than anything else.

But let me show you how this can work together. Let's say this task number three here is actually something that was meant for my personal list, but I created it here within my work list.

All I need to do is click on that task where I can see the further details and you can see near the top, we actually have a little blue dropdown.

It's in my work list at the moment, but I can come up here and say move it to my personal list. So now this task is within my personal list.

If I come back out, I am still in my work list because that's where I was before I selected that task, but if we switched to my personal list, now you can see that task three resides there.

So you can easily and quickly move your tasks back and forth between these lists. Let's go back to the work list for just an example and let's take a look at some of the other things that we can do within a task.

Creating Repeating Tasks

So for example, I'm gonna open up task number two and let's talk about repeating or a recurring task. So in this case, if we need to edit the due date at any time, we just click on the date itself and it's gonna open up this calendar view.

So in this case, let's say that this is a task that I want to occur on a regular basis. It's something that I want to have happen maybe every day at a certain time.

So I'm gonna say I want it to start… I'm gonna change the date to the Monday. And I'm gonna say I want this to happen every day at let's say 2:00 PM in the afternoon.

So I've got my due date, I've got my due time. It's actually not repeating yet. For that, we need to select this repeat option down below.

And so here we can choose from a few different options here. I said I want it to happen every day so I'm gonna select this dropdown and say every day.

I want it to start on May 10th and yes, I want it to happen at 2:00 PM. So I am going to hit done at this time.

So now we have our repeat on here. Now if I go back to my master list, we can see we now have another icon.

We've got that repeat icon, those two little arrows showing me that it is a recurring task. So this is something that's gonna be very helpful.

Now, one thing to note is that as we check off this particular task, it actually is not going to appear again until the next time that it needs to be repeated, but let's talk about checking things off.

I'm gonna add another task here as well. Let's just keep with our number system task four and maybe task five in this case.

Completing and Reviving Tasks

So we've got a few more tasks here. So once you've completed a particular item, all you need to do is either check off the little circle to the left of it.

Here you can see one completed, I can undo it if I need to. And where that task goes is to the very bottom of the list under this completed section.

Let me check off task number four as well. So now I can see that I have two in parentheses that are completed.

Now, if I want to see specifically what those tasks are, I can just choose the little dropdown arrow here and it can show those tasks that are crossed out.

I can even click on them if I want to go into and review the detail. I haven't revived it yet.

At the very bottom, I can choose to mark it as uncompleted, but at this case, maybe I just wanted to review that task. Now at any time if I want to, I can come down here and I can say, you know what?

I prematurely completed this task so let's say mark it uncomplete. And now what we'll see is that task four is now in the upper portion again so we have that task ready and available for us to do.

Now at any time if you want to get rid of all of the tasks in this completed section, you could either do it one by one, but I would recommend you come back down to these three little dots in the bottom right-hand corner.

Here, we have a choice to delete all completed tasks. So in my example, I only have one, but you may have a dozen or many, many more.

If you never want to see them again, all you need to do is say delete all completed tasks. You will get a warning saying if you want to delete it permanently, I'm gonna say yes, and now you can see I have nothing left in my completed area.

Now, the other way in which you can complete a task is simply by swiping to the right. Here, you can see that I'm using my finger to swipe to the right and if I continue that all the way to the right, it is now brought that task down to the completed area as well.

Let's take a look at another piece of functionality here.

Adding and Managing Sub-Tasks

Which can be very, very helpful and that is using sub tasks here within Google Tasks. So I'm gonna add what I'm gonna call a master task in this case so this is the high-level task.

Maybe it's a project that's gonna take me a couple of weeks to accomplish. So let's say I'm gonna make a master task here and I'm going to hit save.

But now what I can do is I can open up this task and you can see at the very bottom, there's an area called add sub tasks because maybe there's a few different things I need to do in order to accomplish this bigger or larger master task.

So I'm gonna select sub tasks in this case and I'm just gonna say sub one. I can hit enter and add another one.

Hit sub two, in fact, you don't have to hit enter. You can just click on add sub tasks to quickly and easily add more sub tasks.

So now I've got my three sub tasks here as well. Now you'll notice at this stage, I cannot add a due date to these sub tasks, but don't worry.

We can still give them all their own unique due dates depending on where you need to accomplish them within this larger task.

So at this case, if I come back out to my master list, you can see that we have the master task and we also have our sub tasks as well.

Now, the nice thing is that if I go back to reordering, let's say if I don't want to order it by due date, I want to go by my own order, you can see that those sub tasks are actually indented which is nice and easy to see.

And if I click and drag and want to move the master task around, it will keep the sub tasks with them which really only makes sense, but I just want to make sure that you're familiar with how that works.

So if I want to drag it back to the top, those sub tasks are going to remain with it. But let's say I want to give those sub tasks their own individual due dates.

All I need to do is click on them and now you can see that they really behave and look just like any other regular task. I can come in here and I can say well, this one is gonna be due on the 11th and then sub task number two is gonna be due on the 13th.

And then sub task three is going to be due a little bit later on on the 17th or something along those lines. So here we go.

Now I've got all of them with their own unique due dates. Now that we're familiar with using Google Tasks on mobile,

Using Tasks within Google Calendar

Let's jump over to Google calendar and show you how it looks like over there. Here within my Google calendar, you can see we have that Saturday event, email Karen about something.

It's showing here on my Google calendar. To make sure that your tasks appear here also, just click the sandwich menu on the top left-hand corner and make sure that you have tasks selected so that you can see your tasks on your calendar.

So not only will you be able to view them here within Google calendar, but I can actually click and drag and move it and of course, that's going to sync directly with my Google Tasks as well.

If I click on it, I can see the details if we had added further details to this. In the bottom right-hand corner, I can mark it as complete and I can even hit the edit button and start to edit things here as well.

I can see which work list it is listed under. I can change it to an all-day task as well. So you can do all the same things or most of the same things that you would find in Google Tasks.

The other thing that is good to know that here within Google calendar, we can also add tasks directly. So you don't always have to be going back to the Tasks app itself.

In the bottom right-hand corner, if we hit this plus button, you're probably used to adding a new event or possibly a reminder here within Google calendar, but you can see just above event, we have the option to add a task.

So if I select this, I'm gonna say task in calendar just so we know which one it is. And I'm going to say that this is not gonna be an all-day event, I want it to be on the Saturday at 10:00 AM and I'm going to hit save.

So here you can see that we have the task in calendar. It's going to appear here on this date exactly where I want it, but if I go back to Google Tasks here as well under my work list, you can see there it is under tomorrow task and calendar at 10:00 AM.

So a great way to be extra efficient while working in mobile. Now let's jump over to our desktop computer.

Using Tasks on Desktop Computer

To show you where you can manage Google Tasks there. First, you're gonna want to go to Google calendar.

Why, because that's probably where you're going to be dealing with most of your task, but note you can access tasks in both Gmail and Google Drive as well. Here on the right-hand side, there is a Google side panel and you should be able to see the tasks view here.

If you don't see the Tasks icon, come all the way down to the right, and you should see a little arrow which will expand this side panel.

By selecting Google Tasks, you can see that we have the exact same menu and the exact same functionality that we had on the mobile view. So here we have the tasks that we created earlier and if we look on our calendar, we can see them listed here as well.

Make sure to remember that you have tasks visible on the Google calendar that you are using so that you can see them here right in your calendar.

But when it comes to working with your different lists, for example, you can do so right here. When it comes to editing and adding sub tasks, et cetera, you can do so as well.

The one nice advantage is that the desktop version does allow you to access some of that functionality directly. So for example, if I have over a master task and hit these three dots, I can add a sub task, indent, delete or change it to a list right here without first having to open up the task itself.

Now if you have some specific questions about how to use Google Tasks, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

We also have a large number of Tasks experts right here in this Simpletivity community and I'm sure that they'd be happy to give you some additional answers as well.

Thank you so much for watching this video and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Editing Your Event Settings

If you want to get the most out of Calendly, you should optimize your setup. So in this video, I'm showing you seven Calendly settings you should review right now. (air whooshing)

So here I am within my Calendly account, and the first place that we're gonna go is one of our events. I'm gonna click on this event to open it up and now I can edit my details. First thing, we want to go to the 'When can people book this event', and there's an awful lot of information in here so you want to make sure that you look at the careful details.

Days Out Invitees Can Schedule

The first place that we want to look is the date range. Now often when people are first setting up their Calendly events or accounts, they select indefinitely into the future, meaning that they want to be able to be booked at any time, right? If you're trying to acquire clients and get more bookings, you might want to select this option or at least be tempted. But I highly recommend that you keep some type of tight timeframe into the future. So in this example, I've set mine up for 14 calendar days.

Now we can change between calendar days and business days if you want to exclude the weekends but I've chosen two weeks out from today, meaning that no one can book me three weeks out in advance. Remember, do you really want to give someone the ability to book you three months or even six months into the future?

