Scribe

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Chrome extensions are one of the easiest ways to save time and get more done whether you are working online or just browsing the web. So in this video, I'm going to share with you seven free Chrome extensions that I think you should be using right now. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Now, the first free Chrome extension on our list is called Scribe.

Scribe is all about showing others how to do something, or maybe just remembering yourself how to do something online without wasting the time of watching a full video. So let me give you a real world example. Here I am within my QuickBooks online account and I don't know about you, but when it comes to something such as

accounting or tax purposes there's many things that I only do once or twice a year.

And those are so easy to forget whether I need to do it or I need to share this, perhaps with a personal assistant. So in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to record myself actually going through the actions. Up here in the Chrome extension window, you can see here is the Scribe icon. I'm going to select that and I'm going to say start recording. Now, it's going to tell me that the capture has started and now I just go about the regular order of events. So I'm going to say, we need to click new and then we need to come here and select the journal entry. That's going to open up a new screen. Now remember, we're actually not recording any of the video. What scribe is doing is recording my actions. So maybe I always forget to change the currency. We need to change that to U.S. dollars. And maybe I need a particular exchange rate, so I'm going to enter that in here. And I'm just going to list this as test entry

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for this purposes. Then I'm going to come down to account, the account that I need to select here and put in the amount and then select perhaps the additional account that I need to use here.Again, things that I probably will easily forget if I'm only doing this a handful of times, or if I'm trying to teach someone else. Maybe lastly I want to throw something in the memo here, so this is just a transfer note, and then we can hit save. In the bottom left hand corner, you can see it is flashing. What I can do is click on this. I can either pause my recording, I can start again, I can move this somewhere else, but in this case I'm going to say complete the recording. What Scribe is going to do is open up that recorded steps in a new browser tab. So here it's called it an Intuit Workflow, but I can change that right away. I can say, actually, this is the a journal entry, journal entry example, for,for example, here, it took me about  two minutes to record and there's a total of 19 steps. But remember I was explaining what I was doing. I probably could have done this in as little as 45 seconds. Down below, you can see all of the different steps and they're clearly numbered. So navigate to this website,of course, all of this is editable. So instead of maybe including this messy URL, if that's not what I need to send them to I can say, you know what? Just navigate to QuickBooks. Okay? In this case, especially if I'm teaching someone else maybe how to do this with their own QuickBooks account. But down below, here are all the recorded steps, click new, and you can see it highlights where my cursor was. Then click journal entry, then click U.S. dollars down below, then click this text field and type 1.2 and then click here. Now you'll notice I just clicked out of this field. This actually isn't a step. No worries. I can just come here and say, delete that step. Are you sure? Yep. Let's remove that one. Then I want them to click this field and type test entry. Yeah, that's what I want them to type into that field. So you can see it's recorded all of the different steps that I have input here. And unlike a video recording,

I can always come back in here and make minor changes if I need to. When I'm ready to share, I can either select copy link or I can select this share button. And if I want to, I can even export it into a variety of different formats, including a PDF. So if you want a much easier way to create a visual guide and not a lengthy video, be sure to check out Scribe.

Wordtune

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Next on our list is an extension which is going to help us write a little more cohesively,

but also give us some further ideas. Regardless if we're writing an email or writing in some other text field on the web. And for this, we're taking a look at a tool called Wordtune. Let me show you how it works. I'm going to open up this email message that I'm crafting here. And I have to admit writing is one of my least favorite activities and sometimes I could use a little help. So sometimes when I'm crafting an email or putting together a draft, I'm often second guessing myself and seeing if I could have put things a little bit better. Well, that's exactly where Wordtune comes into play. If Wordtune is installed within your browser, all you need to do is hover over a selection of text, such as this sentence, and you'll see you'll get this little Wordtune icon. If I select it, I am automatically given some suggestions as to some other ways in which I could say this, maybe something that's a little more casual or a little more professional or something that's just going to be that much more eye catching to the readers. So maybe how are you and your team doing? That's actually probably a little bit proper than the way I phrased it. How's the team? What's up with you and the team? Maybe that's a little too informal for me. Did you and the team have a good week? So if I've settled on this, all I need to do is select it. It will automatically replace it. And I can go to somewhere else, maybe I want to highlight this text and see, have you taken a look at the proposal yet? Have you seen the proposal? Did you review the proposal? Have you given the proposal a look yet? So a variety of different ways in which we can use this. Now the free version is going to give you a total of 20 rewrites per day. That may be enough for many of us, but if you need more and want more options, you can choose other tones as well. So there's a formal tone, a casual tone, for example, if you want to shorten or if you want to expand, but that is all with the premium version, but you can get 20 rewrites per day with the free version of Wordtune.

Hover Zoom

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Next up, we're taking a look at an easier way to view images in their proper size, regardless of where you go online. And for that purpose, we're taking a look at Hover Zoom+. Let me show you how this comes into play. I often spend a lot of time searching for images on Google images. And so you're probably familiar with a results page such as this, but if I want to take a closer look at this one, I need to click on it and it's going to show me a preview of the image here. But if that's not quite what I'm looking for, I got to close this and I got to come down here and I'm going to click on this one. And well, wait a minute. Is that really the full resolution? Is that how it's really going to look? Well, with the Hover+ extension installed, any image you hover over will show you that image in its full size and full resolution. So if I want to come down here, how big is this really? Oh, that's a much better preview of what's happening here. What about this image that I looked at earlier? Fantastic. Now I can just hover over those images and see them at a full size rather than having to click here, there, and everywhere. So, so perfect. I can see the resolution. I can see what that's going to look in its full size. This free extension can be especially helpful when you are visiting shopping sites. So if I just hover over some of these images here,

I get the full size book cover. If I want to take a closer look at this product here, perfect, I'm just hovering over it and I can zoom in on it.

Text Mode

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Now if our last extension was all about seeing images more clearly, our next extension is the complete opposite. In fact, it's going to remove images when you don't want to see quite as many and maybe you just want to focus in on the text. And for that, we're taking a look at Text Mode. Let me give you an example. Here I am within a website which has an awful lot of images going on. And often we are drawn more to the images than the actual titles or perhaps the headlines if you are viewing a news site. Well, with Text Mode, we can simply select it here from our extensions in the top right hand corner and what it will do is convert that page and eliminate the images, it will actually turn it into more of a gray scale experience, so now we can just focus on those headlines themselves and not necessarily be persuaded by the fancy graphics and the digital images that are shown in front of us. So here I can go through and I can search through

the actual titles and see what is more applicable to me and not just be enticed maybe by the images that are presented here. Now text mode gives us a few helpful options. So if we don't want to desaturate those colors, we can uncheck this box and also the white background. And you can also choose what it will look like for those images. So maybe I don't want something quite as intense, I'm going to choose this first option here, and now you can see the images are a little less obvious. I can still click on anything and treat this website like I would any other way, but now my eyes are drawn more to the headlines themselves not necessarily the images that accompany them.

Dark Reader

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Now another great way to make it easier on our eyes and just a more enjoyable experience while we are online is by turning on dark mode. And for that, we're taking a look at Dark Reader which can turn absolutely everything into dark mode, but also give you some customizable options so if there are particular sites you would like to see in a different way, you can do so right here. So let's go back to Life Hacker for a second and you can see that we are in dark mode. If I jump over to Sports Illustrated or to Ticketmaster, it has taken everything and given it a beautiful dark mode experience. But let's say when I am on the Sports Illustrated page, I would rather this website be in its normal mode. No problem. All I need to do is come up here and select Dark Reader. And I am going to click on this, I'm going to click on that domain, and now Dark Reader will remember that. So I can continue to browse the rest of the web in dark mode, but I can set certain websites to an alternative view if I prefer it in another way. The other great feature within Dark Reader is that we can choose other options to slightly adjust the settings for either a particular site or the mode as a whole. So rather making these brightness and contrast adjustments on our monitor, I can adjust this throughout the day. I can dim both the brightness and the contrast here to make it a little bit easier on my eyes. So a lot of choice, a lot of options available to us here. If you enjoy dark mode and want to apply it to your web experience.

Fakespot

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The next free extension on our list is especially designed for those of us who shop on Amazon, eBay, or other popular review sites. How often, for example, have you been shopping on Amazon and recognize that really all of the ratings are exceptional.

It's really hard to find something that is less than four and a half stars. These all look like fantastic products. Well with the Fakespot extension installed, you'll get some additional helpful information. For example, you'll notice here in the image, I've got a little check mark, that's the Fakespot, icon and a grade. This has a grade of B, this has a grade of B, but some of these have a grade of C and oh, this has a grade of A.

What Fakespot does is it searches for fake reviews. That's right, because often some of our Amazon products and other shopping websites are flooded with fake reviews.

