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Why Trello templates are important

[Scott Friesen] This video is brought to you by Pipedrive.

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(zoom)

If you wanna save time managing all of your projects here in Trello, or starting your projects in just a matter of seconds, this video is for you.

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

And today we are talking about templates.

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use both card templates, board templates, and also, to get some inspiration from other people's templates.

So, you don't have to start from scratch.

You can take what other people have used or learned from, and start applying it within your own Trello environment.

How to Create Trello Card Templates

So, let's get started right here at the card level.

And let's say here, I've got a demo board and I've got an Ideas list here, and I've got a New Idea card.

And let's say that for myself and my team, I'd always like a few things to happen when we start or create a new idea.

I want it to have this new project label.

I want it to have this brainstorming document attached.

And I want us to ask ourselves these questions: does it add value? Will our customers benefit? And are we excited about it?

But I don't wanna have to add a new card and then like, oh yeah, I gotta remember to add the checklist, and the document and that type of thing.

I just want this to be available to me each and every time.

Well, all I need to do is open up this card, scroll down near the bottom under Actions and say, Make a Template.

Now you'll see a few things change here.

Not only does the template get a nice green check box, but when you go to the top, we get a nice header telling us that this is a template card.

Now this is important, because whatever we change here now within this card is going to be applied to the template when we use it.

So if I close this, you can see on the front, there's a little icon here as well.

It's sort of a light blue, telling us that this is a template.

How to Use Trello Card Templates

And there's a few different ways in which we can start to use it.

So, number one, if we open this card again, you can see this big green button saying, Create Card from Template.

Perfect, if I click on that, I can give this a new name.

I can say, this is a New idea for the fall of 2021, for example.

And I can choose what I want to keep or leave off.

Now, in most cases, when you're creating a template, you wanna keep all this stuff, right?

This is all the things that you added to the template, but I can also choose to put it in a different list right off the bat.

I'm gonna say Create Card.

And now we're brought to this new card, which has everything that we input before.

It's got the document, it's got the label, it's got the checklist.

And I forgot to mention that I also included myself, because maybe I want to be attached to every new idea as well.

But there's another way that we can create templates as well.

You can see at the bottom of every single list, there is an icon.

Now this is a create from template icon, so if I wanna create that card in one of these lists, maybe I wanna put it right under Task List.

I'm gonna select this one, and now you can see all the templates that I have available to me on this board.

So, here's that New Idea Template.

Same thing as before, I'm gonna click on it, I can give it a new name and give all these things, keep all these things down below as well.

How to Hide & Manage Card Templates

Now, you don't have to keep your templates visible, because this might be confusing.

In fact, someone, even yourself, might come in here and start editing things and then forget that, oh yeah, this is a template card.

So, what you can do, is you can actually choose to hide your templates.

So, in this case, I'm gonna come over here to this little edit stylus, and I'm gonna click on it, and I'm gonna choose Hide from list.

I'm gonna select that option and it's gone.

It's no longer visible to me here on this board, but it's not actually archived, nor has it disappeared.

You can see if I come back to the Create from template option, there it is.

I can still use it, along with my other template cards as well.

Now, if I wanna edit these templates, I come down to the bottom, select Edit Templates, and now you can see I've got both an edit icon, but also a delete icon.

So, if I really truly want to delete any of these templates, I can do so at this level, or if I just wanna make a tweak.

So, let's come down to this one, I'm gonna say edit.

I'm gonna come in here and say, you know what? Actually, I'd like this HR label to be attached to it as well.

Perfect. I don't have to hit save or anything like that. I can just close it at this point, and now going forward, that label will be available to me.

So, this is a really quick and easy way for you to get started on a new card, especially if there's a few different types of cards that you use most frequently within a particular board.

How to Copy Existing Board Templates

But next up, let's talk a little bit about inspiration, and maybe piggybacking on someone who's already created a fantastic board, and you wanna be able to make use of it as well.

So, if we come up here to our Home screen, you'll notice that on the left-hand side, there's an area called Templates.

If we click on Templates, it's gonna bring us to a vast library of great Trello templates that we can take advantage of.

Now on the left-hand side, along with the top of the page, we have a few different categories that we can dive into, or if there's a specific template that you're after, you can just type it here into the search bar.

I'm gonna click on Marketing for this example, just to see some of the other templates that are available to me.

And it gives us some helpful identifiers here, in terms of how many people are actually using it, and how many people have actually viewed that template.

So, if I scroll down here, and let's say I'm looking for an editorial calendar, I'm gonna click on this one here.

What it's gonna do, is it's gonna give me a bit of a description about this template, so I can read a few more details about what it's about, and who it was designed for.

But I can also come down here and see a preview of this entire board.

So, I can scroll over, I can see the types of lists, the types of information that's included.

Now, if this doesn't give me enough detail, what I can do is actually come down here and say View Template, which will open up the board.

And now I can actually open up these cards and I can see, wow, this is a really helpful checklist that they have as a part of this calendar.

These are the types of things that I would like to use in my own editorial calendar.

It's got the checklist, it's got the list, it's got everything that I want. I might make a few tweaks.

Maybe I don't need all of these lists. Maybe I want to revise the labels, but you know what? This is gonna save me so much time.

So, at this point, all I need to do is come up here and select Create Board from Template.

And I can give it my own name, right? I can say, well, this is Scott's Editorial Calendar.

At this point, I can assign it to a team. Again. I can choose whether I want to or not keep the cards and the template cards, but that's kind of the whole point of using a template, and I can say Create.

Now it's gonna take a second to create this board.

And now it's my own.

Now I can come in here and change the labels. I can start removing some of these example cards that they've laid out for me, but I can start using this template right away.

How to Create Trello Board Templates

Now the third thing I wanna show you today, is how you can create your own board template, because there's chances that you have some processes or some boards that you use on a regular basis, and wouldn't it save you or your team time if you already had them in order?

So, let me come up here, and let me go down to my Customer Success Template.

I've already taken a few minutes to flesh out a few lists and a few marching orders, a few descriptions here at the top of each list, along with some custom labels.

Now, let's say that this is the type of board that I want my team members to use for their various clients, their various customers.

So, we're gonna have a number of these boards, but I don't wanna have to write this out, or for them to write out this information each and every time.

And of course, your board may have a lot more detail involved in it as well.

So, once I have my board in place, all I need to do is come up here to Show Menu.

We're gonna come down here to More, and I'm gonna select Make a Template.

So, it's gonna tell me that it's gonna turn this board into a template for others to copy.

I'm gonna say Make a Template.

And now you can see at the very top of my board, I've got the same green button, so members of my organization and even myself, right, maybe I have a few template boards that I just wanna use in my personal life or my personal projects, I can do so as well.

One thing that I would recommend, and you can see that Trello encourages us to do so as well after making the template board, is to add a description down below, because as members of your team may be searching or looking for various boards, this can be helpful to tell them what this board is designed for and who should be using it.

So now I can repurpose this board again, and again and again.

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Intro

[Scott] This video is brought to you by Woven.

Woven lets you access all of your calendars in one place and gives you powerful scheduling tools to help you save time.

Stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more.

Do you wanna spend a lot less time managing your schedule?

Do you wanna look like a pro when it comes to managing your Outlook calendar?

Well, in today's video, I'm gonna share with you seven of my best tips for managing your calendar here within Microsoft Outlook.

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

Go To Date Keyboard Shortcut

And let's dive right in with tip number one, we're talking about a shortcut key, which will allow us to go to any date on our calendar.

All you need to do is select Control + G on your keyboard, and you're gonna get this go to date dialogue that pops up.

Now, at first glance, you may think to yourself, oh, do I have to type it in, in this format? Absolutely not.

Let's say I want to go directly to November 27th. I'm just gonna type in November 27th, hit enter on my keyboard and boom, here I am at Thanksgiving or I should say Black Friday for this particular year.

Let's hit Control + G again and let's say I just wanna go to the next Saturday on my calendar. I'm just gonna type in S-A-T, hit enter on my calendar and here I'm already selected for the next Saturday from today.

