How to Use Gmail + Keep Notes + Google Calendar Together

Gmail, Keep Notes, and Google Calendar are all great productivity apps. But did you know that you can combine them together for even more benefit? In this video, Scott Friesen shows you how to link Gmail, Keep, and Calendar so you can get more done in less time.

Transcript:
​Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Keep are three Google apps that are core to my personal productivity system. But you know, what helps out even more is the relationships between these three. So in today's video, I wanna show you how you can get so much more out of these three and by connecting and linking them together. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. So let's get started. And we're gonna start with my inbox. And often I'm dealing with an email here. And you know, I'd like to take some notes, maybe there's some helpful information here, maybe I've got an existing node that I would like to grab some of this information from. Well, something that really helps me out is this side panel here on the right, and you can see that we've got some icons here for things like Google Calendar, and Google Keep. Now First things first, if you don't see See this sidebar, most likely, it's because you have not hit this little arrow in the bottom right hand corner, maybe your website looks or your browser looks a little bit like this. Come all the way down here to the bottom right hand corner and say show side panel and that will be revealed unto you there. So if I click on the Keep icon, I've got all of my keep notes here. So I can take a look at the relevant note and input the information that I want. But it gets even better. Let's say that this is a brand new piece of information but I'd like to have a note linked to this information. Well, all I need to do here is say, take a note and just before I even begin writing anything, you'll notice that there's an actual link between this spring conference ideas and the email that I'm writing here. So I'm just gonna say, new note here as an example, I'm gonna hit Done. The great thing is is that no matter where I am, let's go into keep itself. Here's that new note. I've got that link, I can just click on that link and now in a new tab, I'm gonna go directly to this email. I've got a connection between that note and going back to this email. So no matter what I do with this email, if I archive it, if I send it to a different label or a different folder, I've got a link. So as I'm fleshing out these notes, maybe I'm adding a bunch of notes related to that email, I can always go back and revisit it here. If I wanna kill that link, well, I can just hit the X. If I never wanna have that link, go back, I can do so there. But let's look at another way in which we can connect information from a Gmail into this time Google Calendar. So in this case, let's say this is something that I wanna create a meeting about in this email example, someone would like to set up a meeting with me and we've already got part of the agenda listed here. So why do I wanna copy and paste this or write it all out again, why don't I just create an event from this. Well, if we go up here to these three dots, we've got a number of other options available to us and one of them is create event. So if I select Create event within any email that is open, what it's gonna do is open up a new tab within Google Calendar, it's gonna input the subject of that email up top here, and the contents of that email automatically in the description. And in fact, it's even added that individual over here. I can actually just hit save and create this me, I should really take a look at the date and the time first, but I can hit save and create that meeting almost immediately. Now, of course, I can change the title, I can add some more information down here as well, but in just a few clicks, one click to be exact, I can be in here and be ready to set up that particular meeting. So those are a couple of ways that you can get information out of Gmail into both Keep and Google Calendar. Now let's stick with Google calendar for a second. I'm gonna discard this particular meeting. I'm gonna go back to this one here. So I'm here within Google Calendar, and perhaps I wanna link some of the information here with my notes. So For example, let's say I'm interviewing someone later today and I wanna write out some of the job interview questions. Well, if I open up this invitation here, I obviously don't wanna add it to the description, because perhaps the person I'm interviewing is a part of this invitation. I don't wanna give away the questions or my personal notes in advance, but with this event already open, I'm gonna come back over here to this side panel and hit keep, and very similar to what we saw in Gmail, if I say take a note, I've got that link again. So here, maybe I've got, question one, Question two, question three, I've got a bunch of questions. I'm gonna label this job interview, questions here, perfect. So I've got some my job interview questions and perhaps I'm gonna keep adding to this. I don't wanna be in here all of the time within the calendar, I'm gonna go about the rest of my day maybe throughout the week, I'm gonna come back here and add to these