Let's be honest, we spend an awful lot of time right here within our web browser,

so isn't it about time that you optimized your bookmarks? In today's video I wanna show you several tips on how to get the most out of bookmarks, right here in Google Chrome. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here, at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress.

Bookmarks Bar

And let's start off with a very, very simple tip.

Is that if you don't see your bookmarks here, if the bookmarks bar as it is called is not displayed, make sure that you have it displayed, because you want these available to you in just a single touch, you wanna be able to access this as quickly as possible.

So to do so, we just need to hit our settings up here, come down to Bookmarks, you can see that my Show bookmarks bar is already checked.

If I uncheck that, yeah I do gain a little more real estate here, but I don't have that quick access to my bookmarks. I can go over here and select Bookmarks, and I can scroll through this list if I want to, but Show bookmarks bar is certainly essential.

Organize Bookmarks

Now, next up is how I organize my bookmarks, and remember you can just click and drag anything in here, into whatever order that you want.

By default, it's gonna add those new bookmarks usually to the end of your list, but I highly recommend that these first, you know, five, six, seven spots that you have here, you should use for your most frequently used websites, or most frequently used apps.

So I've got things like my calendar, and Gmail, a couple of different email addresses here, things that I go to most frequently.

Create Folders

And then a little later on you can see that I also use some folders, and I think folders are very important to use here as well. Now, if you don't know how to create a folder,

well it's pretty simple. I recommend that we actually come in here into our bookmarks, our bookmarks manager. So once again, I've come down to Bookmarks,

and under Show bookmarks bar, we can click Bookmark manager. I just find if you're spending a few minutes editing, and revising, and optimizing all of your bookmarks,

might as well come in here and get a cleaner or better view. so once again, we can drag things around, right? We can drag things, Gmail to the first spot, or a calendar for the first spot here if we want to. Here, I've got a couple of my folders as well, but all I need to do here is click here, is the right-hand corner, and say Add a new folder, and by doing so I can give it a name, and start adding things into that folder as I want.

Bookmark all tabs

But there's a couple of other things that you should know as well, and that is when you are creating a new bookmark, if I come up here, and again, I'm gonna hover over bookmarks, not only can I say Bookmark this tab, and we can use Control + D if we want to, as a shortcut key, but we can also say Bookmark all tabs, and this is really, really helpful, because if you've got three, or four, or a group of websites that you typically use all at the same time, you can bookmark them all at the same time as well.

But it gets even better. Let me click off of this for a second, and let's say for example I come up here to my social media tab, and let's say I'm often spending time with all of these open at the same time.

So do I wanna come up here and then select Facebook, and then come back and then select LinkedIn, and then come back and select Twitter? What if I right-click on this, and say Open all four. I'm gonna click that, and instantaneously, here you can see in four new tabs, I've got all of those websites opened up.

So if you have a need of opening a group of websites all at the same time, or you're dealing with, or working with a number of websites at the same time, why don't you put them in a folder, and then you can open them up all at the same time as well.

Now there's another benefit of using these folders as well, and I'm gonna stick with my social media example, is that is, these remain an additional click away from me, and maybe I'm spending too much time on social media, so I kinda like the idea that they're hidden a little bit. I have to hit Social first and then come down.

I don't see these logos on my bookmarks bar all the time. So maybe if there's something that you use, or that you need, but you spend a little more time, or it's a little too tempting, you can use folders for that purpose as well.

Use Emojis

Let's stick with those folders for a second here though, and I wanna show some other things that I've added here.

You'll notice that this little folder icon is the default, and in fact it's really our only choice when it comes to creating a folder of bookmarks, and you know, if I didn't have these little emojis, they wouldn't stand out as much.

So what I often recommend is going to a website such as Emojipedia. Emojipedia was the place that I happen to go, there's other websites you can go to as well, where you can search up things.

So if I search up a laptop, let's say, that's what I used I think from our marketing example here, I can find a laptop emoji, I can just hit copy, and then paste it. If I come up here and right-click, and say Rename, I can just paste it directly into the name.

And I like to put it at the front of the name, so it's consistent with everything else, and then things like marketing, money, and social, just stand out that much more, beyond just the folder here itself.

Shorten Bookmarks

But there's another thing that you might wanna keep in mind, and this is not just about folders, but this has to do with all of your bookmarks, is the length of the name that you give it.

So if you go into any of these bookmarks here, and if I right-click this, I can say Edit, and change the name. So Nimble, which is my CRM system at the moment, maybe I wanna change that and shorten it. I could just say CRM, right? Because I know what the Nimble icon looks like. I'm gonna say CRM.

By shortening this I might be able to fit a few more things here within my bookmarks bar. You know, money, for example, that money emoji that I've included, I think that's pretty self-evident, so why don't I go up here, and I'm gonna say Rename it, and this time I'm actually just gonna delete the label altogether, and just hit Save, and now I've got the icon, I can still have access to all of those pages there, but I've reduced the length of that title, and now I might be able to fit even just a few more here on my bookmarks bar.

Now of course, if you've got too many to fit on the bookmarks bar, you can just click these arrows, and you'll find the spill over here on the right-hand side as well.

Well, I hope you enjoyed some of these tips for getting the most out of your bookmarks. Many of these tips will apply to other web browsers as well, including Safari, and Firefox.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next, because I'm sure you have some very creative ways as to how you manage your browser bookmarks. 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.