So no, you don't have to put things in, in a particular date or a particular date format as you see here.

How about February, 2021? I'm gonna hit enter and boom, there I am taken to the second week I think it's chosen the ninth because today is the ninth, but it's brought me exactly to February, 2021 and I can even go back and just say today, if I'm somewhere else and hit enter and it's gonna bring me back to today.

So it's gonna save you a lot of time, that's Control + G on your keyboard.

Now tip number two has to do with viewing time zones.

Viewing Multiple Time Zones in Outlook

In particular, viewing multiple time zones here on the left-hand side of your calendar.

Of course, by default, it's gonna show your local time zone, but what if you work closely with someone else or with clients or colleagues in a different time zone?

Wouldn't it be nice to have one or maybe two additional time zones here on the left-hand side?

In order for us to do that, we need to go up to File and then all the way down to Options. It's gonna bring up this dialogue and on the left-hand side, we wanna select Calendar.

Now we wanna scroll down just a little bit here to Time Zones.

Now there's a few different things we wanna pay attention to here. Number one is that we can add labels to our time zones, including the existing one. So just in case you want to remember, maybe I wanna type in here Pacific, just so I know the difference between this particular time zone.

But here, I can show a second time zone. So I'm gonna tick this box here and it's already selected Eastern for me, and that's perfect. I often work with a lot of clients on the East Coast, so I get to select the Eastern time zone. And just so it's easier for me to see that on my calendar, I'm gonna type in East, it's gonna keep it nice and short so I can see it on my calendar.

All I have to do is come down here and say, okay, and now on the left-hand side, I've got two of my time zones. I can see my local time zone here, which is gonna show up in a bold here, but I also have got my Eastern time here.

So when I'm looking at my calendar and thinking about making an appointment, making sure that, oh yeah, 2:00 PM is fine for me, but maybe that's a little late for some of my colleagues on the Eastern time zone.

Now next on our list, we wanna look at viewing our calendar in a different way.

View Outlook Calendar from Email Inbox

And in particular, viewing our calendar when we are dealing with email, because let's be honest when you're here within Outlook, you're probably spending an awful lot of time here in your inbox rather than just your calendar.

But it can be time consuming to go back and forth, right? To click over here, click on the calendar, come over here and then click over here and then go back to your view here within your inbox.

Well, you can actually view a mini view of your calendar and actually see your entire schedule right here from within the email portion of Outlook.

In order to do that, we wanna come up here to the top and select View. And then on the right-hand side of your ribbon, you'll see this Layout area here.

Now there's one that's called the To-Do Bar and it's maybe not the best named label here because it's gonna show us a lot more than just our task lists. We can choose to show our task list as well.

But if we select on this option, we have three options. Calendar, People, Tasks, or Off. In this case, I want to select Calendar and now on the right-hand side, I've got a miniature view of my calendar, but it gets better than that.

Not only can I go up here and select certain dates and see what my schedule is like, but as you can see, if I go in today, it's actually showing me an agenda view of my calendars. So I can quickly see what's coming up today and what do I have for the remainder of the week.

And let's say, I need to change this consulting session, or maybe I just wanna see more details about it. All I need to do is click on it and it opens right up here. It doesn't take me to the calendar, right? I haven't switched to the calendar view, but it's opened up this event. I can add the location, change the date, add invitees, do everything that I would regularly do.

And when I'm done, I can hit Save and Close or I can just close it here, if I just wanted to find out more information and I'm back to this view.

It still gives you a lot of real estate, a lot of room to deal with your email and view your inbox, but a helpful little view so you can see your email here within Outlook as well.

Share Your Outlook Calendar via Email

We're gonna stay here within the email side, even though this is a video about calendar tips, I wanna show you how to share your calendar with someone via email.

So all we need to do in this case, I'm gonna select Home up here to get to our traditional or default format here. And I'm gonna create a new message. And it really doesn't matter who I'm sending this to in this example, I wanna come down here to the body of the email itself. And so maybe I'm gonna write something and tell them that, "Hey, just look below. This is what my schedule is like for the next week. What's your availability or which of these times works well for you?"

So in order to do this, what we need to do is come up here to Insert and you can see in this first section here under Include, there's one called Calendar. So I'm gonna select this one. You can choose the particular calendar, if you manage multiple calendars. I'm gonna use my default calendar here and you can also include the date range. So in this case, I'm gonna say the next seven days, and I can choose the amount of detail that I'd like to include as well.

So I can include limited details, full details or availability only. This is probably the one that you want to use most often because it's gonna basically just show free and busy. It gives us the other ones like tentative, working elsewhere or out of office. So they're not gonna see your specific meeting names or invitees or anything like that. You can also say show time within my working hours only, which is probably pretty smart, right? You don't want someone to pick a time that's outside of your working hours.

There's a few more advanced options here, but in the most part, I typically just use it at this level. I'm gonna say Okay, and what's gonna happen is that within the body of that message is gonna be included a miniature calendar. In fact, it looks very similar to what we saw in the email view, but as you can see, it's just showing free and busy, free and busy so they can take a quick glance and see that, okay, on the 10th, I'm available in the morning for about an hour and a half, only a half hour window here, and then most of the afternoon. So they can get back to me and say, "Hey, Scott, that’d be great. Let's meet on the 10th at 3:00 PM." Or something like that. I've given them enough details. But again, they don't know the specifics as to who I’m meeting with or the titles of those meetings.

Now I'm just gonna close this one and show you an example of what the person on the other end will receive. And this is what I think is really neat 'cause they actually get sort of a dynamic link here. If they want to look at this mini calendar and say, "You know what, I'm really wanting to meet on the 13th." They can click on this 13th. That's gonna jump down here and they can quickly see my free and busy information. So a great way to share your availability with someone outside of your organization.

Now let's jump back to the calendar itself because this next one is something that I was not aware of, but I find it so powerful.

Automatically Apply Colors to Outlook Events

And it might just change the way that you look at your calendar. It has to do with color coding or other things that you'd like to do for your calendar and make it happen automatically. So you don't have to waste your time picking up a specific color or category for every meeting that you create or the ones that you receive from other people.

So here you can see in this example. I've got green as my default color here for a number of meetings. Maybe purple is for personal things such as this lunch and anything related to a consulting session is red. But instead of wasting my time typing in consulting session and then changing it to red or receiving a consulting session appointment, check this out. I'm gonna create two different meetings just so you can see this in real time.

So let's say I'm gonna create a new meeting here. I'm just gonna call it a New Meeting. So I haven't done anything, right? I'm just gonna say new meeting. I'm gonna say save and close. There's my default color green, but I'm gonna create another meeting over here. And this one, I'm going to call, Consulting Session. Again, haven't done anything, but just giving it a name. I'm gonna hit, save and close. And this one is red. Hey, what happened there? I didn't pick red. No, that's because I'm using conditional formatting here within Outlook that whenever that term, consulting session is included in the appointment title, it's going to make the appointment red so it stands out.

So in order to make this happen, we wanna come up to our ribbon and select View. And then we wanna select View Settings. And within this view settings dialogue, we wanna come down here to Conditional Formatting. So here you see this first rule that I've put into place. It's called Consulting Session. This is actually just the name of it. We're gonna select our condition elsewhere, but here you can see I've selected the color red.

Now let's add a new one so you know how to do this as well. I'm gonna select the add button and we're gonna give it a name. In this case, I'm gonna call it a Trello Meeting, okay? 'Cause I wanna give any meeting that has Trello in the name, I wanna give it the color blue, just like the application Trello. So I'm gonna call it Trello meeting and I'm gonna pick this color blue here as the color I want to use. Now remember, this is just the name. We actually haven't specified the condition just yet.

In order to do that, we wanna come down here and select the condition button, which is gonna open up a new dialogue. So here at the top, I'm gonna say search for the words Trello. And I can choose if I want it to be only in the subject only, if I want it in the notes fields, if I want it in other places as well. In this case, I only want it in the subject. Now it's using the term subject because this is the exact same menu that you can use within the email side of Outlook. But remember subject essentially means the name of the appointment or the event.