job interview questions or revise these job interview questions. But if I wanna go back to that particular calendar invite maybe I've forgotten who these interview questions are for, I can select that and it's gonna bring me directly back to this particular invite. So some cool new ways as to making a relationship between Keep in Gmail, and also Keep and Google Calendar. But it gets even better. And we're gonna look at another relationship between Google Calendar and Keep. So let me close this out here for a second. Within Google Calendar, this is where I spend most of my day, this is where I have all of my appointments, all of my events, I even manage the majority of my to do's here within my calendar. But let's go back to this interview example here again. What if I wanna review those questions in advance? What if I wanna review these job interview questions, just to refresh my memory or to revise them one last time? Well, within Google key what we can do, of course, is add a reminder. So if I go in here and add a reminder, let's say I wanna pick a particular time. If the interview is at 10:30am, I wanna be reminded of these notes at 10:00am. I'm gonna hit save. So now I've got my reminder here. If they have desktop notifications turned on, I'm gonna get a reminder here within the browser, I may also get a reminder on my mobile phone. But it gets even better if I go back to Google Calendar as long as you have reminders enabled, as long as you're viewing the reminders calendar here. And I'm just gonna refresh this page so that we can see it here. What's gonna happen is, there we go. There are my job interview questions showing up as a reminder here within Google Calendar. So if I click on this, it's gonna remind me first of all, but if I click on this, I'm gonna have those job interview questions waiting for me. Don't forget reminders that you set here with the Google Keep automatically link with your Google Calendar account. As long as you have your reminders calendar enabled, you can hide them if you want. See those little purple reminders that I had, I'm gonna enable them again, you can see them here, I've got another one here that may be related to this team meeting here, this particular note as well. So that can be very helpful too. But let's go one step further here, because I want you to show that it actually keeps the link between some of the notes that we've created over here, and the things that we've done on the calendar itself. So you'll remember that when I created that note, let's open up a new one here. I'm gonna open this up. And if I say take a new note, and let's just say this is a new visit client note just so we can see it there. I'm gonna say done. I've got that link, it's creating that link because I'm creating it here while it's open. New clients note how about that? Let's make sure we get the title correct here. But what I wanted to show you here is that when I'm back on the calendar, here I've got my notes here, I don't see anything too special, it's just ordering it in the way that I've entered it here. But if I open up this calendar event, what you're gonna see is looking at that, related. That's actually gonna jump to the top. So even if I took this node, and then I took hundreds of other notes, whenever I open up this event within Google Calendar, if there's a link, this is gonna jump to the top, I'm gonna be able to find it later on that much easier as long as I have this side bar open. Let's go back and look at that example with the interview one. If I open this one up, again, related, there's my job interview questions. It wasn't the last one I created, this was the last note I created, but it knows that it's related so that is gonna pop up in the side panel as well. Now the last thing that I wanted to share with you today here is how you can actually add a Google Keep link to absolutely anywhere, not just Gmail or Google Calendar you can add it absolutely anywhere. So here, if I open up, let's say I wanna link back to this particular note here. Whenever you have a note open within Google Keep, what you can do is come up here and copy, you can copy the information in that link. Now what I can do is I can go back to absolutely, I've already got one here in that particular note, let's open up this one here. I can go to anywhere and paste that link. Now it doesn't have to be within a Google app like I'm showing you here, I gotta save this one, but I'm just gonna use this as an example. If I come back here, here, I've got that link. If I click on it, what it's gonna do is in a new tab, it's gonna open up that particular note. So Isn't that fantastic? No matter where I am, I mean, I could be pasting this into a Google Drive, document or a PDF or something like that, it's gonna bring it back to this particular note. So it may leave you with a bit of an ugly URL. This is a bit of a workaround, you could say it's not the most prettiest link, but of course, you can do that here by pasting that where you like it. I'd love to hear from you next. Number one, what was your favorite tip from today's video? And number two, Did I miss anything? Is there another way that you can create a connection between these or other Google Apps? 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.