Sharing your screen in Zoom is a must-know skill, but do you know these seven tips?

In today's video, I wanna show you not only everything that you need to know about screen sharing, but things that are gonna make it so much easier for you including how to prevent participants from doing certain things.

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

And let's start off with a shortcut key.

Keyboard shortcuts for sharing your Zoom screen

to make your life so much simpler. So for example, you are probably very familiar with how to share a screen. All you have to do is come down here and select this button, share screen, and that's pretty easy to bring you up to this dialogue prompt.

But, isn't it a bit easier if we just put alt S on our keyboard? Alt S will also bring up that dialogue box whether you have this window maximized or maybe you have this minimized. Maybe you're somewhere else. I can just put alt S or if you're a Mac user, you can select command shift S, and that will immediately bring up your share dialogue. But there's something else that I like to point out with this is that often I will give this tip to some of my participants, if I want them to share their screen. You don't know how many times I have been trying to tell them or try to help them navigate where to find this share screen button. It's so much easier if I just let them know,

hey just hit alt S on your keyboard and we can get right to sharing your screen.

How to stop participants from Zoom screen sharing

Now let's move on to tip number two and this actually has to do with the opposite.

That is actually preventing someone from sharing their screen.

Because you wanna be in control, right? You want to say who and when can share their screen. Instead of them taking over your meeting.

So what Zoom has done is they've conveniently added a security button here in our tool bar.

And we select on security, you can see that there's a few options here including the ability to allow or not allow participants to share their screens.

So here you can see I have it unchecked, meaning, anyone who is in this meeting with me, they cannot share their screen unless I come in here and select this.

If I check this, now my participants are allowed to share their screen with me and share their screen with others.

However, this is probably on by default. So what I like to do is going into my Zoom settings and change it so this is unchecked by default so I can always make sure that I remember I don't have to remember, I should say, to come in here and uncheck that.

So let me show you how to do that. Here I am within my Zoom settings, within the Zoom.us website.

And after you've logged into your account, you want to select settings and we are wanting to scroll down a little bit to the second header which is called in meeting basic.

Now we wanna scroll down just a little bit further here until we get to our screen sharing settings.

Most likely this is already set, right? 'Cause that's a standard feature within Zoom to be able to share your screen.

But it's the second option, who can share? By default it probably is set to all participants.

Now you may be hesitant to say host only, only yourself or if you make someone else a co-host.

But remember, this doesn't actually prevent other users from sharing, what it means is that that checkbox that I just showed you is always going to be unchecked.

So whenever you start a meeting, when you have host only set on your user account, on your settings, this is always going to start a meeting with this unchecked.

And then when you want to allow someone else to share their screen, you can come in here, select security and turn that on.

So a helpful tip, especially if you don't want other people hijacking your meeting, even though they were supposed to be in your meeting, you don't want to allow them that control to start sharing whenever they want to.

How to optimize Zoom screen sharing for video

Now let's go to another screen sharing tip.

This one has to do with sharing video because we often wanna share a YouTube video or maybe some other type of video that you already have on your machine.

And many people have been complaining that oh it's really either fuzzy or it's choppy or they can't quite hear the audio.

Well before you share your video, whether it's online or on your system, be sure to come down here and check this checkbox.

Optimize screen sharing for video clip.

You wanna check this box which is also going to automatically check this one, share computer sound, because we obviously want to share the audio when we're sharing that video.

But, this is going to increase your chances for the best viewing experience for your participants.

Now it's not going to guarantee that it's a flawless experience because remember, your bandwidth but also your participants' individual bandwidth is going to contribute to how they view this or what type of quality they experience.

But to have the highest quality, to optimize your video clips, make sure you check this box before you go and select YouTube or before you go and select something on your screen.

How to share only a section of your Zoom screen

All right, we're gonna stick here within the sharing dialogue for tip number four.

And this one has to do with sharing just a portion of our screen.