It's gonna depend on your business and the type of event that we're looking at here, but make sure that you're comfortable with the timeframe in which people can schedule you out.

Adding Buffer Time Between Meetings

The next thing that we want to look at here is when it comes to buffer time. And although it's near the bottom of this list, it's something that we don't want to overlook. Want to add time before or after your events? I strongly encourage you to say yes, meaning that you don't have meetings booked back to back or telling someone, "Listen, I've got a hard stop," because in most cases, we are dealing with video conferencing such as Zoom meetings or Google Hangouts, and so you don't want someone else dropping in to your meeting before you've wrapped things up.

So we've got a few different increments here between five minutes all the way out to a few hours, so you need to select what is best for you. But I also strongly encourage you to select both a before event and an after event buffer time. Remember, we're not just looking at things that are being scheduled with Calendly, these are also other events which are going to be appearing and scheduling on your linked calendars. So maybe even if you've blocked out some time for some important work, you want to give yourself some buffer time before someone can schedule you in. So I highly recommend that you select a buffer time for both the before and after event.

Next up, we don't want to forget this little link here, which we find at the very bottom of this section, 'Additional rules for your availability' cause I think there's some really key things in here that you're going to want to check. The first one here has to do with scheduling conditions.

Minimum Time Before an Event Can Be Scheduled

And there's really two settings that we want to look at here. The first one is invitees can schedule within. Now, what exactly does this one mean? I think this might be the most important setting in the entire event area. This basically means that no one can book me until 16 hours from now. Meaning if I share this or if they come across this link or my scheduling page on my website, no one can book me, the earliest, I should say, the earliest that someone can book me is 16 hours in advance. Now for me, this gives me enough time to both prepare and perhaps ask a few questions, review what they are wanting for me. And if you are not using the built-in billing here within Calendly, it also gives you some time to send an invoice, for example, or however you collect payment, or maybe just to confirm that this is something that you want to keep.

If you're doing a consulting business, you don't want to waste your time and just let anyone book your time. Maybe you need to qualify them first, and that's going to give you some buffer time. If you do not set this for some time in the future, that means that someone could book you 15 minutes from now or an hour from now, so make sure you have at least a few hours in between here, again, depending on your event type.

Limit Number of Events Per Day

Now the one down below is also something that I think many Calendly users overlook and that is the 'Maximum allowed events per day for this type of event.' Now I understand, when you're first starting out, especially if you're starting a new business, you might say, "I want as many bookings. I want as many clients as I possibly can." But think about the event that you are creating here. Should there be a maximum?

In this particular example that I'm looking at here, this is my consulting event, and so I want to limit myself to only two of these one-hour consulting sessions a day. Why? Because I've got other things that I need to do as well, and I don't want to fill up any day full of consulting engagements. I want to give my clients the best of me, and I have found that if I can limit this to a maximum of two, that is great. I've got the energy. I can give them all of my focus and attention. I don't want to be drained when it gets to maybe the fourth or the fifth consulting engagement of that day. So make sure you select at least a number, a number that is appropriate for you.

Next on our list, we want to come down to the 'Additional Options' section and we want to select the first one here, 'Invitee Questions.' Now at first glance, this may look rather basic and including a name and an email address is going to be standard. A quick additional tip is that you may want to turn on the 'Add Guests' feature if you want to allow people to invite other guests, other email addresses as a part of the invitation.

Add Custom Questions

But the one that I want to focus on here is actually asking your invitees a question so that when they sign up to book a time with you, that you are getting some additional information from them. All we need to do is click on this area here and we can edit this message to whatever we want. We can ask them specific questions as to, what would you like to speak with me about in particular? Can you tell me a little bit more about the technology you're using or what you'd like to get out of this meeting? You can change it and you can even make it a required question if necessary. But the other benefit here is that you don't have to limit yourself to just one question. Here, I can select 'add a new question' and I can add multiple questions, and make them required if necessary.

This can be a fantastic way to validate the individual who is requesting to book time with you. What exactly are they after? What are they seeking as a part of this engagement? So you can qualify them in advance and get some helpful information from them. Once in a while, I've received information from someone and realized, "You know what, I'm maybe not the best person suited for their needs." Not only did it save them time, but it saved me time. So I didn't have to find that out during the call. I could read what they wrote here. Maybe ask a follow-up question, but then say, "You know what, this probably isn't the best thing for you. We're probably not the best match and we can both find better solutions."

So make sure you take a hard look at using a question, whether it's a qualifying question or just asking for some more details here within Advance.

Next in our list, we wanna get actually out of our event here and actually come up to our 'Account' and select 'Account Settings.' Now you may think that by selecting 'Account Settings,' this doesn't have much to do with the rest of your site. It has to do with your profile picture and your name and your welcome message. Well, yes, these things are actually going to appear on your Calendly page, but what I wanna show you and what often too many people forget

Add Your Logo to the Booking Page

is the branding area here. Here, you can see that I've uploaded my logo. Why is this important? Well, I'll show you. I send people to my Calendly booking page, I want them to make sure that they know who they are booking with and not to question if this is the right screen. Not only can they see my profile picture here and my name but having the logo here can give them some additional comfort and also can make it a little more seamless if this is coming directly from my website or a link within my email. So if we go to our Calendly settings here, pay attention to the requirement here for the logo. Not only will it remind you where that logo will appear but they recommend that you use an image of 440 pixels by 220 pixels for the best display.

I would recommend that you always look at the recommendation whether it's Calendly or whatever website that you're uploading a logo or an image so it looks the best for your viewers.

Last but not least, I've perhaps saved the best setting of them all and the coolest trick for using Calendly. If you use the Google Chrome browser, I highly recommend that you install the Calendly extension. Why? Well, not only can you access your Calendly dates that much quicker, but let me jump into my email here for a second. With the Calendly extension installed up above, I can select it and I can easily see my different event types here. So what I can do is I can come here and actually copy this link immediately and then paste it into my email. But that's not the best tip of all.

Add Times Directly to an Email

In fact, my favorite feature here is that you can see there is a link here called 'Add times to email.' What this will do is if I select this link, I can then say, "You know what, I'm gonna make myself available" or, "I want to give this individual some availability on the 5th, on the 6th, and the 7th." I don't have to give them my entire calendar. I just wanna focus in on a particular area of the week. I'm gonna select 'Finish and Share' and now these times are copied to my clipboard. All I need to do now is come over here and I am going to paste them into my email. And look at this. Now this individual, once I've sent this email and they receive it, they can then book a time directly from within the email. I don't have to send them to another browser tab. I don't have to send them to my main Calendly screen. They can book it right here from within the email.

Now, if you'd like to learn more about every setting in Calendly, I recommend that you click this video here. And if you have other questions about how to use Calendly, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Adding notes to Google Keep

This video is brought to you by SaneBox. Stay tuned to learn more about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox. (logo whooshing)

Are you brand new to Google Keep, or perhaps you're just looking for a refresher? Well, in this video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know to get started with getting the most out of your notes right here within Google Keep.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today I'm starting with a brand new account.

I don't even have a single note listed here within Google Keep, but let's change that and show you all the different ways in which you can add notes, edit notes, and then manage all of that information here, right within Google Keep.

Now, by default, when you first log in or open up Keep, you will be presented with the notes section. Now, a little later on, we'll look at the other options that we see here on the left-hand side.

But to get started, let's start putting in some notes. Well, it's very, very easy at the top of our screen we will always have this take a note section.

And if we place our cursor in here, we are opened up with a brand new note. So we can start adding any piece of text, we can copy and paste links and other pieces of information directly into this note.

You'll notice that the cursor will always put us into the body of the note and not the title up above. A title is not necessary here within Google Keep.

So if I select close, you can see there is my full note at this case in point. If I start a new note, maybe I want to say this is new note number two but I do want to give it a title.

So this is the title section up here. If I hit close, you can see it doesn't make that significant of a difference. This really comes down to personal preference, and you may not need a title for each and every one of your notes.

But let's take a look at some of the other things that we can do here within our notes as well. Whether you're taking a new note, or perhaps you're coming in here to edit an existing note,

Using time and location reminders

You will see some other options here on the left-hand side. Let's start off with our reminders.

This can be really helpful if you wanna make sure not to forget a particular piece of information, or especially if you're using Google Keep as a to-do list.

So if we click on our reminders here, we're going to be presented with a few different default times, including later today, tomorrow, or next week. Now, if these fit my needs, I can select one of these right away.

Otherwise, I can come down here and select pick a date and time and be very specific as to when I would like to be reminded. So I'm gonna hit save in this case, and you can see I now have a little icon here, a little badge you could say that it's telling me when I will be reminded today at 2:30.

If I click on this, I can always come back in here and change that and say, you know what? On second thought, remind me tomorrow.

So now, I will be notified if I have Google Keep on my mobile devices, if I have my browser notifications turned on, I will be notified at that time about this particular note.

But you may have noticed that there was another option here under reminders. Maybe I don't want a particular date and time. Maybe I want a particular place.