Now I can choose other options in terms of what it was organized by, who it was organized by and other attendees. There's more choices in advance, but let's keep it simple for this example. I'm gonna hit okay in this case and I'm gonna hit okay once again. We're gonna hit okay a third time here just to close this dialog off and let's test it out and see if it's working. So here on Friday, let's create a new event and I'm gonna say, this is a Trello meeting with Bob, for example. I'm gonna hit save and close.

Convert Any Email to an Outlook Calendar Event

And automatically it's received the blue label. Next up on our list, we wanna look at quickly converting any email to an appointment because let's be honest, you're probably spending a lot more time here on the email side of Outlook than the calendar itself. But let's say someone has sent me a message like this, and they've included a lot of good data or information in it. And I wanna be able to create a meeting so we can talk about this. So in order to convert this to an appointment,

all I need to do is take the email, click and hold, and I'm gonna drag it over the calendar icon here on the left. When I release it, what's gonna happen is it's going to create a new appointment with the subject of that email is now the title of the appointment and everything within that email is going to be listed below. So here's that table I was talking about earlier. It's all there for myself and whoever I invite

to this meeting, we can now reference it together, either in advance or during the meeting itself. So I'm gonna close this one out. Again, you can drag any email,

just click and drag hover it over the calendar icon and it will automatically convert it,

getting you set up to create a new appointment.

Add Public Holidays to Outlook Calendar

Now next on our day has to do with adding important dates to your calendar, because I wanna make sure that you don't miss anything important, especially if you're dealing with someone perhaps outside of your country or outside of your faith or geographic region. And that has to do with adding public holidays to your calendar.

Here you can see I've got both some Canadian and US holidays listed here, but I didn't add these myself. No, I wanna let Outlook do the hard work for me. So in this case, what we need to do is go up to File. We're gonna come back down to options and yes, we are going to select calendar here.

And under the second menu calendar options, we wanna come about halfway down and here you can see we can add holidays to the calendar. So if we click this button, we're gonna get a dialogue here. Now there's a combination of both countries. There's some religious holidays. There's a variety of different things. Some things may be specific only to Vatican City, for example. There's a variety of different things that you might have to search through here but all you need to do is select the few that are important to you. The ones that you would like to add and hit Okay, and they will be added to your calendar.

Now, if you'd like to access all of your calendars in one place, I recommend that you check out Woven. Woven allows you to bring in all of your Google and Microsoft calendars into a single view. They also allow you to create custom tags so you can keep track of everything that you're doing in a given week. I especially like their template feature, so I don't have to type out the same thing again and again. It also comes in with some very powerful scheduling tools, so you don't have to use third-party apps. If you'd like to check out Woven for yourself, go to woven.com or see the link in the description below.

Productivity app categories

With so many amazing productivity tools available to you and I, you may be asking yourself, Scott, what do you actually use on a day to day basis? Well, in today's video,

I'm gonna share with you 10 productivity apps that I use every single day. Now I've broken them down into 10 different categories. Everything from project management, to notes, to scheduling, to even things like social media and feedback. So let's get things started and let me show you what I am actually using.

Project Management - Trello

Number one, we're gonna start with project management. And this probably isn't a surprise to many of you, but my project management tool of choice is still Trello.

Day in and day out how I manage my business, and also how I manage other projects when I'm dealing with clients, whether it's short-term or long-term,

I am using Trello. I still feel it is the quickest and easiest way to start a new project, especially if you are collaborating with others that may not have much experience

with a project management tool.

Meetings - Zoom

Now, number two on my list, we're putting in the category of meetings, and this might also not be a surprise because I produced a number of Zoom videos over the past year. And certainly with the pandemic of 2020, more and more of us are using Zoom on a regular basis.

Now I actually started using Zoom about four years ago, and I used it because I found it was the easiest tool to send a link and for having my participants join quickly and easily, and I still feel that it's the easiest way from a host perspective to manage a meeting.

Zoom has only gotten better and better over the last several months, as they've included new features and new technology.

To make it more secure, and also to make it easier to use as well. Now let's stick with mediums for a second

Scheduling - Calendly

And let's talk about scheduling.

What I am using on a daily basis is Calendly. Now I have to admit for a number of years, I hesitated to use Calendly as a part of my business operations. But since starting to use it a little over a year ago, it's hard for me to envision going back.

You can see here on this example, Calendly is doing exactly what I want it to do, it has booked me for my available times through the end of this month. So whether you are wanting someone to book you for a paid session or a consulting session like you see here, or maybe you just need a more convenient way to set up times so that you can send out a single link and others can click and see your availability.

Now Calendly makes it really easy for you to create a number.

Of different meeting types depending on your purposes. I also especially like Calendly extensions, which I use within my Gmail client in particular.

Notes - Google Keep

Next up on my list, we've got to take a look at notes and note-taking.

And still, my note-taking tool of choice is Google Keep. You may find this surprising because in comparison to apps such as Evernote, or Microsoft OneNote, or Notion, and many others, Google Keep is relatively simple. But that's precisely why I have stayed with Keep. When I am writing down new notes quickly and easily, I want it to be fast, I want it to be quick, and I'm usually not taking really lengthy documents or writing a blog article, for example, here within Google Keep.

These are usually short notes and short checklists that I want to use in short order. They may only have a short lifespan as a part of it. And in particular, I find that Google Keep is the fastest and quickest mobile app amongst the major note-taking tools. Again, chances are, you're gonna have that great idea when you're on the go. I want something quick and easy that I can use.

Capturing - Adobe Scan

Now next up on our list, speaking of mobile apps, is something that I am using on a daily basis, and that is Adobe Scan.

Now, I try to run a paperless office as much as possible. I produce very, very little paper. But of course, I still will receive papers on a semi-regular basis. And one of the first things I want to do is convert it to a digital format. Well, Adobe Scan is a free app that allows me to do that quickly and easily.

And I know this is a very competitive market. There's a variety of free scanning tools out there. I have not found something that is easier and has better quality at the same time. I can count on one hand how many times I've retaken the photo or retaken the scan when using Adobe Scan. It quickly and easily finds the edges of the paper document that I'm scanning, adjusts the contrast very easily, and it's very quick and easy to convert this to a PDF or to share it via email or via a link.

However, I'd like to share that document. So, Adobe Scan—a great tool that I'm using on a very frequent basis.

Extension - Boomerang

Now, when it comes to creating this list, I specifically wanted to leave off things like email or calendar, because for many of us, that's just a given. And for many of us, you may not have a choice, whether you're a Google user or a Microsoft user when it comes to email and calendar.

But I wanted to show you an extension, which is perhaps the most valuable app or the most valuable tool on this entire list. It's something that can be applied to both Gmail and Microsoft Outlook users, and it's right here at the very bottom of my email. Boomerang is something that I have been using for several years now and has absolutely transformed the way I deal with email.

Now, Boomerang does a variety of different things, but it's this Remind me function, which I use every single day. So here's the scenario: I'm reaching out to someone and asking them a question, and I really want to make this meeting happen by the end of this week.

So, before I hit Send, I'm going to come down here where we have this Boomerang addition, and I'm going to check this Remind me option. And I'll say, you know what, please remind me tomorrow afternoon if there is no reply. I have a few other options here if I want, but usually, if no reply is my default.

What this is going to do is that if this person does not reply to me by tomorrow afternoon, this exact email is going to reappear in my inbox. That's going to be my reminder, that's going to be the trigger as to, that's right, Scott never got back to me. I should give him a call or send him a follow-up email.

However, if this person does reply within this timeframe, nothing else happens. I don't get any other clutter in my inbox. As I said before, I've been using Boomerang for several years. It's transformed the way that I deal with email. I encourage you to check it out, available for both Gmail and Outlook users.