When we click on the product itself, you can see that we have the fake spot review and grade over here in the top right hand corner, but we can also select this analyze reviews. And this is what I find is most helpful because it summarizes the pros and cons based on the information and the reviews that it has given down below. As a result, this extension can give you some great additional information and give you more confidence while shopping. For example, on this product here, it has an Amazon rating of four and a half stars, 4.7 to be precise, but Fakespot says that it's really should be more like a three and a half based on its grade and looking and weeding out fake reviews. In fact, it would say that this would only give this product

a score of a C compared to the thousands of ratings which it has received. So if you want to be a smarter and more savvy shopper, you may want to install the Fakespot extension.

Similarweb

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Next, we have a tool for all of you who like data and numbers and wanting to find out a little bit more about the website you are currently browsing on. Similarweb gives us both traffic rank and website analysis for almost any website you come across.

Let me take a look evernote.com, for example. And have you ever ended up on a website and wondering if you really are the target audience, or if it's worthwhile spending your time within that particular site? Well, with the Similarweb extension,

all we need to do is click on it and it will give us some very helpful data. For example, the global rank, the country rank, and the category rank. As you can see, Evernote is yes, fairly high when it comes to computers and electronics, but you can also see the visits over time and how many other people are visiting that site. Something that I find very helpful is the geography. So in this case, did you know that United States are the number one share of visitors, but Japan is close in second place. So some interesting data which may be valuable to you especially if you may be a competitor to a particular site. Here, if I go to another one here, I'm on lifehack.org, once again, I'm going to click on Similarweb and I'm going to see things such as the bounce rate and pages per visit. So I can see how long are people actually visiting this website.

And once again I can take a deeper dive at their target market also the traffic sources and how people are ending up and getting to this particular website.

Now, if you enjoyed this video, you'll also enjoy the other content right here on the

Simpletivity channel. So be sure to subscribe. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Downside of regular Windows search

If you're a Windows user, you're probably familiar with Windows search, where you can type in a few keywords and get a few different suggestions, including web results here on the right hand side, but also some things that may be specific to your machine, including apps, documents, or photos.

But in my experience I just haven't found this quite as helpful as I would like. Therefore, I don't use it as often. So, recently I've started to use a free launcher called Flow Launcher, where I can easily type in a few characters, including getting access to system settings and other things on my device, but also on the web as well.So, let me show you how to use it and how to install it on your machine.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And first things first, why might you want to install a launcher or use such a tool? Well, recently I found myself wanting or needing to go into my settings, specifically my Bluetooth settings, in order to make sure that a specific device was connected, and I'd either have to come down here to my system tray and then come here and find what I'm looking for.

It's going to take me at least two or three clicks in order for me to do so, but after discovering Flow Launcher,

Benefits of using Flow Launcher

all I need to do is hit a few quick keys on my keyboard, and even if I just type in BLU and then enter it's going to bring me directly to that screen.It's bringing me directly to what I need. If I hit those quick keys again on my keyboard, here, you can see, I can even dive down deeper into specific areas of my machine.

How about my network settings? Yeah, I just typed in network and immediately I'm brought to my network settings. How about if I want to maybe search for something online, such as a free CRM? No problem.

It's going to bring me right to my search results right here within the browser. You can even do some other cool things such as equations. So, for example, if I go eight times three, yeah, that's 24.

And then what else might I want to do with that? I could copy it to the clipboard. I can do a variety of different things. How about file folders? So, if I'm looking for something on my machine here, yeah, and then I can use my keys, my arrow keys to go down and find the file and yeah, that's the, yeah, this is the video file I'm looking for.

So, let's open that up. So, as a result, I can spend a lot less time with my mouse and keep my fingers on my keyboard, so I can pull up the launcher at any point in time and find almost anything that I'm looking for.

Flow Launcher settings and options

So, let's open up the Flow Launcher interface and see how you can change a variety of different settings, so that you can get the most out of this tool. Now, here within general, a lot of these initial settings have to do with do you want to hide it within your system tray? Do you want to start it up automatically?

For example, auto update, a lot of things that you can change and decide what's best for you. But what I like here are some of these customized features, such as the maximum results shown.

So, for example, if I bring up the launcher here, and again, let's just type in something like CRM, right now I've got it set to five. It's going to give me five suggestions, but if I want more or less, I can do so I can choose and change that right here.

The other thing here is you can change things, such as, which is the default file manager. If you're managing files in a variety of different places or if you just want to search a particular file folder, you can do the same thing with your web browser.

If you want to just follow the default for your system or use something in particular, but perhaps what shows

Plugins and advanced search features

off Flow Launcher's capabilities the best is by looking at the plugin section. So, for example, these plugins are really referring to the types of search queries that you can make within your system, and yes, there's quite a lot to choose from.

So, for example, at the top, we have browser bookmarks, and you'll notice the different icons here. So, for example, if I come down here and expand this the action keyword is the letter B, B as in bookmarks, and all of these are editable, but I think B makes the most sense.

So, if I open up the launcher here and I start with the letter B, already it's given me some suggested bookmarks for my browser. And if I continue to type in CRM that's the first one on the list.

I can see that all of these are bookmarks that I can go directly to, but you want to be familiar, or you'll want to get familiar with some of the other options here as well. The other thing that you'll want to notice here is priority.

Now, by default, all the priorities are set to zero. If you want your files to search higher up in your launcher rankings, all you need to do is select on priority, and in this case,

the higher the number the better the result will be ranked. So, for example, we could change this to five and then that's going to be much higher in the results than the other options listed here.

And that's of course, very helpful, if some things share the same names, but as you go down here, we can do everything from process killing, in terms of killing certain apps, we can do things such as shut down commands, or restart commands, as you can see down below, type in certain URLs.

There's really such a wide range of possibilities. Now, if you'd like to customize your launcher experience even further, you can click on the plugin store, and here you can see there is a wide selection of things that are very specific.

So, if there's a particular service, maybe a particular website or social media site that you'd like to integrate with, you can do so here.

For example, here's a flow YouTube plugin that I may want to explore, if I'm using it quite often to manage and to search for certain videos, there's also a Spotify plugin, which can make it really easy for you to access your playlist, rather than always having to come up to another tab or switching back and forth.

Below that we have the theme, which allows you to really customize your experience here as well, including the size of the launcher itself, and of course a variety of different color schemes as well.

So, depending on your needs depending if you want, for example, a sound effect or something else to play when you're using it, you can do so as well.

How to install Flow Launcher

Now, if you'd like to try Flow Launcher for yourself all you need to do is go to flowlauncher.com, and when you get to this screen, we're going to select GitHub, so we can access the latest version.

Now, you might be a little intimidated, especially if you're not familiar with the GitHub website because you're going to have a lot of information staring back at you. Don't worry. You can ignore a lot of this.

Where I want you to go is down over here to releases and we can select that most recent release here and then scroll just a little way down and here you can see all of the assets.

Now, it's really up to you. If you'd rather download the zip file, you can choose this first one here, or if you'd just like to download the executable file, you can choose the one down below and that will get you started with using Flow Launcher within your machine.

So, if you'd like a faster and easier way to access your files, access your web and customize certain procedures right within your Windows machine, be sure to check out Flow Launcher, and if you have any questions about how to use Flow Launcher, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

Problem with sharing spreadsheet data

I want you to take a close lookn at this spreadsheet and tell me in just three seconds

how this business is doing, ready? Three, two, one. Okay, did you get anything meaningful out of that data? Now how about this? This is much of the same data that we just looked at but is there something more meaningful here? Yeah, we've got some big numbers.

We've got some trending lines. We've got some valuable information which will help us manage our business or our teams that much more effectively.

So in this video, I'm going to show you how to create a professional dashboard just like this one by using any Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet and many other tools that you already use in just a matter of minutes, hello everyone,

Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And when it comes to managing your business, you are dealing with spreadsheets

and you're dealing with an awful lot of data but it can be really challenging to look at a spreadsheet such as this and determine, are things going in a positive direction,

in a negative direction, which of these figures, which of these numbers is most important or less relevant to us, and how can we communicate that to other members of our team or perhaps even our clients? Well, there is a much easier way,

and dare I say, a much more fun way to link your spreadsheets and also other data

so you can create a live, real-time dashboard that you'll be proud to share with others, but perhaps more importantly, will allow you to keep tabs on what's most important to you. So in order to create our dashboard, we are going to be using a tool called,

Why Geckoboard is a better solution

Geckoboard, not only is Geckoboard very simple and easy to use but it integrates directly with your spreadsheets and other apps and services that you may already be using to run your business.

So here we are with inside Geckoboard and after creating your first dashboard, we need to start adding some widgets. We are given a complete blank canvas so we can start to build out the visuals and the key metrics which we want to track.

So here I'm going to select add widget in this case and what it's going to do is going to bring me to my integration page. As you can see, spreadsheets are one of the most popular ways to connect your data to a dashboard whether you use Excel or Google Sheets but you will also notice there is a large quantity of other services and applications you can connect as well.

More on that a little bit later. I'm going to select Spreadsheets in this case and I've already connected my Google Sheets account. So I have access to all of my spreadsheets down below and you can add as many accounts here as you like.