And this is especially helpful if you are using the Google Keep mobile app on your phone. If I select place, all I need to do is start typing in the name of maybe a store, for example.

Let's see if I can pick something a little bit closer to home here. You can just start typing things in like you would in a regular Google Maps or Google Search.

And now when I've found, in this case, my local Staples store, I can hit save. And you can see that that is now added to this note.

Now it's not going to remind me at a particular date or time. What it's going to do, is that if I have Google Keep on my mobile device, when I am near this store, when I am driving by, or walking by it, when I'm within vicinity of this store, then I will be reminded.

So this can be especially helpful if you're managing a grocery list, or in this case if I need to buy some office supplies, when I'm close to that location, I will be reminded on my mobile device.

Collaborating notes with others

All right, a few other options here, the next one over has to do with collaboration. So you can always add someone to your particular note.

In this case, I am the owner here but all I need to do is type in someone else's email address. Let's type in this test account here, and I can hit save.

And now I can see that that individual has been added to this note. In fact, on the front of the note, from my main screen I can see that as well.

So now they can have access to this note and we can collaborate together. They can actually add content and we can see each other's changes as well.

Adding colors to notes

The third option here has to do with changing a color, and this can be very helpful to organizing all of your notes. Maybe I wanna make this note yellow.

And maybe for me, that represents something that I need to do today, for example. So I can manage my notes and base it on color coding.

You don't have to apply a color, but again another way in which we can organize our notes.

Adding and removing images to notes

The next one over has to do with adding an image. So you can add an additional image to any of your notes.

In this case, maybe I'm gonna grab this image here. I'm gonna select open. And now I've got this image embedded or a part of this given note as well.

There's a lot of other things that we can do with our images here within Google Keep. At this stage, I'm just going to show you how to remove it.

If you hover over the image, we can remove it, we can remove it here as well. And now it is removed, it's gone from that particular note.

The next one over has to do with archiving this note. And remember, archiving is different than deleting a note. Deleting is permanent, it's gone for good.

If I choose to archive this note, it will end up over here in this archive folder, so I can retrieve it later. Last but not least, we have this more section where we have a number of further advanced options as well.

This is where we can delete a note permanently. Here we can add a label, which I'm gonna show you in just a moment.

Adding drawings to notes

We can also add things like a drawing. So if you want to add something that you're drawing to, this is especially useful if you're using the mobile version of Google Keep, you can do so as well.

Now you can see I've added this drawing directly to this particular note. Be aware that it's actually going to add a full square, regardless of how small your drawing may be.

It's actually gonna take up an awful lot of room here when you add a drawing to that particular note. But let's look at some of the other options we can do here as well.

We can make a copy of this note. Maybe most of the note is the same thing that we want somewhere else, but we can make a copy and make some changes.

We can also show checkboxes, which I'll show you in a moment, and also copy it to Google Docs so that you can access this information within Google Drive.

But let's get back to adding more notes, because we can do so much more than just adding text-based notes here within Google Keep.

Lists and checklists within a note

One of the more popular ways of adding notes here within Google Keep is to create a list or a specifically a checklist.

So rather than placing my cursor here within take a note, I can come over here and select a new list. And what you can see is that it's going to give me a list-based form.

So if I start to write in, maybe a grocery list here, for example, I now have some checkboxes that I can tick off as I go along the way.

So this is especially helpful if you're creating a shopping list as you see here, or anything else, such as a to-do list where you want to tick things off.

If I close this off, I can see, and I can actually even access this checklist from the front of the note. I don't have to necessarily open it up.

I can actually start to tick these things off and you can see that it's going to cross them through and put them to the bottom of my list as well.

The other nice thing about the list format here within Google Keep is that you can drag and embed them or make them as a sublist down below.

So here I now have milk under oranges which probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but maybe what would make more sense is if I had a category named dairy, for example.

And maybe I added some things like cheese for example. And maybe dairy is gonna be my main header, and I'm gonna bring milk down below.

And I'm gonna bring cheese down below that as well. So I can have all of those areas underneath that subcategory down below.

Now, if I want to hide my completed events I can do so as well by clicking this down arrow here. But the other thing that we can do is always convert this back to a regular list.

So if I come down to my three dots here, I can say either uncheck all items, delete the checked items, or I can say hide checkboxes.

Now, in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, keep, I wanna keep my deleted checkboxes. And now it's just gonna bring it back to a standard text or note-based form.

If I want to, I can always come back down here and say, show checkboxes. And it's gonna bring it back into that checkbox form.

But please note, it's not going to keep any of your previous formatting and here you can see milk and cheese are now in the same order as dairy in this particular example.

The other two options that we have here, is to create a new note with a drawing right out of the get-go. So we get our drawing screen here.

I'm gonna close this one, and the last one here is a new note with an image. So we already showed you how to add that image with an existing note.

Here, we can start with an image and we don't necessarily have to add any additional text down below if we don't want to, we can just add that image here as well.

Well, now that we have several notes created, and although many of them are very, very simple. What are some of the best ways for us to organize these notes?

How to organize Google Keep notes

Well, within Google Keep almost everything is drag and drop. So if you want to take something and move it somewhere else, you can take your cursor and just drag it around into a different location that you wish to.

Now up above, we actually have two different views. This is what's called the grid view, where you'll probably have roughly three or four across the top depending on the size of your screen.

But we can also have what's called a list view, by clicking this option, we get a vertical list. So now everything is gonna be stacked on top of one another, regardless of what is inside or how much content is within those notes.

I think for most people this grid view is a bit easier to work with just because you see so much more information on the screen at a given time.

But let's take a look at two other ways in which we can organize our notes.

How to pin notes to the top

You can see, as I hover over each of these notes, I have an option here to pin the note.

And so if I select this option here for this new note number two, if I select pin, you can now see that it's created two different sections here within my home screen.

I've got a pin section up top, which includes this one that I want to pin. And then I've got everything else listed as others down below.

Maybe I also want to pin this image one as well. So I'm gonna select that pin and I can reorganize these ones as well.

If I want to reorganize them in different sections, for example, I can do so. But if you have something very, very important and you'd like to pin it to the very top, this is a great way to do so.

Now the other thing that you might notice here is that as I hover over these different notes is that there's a little checkbox on the top left-hand corner.

What this allows me to do is actually select that note and then I can do other actions to it. Now this is really only most applicable when you want to multi-select and apply something to multiple notes.

So with this one selected, maybe I wanna select the other pinned note, and I'm also gonna select this yellow note. So here you can see in the top left-hand corner, I have three notes selected, and now I can pin all of them.

I can add the same reminder time to all of them. Maybe I wanna come over here and say, you know what? I wanna make them all yellow in this case, because this one is an image you can't really see that it's labeled as yellow.

But if I was to come in here, if I come in here and de-select them, you can see it has this yellow hover over it if we added some text, it would still look yellow as well.

So remember, that's the checkbox here if you want to multi-select and apply an action to more than one note. Now, the third way in which we can group our notes together

Using labels in Google Keep

And really start to declutter this home screen a bit, is by adding labels. And on the left-hand side we actually don't have any labels created at all.

We can create them in one of two ways. We can come over here to edit labels. And I'm just gonna call this one a work label, for example.

Okay, I've got one work label, and maybe this one I'm gonna say is a family label so I can do so as well. Now I've got two different labels.

You can see them here on the left-hand side of the screen. And now when I come over to one of my notes, if I select more, I can say add a label and say, yeah, this is work-related.

So I can add that label to it. You will notice, you can add more than one label. You don't have to keep it from a one-to-one relationship.

You can add this to work and family, if I want to. And those will also appear on the front of the card.

The power here is that if I only want to look at my work-related notes, I come over here to the menu side, select work. And now all I see are my work-related notes.

If ever I want to go back and see everything, I come up to the top and say notes. Maybe I'm gonna come over here and say that this one is a family related item.

I'm gonna say that this is a personal one. I'm gonna say that this is also a family related item, and I'm going to hit close. So if I click on the family option here, I'm gonna see those two included as well.

Another helpful tip, a very quick and easy way to add these labels. Let's start with a new sample note here, is if I add a hashtag. So in this case, I'm gonna add the hashtag.

I can either type it in, or it's gonna bring up my options here as well. So I'm gonna select family in this case, I'm gonna say close, and here you can see the hashtag still exists but I also have that family label included here as well.

Now, instead of coming over here to edit our labels, if I take another new note, or maybe I can just apply it to an existing note here, if I want to, if I say add, change labels or add a label, I can start to enter in a new label right from this menu.

I don't have to go into the edit labels area. I've now both added this new label to this note but I've also created this label here on the left-hand side.

Note, Google Keep does not give us the option to rearrange these labels or reorder them. So they will always be listed in alphabetical order.

Sticking with the menu side here on the left-hand side, you will remember that we added a reminder over here. If you ever want to see just the notes

Archiving and deleting notes

That have a reminder applied, you can always select reminders. And here we can see this location-based reminder, whether it's location or a due date that you've added.