Focus - Scirocco Take a Break Timer

Another tool that I've been using for many years, and it probably looks that way because the UI has not changed much in that time, is the Scirocco Take a Break Timer. I encourage all of my clients to use a timer in some way, shape, or form to increase their focus, to discipline themselves, to focus on a particular project or a particular task before moving on to something else.

Let me just open up my Take a Break Timer, just to show you what it looks like here. I like to work in 50-minute intervals. So if I just hit the play button here and I can minimize it, it's out of the way. And when that time is up, it's going to jump up in front of me and let me know.

Now, I can't ignore it. Of course, I can always minimize it, but at least the reason why I like it on my desktop rather than just using my phone or a smartwatch is that it's going to appear right here on the front of my screen. Let me just open it up again. It's going to appear over top of every application that I have opened at that moment. So I have to at least acknowledge it.

And I think it's really important that we take micro-breaks throughout our day. As you can see here on the left-hand side, it does look like it was created perhaps in the 90s and it hasn't changed a whole great deal. But you know what, that's the other bonus of this, is that it doesn't take up any real memory or power, it's not gonna suck anything from your machine. It's simple and basic, and it just works and it works very well. So I'm going to continue to use the Scirocco Timer.

Now, it is only available for PC users, but you can find a variety of other good timers for Mac users as well.

Feedback - Slido

Is something that I'm going to put in the category of feedback. And for that, I am choosing an app called Slido. Now, you may have used Slido in the past as a participant. If you've attended a conference or maybe you've attended a virtual meeting where the host wanted to get your feedback, you may have used Slido.

I am using this on a very regular basis to get that feedback anonymously from my participants when I am hosting meetings, giving training, or just wanting to go through a brainstorming session. The great thing is that your participants do not have to install or download anything. They just need to go to slido.com and you give them the meeting code or the meeting hashtag, like you can see here in this example, and then they can participate directly from their phone or their browser, or whatever machine that they're on.

And the great thing is that they can ask questions anonymously, because no one likes to feel like they're asking a stupid question, right? Well, they can do it from the privacy of their own device and do it without giving their names so you can collect great feedback questions, get a feel for what the room is thinking about, or feeling about. And it's also a great way to make your virtual meetings that much more engaging as well.

You can also create polls and quizzes within Slido as well. And I've often seen how excited people get as they participate in a dynamic poll. These things are changing at the same time, often it can be great for us for a good laugh and keep things nice and light, but you can also address serious topics with Slido as well. You can get a lot out of Slido just with the free version itself, so you might want to give Slido a try.

Sharing - Google Drive

Now, next on my list is not Drive, well, it is Drive, but it's maybe not what you are thinking.

I'm not putting Drive under the category of file management, but instead I'm putting this under the category of Sharing.

I don't create as many documents within Google Drive as you may think, but I upload an awful lot of documents right here to Drive, because I find it's just so much easier to share those documents with others.

Remember, you can use Google Drive to share any type of file, it doesn't have to be a Google based file.

So whether I want to share something with people specifically, and set their limits as to what they can do with that file, and if they're going to be a viewer, or an editor, or just a comment.

But the other great thing with Google Drive sharing is that I don't have to just share it with a restricted number of people, I can also create a public link.

So many times I've created a document or a file that I wanna add that link within an email.

Maybe it's an answer to a frequently asked question. I just wanna send them a link to a document, I can do that here within Google Drive.

I don't have to create a webpage or something special like that.

I can just create a public link and share it right here from within Drive.

Social Media - Hootsuite

And then last but not least on my list, we can't forget social media.

And whether you run your own business or not, you have a need to be engaged and to post content to your favorite social media channels.

And for me, I use Hootsuite on a regular basis.

Here you can see I've got a few different feeds that I have some content already written and ready to post.

Here's my Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Facebook page here.

So Hootsuite is great to save time where you can create one piece of content like you see here, but it's actually gonna go out across multiple platforms.

I just have to write it once and it's going to go out at different, I can choose to have it go out at different times, but go out across different social media platforms.

Or you can be more specific as you can see down below, each of those platforms are going to get a different image, a different quote, because sometimes we want to be very specific depending on where we are posting.

Now it's true there's a number of other social media managers out there as well, but Hootsuite is very feature rich.

I have barely scratched the surface myself, but it helps me save an awful lot of time with managing my social media.

Question for you

Now, I wanna hear from you next, what is on your top 10 list of the apps that you use on a daily basis?

What saves you the most time?

What helps you be most productive?

Be sure to let me know and share it with others in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching today's video.

If you liked it, please give it a thumbs up.

Be sure to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel.

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

In fact, it's very simple.

Introduction

[Scott] Wouldn't it be great if you could access all of your calendars in one place, I mean, all of your Google calendars and Microsoft Outlook calendars, all of your work and business calendars from the very same screen?

Well, you can and you can also use all of these additional features for free with Woven.

So in today's video, I'm going to give you a guided tour and give you three great reasons why you should check out this free calendar.

Hello, everyone.

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

Manage all your Google & Outlook calendars in Woven

And the number one reason why you'll want to check out Woven is that you can bring in all of your calendars into a single place.

I know for many of us, you don't have a choice as to what your work calendar is.

You may use Google Calendar in your personal life, but perhaps you have to use Microsoft Outlook in your work or in your business life.

Well, now you can bring all of those calendars in the same place and never have to go back to those other calendars either.

Here, for example, I've got a combination of Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook events here.

And with Woven, it is a true two-way sync.

I don't have to worry that something is appearing on one of those other calendars and not showing up here.

So let me give you just a quick example.

Microsoft Calendar to Woven sync example

I'm actually going to open up Microsoft Outlook here.

You can see I've got these two events which do appear on my Woven calendar right here at my two lunch events.

But what I'm going to do is I'm gonna create a test event, and let's just call it something simple like that.

I'm going to say, Test Event, okay, Test Event from Outlook, just so we know which one we're looking at here.

And why don't we make it an hour in length, and I'm going to say save and close.

So here we have our test event in Outlook.

Maybe this is my personal calendar and Google is my work calendar.

Well, if I open up Woven again, you will now see that it appears here within my Woven calendar.

I can see it, I can access it, I can change it, but what if I have to change the dates?

You know what, I have to move that till tomorrow at 1:00 p.m., so, I'm gonna move it over here.

Let's jump back to our Outlook calendar.

It may take just a few seconds, but there it is.

Now it's updated here, everything is in sync.

So I never actually have to come back here to Microsoft.

I can manage everything right here from within Woven.

Now, the second reason why I think you're going to want to try Woven out for yourself is the ability to create templates.

How to create smart templates in Woven

And templates can be so great because there's oftentimes where you're creating recurring meetings that have the same information time and time again.

Think about something like a team meeting where you're always including the same four or five people, maybe you need to include a link to a particular document, maybe there's a particular video conferencing link that you always need to add as well.

So, to create your own template, all you need to do is come up here and hit the plus button, and we're going to say Template.

We're going to create a new template.

And in this case, I'm going to call this a client meeting, a client review meeting.

Let's do that, okay?

So this may be a particular meeting, I've given it a title, and now I've got this area here where I can create very specific details as to what I want to happen with that client review meeting.

Now, my very first option here is to publish this as a scheduling link.

We're going to come back to this so that you can use Woven to replace things like Calendly so you can just send out a link and people can book time with you, but I'm going to leave that off in this particular case because I want to send out this invitation on my own.

So I can come down here, and the first thing I can choose is duration.

So for example, let's choose something that is maybe not typical.

I'm gonna say an hour and 30 minutes.

I know for most of us, our default time within our calendars are probably a half hour or maybe one hour.

And whenever you book a particular meeting that's different than that, you gotta remember, Oh yeah, I gotta drag this down or I gotta change the time.

Well, the great thing about templates is you never have to do that.

You can choose it here, and it's always going to remember that as we apply the template.

Next up we can choose our available time.

So this is really key if you only want to schedule these meetings on certain days or times.

Create available time for Woven event templates

So if I open this up here, I can say, you know what, I never want these client review meetings to happen on Fridays or Mondays.

