In a recent video, I asked you what would you like to see next here on the Simpletivity channel and I got an amazing response. One of those questions, one of those requests came from Zelphia, who says that they want to learn how to create a calendar task/event from info in an email. And many of you seem to agree because this received an awful lot of up votes.
So in today's video, that's exactly what we are going to tackle.
Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Dealing with email and your calendar, often, we are switching back and forth between a number of different tabs. And we often start out by receiving an email and we'd like to convert this into a calendar event. Perhaps we want to send a meeting request or just convert some of the information here into a task. Well in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do just that.
So let's start off with one of these emails, and these are fictitious of course, but hey, Scott, how does 3:00 pm on May 9th sound to you? I'm receiving an email from someone. They're suggesting a date or maybe I want to suggest a date, whatever the case may be. How can I quickly and easily create an event in my calendar?
Well the feature wish has been around for quite some time, but it seems to get hidden, is right up here. These three little dots. You may be more familiar with things like archive, and delete sending things to the trash, even the new snooze button, or the more recent snooze button, but all the way over here these three dots, we have some more options available to us. And one of them is to create an event.
So right from within the email, if I select create an event, what it's going to do is actually open up another tab. I'm gonna show you an alternative method, but this one is gonna open up another tab, and it's gonna do some great things for me.
As you can see, it's going to put the subject of that email here as the title of the event or the event name. And if I scroll down below, you'll see in the description, I have the email itself. Right here's the question, here's the person who sent it to me. So I have all that information at the ready.
Now this can be very helpful in some cases if the subject line or that information in the email is relevant, or in many cases, maybe you just want to scrap it and retitle it yourself, but many times I've received an email and the subject line made sense or was close enough that I could use it right here. I wouldn't have to do much editing.
But I'm gonna say, I'm just gonna call this something really simple. I'm gonna say meeting with Scott. I'm gonna change the title here.
But when it comes to the description, this can be quite helpful because at least it's a reference point for the person that you're inviting. It can be a reference point for yourself as well, in terms of why did you set up this meeting, and if there's an email thread, for example. If there's other pieces of information here.
Now by default, Gmail or Google Calendar will typically just pick the next available slot, like what's coming up in the next 30 minutes. So you will need to decide you know to change the more appropriate date, in this case, we're meeting on May ninth and we're gonna meet at three p.m. If it's an hour or if it's a half hour, you can change that here.
The other thing that you want to remember is that by default, by selecting create an event, it's going to automatically include the person or persons who sent the email. So this includes other people who may have been on the two line or in the CC line. You may have multiple people here.
So make sure to keep that in mind. If you are wanting to create a meeting with that individual, maybe it's just one of the three individuals on that email, or as I'll show you later, if you're creating a task, you'll want to take them off immediately. But it is going to come over here automatically. So that's great. That's one less thing for me to do.
I can hit save. It will prompt me do you want to send invitations? And this is I think a great prompt. I know it may be a little frustrating that you get this so frequently, but I think it's important, especially if you forgot, especially if you forgot that it added other people to this invitation, oh that's right, there's other people on that line there as yes so yes I am gonna say send.
That event is now created. Here it is on my calendar. And they will be sent an invitation as well.
But let's look at an alternative method.
So let's go back to our email here. I'm gonna go back to a different email this time. And here we've got big project with an early deadline. And this person says, let's set up a call so we can discuss this situation in more detail. Can you please send me an invite?
So we've already talked about creating an event here. We don't want to forget about the little sidebar menu here, on the right-hand side of your screen. And of course, calendar is one of those options.
So if you don't want to leave the comfort of Gmail. If you want to create an event directly without opening up a new tab, all we need to do here is click the calendar icon, and we're gonna expand this little mini menu here. And you can view this in a few different ways. You can view this in either the day view, as we're viewing now, or the scheduled view.
I don't have a whole lot here, but here's that meeting that we just created. I actually prefer the day view myself, but you can choose the default that's best for you.
So let's say I'm gonna set up another meeting on the ninth. In this case, all I have to do is select when I would like this meeting to take place. I'm gonna click right around the 11 o'clock mark. And now what it's going to do is that it's already brought in that subject line again.
We see similar behavior here. It's brought it automatically. I'm gonna leave that this time because that is maybe a little more relevant than the question that we saw in the previous example. The time is already what I want.
Remember I selected that on a previous screen. Now in this case, it doesn't bring over anything further in the description. So I'll have to add that myself. And under guests, it doesn't bring anyone else over either.
Now, again, this might actually be preferable to you depending on how you like to work. This is a little bit quicker in that it doesn't have to open up another tab, in some cases, but you can see we don't have all the same information that is brought over either.
So if I need to add another guest, then I would just need to click on that icon or click on this area and add this guest in this case. So let's do that. We've got the person there. And so now we can see that we've got both myself and that other individual.
I can do further editing if I want to open up another tab. But in this case, everything looks pretty good. I'm gonna hit save. And I'm gonna get the exact same prompt that we saw before.
And I'm gonna say yeah, let's save it, just send it over. This expanded calendar, this little mini calendar on the side will continue to stay visible, unless I hit the X, right. Unless I minimize this myself, which again you might like as you're dealing with your email and as you're adding other projects along the way.
It's a great tool to see just a quick snapshot of your day, again without having to go back and forth between tabs.
Now the two methods that I just showed you remember can also be used for tasks, because long-time subscribers of the Simpletivity channel probably know that I recommend using your calendar as a very, very effective to-do list.
So what we just did there can be replicated for tasks.
So let's take this first example again. This case, I'm gonna close the tab that we created later. If I say create an event, typically what I will do in this case, it's gonna bring over that information, and it's really this stuff down here, the description, right the body of the email that is what I want, but I'll convert it as an all-day event, is what I'll do. I'll convert it as an all-day event, and then I'll select which day I'd like to complete that task.
The one really important thing that you need to watch out for here if you are creating tasks in this way, is that remember it's gonna automatically bring those individuals over.
So I'm gonna have to remove that individual if I just want this to show up on my task list. But yes we're gonna leave that tab there. But there's another way that you can do this as well. It might be fairly obvious that I could go over here to my tasks pane, or my tasks view, and I could open it up, and I could just say add task, but let me minimize that for just a second.
Because if we go back to the little three dots, the little more options here, we also have add to tasks. So if you happen to be a Google Tasks user, you can select that option, and then what it's gonna do, it's gonna open this up once again, but let's see if I scroll down.
Here we go, here's the can we meet Thursday. So it's added it under my no dates.
Right, these are the things that are due or have been due in the past. But it's gonna bring it in here as a new task. The subject comes over, but I think the really valuable thing is that it creates a link, a direct link, to that email itself.
Right so if I go about my day, and I'm working away and I see whatever this task is and I've probably will rename it in something that's more actionable, I can always go back and click on this, and immediately here to my left, it's gonna bring up that original email.
So if I need to go back and retrieve an attachment, or find a link or something along those lines, then I can access it there as well. And remember you can always access your tasks and view your tasks within Google Calendar as well.
Thank you so much for watching today's video, and don't forget, if you'd like to see one of your questions answered, just let me know in the comments down below.
Remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