You can see all of those reminders here within that reminders tab. Lastly, we've got two other options down below. And that is our archive and our trash.

Now, Google Keep makes it very easy for us to archive because as you hover over any of your notes, you can see the last little icon here is our archive icon.

So if I select that here, and I'm gonna come over and maybe select that on this note as well, both of those notes have now been removed from my home screen.

But if I ever need to go back and take a look at where they are, I can click on the archive option and see all of my archived notes. The other helpful thing here is that you can see this one is listed as a family note.

If I come back up to family, it will actually show me the archived notes here as well. So it will create that separation from either your active or the notes that do display on the homepage, and things that are listed here as archived.

Last but not least, you still have access to some of the notes that you have deleted or put in the trash. By default, notes in the trash are deleted after seven days, or you can go ahead and manually delete these notes as well.

This is where you will find them in the trash option.

Searching for notes

Next up, we wanna take a look at the search capabilities here within Google Keep, because rather quickly, you build up a lot of information and a lot of things that you may be searching for.

So here at the very top of the screen we have our search bar. By clicking in our cursor, we actually get a variety of other options available to us even before we apply any text.

So for example, maybe I just want to look at images here, I can click on this images option, and it's gonna bring back any of my notes that have that image.

If I select X here, I'm gonna come back to this menu, I can also search by my different labels. I've got things titled, things, which is sort of a smart way of Google Keep to try and classify all of your different notes.

I can see who I've collaborated with, or the things that are a particular color. So in this example, I just wanna pull up the things that have yellow with them.

Now that we're familiar with the search capabilities here within Keep, let's take a look at our setting. And there's some particular things that you're gonna want to make note of.

Google Keep settings

The very first option here under the gear icon is settings. And let's take a look at each of these one-by-one. So the first section is notes and lists, and you have the choice to either add new items to the bottom.

And if we uncheck this, uncheck this, new items will be added to the top. The second option, move checked items to the bottom. Now this has to do with creating a list or a checklist like you saw before.

Next up is displaying rich link previews. What this has to do is that when you are copying and pasting, for example, a website URL, do you wanna be able to see a preview of that website, maybe a little image or a font that is particular to that website, or do you only want to see the link itself?

Lastly, here in this section, we can enable a dark theme. So if you don't like the white background you can have a dark theme as well.

Down below, under reminder defaults, this is where we will select those default reminders. So if there are particular times of the day in which you would like to be reminded, just to make it that much easier when you're applying these reminders, this is where you set it.

And here's a pro tip, changing these reminder times will actually change the default snooze times in your Gmail account. So if you'd like what's going on in Gmail with those default reminder times, be careful with what you select here.

But if you need to change them, this is the place to go. Last but not least, is the ability to enable or disable sharing if you don't want to allow sharing of notes with other members.

Now, if you'd like to keep your email inbox in order, check out SaneBox. SaneBox is the artificial intelligent tool to help you keep your inbox and all of your messages uncluttered.

I especially love the SaneLater folder, which learns from you as you move different messages into the folder. Therefore, you don't have to fill up your inbox with things that you don't need to see right away.

And the great thing about SaneBox is that it learns from your behavior. So the more that you use it, the better it gets at refining your messages.

If you'd like to try SaneBox for yourself and receive a special bonus, just for Simpletivity viewers, be sure to click the link in the description below.

Searching in Google apps can be difficult

Sometimes it can be hard to find what you're looking for in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, or any Google app product. But I've started to use something to really make my labels pop and make sure that I'm finding exactly what I'm looking for.

Let me show you how in today's video. (air whooshing)

So let's get started here within Google Keep, and then we'll move on to other popular Google products such as Calendar, Google Drive, and even Gmail.

The reason why I wanted to start here within Keep is that perhaps it is the most limiting when it comes to our labels. Here you can see I've got three different labels: Family, Personal, and Work; however, there is not even any color coding beside them.

They just give us this sort of generic label icon beside them. And if you come down here to edit labels, you may say to yourself, "Oh, great. Here, I can add a label. I can just go in and..." No, it's just text-based.

Adding emojis to Google Keep

So this is what I like doing. I will come in here and I'll usually put it at the front of the label.

Now, if you're a Windows user, you can just use Windows + . and that's gonna bring up your emoji icon, your emoji dialogue. So you can start to search and start to type in something or use from one of the more frequently used ones here down below.

Otherwise, you can go to a website such as Emojipedia, which is one of my personal favorites. If you wanna search through and maybe spend a bit more time looking at some particular icons.

But let's do this quick and fast. So maybe under Family, I'm gonna select this family icon.

Now, one thing of note, before you come down here and edit the next one, make sure you hit the check mark here to lock it in. So there you can see that we now have that icon down below.

I'm gonna get to why it shifted to the bottom in just a moment because it's treating this as something special here. But let's go to the other ones first.

I'm again, gonna bring up my emoji dialogue here. And for Personal, I'm just gonna put this individual person here in front. I'm gonna hit that check mark.

And then for Work, why don't we use something like a laptop, I think would be appropriate. Usually, I'll put a single space in between just so it's easier to read the label.

I'm gonna hit the check mark here and I'm gonna say Done. And so the great thing is, is that these really pop. Now I only have three at the moment but what if I had 27 different labels here within Keep?

Now it's gonna make it that much easier for me to find those labels that I'm looking for. And also keep in mind, you don't have to do this for every single one, maybe there's just a particular one.

But even when it comes to the notes themselves, here you can see that they really stand out that much more. I don't have to come down here and read. "Oh, is this a personal label?"

No, I can actually see my little icon on here and see that these two labels are indeed Personal. If I go over here to Family, it's quick and easy to see that I have that label immediately on it.

And even when you're adding labels from within an existing note or taking a new note, right, if I come down here and say that I want to change the labels or add a label, it makes it that much easier in all cases.

Using emojis in Google Calendar

So let's move on to something that we don't often attribute to labels themselves, and that is Google Calendar.

So here I've got a very basic calendar and I've just got a couple of recurring events that are listed here but already, you can see that my exercise time stands out a little more, right? Because I've got this little running man beside it.

So not only do I have it perhaps in a different color, but I've got this icon, I've got this emoji right next to it. If I want lunch to maybe stand out that much more, If I come in here to edit it, and again, I'm gonna bring up my emoji icon here.

And let's see, let's just type in something like, Oh, I dunno, food. We're just gonna search up some food. I'm gonna put in a nice, green, healthy salad here.

I'm gonna say Save and let's do it to the following events as well. So now, again, I've got that icon that emoji, sorry, that is gonna be in front of all of my events.

It actually makes it maybe a little less important that I use the color changes here, right? 'Cause as you know, unless you're using different calendars here on the left-hand side, when you're creating a new event, it's gonna go to your default color.

And yeah, you can select a different color down below. If I go into more options here, I can choose any one of these colors if I want to, but that becomes a little less important when you start adding these types of emojis.

And you can start to build sort of your own glossary or your own index of what these emojis mean. So for example, maybe I've got a very important meeting, right? This is something that is very important.

But if I want it to stand out as something that's gonna grab my attention or something that's going to stand out, maybe I wanna start using this green check mark.

So anything that is extremely important or something that I need to prepare for in advance, I'm gonna use that green check box. So, again, you don't certainly have to use this for all of your appointments or your events but they can really help things to stand out.

Many of you know that I like to use the all-day event area up top, and I'll often use them for things such as tasks or agenda items, not just things like a vacation.

But if I wanna separate out the difference between perhaps something that is just an agenda and a reminder versus maybe I am gonna take some vacation time up here, why don't I start with an emoji?

And let's see what comes up for vacation. Yeah, plane, travel, things that many of us haven't been able to do recently. (Scott chuckles)

And I'm gonna say vacation and it's gonna span over a few days, the whole weekend or something like that. So again, it just stands out that much more.

I'm not going to question, "Oh, am I really flying somewhere? Am I really going somewhere?" Well, yeah, you added the emoji, Scott. That's why you put it there in the first place.

Adding emojis to Google Drive

Let's move on to something else that many of us are using and that is Google Drive. And here I've got a test folder where I'm already using some color coding, right?

I'm using green for my finance folder and I'm using red for sales. And if you come up here and just right-click, of course, you can change the color on any of your folders, right?

Any folder, doesn't matter what level, you can choose a different color, and that can be very helpful, right? That can be very helpful to make sure that things are in place here or that certain things stand out.

But maybe I wanna come down here to Support and I'm gonna select Rename in this case. And at the beginning here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring up something like maybe a phone, maybe something like that. Phone, support, would that make sense in this case?

And I'm just gonna hover over this for just a second. It says telephone receiver. Okay, so I just wanna know what the actual name is.

I'm gonna say OK here. The reason why I wanted to see that is 'cause number one, you'll see something with an emoji, in most cases, will sort to the very top.

