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Are you frustrated with the ability to organize all of your notes within Google Keep? Or perhaps you're relatively new to Keep Notes and you don't fully understand the power of labels, reminders, and notes.
Well, in today's video, I want to show you how to get so much more out of Google Keep, and it all starts with archive. One of the most frustrating things with Google Keep is that every new note you create ends up here on the note home screen or the note home page. Even if you add labels, you can see that all of my notes here—I've got things like work, family, volunteer, personal—they're all labeled, but they all remain here on the home screen. Yes, I can go over here to the left and click on family, and there's my family note, but I don't necessarily want it in two places. I don't want it amongst dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds of notes here on the Google Keep home screen.
Well, in order to clean this area up and make it more manageable, what we're going to do is start archiving some of our notes. Now here's a quick keyboard shortcut for you. If you'd like to archive your notes quickly and easily, all you need to do is select the E key on your keyboard.
So for this first one here, I'm gonna hit the E key, I'm gonna hover over it, and I'm going to hit E on my keyboard, and there it goes into archive. I'm going to take this next one, hover over E, I'm gonna hit this one, hit E. It's immediately gonna go into archive.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "Scott, I still want to search for these notes. I still want to interact with these notes." No worries. They haven't been deleted. They haven't gone away. Yes, you can click on the archive folder and see where they are, but if we look at this new office design, for example, it's labeled work. I can go to my work label and it's still there. It tells me it's in the archive, but it's still there.
Let's go back to that notes home screen for an example. I'm gonna hit E here, here, and here. Now my note screen is completely free for new notes. I can use this for processing new information. Maybe I only want to use this area for things that are due or things that I'm working on, but I can now go to my labels and all of my notes are still there. They're labeled under archive, but it has kept my notes area nice and clean.
Now we want to combine this with using reminders. Something that often a lot of people don't get as much out of when they're first using, or even if they've been using Keep for some time. So I want to take a look at an example that I set up earlier today. So this is a note. It's called review customer contract. I gave it the label work. Remember, you can use a hashtag if you want to add that label quicker than just selecting the drop-down menu here as well.
Now I'm actually gonna unarchive this because this is gonna give you an example of how this really works. You can see that at the reminder here—I set a reminder for earlier today. So this one is actually already been triggered. It's already been fired, and as a result, although it was still in archive because it had a reminder, it graduated here into my notes workspace.
Let me give you a closer example of how this works. If I go into reminders, you can see that that's not the only one that has a reminder. It's the only one that's been fired. It's the only one that's been triggered, but I've got a couple of other notes here that are due soon.
So this red one, for example. I've got a reminder for later today at 8 p.m. So if I go to my notes home screen, you can see that I've just got the one note here at the moment, but this is what's going to happen. As soon as 8 p.m. comes along, not only is this one going to move up here to the fired section within reminders, but this note is also going to appear here on my notes home screen. It's gonna appear here in due date order, right up at the front. So I can deal with it, I can review it, I can check it off. Whatever that note represents, it won't get lost. I won't have to click on reminders. I won't have to go and find it under my family label. It's going to automatically come here into the notes section, just like this work note did earlier at 10:15 a.m.
And remember, if you have desktop notifications enabled, you'll also receive a notification here on the desktop version. If you have your notifications set up on mobile, you'll also receive a notification there as well.
So let's go back to our labels 'cause I want to show you something else that may be helpful to you. You'll notice that these labels are always listed in alphabetical order. And if you have a small number of labels, like you see here, that might be okay. It's pretty easy for me to find these different labels. But what if you have many, many more? What if you have 10+? You obviously work with some labels more often than others, so here's a very quick but simple trick to help you reorder your labels.
Under edit labels what we can do is that we can put a number in front of the labels that we would like to order in a particular way. So let's say I use work more often than anything else. I'm gonna put a one in front of that. And let's say I would like my personal label to be next. So I'm gonna put a number two beside that. You don't necessarily have to number every one of your labels, but maybe there's just a few that you'd like to keep at the top of the list. I'm gonna hit done, and now you can see those labels will always appear at the beginning of this list.
So if you want to clean up your notes home screen, I would encourage you to start using the archive function. Yes, that means archiving almost every single note. Once you've decided what to do with it, set a reminder as to when you would like it to reappear. You can keep your note screen nice and clean. And remember, when that reminder is triggered, when that time comes across, it's going to graduate, not only here to the fired area, but it's also going to appear here in your notes area.
I hope you enjoyed today's video. If you have further questions or suggestions for future videos about Google Keep or other productivity tools, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. As always, I want you to remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