And in terms of timeframe, I always want to make sure that they happen in the afternoon, so, I'm going to say 12:00 p.m to 5:00 p.m.

Now you can adjust a few other things down here in terms of no sooner than, no later than, and even include a buffer time.

I'm going to come back to this in a Moment when we start looking at that public link, but let's just keep this one relatively simple.

We've added some specific timeframes as to when we want to have this client review meeting.

I come back to the template area here.

I can specify which calendar it's on, whether it's going to be on my Google Calendar or my Microsoft Outlook calendar.

I give it a specific color as well.

I can say that maybe these are going to be this sort of orangy color here.

And then I can also choose my default reminder time because maybe this is such an important meeting, I want 30 minutes in advance.

Remember you can only choose one default time within Google Calendar or within Microsoft Outlook.

You'd have to come down here and remember, right?

Every time you create that meeting, you have to remember to adjust that reminder time.

Well, you don't have to do that with templates.

And then at the very bottom, we've got several options here in terms of, do we want to add the same people each and every time?

Is there a specific conferencing link that we want to add each time?

So maybe if I click on this, I've actually already input a bit of information here earlier just a fake address and a password, but this is always going to be included in this template.

I don't have to retype it, I don't have to copy and paste it from anywhere else.

All right, now that I'm good with this, all of my changes are automatically saved.

Applying templates within Woven

Next up I want to be able to apply this template, okay?

So when I come up here, I'm going to schedule a new event.

I'm going to say new event, and here are some of my most popular templates.

Here's my client review meeting that we just created.

So I'm going to click on that, and what it's going to do is it's going to say, well, let's, you know, if you want to add any information or change any information, you can do so here, but I think the most key part is this one: find a time.

Now you'll notice over on the right, it's actually highlighted my available times.

Like for this week, this is really my only window of available time.

Remember I said no Fridays and only after 12:00, between 12:00 and 5:00.

If I go to next week, you can see I've got a little more time because I've got nothing scheduled and I'm available on that Tuesday as well.

But let's go back here.

So already it's telling me where I should be looking.

I can click on this calendar.

I can click outside of these times if I want to, but I want to come back over here to the left.

If I say find a time, now you can see it's actually highlighted my only available time for this week.

I can either click on these ones within the calendar or I can scroll down and pick something in the future as well.

Maybe I'm going to say, you know what, yeah, 3:00 to 4:30, that sounds great.

Let's set that time.

There's that client review meeting.

Again I can still add and edit information here if I want on the left, but I'm going to say schedule, and now I'm ready to go.

It's an hour and a half.

I'm going to get that 30-minute reminder time in advance.

Everything that I set up in the template is ready to go.

Create a public or private scheduling link in Woven

Now, the third thing I want to cover today has to do with public links.

And what do I mean by public links?

Well, how often are you trying to schedule time with someone and there's all this back and forth, right?

All this email back and forth or texting, you available here? "No." "How about this?" "No." "How about this? How about this?" "No, no, no" back and forth, back and forth until you find the available time?

Well, that's where schedulers like Calendly can be very important, where you can just send them one link.

And then they have access to when you are available, and they can book time with you.

Well, Woven has that built right in here.

So you don't have to use a third-party application.

So in this case, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here, and we're going to hit plus again.

We've got actually two options here when it comes to scheduling link.

We can choose a one-time scheduling link, meaning that a person can only use this one time, and you're only using this with an individual, or you can use a public scheduling link.

And this is probably the more common one here or the one that I think you're going to use more often.

So let's create a public scheduling link.

And I'm going to say that this is an interview with Scott.

Maybe it's like a podcast interview or something like that.

Now we're going to get an option here on the left-hand side which is very similar to what we saw with the template before.

In fact, many of the same options here.

So here we have the publish as a scheduling link turned on, but before we copy this link and see what it looks like to the end user, let's just go down here and make sure that everything else is in order.

So one hour is that, you know what, I'm going to say 45 minutes.

That's the length of time.

Again, we've got our availability here.

Maybe this time around, I'm just going to say no Fridays, and I want it to start after 11:00 a.m., right?

That's what I'd like it to be, no earlier than 11:00 a.m.

Adding buffer times to scheduling links in Woven

I'm also going to come down here and take a careful look at the no sooner than and no later than.

Now, this is important because chances are when you're sending out a public link, you don't want people to be able to book you within minutes of them receiving that link, right?

You want to be able to have some buffer time.

So I'm going to say, you can't book me until two hours from right now, right?

You got to give me some warning as to when I can schedule and fit this into my calendar.

And I also like to give them so much leeway time.

I don't wanna give them my calendar availability for the next 12 weeks.

I'm going to say, you can book me out to two weeks.

So anything between two hours from now and two weeks from now, that's when I want people to be able to book me using this calendar link.

So let's go back here.

As we saw before, we can choose the calendar, we can add conferencing information, we can add the description, everything that we like, but let's keep it simple and save it as is here.

So already it's showing me this is what people could book me for this week.

What scheduling links look like to end-users

When I send out this link, but let's see what it's actually going to look like for the end user.

So here's the link here.

We could edit the URL if we want to customize this a little bit, but I'm just going to copy this link and let's open up an incognito window here and paste it.

So this is what your end user would see.

When they click this link, they're going to see something that looks a little bit like Woven, like we see here, and they're going to be able to see the availability here.

So they can either click on one of these time slots here right on the calendar, or they can look at sort of this column view here, right?

They can scroll through and select a time that's available to them.

So maybe they say to themselves, "Yeah, tomorrow 2:00 to 2:45, that sounds great, that works with my calendar, I'm going to click that."

All they have to do is input their name and their email address and schedule it and it will appear on your calendar.

So something that's going to replace maybe a cost or a third-party app in your life, you can do that right here within Woven.

Now, if you'd like to use Woven for yourself, it is currently still 100% free and you can do so at woven.com.

Thank you so much for watching today's video.

And if you have any further questions, 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.

Why using Pivot Tables is important

[Instructor] This video is brought to you by Pipedrive.

Pipedrive is the easy to use CRM designed to increase your sales.

Stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more.

(upbeat instrumental)

When dealing with your spreadsheets it can be difficult to determine what all of this data means.

So in today's video I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about how to set up your own pivot table, right here in Google Sheets.

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

And I know a lot of people tend to be intimidated by a pivot table, but I'm gonna show you how it is much easier than you think and how you can interpret this data in any way that you like.

How to start a Pivot Table in Google Sheets

What we need to do is come up here to Data and about halfway down we've got the option to create a Pivot table.

We're gonna select that.

And the first thing that we need to do is select our data range.

So we're gonna select this little icon here to select that data range.

And what's most important is that you also include the headers.

Because that is key as we create our pivot table.

So I'm gonna come down here.

I'm gonna select the data range that I want including my headers.

And I'm gonna say OK.

And the next thing we need to decide is if we want to put this pivot table on a new sheet or an existing sheet.

Now I typically choose a new sheet.

That's what we're gonna use today because it just gives us a lot more space.

But if you want you can have a pivot table right over here, to the right.

So I'm gonna say, Create, it's gonna open up a new sheet and now we've got a blank slate,

Understanding the layout of a Pivot Table

Something for us to start working with.

Now here we've got our rows where we're gonna decide what types of data, what types of information we want to display here.

And then on the top, we have our columns where we get to choose what we want to display here.

And the power of a pivot table is it's gonna bring these two values together.

And it's gonna show us all of this great data here in between.

Now on the right hand side, we have our Pivot table editor and right off the bar you can see that it's giving us a few different suggestions.

Now there's a chance that Google may have guessed correctly as to what you are after, but we wanna look and get comfortable with using and creating our own pivot table.

'Cause there's a good chance there's something specific that you're after.

If you ever need to change the selected area you can always do that here as well.

For example if your data set expands or includes more information

Adding Rows to your Pivot Table in Sheets

But we're gonna leave that for right now.

So first off, let's start with Rows.

We're gonna hit this Add button and you can see we have all of our headers from our dataset.

From everything here that we see on sheet one.

So for myself, for our example, I'm gonna choose my sales Rep.