It's gonna treat it almost like a special character. So you wanna keep that in mind as well as this one sorts to the top. But the other thing you want to consider is that if you are using multiple emojis here,

Is that whatever that emoji name is, so in this case, this was telephone receiver. It's gonna sort it by that T in telephone. So let's come down to Development and use this as an example.

So I'm gonna click on it and I'm gonna say Rename, and I'm gonna come to the front of it just like we have been so far, and this time I'm gonna choose this question mark, right?

So I'm gonna choose the question mark, I'm gonna give it the space, I'm gonna say OK. Now you'll see that it's actually not sorting this based on the D in development, because, yeah, D does come before S.

It's actually sorting it on the Q in question mark, instead of the T in support. If we come down here to support and say Rename, and let's purposely get rid of the phone, and let's do something like, oh, I don't know something like a baseball, like the letter B in this case.

So what we should see now is that yeah, the B in baseball is now sorting this ahead of the Q in development. So you wanna keep that in mind if you do want your folders or your labels or wherever you are using emojis to sort properly.

Now, of course, the easy way to get around this is to put the emoji at the end and not the front. The challenge there is that sometimes it can be a little out of balance because your emojis, some will be way out here and some will be a lot closer in and so forth.

But again, that can be another way to just highlight certain things within your folders.

Using emojis in Gmail

Last but not least, let's jump into Gmail where many of us often have a long list of labels here on the left-hand side. And yes, Gmail gives us the ability to add color coding, but sometimes we wanna go one step further.

So if you come over to any label you select the three dots and say Edit, what we can do here is again, add some emojis. And if this is a newsletter, maybe I'll select something like a newspaper.

That seems appropriate in this case. I'm gonna hit Save. Now, if I come down here and actually select the newsletter's label. And I'll just open up and sample email, you'll see that that emoji carries over everywhere.

So you're gonna see that label here. If I wanna come up here and change my label, the emoji is going to be listed there as well.

So you don't have to worry that it's gonna appear in some places and not others. A helpful way to keep everything organized.

Now, keep in mind that you can apply these same emoji tips to almost any other application, whether it's on your mobile device or on your desktop computer.

Now, I would love to hear from you next. What are some creative ways that you are using to help you stay more productive? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

And if you enjoyed this video, you may also like the video that YouTube is recommending to you right here. Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

My Mailchimp History

For the past four years, I've been using Mailchimp for my email marketing, but recently I quit. In this video, I'm gonna tell you why I've made the switch and what I'm using instead. (upbeat music)

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And it's true.

For most of my business, I've been using Mailchimp as my email marketing tool. In fact, when I think back of one of the things that I wish I had done earlier, that would be to have started to grow my email list that much sooner.

And the reason why I first started to choose and work with Mailchimp is that it's fairly easy to use. It's relatively intuitive and it was one of the most popular tools at the time.

It continues to be a very popular email marketing tool, a way to grow your email list. However, over the years as my list has grown, my needs have also changed and I'm not that wild about the direction where Mailchimp has gone.

So let me show you some of the things that I do like, but a number of things that really led me to move to something completely new. Now having an email list is so important because it's something that you actually own.

Unlike your subscribers or followers on social media, this list is something that you can take with you. It's also a much more direct relationship as you are sending communication and messages directly to someone's email inbox.

Rather than just having them swipe through or maybe not even see the majority of your posts through social media. Now it's pretty easy to get started here with Mailchimp and Mailchimp is relatively generous with giving you up to 2,000 subscribers in your account before you need to transition to a paid account.

Drawbacks to Using Mailchimp

However, the big thing that I felt was a major drawback for me when it came to Mailchimp was the variety of ways in which I could get people to sign up for my email list. Here under my audience tab, I'm under the sign up forms and you can see that Mailchimp gives us a few different options here including a form builder and also a subscriber pop-up.

However, here was the major drawback for me. If I open up this form builder, let's say I want to edit my current form, this is the only one that I have.

Mailchimp doesn't allow you to create multiple forms

It's gonna force you to either use another application or build something else or one of its many integrations with other applications.

But if you wanna create another form to use on a different part of your website or to add for a different group, but include them in the same audience, you can't do that here within Mailchimp and I felt that that was a major drawback.

If we go back to sign up forms, the same thing happens with the subscriber pop-up. If you want to create one, that's fantastic, but if you wanna create more than one subscriber pop-up for your page, you are out of luck.

Now don't get me wrong. I realize that Mailchimp has many larger organizations that have… And then have an entire team that is dedicated to social media marketing.

They are using other applications to build custom forms and landing pages. But if you're like me and you're running a small business, if you have a relatively small team or maybe just a team of one, you want something that can be doing this for you and doing it with ease.

Mailchimp Features I Didn't Find Useful

The other thing that I noticed over the years that I have spent with Mailchimp is that they decided to add a number of other features that just weren't that relevant to me. So in terms of creating a website, well many of us already have a website or are using another tool for that.

And if I come over here to the content studio, you see that there's a variety of different ways in which I could create, you know, social media posts, I could create product descriptions and integrate with social media.

However, none of these really fit my needs. As someone who is selling services and not physical products, many of these things fell flat and it just seemed like Mailchimp was going in a direction which was very different than my own.

But probably the biggest thing, compounding all of these things that I've shared so far is Mailchimp's pricing because once you exceed that free limit, it is not cheap.

Now for someone like myself with a relatively meager email list of under 5,000 contacts, I was paying $53 U.S. per month. Now in contrast to the other tools that I use as a part of my business, whether that's a project management tool, whether that's other add-ons for my email accounts and other productivity suites, whether that's other things just to keep a website running, this is a very expensive cost.

In fact, it's one of my most expensive business costs that is recurring month after month. $53 for a relatively small list can add up over time.

Email Deliverability Data Research

So what did I do? I went searching for something that fit my needs that much better, was of course simple and easy to use and met all of my form building needs so I could be that much more creative and hopefully acquire and more easily acquire new subscribers such as, oh, I don't know, possibly yourself.

One of the places that I turned to was a website called EmailToolTester and I came across this report that they publish each and every month. What it's about is all about email deliverability.

That's a tough word to say, deliverability. A lot of syllables in that word.

But when it talks about deliverability, this is really key when it comes to email marketing because really it is these services such as Mailchimp who are actually delivering the mail to your subscribers. You may be using your email address, that's what the receiver sees,

But it's these services that need to get through spam filters and other such things. And what I discovered here is at the very top of their rankings here, they put a product called MailerLite at 97%, even ahead of such more established products such as ConvertKit, HubSpot, Constant Contact.

And yes, a little bit further down the list is something called Mailchimp. But it gets even more interesting here. In the second factor here, you could see that when it comes to the least versus most likely to be flagged as spam, MailerLite ended up in the top three.

Meaning that only around 2% of all of their messages may be flagged as spam whereas the ones that are most likely, well, Mailchimp is in that category with nearly 13%. That's a pretty significant difference.

So I started doing my research myself and what I found is I absolutely love MailerLite.

Favorite MailerLite Features

Now I wanna be very clear. This is not a sponsored video. I have never been sponsored by either of these products, but so far two months in and I am loving everything that I'm coming across here within MailerLite.

First off, even just by looking at the dashboard here and the menu up top, it is a much cleaner feel. It's so much easier for me to navigate around and get to where I want.

Here on the dashboard, I can see my last campaign and I can see some of the statistics of my most recent subscribers and subscriber growth. And no, this wasn't just a massive change or addition of subscribers.

This is when I transitioned over from Mailchimp here to MailerLite. But the great thing as I pointed out is something that was lacking in Mailchimp is its forms ability, both pop-ups and embedded forms.

So for example here, I've got four different embedded forms which are live for different purposes on different parts of my website. This one actually is particular to Facebook.

And so I can customize them for their different areas, for their different purposes and also for people who I want to add to perhaps a different list or a different group within that list.

Over here under pop-ups, I may only have one active at the moment. I can quickly see the data that I'm interested in, but if I want to add further pop-ups, maybe a different pop-up for a different page on my website, I can do so here as well.

And when it comes to price, price is about half, half of what I was paying over in Mailchimp. Now it's true, I'm only about 2.5 months into my adventure here with using MailerLite as my primary email tool, but so far I have absolutely no complaints.

Now if you'd like to try MailerLite for yourself and explore its features, be sure to click the link in the description below. You can sign up for free and stay free up to 1,000 subscribers.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. Be sure to give this video a like and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Basic way of sharing slides in Zoom

This video is brought to you by SaneBox. Stay tuned to learn more about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox.

Do you want more flexibility when it comes to presenting PowerPoint within Zoom? Or maybe you wanna add a little pizazz and impress the people that you're presenting to. Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you three different ways that you can present Microsoft PowerPoint so you can see everything, your notes, your participants, and present the way you want to.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's get things started by jumping into our Zoom console. I've got a Zoom meeting started here already.

Of course, probably the easiest way to share PowerPoint is just to share your entire screen, right? We can come down here to share, we can click on Basic and say, share screen, and we can just say share. Now, I'm sharing my entire screen.