So let me cancel out of this for just a second and let's say that I've opened up a PDF document. However, I don't wanna share the whole toolbar, maybe I have some notes or other things here on the right hand side, I just wanna share the text, but I don't wanna hide all this other stuff because I might be doing other things, I just don't want them to see that.

So when I go to share, when I go back here, let's open up our share screen here.

I'm gonna click on advanced. Basic is the one that we always see by default, but let's click on advanced and here we have the option to share a portion of our screen.

So by selecting this, we go back to our PDF example here, and here you see I have a green, rectangular area here, and the green means that this is what I'm sharing in the moment.

Now that green color is key and we're gonna see that on a future tip as well.

What I can do is I can click on this larger part here at the top and I can drag it around. Now while I'm dragging it turns yellow, that means that my screen sharing is paused, they're just seeing this while I drag things around and when I release it, we're back to green. Now I'm only sharing this area here.

So I can go over here and make changes or reference things or go up to the file menu and they're not gonna see any of that.

Now you can always resize this window. If I wanna drag this over and make sure that I'm capturing everything here.

You can resize it at any time, just remember while you're resizing it's gonna be paused as well, green means go, green means that you are sharing at that point in time.

So if you only wanna share half or a portion of your screen, that's gonna be something that's very helpful to you.

How to poll your Zoom participants

Now, let's move on to tip number five, which is going to greatly enhance your meetings especially if you want to get your participants involved.

And tip number five has to do with polling your audience.

So down below here in my Zoom menu, you see I have a polls button.

Now you may not see this immediately because this is often not turned on by default. Let's go see where we can turn that.

We wanna jump back into our Zoom settings and we are back, this is setting, we are still under the meeting tab and yes, we're actually still gonna go to the in meeting basic header.

And if we scroll down just a little bit further, you're gonna come across this option called polling.

Now as I said, there's a good chance that this is turned off by default, you just need to hit this switch, and you will have polling options available to you.

So how do you create your first poll?

Well, you're gonna wanna stay here within your Zoom account and this time we're gonna click on meetings.

The meetings tab of course is where you're gonna see all of your upcoming meetings. And I've created one here called test meeting. All you need to do is go into your meeting in advance, of course, and scroll down to the bottom.

Now at the very bottom here you're gonna have an option here to add polls.

Now I've already added one here. Let me just delete this one so you can see what it's gonna look like before you create your first poll.

So again, I'm just inside this particular meeting, I've scrolled down to the bottom and it's got this little area that says you have not created any poll yet.

So all I need to do is hit this add button and we're gonna get this menu here where we can set up multiple simple polls.

So I'm gonna create a quick one for you here, I'm gonna call this one phone type, the first field is just the title of the poll, it's not actually the question.

You can choose if you wanna make it anonymous or not. In many cases I like this option because I want people to be as honest with me and everyone else on the call as possible, so you don't need to track or share who said what.

And I'm just gonna say what type of phone do you have? It's a very simple question here.

Now, it's a multiple choice answer as you can see down below. You must have at least two answers, but there is an option here above.

You can either make it a single choice answer or a multiple choice answer. Meaning single choice they can only pick one of your options or multiple choice meaning they can pick more than one.

In this case I wanna leave it at single choice and I'm gonna say Android or iPhone or other, those are the three choices that I'm gonna give them there and if I scroll down to the bottom, I can hit save.

Now you can add more questions that are going to be tagged on to this, meaning that as soon as they answer this question, if you add another question here, they are immediately gonna be presented with that second or that third question, however many you add here.

But in this case, I'm just gonna hit save, I'm just gonna have that one poll question.

So if I come down here, you can see that poll question. I can add another one.

Now the difference here between the add here versus the one that I just showed you, is that it's gonna be a separate poll question, right? Maybe I want to ask them another question later on in the meeting.

That's why it can be helpful to add separate ones here if you don't have ones that should be answered all at the same time.

So now let's jump back into our meeting. We're gonna come down here and select polls.

