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This video is brought to you by SaneBox, more about them a little later on. Nearly five years ago I released this video, "How to Use Gmail filters and Labels," and it has certainly become one of my most popular pieces of content, receiving more than 1.2 million views. Now, no, this is not about boasting about one of my successful videos,

it has to do with the subject matter, specifically, Gmail labels. And here's the truth, I don't use labels, I never have and I don't intend to. And I want you to reconsider

your use of labels or folders within your email account. So in this video, I'm going to give you three good reasons why you should forget your labels in order to spend less time within your email. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you

to get more done and enjoy less stress. And here we are inside of my actual Simpletivity business email account. Now, of course, I've masked my incoming emails

to protect any sensitive or personal information, but where I want you to focus your attention is to the left hand side of the screen, here, under labels. You'll see that there is absolutely nothing shown here under my labels heading. Now, there is a more button, and if I select that, you're going to say, "Wait a minute, Scott, you've got labels,

I'm looking at three right now." While technically these are labels, I did not create them, nor do I ever click on them or apply them. These are related to a Gmail extension, which I use, so they can manage when an email is returned to my inbox.

But you'll notice there is nothing here, no other label that I have created. No colors, no special text, nothing that is being labeled on the front of my emails either. So why do I not use any labels at all? Let me give you three good reasons. Number one, labels can be incredibly time consuming. The amount of effort it takes for us to create,

manage review, click, and go into our labels and adjust them or re-edit them, can far outweigh any of the promised benefits of using such labels. Furthermore, there are many of us who get so attached to our labels that we start to drag each and every one of our emails into some type of category.

Now, there may be some argument for this three step process of things that are requiring my action, things where I am waiting for someone, and things that I have completed, but even this type of routine

can waste an awful lot of my time, and maybe more importantly, an awful lot of my energy. I've worked with people who are taking spam emails or in this case, a daily notification and dragging it and putting it somewhere else.

And of course it doesn't really matter where you access those labels, wherever you're going to click or apply those labels, it's requiring an extra step to do so. And the question I want you to ask yourself is, how often do you actually come back here and click and use these labels,

or are they simply a repository, a place where they have a specific color or title attached to them but you don't actually make use of them? And that brings us to reason number two why I think you should reconsider using your labels.

And the hard truth is this, your labels and the emails that are contained within them are not nearly as accurate as you think they are. Now, it is true, Gmail does give us the ability to attach multiple labels to a single email.

This is not always the case with other systems or other email clients because perhaps this email is related to two different areas. So I want them to appear in those areas. But we often put way too much trust

on what is being contained within such a label, thinking, that, well, if we've been diligent and we've dragged everything over and if we always put a label on an email,

everything related to my manager or everything related to something over here should be contained within that area, and that is simply not true. Labels are only as good as the individuals who set them up or the individuals who apply those specific labels, so don't always trust that your labels are going to be representative of everything that that label is listed as. A really good example of that is those

of us who may have a label for a specific customer. So let's say this is going to be a customer name, and this could be a client, it could be some other purpose. And I want to make sure that I can quickly and easily put their information all in one place

and then get to it in just a single click. Far too often I've seen people put their faith

in that this label is going to contain everything related to this customer, or from a particular individual. But really the only way to trust or make sure that is the case

is by entering in the email address itself. And of course, we have much more powerful features here within the search bar if we want to filter it by specific users or by specific timeframes as well. Now, while you might argue that this took me more

than one click to get all of this information, here is the overarching benefit. I know for certainty this is all of the email that I have received for this particular individual. I can go back and still continue to sort, or filter or use some of the other options available

to me here at the top of the screen. And that brings us to my third reason why I feel

that labels are not necessary and often eat up too much of our time. The ability to search for emails within Gmail or other clients, such as Outlook, have become so much more powerful, it is that much easier to get and find what we are looking for.

Getting familiar with some of the basic search functions here within Gmail can not only save you time, but can save you the headache of jumping from this label,

hmm, it's not in there, jumping to this label, still can't find it, maybe it's in this label,

and wasting our effort going through our different categories here on the left hand side. And going back to point number one, sometimes, because we've put in all of the effort and all of the work, we feel that we owe it to ourselves to come here and both manage and search for things within our labels, when it can be so much simpler

for me to simply type in a keyword such as request, and I know that it had an attachment, and now I've narrowed it down to these eight emails. Yes, this took me two or three clicks, but only when I wanted that information. Think of all of the other clicks I saved by not having to drag or apply and put labels on the majority of my emails. Now, the one exception to these three reasons would be if you are using a filter within Gmail to automatically apply specific labels. So for example, here, I wanted this particular email course to not block up my inbox. I didn't want any of those emails to appear here and I wanted to quickly be able to review them here

on the left hand side. So just to be clear, none of these emails had a label applied by me manually. I applied a Gmail filter, so it was looking for specific information, including the combination of the sender, and what was included in the subject line. This can be a helpful way to keep things out of your inbox. And that is exactly where I spend the majority of my time on this video, showing you how to make use of filters

so that you can keep that inbox nice and clean and spend as little time in your email as possible. Now, another great way to leave your labels behind and spend a lot less time with your email is by using SaneBox.

SaneBox creates a number of smart labels for you so you don't have to, and you don't have to manage them either as well. Within Gmail, Outlook, or any email account, SaneBox will create a number of smart labels or smart folders such as this SaneLater, where I can go and review certain emails that I don't want to see within my inbox, but best of all, it learns from me

so I can keep my attention on what matters most, and SaneBox can hide those other distractions or other emails that I don't want to see on a regular basis. So if you'd like to get rid of inbox clutter and spend a lot less time with an email, try SaneBox. Click the link in the description below to get your 14 day free trial and receive a $25 credit

if you want to continue the service. Thank you so much for watching. And remember,

being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Adding a form using Google Forms

In this video, I'm going to show you how to quickly create and add a form to your Google Site, but I'm also going to show you how to create a more impressive form that looks like this, so you can wow your visitors.

Hello, everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And here I am within my Google Site's account, and I am setting up a website, and what do I need, is a contact form.

And of course, forms can be used in a variety of different purposes,

but let's see how easily we can add a form to our site. So in this example, I've got a special event here, and I want to find out some more information. So I would like to add a form just below these images here. Now, Google Sites makes it very, very easy.

Here, on the right hand side under our 'Insert' menu, all we need to do is scroll down

almost all the way to the bottom, and you can see that there is the 'Forms' option.

Now by selecting this, it's actually going to open up a Google Forms preview. So depending on which Google account you are using within Google Sites, you will see a full listing of any forms which you've created within Google Forms before.

Or of course, we can start from scratch. Now, if you have not yet created your form, you will need to go to Google Forms, and either you can start a form from scratch or you can use from one of their many templates to get started.

And Google Forms gives us an actual customer feedback form here, which is great. So we can, of course, adjust any of the questions, anything that we see here, a number of different templates for us to get started with. 

Now, once you're finished creating or editing an existing form, you will see it here, within Google Sites. So for example, here is that customer feedback form, which I just selected a few moments ago. But in this example, I'm actually going to come down to this CRM Intake Form.

I'm going to select it, and down below, it says,

"One has been selected." At this point, I'm going to select 'insert'. As like with other elements, the form will be inserted where the cursor or where the last attention was here, within our site.

But of course, we can click and drag this to any other section or drag it to, let's say if we want to center it here on the page, if we want to center it here on the screen. So now, in just a few clicks, we have our form ready for visitors to fill out.

Now of course, this isn't going to be visible until we hit 'Publish', so I'm going to hit 'Publish', but I want you to be wary of something. If we click on the 'Preview' button and come to this page,

Fixing common form display issues

there is that form, that looks great but wait a minute, we've got this, we've got this scroll bar to the right hand side, and if I don't touch the scroll bar, the 'Submit' button is kind of hidden down below.