So I'm gonna select Rep and here you can see they are now all displayed here on the left hand side.

Now I can choose if I want to order them in a particular way, because we're dealing with names it seems to only make sense that I'm gonna use it in ascending order.

And by default, we're gonna have this show totals checked.

Now you can always uncheck that but in most cases, when you're dealing with a pivot table you're gonna want to see this grand total data at the bottom as well.

Now, the other thing that you should note is that it's not as if this Add button becomes disabled because you can actually layer on additional rows and additional columns as a part of creating your pivot table.

So for example, if I hit add rows again, this time I could choose something like Items.

And here you can see, now I've got a second row, which is breaking out the products which these sales reps have sold.

So I can see, for example Andrews has sold binders and pencils, but someone like a Jones has sold binders, pens, pen sets, and pencils.

So we can start to layer that information as well.

But let's keep things relatively simple.

If you hit the X here, that's going to remove it from the pivot table.

And I will do the same thing here as well.

Adding Columns to your Pivot Table in Sheets

It's not minimized. It's actually going to remove it.

Next up, let's choose what we want to be displayed here amongst our columns.

So I'm gonna hit that Add button again and we get the same choices here except for our representatives because they're already listed here.

And what I'm gonna choose in this case is I'm gonna choose the actual items, the actual products that my Reps are selling.

I'm gonna select that.

And here you can see, we've got our five different products.

You know, again, going back to our original sheet, it can be hard to tell even how many different items we're selling or how many different Reps I have.

But of course the pivot table summarizes all of that data right here for us.

So I've got my products here across the right.

I've got my representatives here across the left hand side.

Selecting Values for your Pivot Table in Sheets

Now, next up, we want to go to our Values.

What do we want to display in the intersection of our items and our representatives?

So I'm gonna hit that Add button once again.

And we've got a variety of different choices here.

Now, in my case, I am gonna choose units.

I wanna see who is selling how many units.

So I'm gonna select this units option.

And immediately we've got all of this great data available to us.

So for example, in a snapshot, I can see that all of my Reps have sold at least some binders, right?

Everyone is selling binders.

But then in the very next column I can see that only three of them have ever sold a desk within this particular timeframe.

So, immediately I can start to break down complicated pieces of information, or complicated data set, and find out trends and find out information that I'm after here.

Changing Values in the Pivot Table

Once again, we've got a few different choices here in terms of how we want to summarize this data.

If I choose this option here I could summarize it by a few different ways including averages and counts and maximums and minimums.

I'm gonna leave that one as some right here, but if I go over here I can also show it as a percentage, if I want to.

So for example, maybe I want to show a percentage of the row.

So in this case, you can see that Andrews, for example, most of his sales have been coming from pencils, right?

84% of his sales have been coming from pencils.

And I can quickly see that although Smith was one of the few people to sell a desk, that only makes up 1.28% of all of the units that she has sold in this timeframe as well.

So again, a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can display that data.

And because we've left those grand totals marks checked we have the grand total here both by the Reps on the right hand side but we also see it by the products as well.

So I can quickly see that Jones seems to be my top sales person here, selling nearly 400 items in total.

He's also pretty even across the things that he's selling here.

Thompson, maybe Thompson is relatively new to the team, selling quite a bit less than everyone else but also only selling two different products.

Adding & Editing Filters in the Pivot Table

Now, the last thing that we wanna look at here, when we're designing our pivot table is filters.

So if we select Add again, we can filter things by another unit or another way of looking at things.

So in this case, I'm gonna select Unit Cost.

I wanna be able to filter out maybe some of my cheaper or my more expensive items.

So I'm gonna select Unit Cost.

Nothing's gonna happen immediately here because I need to decide how I want to filter out that information.

So it's saying right now it's showing all items.

I'm gonna select that.

And here you can see it's got a list of all of the prices, all of my Unit Costs here.

I'm just gonna say Clear 'cause I don't wanna display all of them right now.

And maybe I just want to display everything that is $5 or less.

So I'm just gonna select these first four here and I'm gonna select OK.

And now you can see that my pivot table has shrunk a little bit.

Because desks are my high-end items, so it's not even displayed here.

It's much more expensive than $5, but I can see in that $5 and less range.

Okay now things are a little bit different in terms of grand totals and who's selling more and who's not selling anything at all in certain areas here.

If I come back to the pivot table I'm just gonna hit Clear one more time.

And maybe I just wanna take a look at my high-priced items.

So I'm gonna select those top two.

I'm gonna select OK.

Once again, my pivot table changes because my desk is the high-priced item.

I've only got three Reps who have sold a desk and here are their numbers as well.

If I wanna kill that filter, I could either come here and just say Select all.

So that's gonna include everything or I can hit this X and come back.

Remember a pivot table is dynamic.

You can keep coming in here and changing the values that you want displayed and the filters that you want to add as a part of your data.

Now, if you wanna see your sales data clearly and feel organized every day, you should check out Pipedrive.

Pipedrive is the easy to use sales tool that you don't need an IT degree to work with.

You can visually track your leads pipelines and communication in one place, and never forget what to follow up about.

Pipedrive automates your day. So you can spend more time focusing on your customers.

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Overview of DeskTime time tracker

[Scott Friesen] Do you ever get to the end of your workday and wonder where did all of that time go or perhaps you manage a team and you'd like to know just how productive your employees actually are?

Well, in today's video, we're taking a look at a very cool time tracker which is gotta show you all of that good data.

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

And today we are taking a look at DeskTime.

DeskTime shows you real-time analytics of what you are doing so you can improve on your own productivity.

It's also great for freelancers, if you want to track your time or your projects but it's also fantastic for businesses and teams who want to keep an eye on their employees and see what they are doing, making sure that they either check in or check out at particular times and make sure that they're not wasting all of their time on unproductive apps like we see here.

How to get started with DeskTime

Now to get started with DeskTime all you need to do is download the app to your computer.

DeskTime is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

And after that, there's really not much to it.

DeskTime is a simple application that just sits on your computer and monitors all of the websites and applications that you are working on or using throughout the course of the day.

DeskTime dashboard and data

And here within my DeskTime, I get a bit of a snapshot of what my yesterday was like.

It's gonna show me when I started my workday.

It's gotta show when I left.

And it's also gonna give me some really valuable numbers here such as my productive time, which is gonna be based on the apps and the websites which I choose to be productive.

How long DeskTime was actually recording my time and even gives me an effectiveness score and a productivity score which I find really, really interesting because of course these two things are different.

And just because you spent a lot of time at work or at your computer doesn't necessarily mean that you had a productive day.

But I think what's most valuable here is something that is called the productivity bar.

And here we can see a snapshot of my entire day.

Each of these vertical bars represents a five-minute increment so I can actually go over and I can hover through here and see exactly what I was doing in those five minutes.

And look at how many apps I actually clicked on, how many websites I should say in this case that I clicked on in just a five-minute span.

Now the good news is for the most part, I was productive in that timeframe.

However you can see that there's something here which is orange.

I did spend a little bit of time on Facebook and Twitter here as well as you can see as the day grew on, I spent a little more time on some of my unproductive and maybe social media websites as the day wore on.

But I get to see a nice snapshot of everything that is happening throughout that day.

DeskTime also allows you to fill in the blanks here.

Make manual adjustments to your time tracking

You can see that there's a few gaps where I am not at my computer.

Now it doesn't mean that these gaps were unproductive. Maybe I was at a physical meeting, for example, here in this 15-minute slot.

All I needed to do is click on this slot and I can give it a description.

I can say, well, this was a meeting with Jane.

Maybe we were in a meeting room, for example.

And I gotta say that was productive time because we were talking about a particular topic or maybe a client project.

So I'm gonna hit save in that case.

And I was gonna update that time.

You can see that now it's all green because I've manually added that in here.

Here, for example, earlier I added this as another offline time.

This is actually my lunch break.

I already gave this a label and it's just neutral, right?

It's just a neutral time.

It's not productive or unproductive.

We all deserve a break.