In this case, I'm going to select my Pitch Sales Sample data here which just has a few key metrics here but the problem is is that no one has visibility to this other than myself

or maybe I would just like to include this in a broader dashboard which we are about to create.

Selecting key data to share on the dashboard

Next, what we need to do is select which of these data points or which of these cells

we would like to include in our widget. So in this case, I'm going to select the quarters here but I'm also going to select the units sold. That's really what I want to show on my dashboard, the quarters and how many were actually sold.

Next up, we're going to come up and select Create visualization. And down below, we can continue to edit our selection up above but now we get a preview of the different things that we can display with the data which we've selected.

The nice thing is that it's only going to give us options for the things that are relevant to this data point. So for example,

because I've chosen something with numeric values, as this or I could choose a column or a bar chart. I think I'm going to go with this column chart in this particular case.

When I'm happy with the type of visualization, which I have, I just need to select Continue and now I can customize the look and feel of this widget. So for example, I may want to give this a title and I'm going to say this is Units Sold, so everyone knows exactly what we're looking for here.

But it gets better because what I really want to do

Adding goals to dashboard data

is also add some target ranges to this graph. Make it that much more meaningful

to anyone who is laying eyes on this data. So under Add goal, I'm going to choose this option here and I can either input manually what that goal will be or maybe I keep track of that goal within the spreadsheet itself.

In many cases, you may have a cell where you express your goal and this is also going to be the place where you go to update that. So it only makes sense to link it to that particular spreadsheet cell.

But in this case, I don't have that goal. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here and I'm going to type it in, and in this case, I'm going to say 250 is our goal.

I can choose if it's either less than or more than, because remember, maybe this is a bug reports or something that is maybe more negative and we want to keep those numbers down but look what's happened over here to the right.

Not only do I have that range highlighted in a different shade but it's also showing me that in Q2 and in Q4, we hit that goal because it's changed those bar colors to green. So I'm going to hit save in this case.

If I need to, I can come here and adjust the formatting, right? If these were dollar values or something along those lines, so I can change decimal places. I can change the values here, whatever I like, but I'm pretty happy with the way things look here so I'm going to select Add to dashboard.

Now it's going to load my dashboard

Moving and customizing widgets on the dashboard

and we're going to have this new widget, Units Sold, placed in the top, left-hand corner. Now the great thing is I can customize this any way I want. I can drag it somewhere else. I can bring it out a bit more if I want to make it perhaps a little more prominent or a little wider.

So why don't we bring that back to the top left

but now it's a little more prominent so everyone can see what our Units Sold is.

Let's go ahead and add another widget, but this time, I'm going to show you the power of gauges and how that can really spruce up your dashboard. So to add our second widget, we just need to go to the top, right-hand corner, select Add widget

and we will be returned to the option to choose where we would like to connect that data from. Remember, your dashboard can be made up of connections outside of a single spreadsheet or a single tool, but for this example, I'm going to stick with my spreadsheet.

So in this case, I'm going to choose this spreadsheet, the Pivot Table Example so I have some different data to play with.

Adding gauges to your visual dashboard

In this case, I'm just going to pick out a single number to show you a few examples

of how these gauges may work. So in this case, I'm going to choose this one here,

this number 95, and I'm going to say, Create a visualization. Maybe this is the total number of units for the month. Maybe this is the number of calls per day. Maybe it's a variety of things that we want to track on a live basis.

So down below, I'm going to choose my visualization, but because we're looking at a single number, I can either have that target number, that numeric value like we see here, or I'm going to use this Gauge option which I really like a lot.

This can be really valuable to see if you are meeting, exceeding, or maybe even failing at a certain point. So I'm going to select Continue here so that we can see a few more options available to us.

Now, by default, it's making this gauge from zero to 100 but that might not be the case in this particular example. So I'm going to click on Visualization options and I might leave the minimum value at zero but perhaps the maximum value for this particular gauge is about 200.

So 95 is only about halfway along, right? So again, depending on what you're measuring here, you can customize it the way that you want but the real power here is adding a status indicator.

So for example, I want to say what is our success level here. So I'm going to type in that we are successful whenever we are exceeding 125. Here, you can see that little green marker here but it's more than just a marker.

If this gauge makes it past the marker, this entire side of the gauge is going to be shaded in green. Now we don't have to add these status indicators but they can be really, really helpful and also powerful for other members who may be viewing this data.

I'm also going to add a warning level saying that, you know what?

If we ever drop below 50, that's cause for concern and we need to do a deep dive

in terms of what is going on here. So here at the very top, I'm going to say that this are the number of, let's say, Warm Leads. Maybe we're a sales organization and these are the number of leads that we have in any given week. I'm going to hit Save.

In this case, I could change my formatting again like we saw before but I'm going to say Add to dashboard in this example. Once again, we are brought back to our dashboard and now we have our new widget where we can drag and drop and adjust the size

Spreadsheets sync with the dashboard

any way that we like. Now remember, the information that is being used on our Geckoboard dashboard is being connected live and dynamically from your spreadsheets or any other source which you connect to. So here, for example, is that 95 which we just created with our recent widget. But what if things have changed?

I'm going to select this cell and say that perhaps we updated our units and now have 145 warm leads for the coming week. All I need to do is go back to my dashboard

and you can see that it has been updated automatically. In addition, we now have this green shade because we have exceeded our goal.

If I was to change that unit number to something below 50, this would also be shaded in red, a nice, bright and bold way of letting myself know and others that things have changed either for the better or for the worse.

And remember, goals and status indicators can be used on almost any widget or data type which you select. Down here, in this example, we have a conversion rate and we can see by this highlighted box and this check mark

that we have hit our close rate percentage.

Connecting other data sources to the dashboard

And don't forget the many other tools which you can bring into your dashboard. In this example, as I hover over this widget, you can see in the lower left-hand corner, there is a Trello icon.

This is showing me the number of cards I have in each of these four lists for this particular board. And in the bottom, right-hand corner, I have a running list of all of the actions which have been made on this particular Trello board.

So whether you use email marketing, project management or a CRM system, you can pull in that data as well as a part of your live dashboard.

Sharing dashboard via email, link or TV

Now, when it comes time to share your dashboard with others, Geckoboard gives us a number of different ways to do so. If I select the share option at the top of the screen, I can copy this link and share it with anyone.

But the email share may be the most useful especially if you want to send a snapshot at a given time. So for example, maybe every weekday on Tuesday and Thursday, I would like to send this dashboard out to my team.

I can specify the time in which I want to and all I need to do is include the email addresses up here. So instead of reminding people to use the dashboard or just give them a link which you hope they will go and refer to, you can set up a schedule which works for you.

You can also select a direct connection to Slack or invite others to give view-only access, or if you need to, to have others collaborate as well.

But keep in mind, one of the values of having a dashboard like this is sharing visibility to things which others may not necessarily have access to,

or if they do have access to those spreadsheets, they can now see that data in a more meaningful way. In addition, Geckoboard gives us the option to send our dashboard to a TV.

So whether you want to broadcast this to your entire sales team or support team or maybe you want to display this] in the lobby of your office, you can do so.

And if you're managing multiple dashboards you can create a dashboard loop where it will cycle through two or more dashboards at the timeframe which you choose so that you can see multiple sets of data within the same screen.

So if you want to track all of your key metrics in one place and in real time, be sure to check out Geckoboard. You can sign up for free by clicking the link in the description below.

And if you enjoyed this video, you'll enjoy the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel.

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

Schedule send emails for the future

This video is sponsored by NetHunt for Gmail. More about them a little later in the video. If you can learn to automate more features as a part of your day, you're going to automatically save a lot of time, so in this video, we're looking at several different ways in which we can automate functions right here within Gmail.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And we're going to be looking at everything from creating templates, snoozing emails, scheduling emails in the future, and a whole lot more. So let's dive in with tip number one. And yes, we're talking about scheduling emails in advance sometime in the future.

So let's take a look at this example. In this case, I want to remind a client

that we are meeting sometime in the future. And let's say that I'm thinking about this.

I'm thinking about sending Ted a reminder on Monday, but our session actually isn't until later in the week; it's not until Friday. So I've already written the email, what I can do is come all the way down here and instead of hitting Send, which, of course, will send it immediately, I can hit this dropdown arrow and select Schedule send.

So if I want him to receive this on Thursday, for example, the day before, I can select that time.

Now, you will be presented with a few default options here. So, for example, I've been given tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, and Monday morning. Well, that's way too far in advance, and these two are too early, but Gmail tries to be helpful by giving us a few suggestions.

In most cases, I'm going to come down here and select Pick date & time. So in my example, yeah, I want to send it out on Thursday and I can adjust this specific time if I want.

Maybe 1:00 pm is a little later in the day than I would like, so let's make that 10:00 am. Perfect, and then I can select Schedule send. Now the message is gone, essentially it's off of my screen as if I sent it.