This can be very off-putting and not look very professional on your site. So, how can we fix this? If we go back into the Google Site's editor, you will see that yes, that 'Submit' button is still hidden here.

All you need to do is select on the form element like you see here, and now I can click and drag, and I'm going to drag well beyond. I'm going to give it almost a good inch below the last thing that is presented here, within my form.

Now I'm going to hit 'Publish' again and let's hit that 'Preview' button. And this time, you'll see that that scroll bar is no longer apparent, and we've got nothing else that is hidden down below.

So, pay attention depending on the size or the length of your Google Form if you need to make some minor adjustments. Now, although adding a Google Form is very easy and straightforward, there can be a downside to using Google Forms.

Number one, you are very limited with the number of editable options available to you. Other than changing the background of the form, and this highlight color, and the color of the button, the layout of your form is very, very standard.

Creating better-looking forms

So how can we make something that is a little more impressive and fits better with your website? Well, I think one of the best ways to both impress your visitors, but also keep them more engaged is by creating a sliding type of form, like you see here.

So I've got a great big invitation to start on this particular form.I'm going to first, enter in my first name. I'm going to go next. Let's enter in a fake email address .com and we're going to hit 'Submit'.

And I even get a nice professional "Thank you," with this graphic here as well. So what am I using and how can you include this within your Google Site? For this purpose, I'm taking advantage of JotForm, a much more robust and powerful form builder, which is still super easy to integrate with your Google Site.

Here, within JotForm, you can create any number of different forms and know they will not look static or standard. And on top of that, you can customize it to your heart's content, whether you want to choose a preset theme, or you can customize virtually every single color element here, on the screen.

In addition, you can add payments to any of your forms and a number of advanced features, including signatures and even the ability to book an appointment. But in our example, let's keep things relatively simple.

I've got a welcome page at the beginning, I've got the thank you page which we've already seen, and here are the only two things that I'm asking for people to fill out. When I'm ready to add to my site, 6all I need to do is go to the 'Publish' area and I'm going to choose this second one, which is called 'Embed'.

Here, I'm going to select 'copy the code', it's automatically copied to my clipboard,

and then I can return to my Google Sites editor. In this example, I'd like to include this form between the RSVP button and these images down below. So no, we are not going to come down to 'Forms'. Instead, we are going to select the 'Embed' button

at the top of the 'Insert' tab. Here, I'm going to select the 'Embed code' option and I'm going to paste in the code which it gave me. I'm going to select 'Next,' and it's going to give me a preview of what that form will look like.

Now, I can select 'Insert' and there it is, exactly where I want it to be. And just like with other elements, we can move it to other parts of our page but I'm also going to choose to actually expand it out, so it actually has the width of most of this page.

It's still centered, but it's going to take up most of the width here. Now, I can hit 'Publish' and the next visitor to my website will see a much more engaging way to interact with my site.

To learn more about JotForm, go to jotform.com or click the link in the description down below so you can start creating fantastic looking forms and add them to your site in just minutes.

And if you're wanting to create a free mobile app to go along with your website, be sure to watch this video next, where I show you how to create one step by step.

Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Easy support system

Would you like to make it easier for your clients to connect with you and would you like to make it painless to manage that entire client relationship and respond to requests and services all within Trello?

Well, in this video I'm sharing with you a free Trello power up that gives your users an amazing experience and will also allow you to save so much time. We're taking a look at a power up called Hipporello, which yes,

gives you a complete customer portal experience like the one you see here, so that your clients are not only going to be impressed but makes it easier for them to connect with you.

Now, Hipporello is a creator of several different powerups including Hipporello apps, which allow you to create your own custom apps right here for Trello. But for this video, we're focused on the Hipporello service desk so that we can respond to support, complaints or create any number of forms which we would like to manage right here within Trello. With the Hipporello powerup installed, you'll see

that we'll have some additional options here in the top right-hand corner. But before we go into the details of how you can set up and manage your own forms and how clients connect with you, let's take a look at the customer experience.

Custom customer portal

Hipporello allows us to create a customer portal like the one you see here. So you can present your brand in a professional manner and go beyond just giving them an email address or a simple Google form.

In this case, I can add my own branding, my own logo, my own color scheme and add as many different forms as I like.

You can also give your users a handy search bar so if you have a number of different forms to look for, they can find it easily and you can have those forms listed here all within the same page. So in our example, I'm going to pretend that I'm reaching out for further information.

I'm going to select this Contact Us form. Now keep in mind you don't have to use the customer portal as you see here, you can create your own custom forms and then embed them directly on your website. So in this example, I'm pretending to be a customer and I'm wanting to find out some more information

about their new features and some of their new pricing plans, at this stage, I'm going to hit submit. Now you're probably used to receiving something that tells you thank you for submitting or we'll be in contact with you shortly, but this is where Here, I can either submit another new request or I can view the request details, and this is what takes your level of support to the next level.

'Cause not only does the user have complete access to what they submitted, when they submitted it, they'll even see the automated response. Here you can see that an agent has already sent an email thanking them for contacting us and telling them that this particular request has been opened.

But up above we can go even further and share this request with someone else. We can give it a rating in terms of how satisfied we are with this request, and if I want to follow up, I can reply to this request directly from this screen.

So instead of some other customer service forms where the user just hopes that that message was delivered and that it was created, you can reassure your clients that you are on top of their request or their application or their feedback 1and they can also keep track of it themselves.

Keep it all within Trello

But let's jump back into our Trello board here. Within Trello, you can see that that new request has appeared within this specific list. I've told Hipporello, anyone who fills out

that Contact Us form, I want it to appear under new requests. And Hipporello also makes it very easy for us to see which ones have been responded to and which ones in which we are waiting for a reply.

So for example, for these two messages, you can see this blue label which says auto messages sent. So yes, we immediately sent a message telling them that we have received the request but we still need to carry it forward, elsewhere, You'll see that we are waiting for a user to reply.

We've already responded to these particular requests and in this job application example, we can see that the user has replied and is now waiting for a response from us. But let's open up these cards to see how much more additional detail that Hipporello gives us,

here within the Trello card itself. Under the description, we have the entire message

including name, email, address, and what they wrote but it's down below where the true power of Hipporello becomes so apparent because not only do we have all

of the tracking information, including the rating that that user gave us, but you can see that we can also reply to this message directly, that's right. No longer do I need to jump back to my email account, no longer do I need to copy and paste this email address or set something up in a CRM system.

I can go right here within my Trello card and hit the reply button and now I can quickly and easily respond to this message.

Now that I've sent my quick reply, I've got a full record of what is being shared. Here is my response to the client and I can also see if they have read

or not yet read my message to them so I can keep track of the entire customer relationship right here within Trello without having to use other details.

Settings and form setup

Now that you have a better understanding of how Hipporello works, let's take a look

at some of the further settings and how you can adjust your forms, by clicking

on the Hipporello powerup in the top right-hand corner, we can access our hip admin account. And remember, you are going to stay right here within Trello, not having to manage multiple tabs or logging into a separate account.

Here under the form to board tab, you can see the list of all of my forms including a bug tracking form that I currently have disabled. But here is that Contact Us form for example

and if I come over here to Actions and select Edit you can see the additional features that we have available to us. So for example, if I select Edit Form, you can see how easy it is to create and customize your forms.

On the right hand side, you can simply drag and drop a long list of different features a long list of different options available to you.

So for example, if I want to add a select box under email, I just need to click and drag and now I can start asking additional questions and giving them additional options. So whether you are creating a form from scratch or editing a template

or copying a previous form, Hipporello makes it super easy for you to create something customized just for your purposes. But in addition to just creating the form, you can set different levels of access and other automations, here under Set Access Policy.