And so that's why this area is grayed out here.

So you can go and fill in these gaps if you need to, if you wanna get a fuller picture.

Down below you can also see some areas here where you were working on a particular project.

And again, these are all editable.

So if you need to adjust them

Identifying productive and non-productive apps

Or change the duration you can do so as well.

But I think what you really want to do, if you start off with DeskTime, is take a look at what is grouped under productive apps, unproductive apps, and neutral apps because in some cases you may need to make some changes.

For example, at first YouTube was listed as an unproductive app. And I think for many of us that might be the case, but for someone like myself who creates YouTube videos, that's actually a productive app in most cases.

So all I needed to do is come over here and I can choose if I want to make it productive, unproductive, or neutral.

And I can also do this across all employees as well. Maybe there's a difference, right, between myself and between my employees.

I've left a couple of these social media sites as unproductive because usually I'm just sort of burning off some steam and just looking up some other things.

And then there's some things that are just simply neutral here as a part of it too.

But again, it's very easy for us to go over them and adjust them if we need to if we want to change that particular category.

Speaking of categories, when we come down to the bottom here, we get sort of a nice snapshot of the entire day.

So each and every one of these apps or websites can be categorized into a variety of different places here.

So here you can see, I was very fortunate. I had a very extremely light email day yesterday, spent a little bit of time on social media but the bulk of my time was within my office apps.

I spent almost three and a half hours dealing with particular office apps there.

And so that's probably one of the main reasons why I have such a high relatively high productivity score here because I did spend the majority of my day within my office apps.

Viewing team time tracking data

But we can go one step further and go here to the dashboard and see how my team was doing yesterday.

So let's go back to Monday 'cause there's a little more data there.

Now unfortunately, myself and my coworker, we were both late. So that's letting us know here that we both arrived a little later or started our day a little bit later than we intended to.

But here again we have now a snapshot over the course of the entire day for the entire team.

And if I come down here below, it'll also give me a preview of some of their data as well.

So Jane, my coworker, I can see their productive scores and their productive times as well.

This can be a great way to see, you know, who is the most effective or most productive across your teams.

And some of DeskTime's clients include businesses well over a hundred, even several hundred employees.

So this can be very helpful.

You can break it down by individual teams as well.

And last but not least, you can check out all these productive apps and unproductive apps.

Again, this time we were looking at it across teams as a whole.

So a lot of great things here that you can work on.

Using a timer for projects in DeskTime

You may also notice in the bottom corner of my screen I've actually got a timer that is working at the moment.

What you can do is actually keep track of certain projects within DeskTime as well.

So let me minimize this just for a second.

And I'm gonna come over here to my projects. Here I've got a few sample projects that I've created.

Now, in order for us to keep track of them, you can just start this simple timer which is built right into it.

And I've spent about 33 minutes on this. If I say stop, now that's gonna be calculated.

How much time I spent on that project.

Maybe I'm done with that one. I'm gonna go onto this Trello board creation.

And I'm gonna say this is actually my setup template board. I'm gonna start that timer.

I can minimize this and just drag it to the corner of my screen.

And now I can go about my day. I can work on that particular task and then DeskTime is gonna record that for me.

It's gonna record that project time.

Here, for example, is that YouTube project that I just finished with the timer.

So it's recorded it right here. I can keep track of how long I've spent on each project.

Again, a great tool for freelancers. If you need to know how much time you've spent amongst your clients or amongst particular projects, great stuff there.

Adding work schedules and absence calendar

The last thing I wanna show you here is that you can add both work schedules here

and also an absence calendar. So for example, if I'm gonna take some vacation time

off on Thursday, I don't want DeskTime to think that I had an extremely unproductive

or I arrived incredibly late to work on Thursday. You can add that as well. So if you want to add schedules absence tracking, sick days, rest days, unpaid leave. You can do that all here within DeskTime as well. So if you love the numbers, if you want to dive deeper into either your own numbers, if you work for yourself or you're a freelancer or if you manage a team and wanna see how your entire team is doing,

I recommend that you check out DeskTime be sure to check them out by clicking

the link in the description below. Thank you so much for watching today's video

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

Why using Remote Desktop is helpful

This video is brought to you by Woven.

Woven lets you access all of your calendars in one place and gives you powerful scheduling tools to help you save time.

Stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more.

Wouldn't it be great if you could access your office computer or perhaps your home computer from anywhere in the world?

Well, you can, and it's actually a lot easier than you think.

In today's video, we're taking a look at Chrome Remote Desktop by Google, and I'm gonna show you everything that you need to know.

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

And first, I'm gonna show you why you may want to do this, and then I'm gonna show you the how, so you can set this up yourself.

Accessing another computer with Chrome Remote Desktop

So here we are at remotedesktop.google.com, and I've already set this up with my home computer. That's why you see this DESKTOP-Home.

I'm actually on my laptop at the moment, but let's say that there's a particular file that I want to get to, or maybe there's an actual application that I don't have installed on my laptop, and I need to use it for just a few minutes.

All I need to do, once you are set up, is to click on this.

And what's gonna happen is it's going to reach out to that computer.

Now, you get to create your own custom security PIN, so only you can have access to this.

And now, in just a few seconds here, I am within my home computer.

Now, on the right-hand side, you can see that there's this little blue arrow. This is gonna be very helpful because if we put this into full screen, it's just a little more comfortable to see here.

But this is actually the desktop of my home computer.

And let's say that there's a particular photo, maybe an image that I didn't upload to Google Photos or Dropbox or the Cloud in some way, I can only access it here.

Maybe it's this one here, this picture of a very, very, very old Scott.

How to download & upload files with Chrome Remote Desktop

So, all I need to do is if I come over here back and expand this little menu, I'm gonna scroll down and file transfer, I think it's probably one of the most helpful features when you are remoting into another computer.

So, in this case, I wanna download that file. I'm gonna select download the file.

We're gonna get a pretty standard dialogue menu here. I'm gonna select that particular photo, I'm going to hit open.

And now, what's happening is that it has downloaded that file to my laptop.

Let me go out of full screen, just so you know this for certain.

So, here's the view of my home computer, but you can see down below this is actually on the laptop.

I've downloaded that file from my home computer here to the laptop.

And, if we go back to this blue menu on the right-hand side, you can see that we can do it the opposite way as well.

Maybe there's something on my laptop computer that I would like to have on my home computer.

Well, I can do that here as well.

But, remember, you're not just limited to files.

Using an application on a remote computer

Because sometimes, maybe, there's a particular application that you need access to. Maybe it's a very large application, something that you just need to quickly download something from or edit something from.

I'll just use a very, very simple example here. I'm gonna open up Open Office.

So, here, you can see the application is actually opening up here and I can start writing this document because maybe I don't have Open Office on my laptop for some reason, and I need a particular feature or need to edit a document right here.

I can do that. I can save the file and then transfer it to my laptop computer if needed.

And when I'm all done, all I need to do is go over here and hit disconnect.

And I will be returned, right here, to the Chrome Remote Desktop screen.

How to setup Chrome Remote Desktop

So, let's take a look at the second step here so that you can set this up for yourself.

I'm just gonna go out of the full screen view here for a second.

Where you're gonna want to go is remotedesktop.google.com.

And that's gonna bring you to a screen like this. Or you can just type in Chrome Remote Desktop, and this will be your first search result.

Now, what we need to do is set this up.

So, if I want to be able to access this laptop, the computer that I'm on right now, I need to come down here to say this device.

This is what we've set up already, right? These are the remote devices that I can access in the future, but I need to set up this remote device.

So, I'm gonna come down here and say, "turn on."

And it's going to ask me to choose a particular name.

Now, I want to add something here that's a little more descriptive, right? So, I’m gonna say something like, I don't know, maybe "personal" or something along those lines, so I know which laptop it is.

Maybe I want to put my name beside it or something along those lines so I can identify it.

I'm gonna hit next here, and the second step we're gonna have here is to choose a PIN.