But over here on the left-hand side, you can see that we have this Scheduled area or this Scheduled menu item. If I come here, I can see a full list of all of the messages that are scheduled to go.

And over here, it's showing me May 5th. That's the date as to when that message will be sent. So if I need to come in here and edit it or change when that message is sent, I can always do so.

Auto forward emails to another address

Now the next tip on our list has to do with automatically forwarding certain emails

to someone else, such as a personal assistant, a virtual assistant, or maybe some other member of your team, or maybe just your own personal inbox or some other email address that you manage.

Now, in order to get started with this, we need to come up to the gear icon and select See all settings. And then we're going to come over here to Forwarding because we need to make sure that we've added that email address to our forwarding section.

Now, in my case here, I already have the address that I want to forward to, but if you haven't done so before, you're going to need to come down here and select Add a forwarding address, enter in that email, and then it will confirm it with that other address.

Of course, you can't just put in anything here. You need to make sure that that other individual, or perhaps the other account that you manage, is going to accept forwarded email messages from yourself. It's a pretty straightforward process.

But now that we have that email account added here, take special note of the two radio buttons. Now the first one is actually what we want in this case, and that is Disable forwarding, meaning we don't want all of my email forwarded to this account.

If I did want that behavior, well, then I would select this second option down below. But in this case, we want to keep it at Disable forwarding because we're only going to forward certain messages.

If you've made some of these changes, make sure to come down to the bottom and select Save Changes before we head back to our inbox. Now, in this case, what I want to do is forward any emails that are coming from Trello, coming from the trello.com email address.

So I'm going to come up here to my search bar and I'm going to start with an asterisk, so that's going to be a bit of a catch-all in this case and then use the @ sign and then put trello.com. Remember, you can use that asterisks as a wild card in a variety of ways. So no matter who that message is coming from,

as long as it's from @trello.com, it's going to be captured in this filter. So whether it's support@trello.com whether it's info@trello.com, or help@trello.com, it's all going to be included here.

Now we can hit Enter at this stage if we want to just sort of double check what kinds of messages will be included. Here you can see, we've got everything from Taco from Trello and a few other ones that are simply listed Trello.

This is perfect. This is exactly what I want to be forwarding to maybe a personal assistant or someone else who is managing my Trello boards on my side. Next up, we want to come up here and show my search options.

So we have the Has words *@trello.com, that's what it's going to be looking for, but here in the next step, we want to select Create a filter. Now I know in most cases, when you hear that term filter, you might be thinking of filtering messages out of your inbox or maybe adding something else to it.

Remember, in Gmail, they sort of use this term filter for a catch-all of a number of behaviors. So in this case, we are given a relatively long list

of different things that can happen to this email, but where we want to pay attention

is about the fifth one down, Forward it to, and here is where we can choose an address. Now, if you still haven't added a forwarding address in the previous step, you can do so here as well. but since we have, I'm going to have this dropdown menu.

I only have the one to choose from at this point, so I'm going to select that in this case. Now I can choose to add a few other things here as well if I want to maybe delete it after it arrives, or skip the inbox, or add a particular label, but let's keep it very simple in this case.

What will happen now after I have created this filter is that whenever I receive an email from trello.com, it will automatically forward that same email to this other address.

Again, that can be very, very helpful if you are working with an assistant or maybe other members of your teams and you want to make sure that they're on top of specific emails, whether that's from a specific sender

or maybe it just includes specific words in the subject line. Now, if you're enjoying today's Gmail tips, you're going to love this ebook from my friends at NetHunt.

NetHunt has put together The Gmail Book: How to turn Gmail into a sales management tool. And if you'd like to gain access to it, you can do so for free.

Now this guide has more than 50 pages on how to get even more automation out of your Gmail account and is especially helpful if you use Gmail for your business, or for sales, or for marketing. If you'd like to get your free copy, be sure to click the link in the description down below.

Adding and editing template messages

Now, if there's one automation feature that I don't think gets enough attention within Gmail, that is templates, being able to repurpose a certain response or a certain email over and over again.

Now, step one in creating a template is that you want to go into your settings and make sure that you've enabled templates. So here we want to come all the way over to the Advanced tab and here you will see the Templates option.

Make sure that you have this enabled so you can start using templates and start saving a whole lot of time. Now, when we go back to our inbox, let's hit the Compose button here. I'm going to maximize this for just a second, and all we need to do is come down to the lower right-hand quarter, pretty close to the garbage can,

pretty close to the delete. But here we're going to select that More button, and here you can see that we have a Templates option.

Now, in my case, I've already created a few different templates, and these save me so much time so I don't have to write out the same message or maybe most of the same message but I can still make edits to them. So, for example, I've got one here called Learn more about Simpletivity.

And if I select that, you can see I've got several sentences written here, I've got a couple of links, I've even got my logo as a part of this template. So when someone asks me a particular question, I can just hit this template and then send it off.

I don't have to write out the full thing, I don't have to go somewhere else and copy and paste it; I have it here right at my fingertips. But the great thing is, is that we can edit and have as many templates as we want. So let me just delete this for a moment.

I'm going to hit that Compose button once again, maximize here and come back to our template. So in order to create your new template, all you need to do is, well, write a new message.

Now, we're going to want to start with the subject, and this is very important because the subject of your email is going to become the name, it's going to become the title of the template. So, in this case, I'm just going to say New Template Example so it stands out from the rest of mine.

And then, of course, down below, I can add as much as I want as a part of my template. So again, links, images, full product descriptions, whatever you want to add as a part of this template, you can add it here. Now, when I come down here and hover over that Template option,

instead of inserting a template, I want to hover over the Save draft as a template.

Now you're going to see that it's going to give me the option to overwrite any of my existing templates. In this case, I don't want to do that. I'm going to say Save as a new template.

It will give me an option to rename this in this case, but keep in mind that the name of your new template, by default, when you first create it, is going to take that subject line.

So I'm going to hit Save in this case, and now when I come down to Templates, you can see that I have that as an option here, my New Template Example.

Now, if I want to change this template, let's say I've added a lot of great information, but I want to add a little more, for example, and yeah, we're going to use a capital U there in but.

Let's say I want to add a little more to this template, what do I do now? Well, all I need to do is use that overwrite feature. I'm going to say Templates here, and I'm going to say Save draft as a template, but instead of saving a brand-new template, you know what, this is just an enhancement.

This is really just a version two of New Template Example, so I'm going to choose that one here. It's going to give me a prompt, "Are you sure you want to overwrite this saved template?" I'm going to say Yes, and beautiful, now I've got that template saved here as well.

One quick tip for you when you are creating your templates is to make sure that you actually remove your email signature, and I'll show you why. Let me get rid of the text here, let me get rid of the subject, and I'm going to add that template that we just created.

Remember, New Template Example. and what you're going to see is that it's including the email signature within the template. So what I should have done when I was creating that template from scratch, I should have just got rid of my email signature altogether.

And that goes for when you're updating your template as well, otherwise your signature will become a part of the template and you probably already have your default signature listed here for each and every new email.

So that's a pro tip when you are creating or modifying your templates in the future.

Snoozing emails for a better time

Next up, let's take a look at one of the easiest automations to implement but also perhaps one of the biggest time savers as well.

As you're processing and going through your inbox, you're probably going to come across several emails that you need to reply to or you need to address but you just don't want to do it at the moment. You'd like to do it sometime in the future.

Now for many of us that may require adding a particular label and moving it somewhere else outside of the inbox.

But the risk is that you might forget it and you might not come back to that particular label. Instead, what we can do is use the snooze feature right here which is listed on every single email. Now we can either do this one at a time.

In fact, you can often just scan or glance at your inbox and say, "Yeah, I need to address that, but I'll do that a little later," and hit the snooze icon here. Or what I can do is actually open up any email and you'll see that snooze function here at the top as well.

But perhaps the fastest way to use snooze is to take a look at maybe those several emails that you want to address a little bit later in the day, select them all here with the checkbox,

and then come up and select snooze. Now, wherever you decide to select snooze, you're going to see an option something like this. Gmail's going to give us several suggestions as to when we would like to snooze.

Now there's a couple of helpful defaults here, including later today, tomorrow, next weekend, next week, for example,

but you can also come down and pick a specific time. Now you may be asking yourself, "Why is it suggesting 6:00 am for all of these options except for the one that is, of course, later today?" Well, here's another pro Gmail tip for you.

If you want to adjust these default times,] you need to go into your Google Keep account. Yes, these times are tied with your Google Keep reminders. Let's jump over to my Google Keep account and show you what I mean.

If I come up here to my settings, you'll see that I have a few different options but about halfway down, I've got my Reminder Defaults. So here you can see 6:00 am is my morning reminder.

So as long as both your Keep reminder settings and your Gmail snooze settings are similar, or you'd like to keep them the same, you can make those changes here. So, let's say for example, 6:00 am is too early for me, I'm going to adjust this to 7:30 and I'm going to hit Save here.