I can customize as to who has access to this form, since this is a general contact us form, I've set it to public, but if I open up a signed policy, I can create a private policy so that perhaps only email domains ending in a certain domain can have access to this particular form.

This is a great feature if you are wanting to use this for a select group of customers or if you're wanting to use it for internal purposes. We can also create other automated rules such as which message gets sent as soon as the form is submitted.

And if you want to add other automation or other triggers, you can do so here as well.

Lastly, if you don't want to use the customized Hipporello customer portal, you can choose to add the embed code. So if you want to take any of these forms and simply put it on your own website, you can do so and take advantage of all of these additional features as well.

Email integration

But keep in mind that Hipporello is so much more than just forms and if you want to

use their email to board feature, you can do so as well. Perhaps you already have an email address that starts with support or help or maybe you want to create one from scratch.

In this example, I've created a custom support email address so I can hand this out to my clients or maybe I can add it as a part of my email signature so they don't always have to use the form or not use the form at all.

Here within my email account, I've pasted in that support email address and I'm pretending to be a customer who is wanting to learn more about their features. Now jumping back to my Trello account, here, you can see that that request appears in that same dedicated list.

So now I can start that conversation with this new user who didn't use a form, but simply use the email address and here's a bonus feature that I really love

and will save you a lot of time. You can create your own quick text right here within Hipporello, so if you have a number of canned responses or templates you'd like to use. here I am just one click away and now I've got that response directly within the message.

All I need to do is hit submit and now I can move on to my next request or next task right here within Trello. So if you'd like to provide the best customer service possible and keep it all within Trello, be sure to check out Hipporello at Hipporello.com or click the link in the description down below.

And if you're wanting to get even more out of Trello and save time, be sure to click on this video next where I walk you through the most powerful Trello automation.

Better than Google search

ChatGPT continues to change the way that we work and how we do business, but you don't always have to be here within the ChatGPT interface. In this video, we're going to take a look at three ChatGPT extensions, which make it so much easier for you to take advantage of AI. And we're going to get started right here within Google.

Why? Well google is still the number one website in the world. Why? Because we like to find out about things and search for new ideas. So in this example, I'm going to give it a question. When is the best time of year to raise prices for a service?

Let me go ahead and head enter on my keyboard. And of course, Google is going

to come up with a number of answers. Or are they, this is a blog post here. This looks like a blog post. Maybe there's something interesting within this Harvard Business Review and we've got this dropdown menu.

But wait, what do we see here on the right hand side? Well, I've installed a extension called ChatGPT for Google, which will give you a ChatGPT response for anything that you search either within your own address bar or within the standard Google search bar.

And here you can see this is a much easier way for me to digest and skim and summarize some of the five key points when it comes to increasing prices rather than me having to go in and out of all of these articles here on the left hand side.

And let's be honest with things such as MailChimp, Fresh Books, Forbes Magazine many of these are going to be sponsored or maybe skewed in some way. Instead, I can find information which is taking a variety of different sources and giving me a fantastic summary.

But there's additional features we can take advantage of here as well. One of my favorites is the ability

to instantly copy this answer in a single click. So no longer do I need to take my cursor and copy the section that I want. I can copy the entire answer in simply one click. In addition down below, I can continue the chat down below.

So here you can see that there is a Let's Chat button. If I select that option, I could say, now tell me the cons of raising prices. And remember, it's going to keep in mind everything that it just told me up above. It's not a new conversation.

am continuing the conversation that I started and I didn't have to go anywhere else. Now, if you want to tweak some of the defaults for ChatGPT, you can come here into the gear icon and here at the top of the option screen, the trigger mode is what I think is most important.

By default, it is always going to be on meaning. Anytime that you search within Google it is going to give you a response. But if you would rather only have it give you a response when you end it with a question mark you can choose this option here.

Or lastly, you can choose the manual option as well. So if you don't want this being displayed for each and every one of your searches you can customize it for your needs as well.

Use AI with your email

Next up, let's take a look at an extension which also has some of the similar features of our first extension. But where I think it really shines is when it comes to handling your email. And for that, we're looking at an extension called Chat Sonic.

So here is something which is often a burden for many of us and that is both reading and replying to email messages. And if we can use some AI to help us get through our inbox that much faster and also perhaps sound a little more professional or maybe help us to deal with an angry customer, well all the better.

With Chat Sonic, you'll see that there is a little icon here at the top of the screen, but in my first example we're going to take a look at a reply. So here's a fairly simple message which I've received.

I'm going to come down here and hit the reply button, but you'll notice that things look very different down below. First of all, you can see that there is a brief reply prompt here, and all I'm going to do is give it some very basic information.

I'm going to say it will arrive Friday. That's it. That's all I'm going to say. Now, of course, there is no way that I would reply this way to an actual customer. I need to show some more caring. I need to show some more specifics when it comes to replying to this request.

All I need to do is come over to the right and select reply and Chat Sonic will quickly give a professional response complete with the details that I've added here. Now, a couple of great things that can cut down on time. You'll notice that I can change

the tone of this message as well. So if I don't want to sound quite so positive I can select neutral and then select reapply. And it will just slightly change the tone of this particular message.

But remember, it has addressed everything up above and it's included the shipping date which I stated here with. It will arrive on Friday. So not only can you play around with the tone, but even if I leave it at neutral, I can hit reapply

as often as I like, and it will continue to adjust and slightly modify the message below

until I see something that I like. But probably for efficiency, it would be better just to change some single words that you would like before hitting the send button. This might just be the fastest way to reply and or create your own messages.

If I come up here to compose, you'll see that we still have that CS, that Chat Sonic logo here as well. So I'm going to select that. In this case, I'm going to say write an email to my VA about our meeting next Monday something along those terms there.

And here you'll also see that we still have that tone available to us. In fact, within this dropdown

we have many more options available to us as well. Since I'm discussing something with my virtual assistant I'm going to say casual in this case. And I'm going to select write.

And not only will it write the message itself but it will also include the subject line above as well.

But there's one more killer feature which can help you save a whole lot of time especially if you haven't been in your inbox for a while, or if you see a message like this, which has a lengthy thread. Now I realize five emails actually isn't

that lengthy but I'm going to use this one as an example. Let's say that I've just woken up and started into my email and there's been a bunch of back and forth from my other coworkers or clients that I haven't yet seen, or worse yet, what if I come back from a holiday or vacation and there's a number of messages in a lengthy thread?

Well, if I open this up and start to expand it, there's an awful lot to get through here.

These are lengthy emails with a lot of detail. But if I come back to my inbox, what if I could find out what was going on in that email without even having to open it up?

Here again, you can see as I hover over each message, there is that Chat Sonic logo.

And if I select it what it's going to do is give me an executive summary of the entire thread. So in just a moment here, I've got a single paragraph which is telling me exactly what happened throughout the entire thread, including who said what and what the final outcome was here.

Now, rather than reading something that was at least six times this length I've got the entire message here at my fingertips. You'll notice that it also has a tab called timeline.

So if I want a quick recap as to when these messages were sent, I can do so as well. But coming back to the executive summary, an added benefit is that I can come down here and select reply. So I don't even have to go into this message or into this email.

I can reply with a thoughtful response or continue to use Chat Sonic and give an AI reply or at least get me started with my response.

Most powerful ChatGPT prompts

Now, the last extension on our list is going to bring us back to the ChatGPT interface, but for good reason it is going to turn our regular ChatGPT interface from what you see here into something so much more powerful.

What we are using is an extension called AIPRM for ChatGPT. And what this is all about is giving us a number of much more detailed prompts so we don't have to give so much instruction and we can take advantage of some very complicated prompts for our business purposes.

So here you can see I've got a number of different prompts available to me here

including the ability to write an optimized article, the ability to create a buyer persona, for example. And all I have to do is give it a few pieces of information.