Now in this case, I'm gonna have to put myself into presentation view if I want to share my slides. At this point, I can use my Space Bar or my mouse or whatever I want to continue with the presentation. But the big drawback here is that I can't access anything else.

If I need to go back, I'm showing people my slides here. If I need to go pull up some notes or another document they're gonna be seeing everything that I'm sharing here on my screen. So let's stop here for a second and show you three better ways in how to share PowerPoint.

Sharing only the PowerPoint app in Zoom

The first one I wanna share with you has to do with just sharing the PowerPoint file or the PowerPoint application. So if we click on Share here, instead of selecting share screen, as in your entire desktop, we wanna come down here and actually find the PowerPoint application.

If we select this and hit Share, it's true, at this point they are seeing this preview pane here within PowerPoint. However, if I was to click on my browser here, for example, if I'm here to click on something else within my computer, no one else has seen that. They're only going to be seen what I have here within my PowerPoint presentation.

Again, I'm gonna have to go into slide mode here if I wanna show it in full screen as I'm going through my presentation. But at least in this case, I know that anything else that I click on they are only gonna see what's happening here in PowerPoint.

Share using Presenter Mode in PowerPoint

But let's take it one step further. And the second tip I wanna give you here is that you can actually present in Presenter Mode here within PowerPoint. Now, number one, you wanna make sure that you're only sharing the PowerPoint application for this to work.

Now, I can go into my Slide View again, and again, you're probably very familiar with this view. But if we come down to the left-hand side and click the More button, we can go into the Show Presenter View.

Now, some of you may be familiar with this view already, especially if you're used to working with dual monitors or perhaps hooking up your computer to a projector such as in a live scenario. However, what's important to note is that when you're using Zoom only the slides itself, only what we see here on the left-hand side is actually being shown to people on Zoom.

So we get all the benefits of PowerPoint Presenter View. We can use the arrow keys down below here. We can see a preview of the next slide in the top right-hand corner. And although I don't have many notes here on this particular slide deck.

If I did, they would all be visible to me but they're not visible to my Zoom participants. So this can be a great way to present online. Only my Zoom participants are seeing this screen here. I can see the preview, I can see my notes and confidently go through the rest of my presentation.

Share slides while using other apps on the computer

Now, there's another one that we wanna look at as well. And that has to do with... Let me get out of my presentation view here for a second. I know for many of you, you may want to access your notes which are not included within PowerPoint.

Maybe you have a separate file, maybe you wanna be referencing something else, maybe you just need to be doing a few things off the side as you're presenting a PowerPoint slide deck. Well, here within PowerPoint, if we go to the Slide Show menu and then we come here to say set up slide show we have an option here called Show Type.

Now by default, it's gonna be presented by a speaker. It calls this a Full screen view. But if you want to access other pieces of information on your screen while only showing your viewers your slide deck, you can choose this second one which is called Browsed by an individual, meaning that it's actually gonna just pop up in an individual window.

If I select this and say, okay. And now if I launch the Presenter View, what I can do is I can actually minimize this and I can resize this window if I need to. I can drag this over here to the left-hand side and then I can have other things going on on my screen.

I can pull up other applications. Let me minimize this word document, just as an example. So let's say that I have all my notes over here. I can access this. Maybe I want to view the chat window here on the side of my screen.

I can permanently have that open there, and I'm not obstructing anyone else's views and they're not seeing my whole screen either. All they are seeing is this window here, which you can see is encapsulated by this green color.

Now, the one thing of note is that it will also share the header which is gonna show the title of your PowerPoint slide. And it's also gonna show the total number of slides and these navigation options down below.

So you can either choose these arrow keys, you can still use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the Space Bar on your keyboard to navigate and advance through your slides. But you can access your notes over here, you can take a look at other things that are going on in your screen, and all they are going to see is this window here.

So this can be really helpful for those of you who want to take advantage of other applications on your screen without sharing everything else. Remember, the key in this particular example is that you have to share only the PowerPoint application first when you hit that Share button and then you can choose this option within the PowerPoint.

Let me hit Stop Share here for just a second.

Share PowerPoint as a Zoom Virtual Background

And I wanna show you perhaps the most powerful way and the most impressive way of sharing PowerPoint here within Zoom. Recently, Zoom has introduced a brand new feature which is really impressive and actually puts you in front of your slides.

So let me show you how it works. Once again, we wanna come down here and select the Share button. But instead of staying on the Basic tab, we wanna come over here to the Advanced tab and select PowerPoint as a virtual background.

Now, in this case, once we hit the Share button, we're actually gonna have to go and find the file itself. It's not like just sharing your screen or sharing the PowerPoint application. I do need to go and find the PowerPoint presentation that I want.

I'm gonna select Open. And then Zoom is not only going to load it right here within my meeting, but as you can see, I am now in front of my slides. So I don't have to see, or I don't have to question if my participants can see me, if they've minimized my view, I can ensure if I'm sharing my PowerPoint slides I'm right here in front of them.

And I can continue to navigate through all of my slides just as I normally would. Now, there's a few different options you have here. I can click on my image and actually I can move it anywhere I want.

So if I'm on a particular slide and my image is actually in the way of something, I can move it. If I want to resize myself, maybe I wanna make myself a little smaller put myself in the bottom left-hand corner, I can do that as well.

Now, I can continue to navigate by selecting these arrow keys down below. But the other important thing is if I get to a slide like this where there's already a picture of me, what I can do is select these three dots and say split video from PowerPoint.

So that's gonna remove my overlay. It's gonna remove my video on top of this slide. And then perhaps when I navigate to my next slide where I do wanna be front and center, I come here again, and this time I'm gonna select Merge Video and PowerPoint.

Here I am again, maybe I need to make myself a little bit bigger, just so I draw people's attention, and I can continue on with this presentation. This can be a fantastic way to not only engage your audience, but make sure that they're seeing you at the same time that you're presenting these slides.

A tip would be that you wanna make sure that you, number one, know your slides very well. And perhaps that you have a lot of your written content for example, a little adjusted to one side of the slide. So you're not always having to go and click and drag yourself and resize your window.

That may be a little both confusing, a little nauseating for some of your viewers as well, but this can be a really effective and impressive way to present PowerPoint via Zoom.

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Why a Decision Matrix Can Help You (logo powering up) - Do you sometimes struggle with making decisions? Maybe you've got an awful lot of ideas on your plate but you're having trouble deciding which one you should pursue first. Well, in this video I wanna show you how to use a decision-making matrix so you can make smarter decisions and choose the things that are best for you.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Studies would say that we have something like 50,000 different thoughts each and every day. You probably have a number of projects that you'd like to pursue, but you're not sure where you should be focusing your time and effort. It's really important that we choose correctly because you only have so much time this week, this month, or this year.

So in this video, I wanna show you how I use a Decision Matrix, right here within Notion. A little later on, I'll show you how to create your very own so you can customize it for your own needs.

How I Use a Decision Table in Notion

So here we have a fairly simple Decision Matrix. The idea of such a tool is to help you quantify the different projects and ideas you're considering pursuing and help you decide which one you should focus on next. I've got a few very simple columns here but they're gonna help me get to a better decision down the road.

On the left-hand side, I've got the names of my different projects. Yes, I've just been very creative (chuckles) with my latest ideas, cool ideas, things like that. But of course, these are real projects for you and real projects for my business that we are trying to evaluate here.

In the next four columns, I have different criteria in which I'm going to evaluate these projects. The first one is Impact, meaning how much of an impact is this going to have on my business? The second one is Effort, in terms of how much time and effort it's going to take me to complete this project.

This is really important when you're deciding on what you should be pursuing next because if something is going to have a major impact but it's also gonna take an awful lot of time, maybe there's some other things that will take you less effort and time but have just as much impact.

As we see in the next column, maybe it can also increase your profits or whatever criteria you want to evaluate your projects on. Profitability is pretty straightforward in this particular example. What is the potential to bring in additional revenue or to be profitable?

The last one that I have here in this example is something called Vision, meaning how much does this particular project or idea align with my vision or my values or what I'm striving to do here within the Simpletivity training business? Last but not least, we have a Score, which is really great because we want to either average out or sum up these numbers so that we can decide which of these projects we should be pursuing next.

As you can see, I've already given all of these projects a score, and they really do vary. Right here, I've got something like the idea that came in a dream, which is going to have a major impact on my business, or so I think. But here, my really big idea, although it's a great idea, I've got lots of energy around it, I've only given it a score of one. I really don't think it's gonna have as much of an impact.

Later on here, and I wanna clarify what Effort is defined as in this case. Again, you can customize this for your own needs. In Effort, I'm giving a high score for something that is actually going to take the smallest amount or the shortest amount of time. The reason being is that if you are going to sum up these numbers or average out these numbers, you want a positive score or a great score here in all of your categories.

So the higher the number, in this case, the better. So when I have a five or some of these fours, this actually means that it's not going to take a significant amount of effort, compared to my really big idea which I've given it a score of three. If I've given something a score of one, that means it's gonna take an awful lot of effort and therefore not get as high of a total score.