And this is a different meeting that I'm sharing at this point in time so I got a few different questions here.

This dialogue will pop up but don't worry, no one is seeing anything just yet. Remember that green color, well we're gonna see that green color again just here.

First off, I have a drop down area here, so I can choose. I've got two different polls set up for this meeting. So I can choose which one that I want to ask. Maybe I want to ask polling question number two.

I can also edit my polling questions on the fly, right? If I wanna quickly add another option or something like that. But in this case I'm gonna leave it like this.

Now again, even though I've selected that, no one is seeing anything just yet, nothing until I hit the launch polling button.

I'm gonna select that and there's that green color, right? That's telling us that now this is being shared, now all the participants of this meeting can participate and vote on this poll.

There's a timer here to let me know how much time has passed and it'll also show me what percentage of people have contributed to this poll.

When I want to, when I'm satisfied, I can come down here and select end polling. That green color's gonna go away so once again they're not gonna see any of these results.

If I had participants in this example, we would see the results here, but, everyone else will not see those results until I say so.

If I come down here to the bottom, I select share results, once again there's that green indicator, that green color telling me, okay now this is being shared with everyone, everyone can see the results of this poll.

And when I'm satisfied, I can just come down here and say stop share results. I'm brought back to this menu, which again is not shared.

I can pick another poll question, or close this in case I want to share a poll a little later on.

So something that is fantastic for making your webinars or your meetings that much more engaging here on Zoom.

How to annotate your shared Zoom screen

Next up we wanna talk about annotation, so let's go back to sharing our screen here.

I'm gonna go back to this PDF document. And instead of sharing just a portion I'm sharing my entire screen.

Don't forget about the power of annotating or marking up your screen.

So if I select the annotate button here from the menu I get a great list of things that I can do.

I can draw free hand here, I've got a little pencil. If I wanna highlight or circle something on the screen. If I don't like it I can just say undo or I can hit clear.

You can add text, you can add spotlights, you can stamp things.

This stamp thing I think is one of my favorites, where I can just go over and say okay, point your eyes up here and then I want you to come down and read this and then we're gonna go over here and review this point and that type of thing.

So lots of things that you can experiment with annotating here within Zoom.

But that also brings me to my last and final tip.

How to stop participants from annotating in Zoom

And that is preventing others from annotating on your screen.

I've heard from many of you complain that other people are jumping on and they're adding things and I don't want them to add things while I'm sharing things or while I'm annotating on my shared screen.

Well, all you need to do is come back up here and select this security bar. And when you are annotating you will get another option here that is called annotate on shared content.

You can see it as checked at the moment meaning that other participants right now could come in here and start writing their own text or start drawing.

All I need to do is select that and now that prevents my participants from doing so.

Now there's one other place you can go to make this change and that is under more. And that is allow participants to annotate, 'cause remember, we just disabled it.

I can select this and now they are able to write on my screen. They can share things. So either place, it does the same thing. Either under more, you can say disable or allow. Or under security, you can check or uncheck your options there.

Well I hope you enjoyed today's video and I would love to hear from you next. What was your favorite tip amongst all of my Zoom screen sharing tips today?

Be sure to let me know down below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact it's very simple.

This video is brought to you by Pleexy. Take control of all of your tasks across multiple project management tools in your preferred task manager. Find out more at pleexy.com.

Todoist continues to be one of the most popular and full-featured to-do list managers available to you. But don't you hate switching back and forth between your task list and your personal calendar?

Well, in today's video, I want to show you how to set up a two-way sync between Google Calendar and Todoist. So that no matter where you are, you can stay on top of your tasks.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And you've probably heard me say in the past that I think it's important to manage as many tasks as possible, right here within your calendar. And the reason being is so that you can see your tasks on the same screen as all of your events.

Because, for example, if I take a look at my Wednesday here, I've got a number of meetings scheduled, maybe I can't do all of the things that I would like to do because of these events. And so I want to be able to see that and say to myself, "Yeah, I've got some more time here on the 14th, why don't I drag or move this task to the next day."