If I jump back to email, I might have to refresh my screen, so let me just refresh my inbox here. But I'm going to go back and I'm going to select a couple of my messages here, and then I'm going to hit snooze.

Now, you can see, as a part of the defaults, it's providing 7:30 am as the time as to when it will come back to my inbox.

So I'm just going to say, "Yeah, let's deal with these messages a little later this week," I'm going to select that option. Those selected messages are now removed from my inbox and will be returned at the time that I specified.

But what if I want to address them sooner or just keep tabs on all of the messages which I've snoozed? Well, on the left-hand side, our third option down is Snoozed. So if we select that option,

here you can see all of the messages which are scheduled to come back sometime in the future. So I can go and address them now if I want to or I can just review them here.]

On the far right-hand side, you can see the dates as to when they are scheduled to return to my inbox. So don't worry, they're not hidden. You can always go find them. You can always respond to them even at an earlier date.

Now, if you've made it this far into the video, I want you to prove it to me by adding the word automation in the comments down below. And while you're there, why not ask me a question or maybe provide a suggestion as to what other Gmail-related content you'd love to see right here on the Simpletivity channel.

Using multiple email signatures

Now for our last tip today, we're taking a look at something that is maybe not necessarily automation but something that will certainly save you a lot of time right here within Gmail, and that has to do with managing and inserting multiple email signatures.

Many Gmail users don't realize that they can have more than one email signature, but also change them on the fly, depending on who they're responding to

or who they are writing to right here within their inbox. So here, I've got my default email signature here, but depending on who I'm writing to, I may want to change that.

Down below, you can see that we have this little pen icon, which is the insert signature icon. And if I select that, you can see the list of all of my signatures here.

So for example, maybe I don't want a signature, I can always choose that option. Or maybe I want to give this particular person a special discount, so I'm going to give them this simplified signature, but it has a link right in the signature.

This is very, very helpful, especially if you're giving a discount or a special offer for a limited time, so you don't want to use this as your default signature but maybe just for certain clients or for a certain period.

So where do you go to change and manage and add your email signatures? In order to do so, we need to go back to our full Gmail settings,

and near the very bottom of the screen, we have the option to manage our signatures. Now, here, in this case, you can see that I already have about four listed here, but if we want to create something new, all we need to do is select this Create new button.

And as you can see, I've got a simple one here. I've got a reply one here

with maybe a different set of icons or a different invitation, or here's that special discount signature, which I can add on the fly. Now down below, you want to pay special attention to the For New Emails Use and On Reply Use This.

So now once you've created your email signatures up above, you can choose from any of them as your default, but also, you can choose a different one for your reply.

So again, depending on your audience, depending on your purposes, then you can manage your email signatures right here within Gmail. And don't forget, you can grab your free copy of The Gmail Book from my friends at NetHunt absolutely free.

Just be sure to click the link in the description down below.

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

Why you need an appointment booking system

Do you run a service-based business? Perhaps you're a coach or a consultant?

Maybe you're a personal trainer or a massage therapist? Or perhaps you're a tutor, or providing some type of medical services? Regardless of the type of service you provide, you need a booking site that not only you can rely on, but makes it easy for your clients to book and pay for your services.

So in this video, I'm going to show you

how to create your own custom booking site, so you can proudly share your link with your customers. Now, first things first, you may be asking yourself, can't I just use something like Calendly for my booking page? Well, you could, but you know what?

Then your booking site is going to look like, well, everyone else's booking site, and they're going to come to a screen just like this, and you're going to have very limited options to present to your clients.

Instead, wouldn't you rather build something that is customized to your needs, and actually looks like a full-fledged booking site, which makes it very easy for your users to book the services and have you list the services that you provide.

So, in order to create a booking system which will make your clients want to book with you, we're taking a look at SimplyBook. SimplyBook is an online booking system specifically designed for service-based industries.

That's right, for collecting payments, for integrating with social media and giving you very in-depth reporting capabilities. This is so much more than just setting up a quick meeting with a client or a colleague. This is a full-service online booking system. So let's take a closer look.

Custom templates and style for your site

So here we are within my SimplyBook account. And right off the bat, there is a large number of templates which we can choose from. In fact, you want to make sure

that you don't look like a cookie cutter or like everyone else. You can choose from one of these existing templates, or start to customize your own down below. So whether it's a banner image, look at all the different color options that we have.

We can even customize the calendar layout as well. But the bonus is that it also gives us a nice preview down below. So here, for example, is what my services will look like, but how will they look like on the phone? Well, they look great and easy to get to and navigate.

Best of all, I can actually play with this in the mobile mode so I can see what my users will experience. I find that many booking tools promise a great mobile experience, but only a handful will deliver. But before we dive deeper into the features on the back end, let's take a look at what your users will experience.

Appointment scheduling user experience

Here we are within an example booking page, which I've created in less than 30 minutes. And yes, this is one of just many templates. And within each template, everything is customizable.

Everything, from the text color, to the background, to the layout of the screen in front of you. And the great thing is, is that you can add so much further details than just a plain Calendly page. So for example, I can add a full description over here.

I can include my opening or operating hours, and all of my relevant contact information. In fact, what you can do with SimplyBook is even replace or use it as your primary website.

Over here on the left-hand side, you can see I've added a few additional pages, but I can add as many different or additional pages as I like. But of course, when you're a service-based industry, first and foremost is to get your clients to book now.

So let's go through the process. I'm going to start by selecting that book now button, and I'm presented with the different options. So here I have three different service options available.

And of course, I can give each a full description, but this is a lot more detailed, right? It's got the price of everything, it has how long the duration is of all of these different engagements.

The additional benefit of using a tool which is specifically designed for service-based industries is that you can walk them through a specific workflow.

So as you can see here on the left-hand side, even before I choose my selected service, I can see the order of what's going to happen. I'm going to start with a service, then select a provider, and then select the time. So for example, I'm going to start with selecting

this coaching opportunity here. And now, it's given me the choice as to who would I like to do that coaching session with? So you can add a full description of your employees, or you can skip this step altogether if you are the only service provider.

Remember, all of this, including the workflow order is customizable. So I'm going to select, Jane, in this case, and I'm brought up to her calendar. So I'm going to pick something, oh, maybe next week on the 12th of May.

And here are the available start times. 10 to 11 looks good to me. Perfect. Now, I'm brought to a screen where I can fill in my contact information. Bonus, this will create an account so they can come back in, review all of their bookings and their history, and then, of course, you get to keep all this valuable information as well.

Over here on the right-hand side, I can purchase this and confirm my booking, and I can ask them questions such as, would they like to opt in to my mailing list or maybe some other promotions which you would like to add as well.

Last but not least, I'm going to confirm this booking. And then I can proceed with the payment side of the transaction. Now, you don't have to accept payments if you don't want to, but of course, SimplyBook is designed so you can integrate your payment processor.

Now, when I go over to my bookings, I can see a full list of all of the things that I've booked with this business. So if I want to maybe book multiple coaching sessions in advance, I can do so. And I always have a place where I can come back and review that information.

This can really make your business stand out and look more professional, because your clients can then log back in, manage all of their bookings, and see a history. It's so much more than just one and done.

They now have a place where they can manage both their existing and future bookings. On top of that, SimplyBook makes it easy for them to book an additional service with you, which, of course, is going to be helpful for any business.

Last but not least, they make it easy for your clients to add that booking to their calendar, regardless of the type of service which they are using online. How important is it that they have the correct information, and that they can add it easily to their calendar?

Editing and viewing appointments

Now, back within the administration page, SimplyBook makes it easy for us to see all of our bookings. So for example, here I have both of my service providers, Jane and Brad, and I can see how they're booked later this week. This can be especially helpful

if you accept phone reservations or changes via the phone. So for example, if someone calls in and says, I can't make it for 10:00 AM. Can we do 11? All I need to do is click and drag it, and I can move it that quickly, that easily.

Or I can quickly and easily see where all of my service providers are available. If someone is requesting for 9:00 AM on that day, I can tell them that Jane is booked, but I'd be happy to book them at 9:00 AM with Brad.

All I need to do is click on that space, and I can instantly start to book that appointment right over the phone or in a manual fashion.

Dashboard view and custom reporting

The SimplyBook dashboard also makes it super easy for me to see all of my relevant information. So for example, here on the right-hand corner, I can see all of my upcoming bookings and my recently added bookings.

And if I scroll down, I can see some relevant information, which will help me make changes in the future. So for example, I can see my most popular services for this month, and I can also see that Jane has about 75% of all of the bookings so far. So helpful data, helpful information,

which I can use to optimize my business.

Add-ons and integrations

Now, something that I appreciate with any piece of software is when they allow you to choose which features are enabled or disabled for your use. So for example, instead of having everything listed on the left-hand side, and you only using a fraction of those features, SimplyBook allows you to enable or disable certain things

that are specifically needed for service providers. So for example, if you'd like to add an intake form, where you're asking specific questions to your clients, you can enable this.

