Not long ago, I gave a review of all of the new enhancements to Gmail. Steve replied with this comment: he says, "I like the new features, but I've been hoping for a sticky note feature that would allow me to put notes on an email that only I can read."
Well, Steve, I think that's a great enhancement to Gmail. I'd love for Gmail to add that natively as well, but in the meantime, I think you're gonna enjoy today's video because I've found an extension that will allow you to do just that.
Simple Gmail Notes
It's called Simple Gmail Notes, allowing you to add your own notes to any email within Gmail and keep them privately. You're not sharing them with anyone; you don't have to reply to yourself or any of that kind of hokey stuff, which is only gonna make your inbox more of a mess.
So let's take a look at this. Let's go into my dummy inbox here—yes, this is not my usual inbox, just some emails that I can play around with for today's example.
Sticky Notes in Gmail
I've already installed the Chrome extension. If I go and click on one of my emails, you'll notice something a little different at the top of the email. Yes, I've got a sticky note area.
This is a place where I can add text-based notes, maybe a reminder of something regarding this email, even after I've replied. Maybe I just want to remind myself of something if I ever go back to this email.
Or if you use a method such as inbox zero, maybe you just want to give yourself a quick note because you might not reply to this email till another hour from now or even a few days from now. So in this area, I can add whatever I want, and again, it's all text-based.
You can't bold, you can't underline, but remember, it's a sticky note feature. That's what you want; you just want to give yourself a brief reminder. You can copy and paste information in here if you want or not.
Previewing Notes
Whatever I write in here, if I click out, I'm going to go back to my Inbox. The nice thing is that you can actually see a small preview of your note, and if you hover over it, you can actually read the entire note.
Now, this is one feature that I particularly like because you want to know which of these emails may have a note. It's gonna be displayed very similar to the label area, and I don't recommend that you use this to replace labels.
But it's nice to be able to see a preview of these notes and hover over and see the full note. But it doesn't stop there. Let's go back into this particular email.
Of course, I can immediately go back and change the note, but it also gives you the opportunity to change the color of the note. So let's say these types of notes, I'm going to give it more of this teal or this light blue color.
Then I'm gonna go to the email just down below, and I'm gonna add a new note here. So add a new note, and let's say I want these ones to be more of—I'm gonna show you that feature just in a second.
Let's say I want to change the color of these ones to like this green shade here because maybe I have a system for my different notes. Right, and so here again, we see that preview: blue notes—maybe this is something personal, maybe green, this is something more business-related or maybe I add financial information.
So I'm gonna make those notes green, so you can customize the color of your notes as well. Now the next thing I want to show you, you're probably wondering, can I search these notes?
Searching Notes
And that's a very important question. Right, what if you have a keyword in the notes, not the email itself, but the notes. So why don't I type in the word “whatever”?
Let's do that up here. I'm going to type the word in “whatever” up top, and I get a hit enter, and, uh-oh, oh, it's not there. Yeah, it didn't search for it there.
Well, that's okay because Simple Gmail Notes allows you to search for these notes specifically. So let's go back into this email, and you'll notice some of the additional options that we have here.
You saw where I changed the color. Well, next to it is a search function, so if I click that, what it will do is give me my own search bar. So I am just searching my Gmail notes.
But also, what's nice and convenient is you can see all of your notes down. Now, I've only added to here my green note and my blue note here, but now I can quickly and easily see all of these notes.
I can see when they were last updated. If I select them, I've got a few other options if I want to do a bulk delete, for example, I can do so that I can do that here as well.
So don't fret, you can search your notes. Just remember you can't use the default or the standard Gmail search. This is only going to search the contents of the mail or the senders or receivers.
But if you want to search your notes as a part of this Chrome extension, you can do so here. A couple of the other features here as well: you can immediately send this email and note to Google Calendar.
Other Features
So it will include the note if you're looking for that as well. There is also an option to sync to mobile because you're probably wondering, can you get these messages? Can you get these custom sticky notes on your mobile device?
Now you can, but it seems like there's a bit of a workaround. You're gonna need to install Simple Mobile CRM. It is available to iPhone, iPad, and Android users; however, I've not yet tested out this feature.
So I can't give you a good, bad, or otherwise review. But the short answer is yes, you can have it sync and have it appear on your mobile device, but you will need to use this other app in order to do so as well.
Lastly, I just want to briefly show you some of the preferences because maybe you don't want your notes at the top of the email. That's okay, you can have your sticky note appear at the bottom of emails or even here on the side.
If I click on the Preferences bar here, you can see there's actually quite a few options. You can even change the default background color or font size, how long do you want to see that preview, what about the note height.
I've changed it to three; you can do a number of others. Look at that, you could have a full paragraph visible. It doesn't mean that you are limited by that number of lines but just how many do you want to see at a given time.
So if you are wanting the ability to add some sticky notes, some custom notes that are just for you, remember, you're not replying to yourself. Stop doing that—it's just adding more garbage, more notes, more stuff to your inbox.
You can add custom sticky notes to any of your emails here in Gmail. So if you want to learn more, I'll leave a link in the description below. But all you need to search for as a part of the Chrome Web Store is Simple Gmail Notes.
You can find out, read more reviews, quite a few users; you can see it's got a 4.7 rating with nearly 500 users. So, 33 thousand users—enough people are using it, and I've been impressed with my initial test, with my initial review.
So I'd love to hear from you next: what other features would you like to see within Gmail? This is one of the things that Steve wanted to see. What are some of the things that you wish you could do here in Gmail?
Perhaps I can do a video just for you in the future. As always, thank you so much for watching right here at Simpletivity. I hope you give this video a thumbs up, make sure to subscribe, and leave me a comment down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