So for example, maybe I want a monthly content calendar and I only want to do it in as few clicks as possible. All I need to do is select this prompt here. And now down below you can see that title has been input.

At the very bottom where the cursor is displayed it's going to tell me what type of information it is looking for. So what is the primary keyword that I want to create content for? Well, let's say that I am a cleaning service agency.

That's the keyword that I'm looking for. Or let's just say cleaning services in this case and I'm going to hit enter. So all I had to do was give it two words

but what it is going to do is give me a number of content ideas so I can plan for the coming month or maybe several weeks in advance. So immediately it's given me a nice table which has given me a number of fantastic titles, a number of fantastic themes that I could turn into a blog article, a social media post.

Many of these could be a YouTube video if you wanted to a number of fantastic ideas. And all I had to do was type in cleaning services. If I come back to the top and select new chat, once again I will be given this full list of prompts.

Now, you'll notice that there is over 2,500 different prompts. So what you're going to want to do is use this search bar in the right hand corner. We've already seen this buyer persona legend, but what if I type in the word persona again and hit enter? You'll see that there's actually 65 prompts

that are related to a persona. And within each prompt not only will you be given a brief description but you'll also see how many people have viewed it, how many people have actually used it, and there's also a thumbs up, thumbs down.

So how many people have voted on it as well? So in this case, why don't I stick with the one with the most votes, this buyer persona legend. I'm going to click on it and down below, again, it is only needing some very simple information.

Keep in mind that this prompt contains an awful lot of detail, and not only would we waste a lot of our time trying to include that detail, we probably couldn't come up with the same results.

So this is the real power of the AIPRM extension. So what does our business sell?

I'm going to say that we sell business consulting to bookkeepers in, and let's say Orlando, Florida. I probably didn't even have to say Florida but I'm going to say Orlando, Florida. And in a matter of seconds it's given me a complete user persona

something that I can start to use either for my own marketing purposes or maybe I'm researching for a client. So here I've got a complete demographic with name, age

annual income, even their family or marital status. Down below, I've got further information including things such as their personal aspirations or their biggest pain points. I've got information on their shopping behaviors including some of their preferred brands, and maybe some of the search terms that they use most often.

So this can be a fantastic starting place for creating a user persona or using this information with the clients that you serve. Now, to get started with any of these extensions be sure to check out the links in the description down below.

And if you have further questions about AI or ChatGPT and your business, be sure to let me know in the comments.

Thanks so much for watching, and remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

If you want to really impress your clients and those you work with you know how important it is to stay on brand. But that can be really difficult with our project management and other productivity software.

But what if you could turn something like this into this complete with your logo, your colors and everything else that you would like to customize including the ability to hide certain menus so you're only sharing what you want to share? Well, in this video I'm going to show you exactly

how to do that with one of my favorite tools.

Walling Features

Now, Walling has been one of my favorite productivity tools for a while. Why well number one, they have a free Forever option which has very few limitations. And number two, it has such a frictionless way to add your ideas and your information.

Here I am with a brand new wall and if I just double click anywhere I can immediately start to type in my new idea and other details that I want to share down below. But the great thing is that I'm not just limited to text or checklist or to bullet points.

If I want to quickly grab an image, all I need to do is grab it, drag it again wherever I want to and I easily have that image available to me. What about if I just paste a link? Perfect, now, I've got direct access to this website as well and everything is click and drag.

So if I want to easily group things together I can do that right here within Walling as well. The other feature that I love is that we can create as many sections as we need to.

So maybe down here I'm going to add some tasks and in this case, I'm going to make it more of a KanBan board so I can quickly and easily create as many different sections as I like without having to jump to different pages on my screen.

Public Sharing

But let's get back to customizing how Walling will look for others. Another one of my favorite features is that if I hit the share button here, I can create a public shareable link, meaning I can copy this link and share it with others where they will not have to log in.

I can keep them up to date with what's happening with this project. They can see where things are at, but they don't need to create their own login. They can quickly and easily access this same information.

But recently, Walling has added the ability for us to customize our wall. So if I select this option here,

Logo

we will have the same wall open up, but now we can go ahead and customize to our heart's content. Let's get started with the logo. So I'm going to come up here and I'm going to add a logo from file. So in this case, I'm going to add my Simpletivity logo.

I'm going to add this one here, but because it's a white logo I can't see it, so I better come down here and change the wall background. So maybe I want to use this darker shade of blue.

Perfect, now, we can see my logo and I can come up and change the position or the size as I like as well. I particularly like my logo in the middle here and maybe I'm going to reduce it just a little bit so it's slightly smaller.

If you have a cover image you can choose to put it above or beneath, but in my case I like to keep things nice and clean.

So I just have the logo up here. Of course, Walling gives us a number of different creative ways for us to lay out our walls and if I want to include that wall cover, I can do so here but in my case, I'm going to keep that hidden so it's nice and clean with those who I'm going to share with.

In addition to changing our wall background, we can also change the default color of our bricks and all of the text as well. So for example, maybe I want the background color of my default bricks to be a bit of a green shade.

What I'm going to do is come up here and I'm going to choose this green color and maybe we're going to do something a little bit lighter

something in that tone there. So again, I can customize to my heart's content and if I want to change the text color, I can do so as well. One of the most helpful things you may want to alter is your default text font. S

o for example, maybe I want this to stand out a little bit different than the other fonts or the other text on screen. I'm going to come down here and choose the Rubik font and I'm also going to make it stand out a bit more by making it a little bit larger.

I can of course change the fonts for the other bricks and section titles as I want, but in this example I'm going to keep them as is.

Now, the next two sections on our customized tab are really going to help us choose what we want to show and display and how it looks to those

Customization

who are going to get access to this public link. So for example, do I want to allow them to both add and view public comments. With this ability here, the user will have the ability to add a comment themselves but if I only want to give them read-only access I might want to toggle that to off.

And then down below, we can customize a little bit further in terms of the look and feel and also what they'll be able to see.

So if I want to change my Brick corner, something from something sharp to maybe something that is extra rounded, I can do that here. Do I want to display the wall members or do I want to keep that hidden as well? In addition, I can review other options such as the wall search function or if I want to change or hide section headers and section numbers.

Themes

Now, when I'm finished customizing my wall, I'm going to come up to the very top.

You can see that it has changed this to this custom profile. Before I'm done, I'm going to want to save this as a theme. So maybe I'm going to call this my green theme in this case and I'm going to hit the save button. This is going to be extremely helpful

so that I can quickly and easily apply the exact same theme to as many other walls as I like. And here you can see I've already created a few other custom themes.

So if I want to go back to this simple blue, I can do so but maybe in this case, I want to stick with my green theme. If you don't want to customize on your own, Walling also provides us with a number of presets as well. So here I can choose this matrix style

or maybe I want to be really bold and choose this orange option as well. So you can either customize or use one of the other options to your heart's content.

Sections

But just before I proceed and sharing this link with an external client I want to look at one other new feature. And that has to do with sharing particular sections. Within each wall, you can create as many sections as you need. And in this example here,

my last and final section is a task list. But perhaps I don't want to share this with my client. This is only for internal purposes, but all of the other sections I want to make available. If I click on this share button again, I can select all sections. And here I'm going to uncheck my tasks.

Unchecking sections

So now when someone views my customized wall, they will have no idea that there is a missing section or certain sections which I've kept hidden. This gives me the flexibility to share only what I want and to display it in the way that I want with those who I share externally.

So if you're wanting a better way to visualize all of your ideas and projects and share them with others go to Walling.app or click the link in the description down below.

And if you're wanting to learn even more of the fantastic features within Walling, be sure to click on this video next where I give you a complete walkthrough of this amazing app.