Multiple locations and you need to change based on the services or service providers, you can do that as well. In addition, SimplyBook allows you to create memberships, and perhaps even restrict certain services only to certain members.

And, of course, it has SMS or text messaging built right in. So if you'd like to send reminders or send special promotions through text messaging, you can do so as well. So if you are needing a booking system that will increase sales for your service-based industry, be sure to check out SimplyBook.

Click the link in the description below to start your free trial today, no credit card required. And if you enjoyed this video, you'll love the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel.

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

Purpose of limiting choices in Google Forms

Google Forms is great for so many different purposes including collecting responses,

submitting surveys or for using as quizzes, but what if you want to limit the number of responses for a particular question or a particular answer, well, that's exactly what we're going to address in today's video. Hello, everyone.

Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress. And in this example, I have a course signup, and one of my questions is that I'm going to be asking my participants, "Which session will you be attending?" And I've given them four different dates, but here's the catch.

I want to limit the answers for these particular dates. For example, once three people have signed up for May 4th, I don't want to give this option anymore.

I want to force other participants after this is filled to only see the other three options, and maybe I want to give different limits depending on the answer.

How to install the Choice Limit add-on

So how do we accomplish this? Well, with the addition of a Google Forms add-ons.

Here you can see in the top right-hand corner, I've got a little puzzle piece, which signifies that I have the Choice Limit Add-On installed. However, if you don't have any add-ons installed, you won't this icon.

So how can we make use of add-ons and extensions right here within Google Forms? Well, we want to start with the more option here, and come all the way down to the bottom, and select add-ons. And yes.

Just like how Gmail has extensions, and Google Chrome has extensions, Google Forms has extensions as well. So you can see a large variety of different extensions which we can add.

Now in our case, I want you to type in the word limit or choice limit, and you're going to get to the one that we're after. Yes. Choice limit. It's the second one here. And here you can see, I already have it installed. So now that I have

the Choice Limit Add On installed, I'm going to come back to this add-on option.

I'm going to choose that particular add-on. Remember, you may have others listed here as well. And all I have to do is select start, and what that's going to do. It's going to overlay my screen with a few more options here in the bottom right-hand corner.

Editing the choice limit options

Now I can start to apply some of these settings to my particular form. So right off the bat, you will see that it actually lists the different questions that I have in my form.

And yes. If you have a large number of questions, they will all be listed here as well.

But you can see that my second question is just a short answer question. So it's not really going to be applicable for this add-on because we need to be using either a dropdown, checkbox, or a radio button such as in my case here.

So any of those three will work with this add-on. So in this case, what I want to do is I want to determine if I want to make a number limit or a value limit. Now, in order to enable a value limit, you're going to have to connect a worksheet, a spreadsheet in order to make this happen.

So in most cases, we're going to make use of the number limit because the value limit is a little more complex, and I don't think it's necessary

for within Google Forms. Now, the next choice that we have to make is whether we want a generic limit or an individual limit. If I select generic limit, what it's going to do,

it's going to limit all choices by a certain number. So let's say for example, I want to have three in each of these sessions. Well, I would just select the number three,

and it's going to limit all of these options to only three. But if I want to be a little more specific I can choose the individual limit. And here you can see all four of my choices are listed. So maybe I only want to have two in the May 4th session. Maybe I've got a little more space in the May 5th and 6th,but I only have two in my last session as well.

So you can be as specific as you want here. Either for each actual answer, or you can choose just the same number for all of your answers here. The last thing that we need to do in order to enable this add-on, and enable these limits is to toggle the little radio button here at the bottom.

You can see by default, it's going to be turned off when you first install, and when you first choose the choice limit add-on

but here I'm going to say, "Yeah, let's turn that on." It's now telling me that the number limit is on. The last thing that I'm going to do for you

What users will see when using the form

is show you exactly what people will experience to see if this is the right extension for you. So now that the number limit is on, let's go ahead and book two sessions on May 4th, and see what happens.

So I'm going to the preview button here, which is essentially the same thing as working and dealing with the live form itself. And let's say, I'm the first participant. And I'm going to say, "Yeah, I want to participate in May 4th." I'm going to hit submit.

Perfect. I've been signed up in this case. Let's go back to our form. You can see that first response has been recorded. And let's say I'm now a different participant. And yeah, I also want to go to the May 4th session.

So I'm going to hit submit as well. Let's go back to our form, and you can see that two responses

have now been collected, but look what has changed. "Which session will you be attending?" Now May 4th is no longer an option. It's doing exactly what we want it to do by limiting those sessions to just two. If I go back to the preview one more time,

you can see that the next participant doesn't even know that May 4th is an option.

They will only have the other three options here or if they start to fill up, maybe it will be reduced to just

Additional limit features and options

one or two options. Now, if you need to make adjustments to your settings,

you can always come back into this dialogue box and either select reset where you can change all of the numbers, and reset to zero. Or you can toggle the numbers individually here as well.

And if you need to turn off the limiter, you can come down here to the toggle, and simply select this, which will turn the limiter off for this particular form. Also keep in mind.

Under the settings option, you can choose if you want to be notified when that is reached. This can be very helpful to keep you on top of how many people are using that form, and what are they selecting, and what is no longer available to them as well.

Now, if you enjoy this video, be sure to let me know

in the comments down below. And if you have other Google Forms questions, I'd love to hear from you.

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

Why your time is worth money

Not too long ago, I posed a question right here on the Simpletivity channel and I asked you would you rather make more money or have more time? And after more than 1,000 votes, I was a little surprised by the results.

Yes, make more money edged out having more time. So if you'd like to make some more money by doing just what you would regularly do online, you're going to love today's extension.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And here I am doing a Google search and let me search for something like the best TV streaming service. And you're probably already familiar with the first set of results that I see here.

They are all ads. In fact, I only see a sliver of the first search result

that isn't an ad all the way down at the bottom. About 90% of my screen are advertisements. Now, not only can it be frustrating to have so much of your screen taken over by ads, but in my experience, many of these suggestions are not even relevant to my search.

They're not even something that I'm looking for or that I might be interested in clicking on, but in the chance that one of them is interesting to me and I decide to click on it, I get nothing out of that interaction.

Maybe I'm going to look a little bit further and see if it's the right solution for me, but the advertiser, the provider of that ad is benefiting from my click. Well, what if we could do something

a little bit differently? Rather of them being bombarded with irrelevant ads, what if I could get recommendations that were specific to my needs, but I could also be paid for clicking on the recommendations that I'm actually interested in? Well, that's precisely where the Comrade browser extension

How Comrade works and earns you money

comes into play. Comrade is a free browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge users that not only gives you more relevant recommendations, but also pays you for your time and attention.

Let's take a quick look at how it works as a part of just your regular day. So here I am within the Google search bar and let's say I'm searching for a savings account for my college student son.

I'm displayed with the regular Google search results, but within just a few seconds, based on my search criteria, I'm given a very targeted recommendation. And by clicking on this recommendation from Comrade, not only am I given something that is helpful to my search, but I am paid and added to my balance immediately just by clicking on this recommendation.

Comrade settings and privacy

So now that we know how Comrade is going to interact with us and give us some very targeted recommendations, let's take a look at the Comrade interface so we can adjust a few specific settings. Number one, I like that it keeps a recorded history.

I don't know how many times that I've been browsing through a social media feed or I've received some other recommendation, and then I've wanted to go back to it sometime in the past.

In fact, maybe you just saw some type of advertisement on this YouTube video and you're going to remember it sometime in the future.There's almost no way for you to find out what that ad actually was, but with the Comrade extension installed, you're going to get a complete history.

So here I can see a few days ago, I was not only presented with this recommendation, but I did click on this recommendation. So if I want to go back and visit it again, or I can choose to delete this history as well, I can do so here, right here within the Comrade interface.

Of course, when it comes to installing any browser extension, especially those that are making recommendations to you, you probably have a question about privacy, but the great thing about Comrade is that it does not store any of your activity, and in fact, the recommendations are delivered based on real time activity, so that recent search that you made.

The actual activity that you are doing, it can produce a relevant and a very targeted recommendation without the need to store any of the data on their servers.

Editing how often you receive recommendations

Another very important one here is the reach frequency. So for example, how often would you like to receive a recommendation? We can choose to set this from one to five per day, six to 10 per day, or you can choose unlimited.

So if you feel that you are receiving too many recommendations, you can always reduce this. In my case, even when I set things down to about six to 10 per day, I found that I was only in reality receiving about three recommendations, and the great thing is, is that all three of those recommendations were very relevant to what I was searching

Payment and withdrawal thresholds

or for what I was doing at that point in time. Now of course, when you are signing up for a service which is going to be paying you, there are going to be some thresholds

before that payment is made. The good news with Comrade is that those thresholds are relatively low. When you first create your Comrade account and add the extension to your browser, you will be able to withdraw at just $50.