What I've done here at the end is I've decided to average it out. Since I've given everything here a score from one to five, I've decided that my end score should be reflective of that. You could choose to use this as a sum total, and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

Here I can see that this one here, this idea that came to me in a dream, has an overall score or an average of four. You can see why. It's got a five for effort, two fours, and a three. Now I've got something here above it, this cool idea which is rather close, set at 3.5.

It's still not gonna take a whole lot of effort, it should have a big impact, scored the highest when it came to profitability, but it perhaps didn't align with my vision quite as much. That's why it resulted in this 3.5. The other thing that you may want to consider when using this approach is that you may want to weigh one or two of these criteria a little heavier or lighter than others.

For example, if we look at something like Profitability and Vision, maybe I shouldn't give them equal weight. Maybe it's important that their vision is close to or in line with my own vision, but maybe I want to give extra weight to Profitability in this case.

One of the key reasons why I use this in Notion is that not only is it very easy to set up and create but it's very easy to add a new idea and also not be skewed by the data that's already existing here. Let's say that I'm accumulating these ideas as I'm thinking about what I want to do in the next quarter or maybe in the second half of this year.

Instead of just typing in new here and starting to go across here in a horizontal manner and giving these scores, that might skew my perspective because I'm gonna see the other scores right up here above.

Instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the new button here in the top right-hand corner. The great thing here is that it sort of blocks my vision of the rest of the table. So I'm gonna say my Latest Idea for Q2, that's what I'm gonna call it here.

Then I can come down and look at these criteria one by one. Effort, I'm gonna say, this is gonna take actually minimal effort in this case, so I'm gonna give it about a four. Remember, the higher the score, the less effort in this particular case.

When it comes to Impact, I'm gonna say maybe not as much, I'm gonna give it a two. Profitability, sort of middle of the road, I'm gonna give it a three here. Lastly, I'm gonna say when it comes to Vision that this is pretty much in line. So I'm gonna give this a four.

Now you'll notice that this isn't quite in the right order that I want it to be. The great thing with Notion is that you can drag and drop almost anything. So I can have that score here at the end. I can add some further notes here, further details about this idea or this project as well if I want to.

Now, I can come back to my table, and here is my latest idea for Q2. I can see that it's got an overall score of 3.25. Now, does this mean that I'm automatically going to pursue this one that has the highest score? No.

You should keep this in mind as you play around and decide to use these types of decision-making tools. It should just really give you food for thought. It's gonna give you some quantitative data here to help you decide what you should be doing next. But I do not recommend that you automatically select the one with the highest score. This is really just a means for you to evaluate and perhaps refine your decision-making process.

How to Build a Decision Matrix in Notion

First thing we'll need to create a new page here within Notion. So I'm gonna call this one a Decision Table, in this particular example. Instead of just creating an empty page, we want to come down to Database and select Table here within Notion.

Now, by default, whenever you start any table within Notion you're going to start with a Name column and a Tags column, but it's so easy to edit these things as we go about this process. Instead of Name, I'm going to call this Project or maybe Idea in this case because that's what we're evaluating, and we can leave it as a name.

But we're not gonna be making use of tags here within the Notion database. So in this case, I'm gonna come down here and choose a Number. In this case, I'm going to use the criteria Impact, alright. Let's add a few more here for our example.

The second one here again, is not text, I wanna change that to a Number, and we're gonna call this one Effort. Let's add one more to our example here. Once again, we want to choose Number, and in this case, let's call this one Vision, similar to what we saw in the first example.

Now we can go ahead and start filling out our projects or our ideas and giving them some type of quantitative value. You don't have to limit yourself to a score between one and five, you could choose one and ten or any other numeric value that you like.

The key thing here is that we need some type of quantitative data so that we can sum up or average that data at the very end of this table. So even if I start to add in an idea, let's just call this one Idea number one, I can come in here and start entering the values.

Effort of four, maybe it's an impact of two, but the vision is very much in line so it's a five. That's great, and I can keep filling out this data down below. But we want to get some type of final or cumulative score at the very end so that we can compare them head-to-head against each other.

So in this last column here, what we're going to do instead of choosing a Number we need to come down to Advanced and select a Formula. Now, if you're not familiar with creating or editing formulas here within Notion, no problem. I'm going to show you a very, very simple formula even if you've never used formulas here within Notion.

Under the column that we just selected here, we want to come down and select Edit Formula. Now, what Notion does is it gives us some of the most common properties, both the properties that we've created here within the table, but it also gives us a variety of other factors and criteria that we can use to make these calculations.

We're going to keep it super basic for our needs today. So all we need to do is come down here and select the properties that we want to add or subtract or average, in this case. So I'm going to select Impact, because that's the first one in my column, and then I'm going to add a Plus symbol.

Next, I'm going to add Effort, and then once again, I'm going to hit the Plus symbol. Last but not least, we have our third criteria, which is Vision. And so that's essentially all we want to do. In fact, as you can see here above it's actually doing this in real-time to make sure that we're getting the value that we're after.

All I need to do in this case is select Done. Now I've got my sum total of this particular row. That's exactly what I want here. The last thing that I may want to do is that I've left this as the title of the column, that's maybe not that helpful, so I can come here and change that to Score.

So now when I have my second idea, I'm going to select New here and I'm going to call this Idea number two. I can come down here to Effort and start filling in my different variables here. I can say the Vision is, ah, it's only about a two as well.

If the Score is not listed in the place where you want it to be, remember you can always drag and move these around as well. Now when I come back to my Decision Table I instantly have that score. I can see this is almost half of my first idea. So I should probably consider doing my first idea.

The last thing that I'd like to show you here is that it may be helpful to you to add a default sort order. So when we select Sort here, what we can do is add a Sort. In this case, what I want it to do, is I want to actually sort it by its score, and I want to sort it by descending in this case.

So now what I'll have is always the idea with the highest score sorted to the very top. So no matter how many things that I list here within this table, I can see the one with the highest score at the very top. Now, I'd love to know what other tools you are using to help you make better decisions. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching today's video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

Introduction

This video is brought to you by SaneBox.

Stay tuned to learn more about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox.

Are you wanting to save time when using Microsoft Outlook?

Well then, this video is for you because I'm sharing with you seven of my best time-saving tips right here within Outlook.

Let's not waste any more time and jump into tip number one.

Turn off sounds and alerts in Outlook

And that has to do with turning off all of those alerts and visual notifications, so we're a lot less distracted when dealing with our email.

What we wanna do is come up here and select File and then come all the way down and select Options.

Now that's gonna open up our Outlook Options dialog, but second, we need to come over here to Mail and near the bottom of the screen, you may need to scroll down just a little bit.

We've got a subheader called Message Arrival.

Now by default, Outlook is gonna have all of these things checked and turned on, which only makes our life that much more distracting as we're trying to get on with other things, especially if we have Outlook open while we have other applications or maybe even other monitors open as we go about our workday.

So we can uncheck Play a Sound, very, very distracting.

We can uncheck Briefly Change the Mouse Pointer.

So even if you're doing something in an Excel spreadsheet, for example, you're not distracted by your mouse changing midway through editing a cell or writing a report notifying you of a new message.

We can uncheck Show an Envelope Icon in the Task Bar, but maybe the most distracting one in this list of them all is the last one, Display a Desktop Alert.

And you know exactly what I mean.

In the lower right-hand corner, you get a little preview of both the subject, the sender, and maybe the first two sentences of that message for every single email.

I strongly encourage you to uncheck this one as well so that you can regain your focus.

Send an email at a later time in Outlook

The second tip I have for you today has to do with delaying the delivery of an email message.

So let me come up here and just open up a new email.

I'm just gonna type in a default or a test email address here, and let's just call this a Test Delay here as our subject line.

So maybe you don't want someone knowing that you were actually writing that email at three in the morning.

However, you wanna use this feature is up to you, but let me show you how to execute on it.

So let's say I finished crafting and writing this email.

Next up, I want to tell Outlook when to send it.

What we need to do is come up here to Options, and then over to the right under the More Options area, we have an option called Delay Delivery.

Now, if we select this, we're gonna actually have a number of other properties show up.

But all we wanna focus on here is down here, these Delivery Options.

So when we select the Delayed Delivery option from the ribbon, this is already going be checked here, the Do Not Deliver Before, and then we can choose the date and time options.

Now, I've noticed by default, it's gonna choose today at 5:00 PM as the default delayed delivery time.

But of course, we can choose any date and time that we want.

Here, I can come to my mini calendar, and I can say, you know what, I'd rather have this go out on Wednesday morning.

That's when I hope this person, I want them to see it or open up this message.

I'm gonna say 9:00 AM on Wednesday morning.

We can say Close at this stage, and you're not gonna see anything different on the message itself.

We can still go ahead and edit and change the subject or the message itself.