If you're an accountant, bookkeeper, payroll professional, or just deal with financial software, this free app might just change everything.

Why? How often have you had to show a client how to do something within QuickBooks, Sage or some other accounting software because they only need to do it once in a while and you have to keep repeating yourself and explaining the process once a quarter or once for every new client.

Well, what if instead you could send them a beautiful user guide that looks like this and only took you a total of 41 seconds to create? And yes, you only have to create it once and then you can share this with as many clients as possible.

What we're doing is taking a look at a free app called Scribe, the easiest way to create user guides whether that's for your clients or maybe even for yourself or other members of your team.

So let's take a closer look at what Scribe is and how easy it is to use. Scribe produces a easy to follow guide showing us step by step what the user needs to do including where they need to go, where they need to click and even highlighting on screen what they need to do.

But best of all, I didn't create any of these titles. I didn't add this little orange circle. I didn't tell it to click here. In fact, all I had to do was go through this process and just do it myself once and in a matter

of seconds it's produced this professional looking guide. But better yet, now I can go

and share it with as many clients as I need to. I can send it directly in an email.

I could add it to my website so that all of my clients can take advantage of this particular process but Scribe has gone one step further. If I come over here and select guide me what it will do is actually open up my QuickBooks account so I can follow along.

How easy is this to have the user guide on screen so I can follow along?

So yes, I've logged into my QuickBooks account. I need to come up here and select new and then it's telling me to select journal entry and then I need to come over here and select US dollars. I have the complete user guide on screen so I can follow along while I'm in the application itself.

Now if I need to, I can always minimize this if I want to just focus on my QuickBooks account here and I can pop it up whenever I need to.

Scribe also gives me the ability to move this to the other side of the screen. So if I need to focus on something over here but what a fantastic way to follow along these steps that maybe I only need to do once a quarter.

But best of all, you look like the amazing service provider because you are the one who's created this easy to follow user guide. So let me show you how easy it is to create your own Scribe.

With the Scribe extension installed, you'll find it here in the top right hand corner of your browser. And all I need to do is click on that to start my own recording. But just before I do, I want to show you something really cool.

Here you can see that there are already 58 other Scribes that are related to QuickBooks. If I select this option here, I can view from the gallery. And here's just an example of some of the other guides that are already created, meaning you might not even have to create the specific guide.

You might just be able to share one of these other ones that have already been generated. But let's go back and create our own guide from scratch. So all I need to do is select start recording and now it is recording everything within my browser.

Now on the bottom left hand corner you can see that these are the controls letting me know that it is recording my actions. Now you'll notice that there is no timer on screen and that's for a reason because it has nothing to do with how long it takes me to record this Scribe. It is only recording my actions so I can wait and delay

and wait for something to load or a report to generate. It's only going to record the things that I click or things that I enter in. So let's follow along with our previous example. I'm going to click on new.

I'm going to come over here and select journal entry. I'm going to come to this dropdown and select US dollars and then I'm going to come over here to the journal number and I'm going to change that number.

And maybe as a last step, I'm just going to pick the right account that I want them to find.So there's the Wise account. At this case, I'm going to stop my Scribe in our example.

All I need to do is come down here and select the controls and I can hit this complete recording option. Now, the other options available to us we can always pause our recording if we need to set up something in advance.

We can of course delete this Scribe and start again. For pro users, there is a smart blur feature and this may be helpful to you when you're dealing with sensitive accounting information.

Remember, everything that I'm showing you is included as a part of the free app but there are some additional features for pro users. Lastly, we can move these controls to somewhere else on the screen if they happen to be in our way. But in our example,

I'm going to select complete the recording. And what it's going to do is it's going to open up my user guide in a new window so I can review these steps and edit them as needed. Now it's even given me a great title, How to Create a Journal Entry in QuickBooks Online.

Of course, everything here is editable so I can change them if I need to. In this example, it's a total of 10 steps and it took me two minutes to record.

Of course, I spent some of that time explaining it to you but this number can also be very comforting to someone who receives the user guide letting them know how long it should take them or at least give them an estimate.

As we scroll down here you can see that it's recorded everything including the specific page that I was on. And yes, this is a clickable link. So you are giving someone an interactive guide that they can go directly to a particular website or a specific area within the accounting software.

Down below, yes, I clicked on new, and then I clicked on journal entry, and then I selected the US dollars. Now remember, it's going to record absolutely everything. So in this step, I did click on the journal number field and then I did hit backspace on my keyboard and hit the number nine.

Now, this is not something that I want them to do every time. So I'm going to choose to edit this. I'm going to select delete this step, I'm going to say delete and then maybe I'm going to come up here and I'm going to say click this text field and enter a unique number.

Maybe something along those lines. So you can always come up and either correct and add more detail. But remember, it's going to record every single step including adding this very helpful orange circle letting people know where exactly to click.

When I'm happy with my edits all I need to do is hit this copy link and I can share it with anyone that I like. Of course, there's other features available to me as well including adding another page or duplicating this or moving it to a team folder.

So I can share these with others, but for now, I can come up to the top of the screen and select Done editing and now my Scribe is ready to go. You'll also notice that it will even reduce the total number of time depending on any steps that you've removed.

Already, we're now down to less than a minute which is going to be incredibly comforting to anyone who receives this guide. But more importantly, think about how much time you have saved.

You've recorded this guide just once in less than just a few minutes and now your clients can take advantage of it again and again for years to come. Now, here within my free Scribe account, I can manage all of my user guides here, so I can quickly and easily share them with anyone that I want.

And if I need to go back and edit a guide maybe I just need to update one particular step, I can easily do so as well. Here's an example perhaps that I want to share with my team how we are going to share particular files with our clients.

And again, as we saw before it's incredibly easy to follow step by step, a visual guide telling us exactly where we need to click

and what we need to do. And keep in mind, if you don't want to share the link with others you can also export any of your guides in PDF format.

So if you want to create your own library of user guides or maybe upload them to a particular site or some other service that you use you can do that with your Scribe guides as well.

In addition, if you are looking for further inspiration or maybe just finding a Scribe which has already been created, you can go to the gallery where you'll find nearly 200 pre-made Scribes.

You'll also find a collection of page templates because remember, you can create a Scribe page which contains multiple different Scribes

or multiple different user guides to keep your clients or your customers on the same page. And if you're wanting to learn even more ways on how you can use automation with your business, be sure to click on this video next where I show you

additional tools that will make your day so much easier.

 I want to show you one of the most powerful things that you can do here within Trello. On this sample board, I've got a list called Projects and another one called Tasks.

Now watch this. I'm going to open up this Team Project and under this checklist called Project Tasks I'm going to add a couple of items, Task 1 and Task 2

And you notice that immediately they become linked tasks. And guess what? Over here within my Tasks list, they've actually created separate cards associated with those tasks.

But better yet, if I come over here and I've completed Task 1, I'm going to mark it as complete. It's going to record it as completed over here as well. So let me show you exactly how to set this up because I think there are so many different ways

in which this type of setup could be helpful to you and your Trello boards. So just before I dive into the automation, I want to review exactly what is happening here.

What I have told Trello to do is to say that any time that a task is added to this specific checklist, I want it to create a linked card in this list over here. So we're going to have a relationship between this card here and the tasks over here.

But just because I've specified this particular checklist name doesn't mean that we're limited to this card. So for example, I could come up here to this Personal Project. I also have a Project Tasks checklist and here I'm going to say "Email the team" as one of my tasks.

I'm going to say "Call Jane" as another one of my tasks. And you can see that the same type of functionality is happening. It's creating those linked cards over here in the Tasks.

These linked tasks are going to end up in the same list, which I've specified, but if I check this one off, it's not going to be confused as to where to go.