And for some of you, that might be just a few weeks of activity, but if you do decide to complete your entire profile and invite five friends to also use Comrade, you'll be able to make your first withdrawal at just $25, so you don't have to wait to 100 or $200 before you have access to your balance. So if you'd like to receive more helpful recommendations

and get paid for your time and attention, go to cmrd.com and install the Comrade extension today. And if you're looking for more ways to save time and get more done,

subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel.

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

View only specific calendar dates

Do you want to look like an expert and save time with all of your meetings, appointments, and reminders? Well, in this video, I'm sharing with you seven tips and tricks that I think every Google Calendar user should know.

So let's dive in. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And the first tip has to do with navigating and viewing only the days that you want.

Now you're probably already familiar with the dropdown menu in the top right hand corner of the screen. We can alternate from a day view to a week view,

or a month view, whatever you would like. But if you would just like to see a specific set or a specific group of days? Well, a little known tip is to use the mini calendar here

on the left hand side. And if I just want to see Wednesday through Friday, I can click and drag across those dates, and now I'm just seeing Wednesday through Friday.

What if I just want to see Tuesday and Wednesday of next week? Just those two days, drag across them, and now I'm just seeing those two days. How about the last two weeks? Well, just drag over top of them and now I've got that view in front of me here,

Not the full month view, just those specific two weeks. So if you're just after a few set of days, be sure to make use of this mini calender under view here by just clicking and dragging your mouse.

Create & dock new calendar events

Now, the next tip on our list has to do with creating new events while still seeing information that is relevant to you. Now, for most of us, when we're using Google Calendar on our desktop, we're going to click on the area where we'd like to add that new event and I'm just going to give it the title of New Event.

Now immediately, it is blocking some of my calendar.

Now I can click and drag this if I want to move this around on the screen, if I want to reference perhaps other information or other events, but another thing you can do is either drag it all the way over to the left hand side, you can see that it gives us a bit of a highlighted area in order for us to do so,

or you can click this little dock to sidebar icon in the top left hand corner. And what that is going to do is to dock that new event here on the left hand side while you can see your entire calendar here on the right, and yes, we can continue to navigate to other weeks or other days.

We can even switch to a day view if we want to, but still have that new event listed here. Now you will also notice in this dock view that it will provide you with a bit of a flashing shadow here on your event calendar.

So as you're adding details here, you can see exactly where this event will appear once you have saved it.

Now you can always click this icon again to undock that event if you want to go back to that traditional view but either you can click this icon here or click and drag it all the way over to the left hand side, if you want to dock this event, if you want to go and use and see other things in your calendar while you're creating such an event.

Adding notes to meetings with Meetric

Now the next tip on our list is all about adding notes to a particular meeting. Whether you're wanting to do that in advance or maybe you want to go back and review the notes for a particular meeting.

And for this purpose, we're going to be using an extension called Meetric. With the Meetric extension installed within your Google Calendar account, when you select any of your events, you will now see a take notes button available to you as well. By selecting this, we get a small slide out which allows us to add as many detailed notes here on the right hand side.

And you can add anything, including links, bullet points, really anything that's going to help you prepare or perhaps if you're taking notes during the meeting.  And the great thing is that all of the notes that you record here will stay synced to this particular event.

So whether you want to share something in advance or if you want to review something that has happened in the past, you can do so right here with the Meetric tool. Best of all, you can also do it in full screen. So for example, later today, I've got my team standup meeting and maybe I want to add some more details to this list

or maybe we're going to ignore a particular question for this particular meeting. I can view and access all of my events because remember it's synced directly to my account. Let's go down to this coaching session, for example, and I can review the things that I want to discuss with this client. I can even assign myself specific tasks

and give them a reminder or a due date so I can use it for more than just notes,

I can use it for a to-do list and to remind myself of certain tasks. And when the meeting is over, I can always choose to share those notes either via a link or send them directly via email. Now, if you'd like to start using Meetric with your Google Calendar, you can go to Meetric.app or see the link in the description below.

Google Calendar keyboard shortcuts

Next up on our list, let's see how we can save time by using the variety of shortcuts

right here within Calendar. Now, I could tell you about some of my favorite shortcuts

but if you want to see the full list yourself, all you need to do is select the question mark key on your keyboard. And that will bring up the full list of all of the great keyboard shortcuts right here within Google Calendar.

Now note, you may have to go into your settings menu and then come down to keyboard shortcuts and make sure that this is enabled. If this check mark is not checked, you will not be able to see this quick reference list.

So be sure to check this first and then you can choose to use the question mark key. Now, one of my most used shortcut keys is the letter G, as in go to date. By selecting G on your keyboard, you're presented with a small dialogue here

where you can type in basically anything that you want. So if someone's asking me, what am I doing in November, I can type in November and immediately jump to November of this year.

If I want to go back to today, I can simply say today and it's going to bring me right back. And what about, I don't know, Christmas 2024? Well, let's go and find out, no, it looks like I'm pretty free at the moment.

So the next time you want to jump back and forth quickly and easily, simply select G on your keyboard and jump to the specific date that you want.

View the Google Contacts sidebar

Now, if you're dealing with a lot of meetings, that also means that you're dealing

with an awful lot of people, and sometimes we can forget in terms of who we are meeting with and why, and what exactly is the relationship with that individual?

Well, instead of having to jump back and forth between your email account or your contacts tab, we can actually access that information right here from within Google Calendar and in order to so, we're going to use the sidebar feature here on the right hand side.

You'll notice that there's a Google contacts icon in which we can open up. Now, if you don't see this sidebar come all the way down to the bottom right, and make sure that you've expanded this little arrow, that's going to allow you to see this sidebar on the right hand side of the screen.

So for example, maybe I am looking at this meeting with Scott and I'm not exactly sure who this Simple Scott is and what is the relationship. Yes, I'll get some details by hovering over here but if I click on the context on the right hand side and then click that meeting I will also see the full list of all of the attendees.

And here I can go one step further, I can click on the individual itself, I can see their full list of information but I can also see some of the recent interactions.

So here are some of the other meetings that are coming up with this person, here is the last email that we've had and I can click on that and go directly to the email.

I can even read some of the notes down below and yeah, maybe I want to stay away from this guy at the next cocktail party. And when you're done accessing

or reviewing all of the information here, all you need to do is select the contacts icon again which will close that sidebar. So a quick and easy way to find out more information about those whom your meeting with.

Share Google Calendar with others

Next, let's take a look at how we can share our Google Calendar with others.

Now, why would you want to do that? Well, of course, you may want to share your calendar with your coworkers or maybe with just someone that you're working with for a period of time.

Now, the good news is that you don't have to share all of your details. Google Calendar gives us a lot of options.

So whether you want to share just a read only version, or maybe you just want to show when you're busy or perhaps you're working with an assistant and you want to give them full control, Google Calendar gives us a lot of flexibility.

The first thing that you're going to want to do

is pick the specific calendar which you want to share because maybe you don't want to share everything here but just your main booking calendar, for example. So I'm going to click on the More button and then select Settings and sharing.

We can still get to this from the main icon from the home page, but this is going to bring us directly to that particular calendar. Then we want to go and select Share with specific people. And here you can see we can add as many additional people as we want.

So yes, I am the owner, but I'm going to say add someone, and I'm going to add that Simple Scott, once again, I can add multiple people here if I want but where we want to pay careful attention to is the permissions dropdown.

So here we've got a few different things to consider. The first choice is to see only free or busy information. So they're not going to see the name of the event. They're not going to see any of the guests, they're just going to see when things are booked on your calendar.

The second option is to see all event detail. So yes, they are going to see absolutely everything as a part of that event but they won't be able to edit anything. Next, we have make changes to events, which yes, they're going to see it, and they're going to be able to make changes to those events.

And lastly, we're basically giving them full control, by selecting this option, they will also be able to share your calendar with others. So make sure that you're making the best choice for yourself.

We can select that here and then select Send which is going to send them an invitation so that they can have access to your calendar.

Change calendar email notifications

Now, one of the biggest pet peeves for many calendar users are the number of notifications and email alerts that you receive for all of your calendar events,

whether you're invited to something new, someone changes their response, or gives you an accepted confirmation, sometimes we don't necessarily need all of this email data and it can really contribute to email overload.

So in order to make these changes for a specific calendar, once again, we want to select on the More buttons, then select Settings and sharing. And this time we're going to come down to Other notifications.

Now here, you can see there are five different events or five different triggers, which will send an email. But the good news is that you don't have to receive all of these events. So for example, event responses is one of my pet peeves. I can always go back into my calendar and see who has accepted or who has declined.

I don't necessarily want to receive an email response when someone has committed to that meeting. So I can come over here and select none as an alternative. And we've got a few other options here as well including new events, changed events, or canceled events.]

So if you want to customize how many emails and for what purposes you are getting in your inbox, be sure to come to the Other notifications area and choose what's best for you. Now I'd love to hear from you next.