Now, it suggests that we choose a PIN that's at least six numbers in length. It does have to be numerical. Of course, the longer you create it, the more secure it's going to be.

So, let me just type in one here. It's gonna ask us to reenter it one more time.

And by default, this is usually checked. I'm gonna uncheck it and you can choose what is best for you. If you don't want to send information back to Google, you can uncheck this box.

And I'm going to hit start.

So, we can choose to save this password if we need to.

And here you can see now, we have this device.

So, now, if I go back and I do it in reverse, if I go back to my home computer, for example, or really, if I go into almost any other computer, I can come back and log into my laptop.

Important notice about using Remote Desktop

Now, the one thing to keep in mind is that the computer you are trying to access must be on and online. It cannot be shut down or off. We are not able to turn a computer on remotely. It already has to be on, and it probably goes without saying that it’s already connected to the internet.

So, here, you can see that both my home computer and the one I'm currently on are online. So, I can go ahead and access it.

Now, one other feature that you may find helpful is remote support. If you click on this option here, you can actually let someone else access this computer and generate a one-time access code.

This can be great in a support situation or if you happen to provide some type of tech consulting. You can use this to remotely access another computer.

Now, if you'd like to access all of your calendars in one place, I recommend that you check out Woven. Woven allows you to bring in all of your Google and Microsoft calendars into a single view. They also allow you to create custom tags, so you can keep track of everything you’re doing in a given week.

I especially like their template feature, so I don’t have to type out the same thing again and again. It also comes with some very powerful scheduling tools, so you don’t have to use third-party apps.

If you’d like to check out Woven for yourself, go to woven.com or see the link in the description below.

Do you wish that you could customize the way your Google Calendar looks and feels? Well, in today's video, I'm showing you seven tips and tricks so that you can view your schedule the way that you want.

But first, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, SaneBox. SaneBox is the email tool to help you keep your inbox under control. Why so few emails here? That's because SaneBox is using artificial intelligence to help filter out my email. I particularly like the SaneLater folder, where I can go back and review unimportant emails as it learns the way that I deal with my messages.

If you'd like to try SaneBox for yourself and receive a special credit, go to sanebox.com/simpletivity.

Different Calendar View Shortcut Keys

Let's get started with tip number one: customizing your Google Calendar views. You may already be familiar with the dropdown menu here, which allows you to switch between different views like day, week, or month.

Here’s a quick tip: instead of using the dropdown, you can use keyboard shortcuts to toggle between these views more efficiently. For example:

• Press D for Day view.
• Press W for Week view.
• Press M for Month view.

These shortcuts let you switch views quickly without navigating through the menu.

Another useful feature is the option to hide weekends. If your calendar primarily focuses on weekdays and you find weekends distracting, you can simply uncheck the “Show weekends” option. This will give you a more streamlined view of your workweek and help you see more of your calendar in the available space.

So, next time you want to customize your calendar view, try using these shortcuts and options to better fit your needs!

Go To Date on Calendar Shortcut Key

Let's move on to another useful shortcut key: G, which stands for Go To. This feature allows you to quickly jump to any specific date in your calendar.

Here’s how it works:

1. Press G on your keyboard.
2. A small window will appear where you can enter any date you want to navigate to.
3. For example, if you want to see your calendar for December 25th, 2021, just type in “12/25/2021” and hit Enter. Your calendar will instantly jump to that date.

This shortcut is particularly handy if you need to check events far in the future or the past without scrolling through months or years. It’s a fast way to get to any date you’re interested in without having to click around.

So next time you need to jump to a specific date, just remember to use G and save yourself some time!

Go To Today on Calendar Shortcut Key

That also brings me to my next shortcut key, which is T as in today, if I hit T on my keyboard, I will automatically go back to today. So whether I'm reviewing something in the past, or whether I'm going fast forward into the future, I can just hit T on my keyboard, and go immediately back to today.

New Calendar Event Dock View

Here's a handy tip for adjusting event times in Google Calendar: Use the dock to sidebar feature to make it easier to set the start and end times for your events.

Here's how it works:

1. Create a New Event: Click on the calendar space where you want to create a new event and start entering your details.
2. Dock the Event Window: In the top right corner of the event creation window, you'll see an option to dock it to the sidebar. Click this icon.
3. Adjust Your Event Time: Once docked, you’ll see a day view on the right side of your screen. You can now:
   • Drag the Event: Adjust the start and end times by dragging the event in the day view. Simply click and drag the edges of the event to extend or shorten the duration.
   • Move the Event: Drag the entire event up or down the timeline to adjust its position within the day.

This feature helps you visually manage your schedule, making it easier to set accurate times for your events without having to scroll through dropdown menus. It’s especially useful if you want a better view of your day while editing the event details.

Side Panel Map View for Event Locations

Now, the next one on our list is something that is quite new and something that I've started to use a lot more frequently.

And that has to do with incorporating a map view here within Google Calendar.

Now, quite often, I will try to include the address or the actual location of the place that I need to be.

I find this most helpful because I'm traveling with my smartphone, and if you click this on your smartphone, it's automatically gonna open up the Maps App.

But here within the desktop version of Google Calendar, you'll notice on the right-hand side, we actually have a Maps view.

If you open it up, you'll get a miniature Maps view of what's going on here.

So let's say that I'm not sure where this lunch is taking place. If I click on this event and then click on the map, what's going to happen is on the right-hand side, it's gonna bring up that address, and I can say, "Oh, Anton's yeah, I know where that is. I know how much time I need to get myself to get to that location."

Here's another lunch I have set up later in the week. If I click on this, and again, I'm gonna click on the address here, it's immediately gonna bring up this miniature map on the right-hand side.

And if I want to, I can even see the reviews and other pieces of information that's down below as well.

So if you happen to have address or location information within your events, not only is this gonna be helpful to you on your mobile device, but it's gonna be helpful to you here within the desktop view as well.

Adding Time Zone View to the Calendar

Next up, we wanna talk about time zones.

And I know for most of us, we are often working with either clients or colleagues that are in a different time zone than us.

But on the left-hand side, by default, you're only gonna see the one time zone. You're gonna see your local time zone.

Well, let's see if we can change that, or shall I say, enhance that?

Up in Settings, we wanna click the gear icon, then we want to click settings, and on the left-hand side, we wanna click on time zone.

Now, here we have the option to display a secondary time zone. You're gonna have to check this box first, and then down below, you can check or select any other time zone that you like.

So here I am gonna select Eastern Time, but you can also customize the label. So I just gonna say Eastern ET, as an Eastern Time here. Okay, that's gonna be the label that I wanna see on my screen.

So if I go back to my calendar here, now you can see I've got home, which of course is where I am currently, but now I've got Eastern Time here as well.

So no longer do I need to do the math, or if I'm on a phone call and say something like, "Hey Scott, can you meet at 4:00 PM Eastern Time?" I can just look at my calendar and say, "Ah, yeah, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, yeah, looks open, sure, we can definitely set up a meeting at that time."

So this can be really helpful, especially if there's a particular time zone that you're needing to calculate or figure out what their time is as well.

Viewing World Clocks on the Calendar

But let's look at another way in which we can utilize time zones or take advantage of time zones here on Google Calendar.

If we go back to Settings, we're gonna stay here in this time zone area. Actually, we're gonna come down to the world clock, which is just below.

And here we can check this box that says, Show World Clock. Now, of course, you can choose how many of these different times that you would like to display, and you can customize which ones you want to display.

I'm just gonna leave them at the default here for this example, we're gonna show the UK, we're gonna show Alaska and we're gonna show New York.

Now, if we go back, nothing has changed in this area here, we still have Eastern Time displayed, but on the left-hand side, we have a live world clock.

So now if I need to debate, like, "Is it too late to call someone in the UK? 5:56, someone might still be in the office." Yeah, it's alright, "I can give them a phone call there right now."

So you can have a live world clock here on the left-hand side of your screen.

Now I'd love to hear from you next. What are some of your favorite Google Calendar view settings, or what's a question that you have about Google Calendar?

Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching today's video, don't forget to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.