It's checking off in my Personal Project. Let's check this one off as well. And now you can see it's going to be completed for all of my Personal Project tasks. Now you can go into much more detail and have certain things appear in different lists.

You could even have these tasks appear in different boards if you wanted to. So if you have a project-specific board, but you want to manage your tasks on a separate board,

you can do that as well. And best of all, because it's linked, I can go directly to Task 2 and I can see the details and then I can go directly back to that Team Project, which is linked as well.

So now that you have a better understanding of what is actually going on here, let's go and set it up so you can do it yourself. All we need to do is click on Automation and we are going to click on Rules. And in the top right-hand corner,

we're going to select Create a Rule, and we have to start off with a trigger. So I'm going to click that Trigger button. And for our trigger, we're going to come over here

and select Checklists and we're going to go all the way down to the bottom, "when an item is added to a checklist" and here is where we need to specify the checklist name.

So you can give it any name that you want, but this is the only checklist where this particular rule is going to apply. Now, in my initial example, I used the checklist name Project Tasks, but let's use something different in this case.

I'm going to call this one Sub-Tasks because that makes a lot of sense as well So I'm going to say Sub-Tasks and I can either choose to do it only by myself, but in this case I'm going to say anyone. And I'm going to hit the Plus button here.

So that is our trigger. When an item is added to this specific checklist, what do we want to have happen. Next, we need to specify the specific actions for this trigger. And for this, we're going to come over here and select Cascade.

Now, what cascade means is that we're going to give it a series of actions based on previous actions.

So we're going to want to scroll down, almost all the way down to the bottom, and say "convert the item to a linked card," right? Because whenever we create a new checklist item we want to convert it to a linked card.

Now, before we hit the Plus button here, we need to specify where that linked card will be displayed. So here under List Name, I'm going to type in "Tasks"

because we want it to appear within that Tasks list. Now there are a few other options here you can make, but we don't need to choose any of them for our purposes.

I'm going to hit the Plus button and you can see that it is added here at the top.

So now with both our trigger and our action in place, all we need to do is select Save.

And at this stage, I would recommend that you test out your automation just to make sure that everything is working properly. So here I'm going to use this Client Project card as our example. I'm going to come over here and select Checklist.

Now remember, we have to use the specific checklist name for that automation. In our case we called it Sub-Tasks so that is going to be the name of the checklist that I add here.

And here, let's call this Task A just so it separates from our other examples. And I'm going to hit add. It may take a few seconds. There is the linked task and over here we have the card itself.

So we can already see that the first part of our automation is working perfectly. But if I open up this card and I give it a due date

and then I decide to check it off, you will notice that nothing will happen in the original project card. That's because we haven't set up the second part

of our automation. So let's return to our Automation dialog. Once again, we're going to select Rules and we are going to create our second rule.

Once again, we need to add a trigger. In this case, we're talking about due dates because when that due date is marked complete, we want things to happen. So the trigger is going to be "when the due date is marked as complete in a card by," I'm going to select anyone

and hit that Plus button. And then once again, we're going to return to the Cascade option here for our actions. And we're going to scroll down to about the third option here, which is "for each card linked in the attachments." Let's hit our Plus button there.

You can see that it's added, but now we need to tell it what to do for each card linked in the attachments. We then need to select the Checklist subheader and scroll almost all the way down and say "check item, and within the item name, we have to give it some very specific instructions.

We're going to use the braces symbol. So we want an open brace and we're going to type in the word "triggercardlink" and then close brace on the end You'll notice that there is no spaces at all.

This is a specific command, a specific reference to what we want happened, triggercardlink. But before we hit the Plus symbol, don't forget to come back and select this icon so we can tell it which checklist.

Here, once again, we need to be specific and type in the name of that Sub-Tasks checklist so it knows exactly which checklist it needs to reference. Now we can hit that Plus symbol and the rest of our automation is ready.

Don't forget to hit Save at the top of the screen. And now with this second automation saved, let's go and see how things work. So once again, I'm going to come up here to Client Project, and we have our Sub-Tasks.

So I'm going to type in Task A and let's type in Task B. So it's working. As we saw last time, it is linking those two tasks together. And I can go directly to Task A here if I want to. And there we can see the master project.

Let me add a quick due date here so we can test the second part of our automation. So it's due in about a week's time. I'm going to say completed. And now you can see that it has been checked off within the project card.

If we go back now, Task A has been completed as well. Now I would love to hear from you next. Do you have any questions about this specific automation or other automation rules right here within Trello? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching this video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Recently I purchased a piece of hardware that has changed the way I work at my desk. While it is most often associated with gamers and live streaming, I'm not using it for either of those purposes.

And I honestly think every professional would benefit from having this tool on their desk. No, this video is not sponsored, and no, I did not receive it as a gift. So let's find out what it is, how to set it up, and which model might be best for you. This is the Elgato Stream Deck,

and it is a small piece of hardware which contains 15 soft-touch keys which are completely programmable, and you can make it do whatever it is you want. You often will have it located

close to your keyboard or maybe close to your mouse. Just in comparison, here is my phone,

just to show you how relatively small it is, maybe the size of two credit cards in total. But what, Scott, are we using the Stream Deck for, and what makes it so powerful? Well, here you can see, I have a number of LED screens on here which I can program to do absolutely anything.

Do I want to change the volume on my keyboard at the touch of a button? I can do so here.

Do I want to launch a folder from my screen and actually change the display of my keyboard? Now, to summarize what the Stream Deck does and why it's so powerful, think of it as a custom keyboard shortcut where you can program any of these keys to do whatever it is you want.

So for example, maybe I want to launch my email. Well, I'm just one click away because I'm going to press this button and go directly into my inbox. Maybe I'm ready to post a video.

Well, I've got a button here called post a video, which is going to automatically launch the three applications or the three browser tabs that I need to go there. And remember, you're not limited to what is displayed here.

You can create multiple folders. So for example, if I want to wind down at the end of the day, I have this one called watch, which is going to bring me to a completely new screen. So if I want to launch something like Netflix,

I am just a click away. If I want to manage my Spotify play, pause, or shuffle, or go back between my tracks, I can do that here as well. So now that you know a little bit about the hardware itself, let me show you how you can set it up and some of the other things

you can do with the Stream Deck. So let's take a look at how easy it is to program our Stream Deck. Here, I've got a blank key, but I want to make use of it and perhaps launch a particular application.

I don't want to have to rely on all of my browser shortcut buttons or all of my shortcut tabs. Instead, I'd like to launch a particular app or a particular website just by pressing this key on my Stream Deck. So all I need to do is decide what type of action do I want on the right-hand side.

The Stream Deck comes with a variety of preset groups. So for example, if I want to add a volume controller, if I want something specific to navigation,

or maybe I want something to launch multiple tabs or do multiple things, I can do that here as well. But for this example, let's keep things fairly simple. I want to open up a particular website.

So under system, I'm going to click and drag Website, put it into that key, and now I can give it a title. Let's say that I want to access Twitter in just a single click. I'm going to give it the title of Twitter, and then I'm going to paste in the desired URL.

Now, when it comes to the image or what the front of the button will look like, I can change that to anything that I want.

I can choose it from my own file. And as you can see here, things like this Evernote icon, PowerPoint, and even my Simpletivity logo are some examples of that. I can create my own custom icon if I want, or I can open up the library here.

So if I want to use something that has been already created here within the Stream Deck profile, just for my simple example, I'm going to use this light bulb indicator. Here you can see that it is now represented on the Stream Deck itself.

Now when I press this option, it will automatically open up my Twitter account or wherever it is that I would like to go. Now, one of my favorite uses with the Stream Deck is actually making use of the text function.

And the example that I have here is this one called Follow Up. How many times have you had to repurpose the same piece of text, whether it's in an email or some other document?