But at this point, I'm gonna hit Send, but it didn't actually send.

In fact, all it did was send it to my Outbox.

Let's see what that looks like.

Here on the left-hand side of my menu, I can come down here and click on my Outbox.

I can see that there's one message in there.

This is the one we just created called Test Delay.

And over here, it's gonna say that it was sent at Monday at 10:40, which happens to be just now or just a moment ago.

Now it wasn't actually sent, that's actually telling us when I hit the send button, but the reason why it's in the Outbox area here, is because it's waiting for that delay time.

It's waiting for that Wednesday time.

If I want to, I can open this up and remove the delay and send it right away or change the delay settings.

But you can always go back to your Outbox if there's something that has not been sent yet.

A very handy feature if you want a message to arrive at a particular time.

Let's go back to our inbox and I want to show you another feature which I think is very underutilized.

Save clicks with Quick Steps in Outlook

Even though it may have been staring at you in your face for many, many years.

Here in the middle of the ribbon, we have a section called Quick Steps.

Now, Quick Steps is nothing new.

It's been around in Outlook for many, many years, but in my experience, very few people actually use it.

And number two, actually don't even know what its purpose is or how to use it.

So by default, Microsoft is going give us a few different preloaded Quick Steps for us to try and make our lives that much easier.

The best way to think about Quick Steps is it allows you to customize some automated steps or multiple steps, even though you're only going to click one particular action.

So to create your own, all you need to do is come down here to select, Create New, and we're gonna get this dialogue here.

So I'm gonna say a New Quick Step.

In this case, you can give it a name, anything that you want.

You can even choose your own icon here to make it stand out from other such things.

I'm just gonna choose this one for fun, so it stands out from everything else.

And next, what we get to do is choose all of the actions we want to apply.

So by selecting this dropdown, we can file things away, change the status, add or remove categories, different responses that we have here.

We can even do things related to our calendar.

So for example, maybe I want to move it to a particular folder, and here I can choose which folder I want to move it to.

But I don't wanna stop there.

I also wanna come down here and flag that particular message, and I can choose which flag it is.

I'm gonna say tomorrow, perhaps in this case.

I can come down here and add yet another action as well.

I can say let's also mark it as unread.

So I come back to it at that time and it stands out from everything else.

So again, you can stack and layer all of these actions, but only select one button to execute them.

Now, next up on our list, I wanna talk about creating and modifying rules here within Outlook.

Create Outlook rules to save time

The rule section is right over from the Quick Step ribbon by default.

So here we can select Rules, and we can either apply a rule to the message that we are currently selected on at the moment.

Or we can select Create a Rule.

Now you can create some very, very sophisticated rules here within Outlook.

By default, it's going to include some of the information on the message, if you happen to have a message selected at the moment.

But you can see that all of these boxes are unchecked.

So I don't have to apply the from Wayfair option to this particular message.

But here's where you get to set the conditions or the criteria for this rule.

So do you want to either flag or send certain messages from a particular sender somewhere else?

Maybe you want to seek out messages that have a particular keyword in the subject line or who it was sent to.

And then we can tell it what to do.

Now, this is the one I wanted to highlight to display in the new item, alert window.

This is where you can turn off your desktop alerts.

Remember that distracting window in the bottom right-hand corner, and you can create your own custom ones for those that are coming from a particular sender or that meet your particular conditions.

Now we can always come back up to Rules here and select Manage Rules and Alerts.

If we wanna review all of the rules that we've created or maybe need to modify them or just delete them altogether.

So make sure you know how to get to this screen so you can make changes in the future.

Now, if you don't wanna spend your time creating all of these complicated rules, for different folders and different places to send your messages, then you may benefit from SaneBox.

SaneBox is the artificial intelligence to help you sift through a large quantity of messages in a matter of seconds.

And the great thing is because SaneBox uses artificial intelligence, it actually learns from your behavior.

So as you drag more of your promotional material or emails from a certain sender into a particular folder, it starts to learn from you and will apply that automatically without having to apply all of these complicated rules.

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description below.

Now, next on our list we wanna look at sharing some information with people when it comes to our Outlook calendar.

Share your Outlook calendar in an email

How many times have you wanted to set up a meeting with someone outside of your organization?

Someone who doesn't have access to your shared calendar but you still want to tell them when you're busy or free in the next couple of days.

Well, Outlook actually makes it quite easy for us to do so.

Let's start a new email here again.

And I don't even have to fill in any information to get things rolling with this feature.

In this case, what I wanna do is I wanna give a summary of the times that I'm available for the coming week.

So all I need to do here is come down to the body of my message, and I'll probably start off by saying something like, please take a look at the following dates or times.

But next I wanna come up here to Insert, and under Insert, I'm gonna say Calendar.

This is gonna pop up a short dialogue which only gives us a few important but critical choices.

First, we need to select which is our calendar.

Which calendar we actually want to share.

And by default, it's probably your main calendar here within Microsoft.

Next up, how far out do you want to share this calendar?

You can start with only today, or you can select tomorrow, a few other defaults, or you can specify a few particular dates.

In this case, I'm gonna select the next seven days.

And it's even gonna give me a summary down below as to which dates are going to appear.

Next up, we get to choose the level of detail that we want to share with the person we're sending this to.

Now by default, it's gonna be availability only, and I would assume that nine times out of ten, this is exactly what you want to share because it's gonna limit it to just free, busy, tentative types of information.

No names of events or appointments are going to be shown.

No attendees or invitees are going to be shown either.

But it does give us a few other options, including limited details, which will include the subject of those calendar events, but also full details which will include the invitees as well.

So like I said, in most cases, you're probably only going to want to show the availability only.

Now, if you have set your working hours here within Outlook, I would also encourage you to select this checkbox, Show Time Within My Working Hours Only because you don't want someone to assume that you're available late in the evening, if those don't include your working hours.

At this stage, I'm gonna select Okay, and what's gonna happen is it's gonna embed this sort of miniature calendar into the body of the email.

So what they can do is scroll down through this mini calendar.

And as you can see, it's only showing free and busy information, no specific details.

So they can come down and say, oh, I wanted to meet on the 25th, but it looks like you're busy all day.

Let's meet on the 26th at about 10:00 am.

It looks like you're free, let's set up a meeting for that time.

So for very quick and easy way to include your calendar information, even for those who are outside of your organization.

Let's stick with our calendar for just a moment and see how we can easily convert any email message into a calendar event.

Convert any email into an Outlook calendar event

Now, first and foremost, why might you want to do this?

Well, I think there's two important reasons.

Maybe you've already been going back and forth with someone and now you need to set up a meeting and you wanna keep all that information that you had in that email.

So you want to quickly convert it into an actual meeting appointment.

The second reason would be if you're using a concept like time-blocking and you wanna just reserve some time to maybe address or go deeper or respond to a particularly messy or important email.

So in order to do so, all you need to do is select that email.

We want to click and hold.

We're gonna click and drag.

And what we want to do is come down to our calendar icon and then release.

By releasing it there, it's gonna open up our appointment dialogue.

No, we are not replying at this stage, we are now creating a calendar appointment.

Now Outlook is automatically gonna convert the subject of the email into the title of the appointment.

And down below, you can see the entire email is now included within this appointment as well.

So the first thing that you might wanna do is change the subject, right?

To something a little more meaningful for yourself or for whoever else is going to be included on this.

And you can still add further details above the email contents itself.

So whether you're actually inviting others or not, a very quick and easy way to do so.

Add multiple time zones to the Outlook calendar

Next, let's go into our calendar itself and show you how you can add additional time zones to your calendar.

For most of us, we are not limited to a very specific geographic area or only one time zone.

You are most likely working with others and also have clients in a variety of different time zones.

So wouldn't it be helpful if you may be highlighted one or even two additional time zones, so you don't always have to be doing that mental math.

For example, I am here on the Pacific West Coast.

So I have the Pacific time zone here listed on my calendar, but many of my clients are on the East Coast.

So I would like to see exactly what their time is rather than always having to add three hours every time I'm trying to plan a meeting.

So in this case, we can get to this area in one of two ways.

Let me show you the long way and we'll shorten it up a little bit.

Once again, we can go up to File, then down to Options, and then this time we wanna come down to Calendar and we're still gonna have to scroll a little bit to get to this time zone area.

But that was an awful lot of clicks.

Let's see if we can speed that up a little bit.

Here within our calendar view, we can select the View option here, and then under Arrangement, we wanna select Calendar Options, and that's gonna take us directly to Calendar Options within this dialogue.

We're still gonna have to scroll down just a little bit before we get to this time zone area.

So for your default time zone, you can choose the default label to whatever you like, but we can add both a second and a third time zone.

By selecting this checkbox, I have now added the Eastern time zone and I can either call it East or Eastern or EST, whatever I want, whatever makes sense to me.

At the very end, don't forget to select Okay, and now you will see I've got the Eastern time zone selected here, right beside my default Pacific time zone.

So quick and easy can help you as you're setting up meetings with others.