What was your favorite tip from today's video or what other problem are you facing in Google Calendar and you can't quite seem to figure it out? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

And if you enjoyed this video, you'll love my other content right here on the Simpletivity channel.

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

Analyze your Trello list workflow

This video is sponsored by Rewind Backups for Trello, more about them a little later in the video. If you clicked on this video, you're probably already using Trello for your project management needs, but are you getting the most out of this tool?

Well, in this video, I want to show you five different things you should be thinking about so you can get the most out of Trello whether you're managing a small business or an entire team, five different steps you should take so you can optimize your Trello setup.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's dive in with the first step or the first thing I want you to think about and that really is your lists or your different stages.

At its core, Trello is based on the Kanban method, the method of moving cards or moving tasks through different stages. However, I find that far too many Trello users are not using it or optimizing Trello in such a way.

In this particular example, you can see I have a fairly straightforward setup. I've got five different lists, Ideas, Tasks, In Progress, Pending, and Complete and the goal is to create cards on the left hand side of the screen

and move them over to the right hand side. However, you want to be very specific

as to what each of these stages represent, making sure that you don't have too many or too few for your needs. So for example, many people ask me, "Scott, why do I have a Pending List, or sometimes I'll label this Waiting For?" I find this can actually be one of the most valuable list in all of my Trello setups.

Sometimes there can be a card which is simply out of your hands at the moment. Maybe you've ordered these books and there's nothing else you can do at this point in time until they arrive, or maybe you're still waiting to hear back from these vendors so I don't want to leave them in In Progress because this might build up very, very lengthy and may not tell the entire story.

This is a perfect opportunity to split or separate these lists so I can tell this information not only to myself but to every member whom I'm collaborating with.

So if you happen to have a list which is growing exponentially, that may be a clue for you to split that list into another list, making sure that you can come into Trello at any point in time and get a great snapshot view of what is going on.

Add estimated effort on Trello cards

Now in step number two, we want to add some more valuable information to our cards. You're already going to be familiar with adding things such as a due date

or labels or members to your cards. These are essential aspects to get the most information out of the tasks and the things that you're managing here within your Trello board, but often something that is missing is how much time or how much effort is going to be applied to those cards and how much time been spent actually working on those cards as well.

So in this case, we're going to make use of a Power-Up called Card Size by Screenful. Now the good news is is that this is a free Power-Up so it will not cost you anything additional.

So let's go in here and look at this card here and let's say there's this New Article, it's assigned to me but I want to estimate how much effort it's going to take. Well, here under the Power-Ups header, you can see that there is the Card Size button.

If I open this up, it gives me three different fields which I can start filling in. So maybe in this case, I'm going to say that this article's probably going to take me a total of six hours. Immediately, it's going to fill in the remaining slot here, meaning that there are six hours remaining.

I'm just going to hit Save here so you can see what this looks like on the card itself, so not only can I see it here within the card, but if I close the card, I can see that it has an estimated time of six hours.

Now, if I come up here to the Card Size icon, I can click on Settings, and I can choose to add other things to the front of the card as well, including the amount of time spent or the amount of time remaining, but I'm going to leave those unchecked here just at the moment.

Let's go ahead and add another one here. I'm going to add a size here to this one. Maybe this one is going to be only three hours in case, I'm going to hit Save here and let's go back, and maybe this Redesign website which is going to take an awful lot more time.

I'm going to come down here to Card Size and I'm going to pick another number.

One of the things that I like is that it will include some of the more recent sizes as well.

So maybe you have some standardization or some common size durations, you can easily click them down below here. In this case, I'm going to say 12 and I'm going to hit Save. So not only can I see the differences in these sizes between these cards

but Card Size also allows us to view this data in a few different ways. So I can see that I have assigned about six hours of work, but there are a total of 15 hours which are not assigned.

I can also filter this by label or I can filter it by list so if I want to see where the bulk of that load is. But let's go back into this first one where I said it was a size of six but maybe I've spent about two hours today on it so I'm going to select two.

You can see right here it's immediately going to show me how much is remaining

so it's going to calculate this data automatically as I adjust the amount of time spent

on this particular project so I can keep track of it along the way. This is a fantastic way to get the most out of Trello and making sure that you're not overallocating

or underallocating your staff along the way. Now, whether you choose to install

the Card Size Power-Up or some other Power-Up, you may be fearful that those changes may alter your Trello boards, or maybe you're a little worried about inviting new members to your boards and what they might do as a part of the editing process.

Well, that's nicely why I use Rewind Backups for all of my Trello boards and why it's one of the top three most installed power ups right now. If you want to back up all of your Trello data, if you want to go back in time in case you make a mistake,

you can do so with Rewind Backups for Trello. And if you're not already using Rewind

for your Trello boards, you can go to rewind.com/scott-friesen and get $50 when you subscribe on this page. Be sure to see the link in the description for more details.

Add automated Trello rules

Now, the next step in getting the most out of your project management right here within Trello is by adding automation.

How often have you told your team or maybe just told yourself that when I move something from this list to this list, I need to remember to add this label, I need to remember to add a due date, I need to remember to add myself or do something else along the way, and how often have you or some member of your team forgotten.

Well, by making use of Trello Automation, we can add a variety of rules to any Trello board

which was going to make your life so much easier. No more forgetting a certain step,

no more forgetting to add a particular individual. Let's go back to my board here

and show you a quick example. So let's say in my case, when I drag something into my Task List, I want to remember to add the New Project label, I want to remember to add a due date of let's say three days from now, I also want to remember to add myself to that particular project. Well, that's a lot of things which I could forget

or I could waste an awful lot of time with, but with Trello Automation, it is so much easier. Let's add a new card for this example here. So this is a completely new task.

It's fresh, It's got nothing else on it but when I drag it over into the Task List, watch what happens, new project, due date three days from now and I'm assigned to it and I didn't do any of this manually. Maybe you have a certain step or a certain phase

within your project where you need certain things to happen on a regular basis.

Add dashboard metrics to Trello

Now, speaking of making our lives so much easier, the fourth step in our process

is adding some quantitative data directly to our Trello board so we don't have to go looking for it or do some other type of manual count. Wouldn't it be nice if we could put some dashboard information directly here within our project management board.

So here at the top of the screen I've installed the Dashcard Power-Up Dashcard/Track. And with this power up, we can add a number of different customized or template information so we can keep track of what's going on

not only in this board but perhaps across multiple boards. So in this case, maybe I want to take a look at some of the cards which have not been touched in a while.

So in either case, I can choose to customize the options here or I can just add it immediately to this board so it's going to place it in the first list at the very top,

but of course I can drag this and move this wherever I want. Maybe, I'll even want to create a separate list just for my tracking cards. In this case, it's telling me that I have five stale cards on this board.

And yes, this is going to be dynamic so as I edit or change things, this number is going to change as well but it's more than just a number. If I click on this extra special card, you can see down below, it will tell me exactly which of those five cards are stale and if I click on it, it will open up that card directly as well so I can go in, take a look around, and maybe update that particular card.

Now, if I don't like the way that this is displaying this information, no problem.

I can edit this card as well. If I come down here and select Explore and edit, I can take a look at the details So for example, here, it is looking at any card that was last modified earlier than 14 days ago.

Well, maybe that's too much, maybe I want to look at anything that hasn't been modified in seven days or something like that, I can select Edit filters and I can say, let's, yeah, let's bring that down to seven days and save it here and then down below, it's going to show me which of those cards fall into that category so you can be very, very specific.

Keep in mind, you can add as many of these cards as you like. If I come back here to the Dashcards button, I can select Customize, and now I can upload my own background, I can give it my own name

and filter this information any way that I like. So this Dashcards feature can really enhance the level of information and the amount of detail which is shown on any of your Trello boards.

View Trello project timeline

Now, the final step in our optimization process is to look at your Trello data in a different way. Although you may be very comfortable in working with your cards and your lists in this Board View, keep in mind that Trello also has what they call a Timeline view, and it's very much like a Gantt chart view where we're seeing the exact same information that we saw in the Board View, but perhaps in a more meaningful way.

If we jump back to the Board view,  it can be difficult to see that this is actually spanning over a few different days, and this one is actually spanning over several weeks, but if we look at the Timeline view, we can see that a lot more clearly and the great thing is, is that we can work within this view as well.

So maybe this create this onboarding letter is actually going to take a little bit longer than I thought, so I'm going to stretch it out here across the weekend into next week. If I need to adjust the timeframe for this project, no problem, I can drag it and move it to maybe next week sometime.

In addition, Trello gives us the ability to filter and view this information

in a variety of different ways. So whether I want to break it down by member or maybe I want to break it down by the different labels that we have, we can view that information here as well. And of course we can click on any of these cards

and start to work and look at the details within it as well. So for some of you, you may actually end up spending more time here within the Timeline view even than the Board view itself. And don't forget to back up all of your Trello data with Rewind,

go to rewind.com/scott-friesen to receive $50 when you subscribe. Now, if you found this video helpful, you might find the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel helpful as well.

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