Well, here with the Stream Deck, you don't have to use some complicated text expander or remember a set of shortcut keys. You can create as many different follow-up or specific text messages as you like.

Here I've given it the name of Follow Up, and then down below I've inserted about three sentences of text. So now when I'm here within my Word document, I just need to select one button, and now I've got that follow-up text insert exactly where I want it to be.

Not only does this save me a whole lot of time, but I could have an entire page, an entire folder of custom follow-ups, and then come here into the Stream Deck software and adjust it as I like.

But another extremely powerful feature that I love about the Stream Deck is that I can set up custom profiles so that when I transition to a specific application, it will already display the types of actions and the types of keys that I want to see.

So here I am within my Word document. That's where the focus is.

But as soon as I expand my Zoom meeting, notice how my Stream Deck automatically changes to the keys that I want to see. Here I've set up a number of different things, including the ability to mute or start or stop my camera, share my screen, view the participants, open up the chat, all at a single fingertip.

And I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to launch this from the Stream Deck. If I go back to my Word document, you see that it will return to my main or my home screen, but as soon as I relaunch that Zoom meeting, it will automatically come to the controls that I want to see.

Now, in terms of pricing, the Stream Deck MK.2, that's the same model that I have here, goes for $210. That may sound like a fairly expensive price tag, but remember all of the things that you can do, all of the things that you can replace

your keyboard shortcuts from and have easier access to. I think this is especially helpful for those of us who may have trouble with certain interfaces and need to squint or look at where to find certain options.

In this case, the Stream Deck comes in so handy where you are always just one button away from the action or the place that you want to be. Now, the Stream Deck does come in a number of other sizes. The Stream Deck Mini, which has only six keys, is $115.

And then the Stream Deck XL, with a whopping 32 keys, is at $340. My recommendation though, is to go with the original. For me, not only does this not take up a lot of space on my desk, but remember, everything here can be used within folders or different profiles.

So you can add as many different buttons on as many different screens as you need to.

And if you're wanting to learn even more ways on how to be productive with the Stream Deck, just do a search for Stream Deck productivity, and you'll find a number of other excellent YouTube videos which will give you many different ideas and other helpful tutorials. As always, thank you so much for watching.

And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Email Tip 1

Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And for years, I spent much more than 30% of my day in my inbox,

but after applying these five techniques, I spend no more than one hour per day, and you can do the same thing. So let's dive in. Tip number one, turn off all of your email notifications, both your desktop and mobile notifications.

To this day, Microsoft Outlook by default will show the preview of each and every new email for the desktop version of Outlook. That means even if Outlook is minimized, you're going to see a preview in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Nothing is more distracting

or will tempt you to spend more time with email than by seeing all of those notifications. But don't forget to turn off your notifications on your mobile device as well. Whether you use Outlook, Gmail, or some other mail client, be sure to remove the notification badges on the front of your app. You know what I'm talking about,

that little red circle that shows you the number of unread emails. Not only will that distract you and tempt you to open up your mail app more often than you need to,

but it also adds an awful lot of stress as you see that number grow and grow. Don't worry about the number. You should always expect to be receiving new emails

throughout your day, even while you sleep. So instead of letting technology dictate

when you choose to deal with email, decide to choose for yourself how often you want to open up the email app.

Email Tip 2

Tip number two, move all of your read or replied emails out of your inbox. Something that wastes so much of our time is trying to decide, where should I start and where should I stop when it comes to addressing my inbox? And here you can see I've got a number of emails which I've either read or replied to.

Well, the easiest and best way to keep a clean inbox is to remove everything once you have touched it, once you've read it, once you've replied to it, once you no longer need it, be sure to move it to your archive folder or to some other folder or label.

Or if you're really not going to need it again, you can simply go ahead and delete it. Every single email client has a safeguard in place, where anything that is moved to the trash folder, for example, will actually remain there for 30 days.

So if you need to go back and retrieve it, you can still find it. And archiving your emails is maybe one of the simplest ways to keeping a clean inbox. Let me show you how easy you can do that here within Gmail without taking an extra step.

Within our settings menu, we can come down to this one called Send and Archive. And if you select the top radio button, it will say, show "Send & Archive" button in reply.

What that means is if I come up here to this email and I decide to reply to it, instead of just hitting Send and have this message remain in my inbox, I can select Send and Archive. The message is sent, and now I'm moved on to my very next email.

Coming back to my inbox, that message is no longer here. I'm one step closer to keeping a cleaner inbox. Now, if you're overwhelmed with where to start with cleaning out a very messy and overwhelmed inbox, I've got a tool for you.

SaneBox has recently released a new tool called Email Deep Clean, so you can regain all of that storage and clean out your inbox. In just a matter of seconds, you can determine how far back you would like it to scan and then select which sender,

either based on the total number of emails or the total number of space taken that you would like to remove. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to clean out any inbox, whether you use Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or any other email client.

And best of all, you don't have to use some complicated search or filters to do so.

If you want to learn more and use Deep Email Clean for free, be sure to click the link in the description down below.

Email Tip 3

Tip number three, get comfortable with using search instead of creating dozens and dozens of folders. So often I see people wasting time by dragging every single email into a dedicated folder and deciding which label that they should apply to almost every single email.

Instead of creating these folders to click onto on the left-hand side of your screen, be sure to make use of the search function.

So for example, rather than just producing a client folder, I can just search for my client's name in the search field, and suddenly, every single message will come up in front of me. Further yet, if I want to go into more detail, you can always use the advanced search option.

So for example, maybe I want to make sure that I'm looking for an email that only has a specific attachment. Well, I can easily do that here as well and go directly to what I'm looking for.

In addition to the search bar itself, Gmail and Outlook have added some quick buttons that will get us there that much faster.

Here, for example, in Gmail, I can quickly see if I want to filter by a specific timeframe, if I want to filter by an attachment, or if I want to look for a recent sender or search for a certain email address.

So this makes it that much easier for me to find what I'm looking for rather than wasting all of my time sorting through and filing every single one of my emails.

Email Tip 4

Number four, unsubscribe or block senders you don't want to see ever again. I know that it may seem like it's going to be a bit time consuming upfront to unsubscribe to a particular sender, but think about how often you click on their messages and just get into the habit of deleting those particular messages.

Instead, why don't you just take a few seconds upfront and actually unsubscribe to those newsletters or other marketing emails. Almost any marketing email, if you scroll to the bottom, will have some type of link such as this one, where you can unsubscribe from the list.

But what if that particular email sender does not honor your subscribe request or you can't find the unsubscribed link? Well, in this case, you can choose to block that sender

so you won't receive emails from them in your inbox. Here within Gmail, if I come up here and select more, I can select Block, and then in brackets, it will give me the username of the particular sender.

In this case, going forward, I won't receive messages from them, a quick and easy way, especially if I can't find the unsubscribe link.

Email Tip 5

Now, my fifth and final tip in saving time with email may be the most difficult,

but also the most valuable, and that is to only deal with email a maximum of three times per day. Years ago, I used to spend most of my day with my inbox open on one of my multiple screens. This led me to dealing with email nonstop throughout my day

and not accomplishing the things that I wanted to. But when I chose to drastically pull back and only deal with email twice in my day, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, not only was I able to accomplish so much more, but I was actually able to get through more of my email.

Why? By only choosing to deal with email at specific times, I could batch and get through so many more of those messages

and then not feel the need to come back to my inbox so frequently. This may be difficult to implement at first, but trust me, it is so worth it. Of all of the the tips on today's list, this may make the biggest difference.

By combining the other four with this one, you are going to not only set yourself up for success, but spend a lot less time with email, saving you so much more time for your business, your clients, or whatever other projects you are working on.

And if you're wanting to be even more efficient and effective with your email, be sure to watch this video next, where I show you how to be a master of your filters right here within Gmail.

Problem 1

There seems to be a constant debate as to which is the better Task Manager. Todoist or TickTick. And while both of these apps are great, in this video, I'm going to show you a tool that does four things better than both of those apps.

And best of all, it's free. Number one, let's take a look at the relationship between our notes and our tasks. For most of us, our tasks are generated from our notes.

Either we are doing a brainstorming session or perhaps we're taking notes during a meeting and then we're generating our tasks and our to-dos from that collection of notes. But most of our task managers are not built around notes.

Here within Todoist, the best that we can do is add a note within the description, but that's within the description of the task that actually seems kind of backward because chances are we are taking those notes first.

This might force you to use another tool such as Evernote or Google Keep or some other scratch pad off of the side of your desk, and then converting it to a task. Now over in TickTick, they've gone one step further and they've given us the ability to create lists.

And in this case, we can create things such as notes. Here I've created something titled a new note and I've jotted down some bullet points but that's essentially it. I can't quickly and easily convert anything here into a task.

Now, I could come up here and set a reminder for the entire note but chances are there's only a few items or pieces of key information that I actually want to convert

into a task. But here within AmpleNote, we have access to all of our notes, tasks, and calendar all in one centralized place. And best of all, there is a direct relationship

between all three of these components. For example, I was taking down some quick notes, some quick thoughts earlier today. Here you can see I've got a few different bullet points here, and then I decided to add a task directly within my note.

Now the best thing is that this task is not going to reside only here within my note area. If I switch over to my tasks, here you can see that research a new training to attend

is now with all of my other tasks, which may be a combination of tasks that I've created as a one-off or tasks which I've created within other notes. So in this case, it follows a much more natural progression from brainstorming or note taking.

And then if I do want to convert this, for example into a task, all I need to do is highlight it and suddenly it has become a task which I will now see on my task list

and which I can now pull over onto my calendar as well.

Problem 2

Number two, adding tasks directly to your calendar. Now, I've talked about time blocking and time batching for a long, long time and the importance of giving a time estimate and making sure that you're able to accomplish what you set out to do.

And if you only keep your tasks in a list format, that is very, very difficult. You want to be able to see it in the context of all of your other meetings and all of your other events. Here within Todoist, we can view sort of a chronological view of all of our tasks

but this isn't really a true calendar. Yes, Todoist does allow us to integrate and has an extension for other calendars, but there's certain pieces of functionality that you just can't do outside of Todoist. So you're going to find yourself going back and forth.

TickTick on the other hand, does have a calendar view. However, you do need to upgrade to their premium version in order to make use of it.

But here within AmpleNote, not only do we have direct access to our calendar and can easily toggle back and forth but we can drag and drop any of our tasks here on the right hand side directly onto our calendar so we can see the relationship between other things that are going on and the other tasks which perhaps we've dragged onto our day already.

So for example here on the right hand side, I want to send out this invitation.

I'm just going to drag it over and put it here for 10:00 AM. Meanwhile, maybe I'm going to drag this recording a podcast  and put it over for tomorrow at 11:00 AM. So already I'm being that much more actionable as I put tasks directly on my calendar.

Now you'll notice that the two tasks which I just added have different lengths, and that's because I set that up ahead of time. When I created those tasks, I gave them a time estimate so when I pull them onto my calendar, that stays with it.

I don't need to recreate it or give it some type of default value, which you sometimes find with other calendar or to-do list extensions.

Of course, if I want to change the details of any of my tasks, all I need to do is select it and I'll have access to everything here on the right-hand side, including changing the duration, choosing the ability to give it a custom reminder or adding any other details that I like. But I can also do that directly from my calendar.

Maybe I know it's going to take me about two hours to record this podcast episode. All I need to do is drag it over like that and everything is set. As you've heard me teach before, I can't emphasize enough how valuable it is having your to-dos on the exact same screen as your calendar.

Think of the following scenario. You've already planned out what your most important tasks are. Now you can plan out your entire week in advance making sure that you're making the best use of your time and all you need to do is drag and drop those tasks in the appropriate place on your calendar.

Problem 3

Now speaking of deciding what's most important and what you should do next, let's take a look at priority. Now, of course, the ability to set the priority for your tasks is a basic feature of any task manager.

Here within Todoist, we can come over here and select one of a number of different priority levels. So if red is high urgency priority level number one then maybe I'm going to set this to priority level number two

and you can see the different color shading here. This also gives me the ability to filter or sort by these different options as well. Within TickTick, almost the exact same rules apply where I can quickly and easily set a number of different priority levels

for any of the tasks which I've created. But just having a simple priority level is often not enough. often have you applied the highest priority to dozens of your tasks?

Now, which one should you tackle first? Well, here within AmpleNote they've created something called a task score which can be a great way when you're determining which of the next three, four or 10 tasks you should embark on next.

And the great thing is, is that it's dynamic based on a variety of different factors, not just the length of time or due date, but also if it's important or urgent. Here's a task I created quite recently so it only has a task score of one.

However, if I say that it's important suddenly that task score increases. If I say that it's urgent as well, well that task score jumps up as well. And if I base it on the start date, or how long it's going to take, that task score will continue to change.

But if I scroll down here and let's say open up this task you can see that it has a task score of 12.5. What are the differences here? Well, it's also looking as to when I created this task which I think is really valuable.

It's taking into account and assuming that I've been meaning to do something with this for a very long time, even though I have not given it a start date, even though I haven't chosen it as important or urgent, maybe this is something I need to revisit next.

And best of all, that task score translates to other parts of AmpleNote.n Here we are back in the calendar view where I have a number of my tasks listed on the right hand side

and I've chosen to sort it by task score. So you can see these first three are red, the next one is yellow, then a number of blues and then a few that may not have a very high task score at all.

Now I can identify which ones should I be looking at next, or which ones do I need to revise. Maybe the due date has changed, maybe something else has changed and I can edit that task.

But this gives me so much more and better information than simply adding my own flags and my own priority level. And even though tasks with the same color may look very similar I don't even have to dive into them to know that this one has a higher task score than the one down below.

So I can be more efficient and quickly make better decisions when it comes to planning my day.

Problem 4

Next, let's take a look at something that continues to distract us whenever you are working with your to-do list. And that has to do with constantly seeing tasks or things that you don't need to engage with for some time in the future.

Here within my Todoist account, I have a task that says it's very important but I don't really need to think about this for another six to nine months. However, there's no real great way

for me to hide or minimize this task. It's always going to be visible to me and often very distracting. What if there was a way in which I could hide my tasks until I want to see them? Well hear within AmpleNote, we can do that for any single task.

It may look like I have a very long list of tasks here but there's perhaps a number of things that I don't need to think about and therefore I don't even want to see it until sometime in the future.

So here on the right hand side you can see that every single task has a little icon which allows me to hide until sometime in the future. So let's say, I don't want to engage with this for another week. Well, I don't want to see this.

I don't want to see it in my calendar view, so I accidentally drag it onto this week. I don't want to see it here as I'm analyzing or grouping my other tasks together. I'm going to say one week and now it's gone.

It's vanished. It's almost like hitting the snooze button. It will return in its normal state exactly at that time. Now, of course, at any time we can always choose and change our filtered settings and we can choose to show our hidden tasks if we want to go back and see what is waiting for us in the future.

But this feature alone is a fantastic way to keep our focus and also keep us distraction free as we strive to be more efficient and more time effective with all of our to-dos.

So if you'd like a more effective way to bring your notes, tasks and calendar all together in one place, and take advantage of all of the features which I showed you today absolutely free, go to amplenote.com or click the link in the description down below.

And if you want to save even more time as a part of your day, be sure to watch this video next where I show you seven Google Drive tips and tricks so you can be more effective and spend more time on the things that you want.