But the last thing I want to do is come back to Todoist, and go back and forth, and look at my calendar and come over here and do some of my work here, and then do some of my work over here in calendar. Well, that's where the Todoist integration with Google Calendar comes into place.

And the great thing about it is that it's not one-way; it's a two-way sync. So what does that mean? Well, let's take a look at this task here. It says, "email Max regarding a tax refund." It's here on the 13th. And if we go over here, you'll see, yeah, it's here on the 13th as well.

But when I'm in my calendar, let's say I want to push that over to Friday, because I don't have a lot on my plate on Friday. I'm going to click and drag it over there to the 15th. Now, I haven't left Google Calendar, but if I go back to Todoist, let's check out my Friday list. There it is, email Max regarding that tax refund.

And then if I'm perhaps here within Todoist and I say, you know what, I need to push this one here, this, "call Jenny about the HR conference." I'm going to push that to Friday as well, we're going to bump it from Thursday to the 15th. So here, you can see I've made that change here, of course, but let's go now to my calendar, and boom, in just a few seconds, it has pushed it over here to the 15th as well.

So no matter where I want to work, or where I happen to be at that moment, whether I'm here within Todoist, or if I'm here within Google Calendar, I can make those changes. I can even create brand new tasks right here from within Google Calendar, and they're going to show up in my inbox here within Todoist.

So let's take a look and see how you can set this up for yourself. To set up this integration, first, log in to your Todoist account. And then we want to come up here to the gear icon, and select Settings. Once we are on the Settings screen, we want to come down here on the left-hand side and select Integrations.

And here you should see the Google Calendar option; we have the ability here to select the Connect calendar button. Once selecting this button, we should get a pretty standard prompt that you've probably seen before where we want to be able to sign into Google. And here it's given me the choice as to which Google account I want to sign into, we have to give it some privileges here, so it can see what is going on. And of course, add and remove certain items from that calendar.

I'm going to select Allow here, which should take just a second here to connect to Google Calendar. And then this is perhaps the most important step right here in terms of what we want to label things within our calendar and some of the options here.

So first of all, it's going to say pick a calendar. Now by default, it's going to give us this option as Todoist new, but we could sync it with one of these other calendars here as well. So I'm gonna leave it at Todoist new because that's what I want it to see, that's what I want it to show within my calendar.

Now the next option here is what do we want it to sync, all projects, or just a specific project? And this may be key depending on if you want everything synced with your calendar, or maybe it's just a specific project within Todoist. I'm going to select all projects in this case.

Third option, tasks created on Google Calendar will go to, now our default option is inbox. But of course, you can choose a number of the other projects that you are working on here. I'm gonna leave it at inbox as the default. And in many cases, this may depend on what you choose for the sync up above. If you're choosing all projects, it's probably the best sense to leave that at inbox.

In terms of event duration, we can leave this at 60 minutes. If you don't have a duration set in Todoist, they're going to be listed as an all-day event. So this one, I don't typically use that often in terms of how things are set up within the Google Calendar site, so you can just leave that at the default of 60 minutes.

And task without a due time. Remember, many of them do not have a due time, should be synced as all-day events, or should not be synced at all. So you've got a lot of flexibility here. The difference here, just for clarification, is that if there is a due time, this is going to show up on your calendar in terms of an actual event, right? It's going to show up in the middle of the day, that only makes sense. If you have something due at noon, then it's going to show up there. But if you've left it as an all-day event, then it's going to show and appear at the top of our screen here.

Last two options here, what do we want to do when the task is completed? We want to leave it on Google Calendar, or remove it from Google Calendar. And again, this comes down to personal preference. I know a lot of you want things to be removed or taken away, you can do so as well.

And then the label added to Google Calendar tasks. So this is a way for Todoist to sort of keep track of what is going on within your events, I should say, here within Google Calendar. This is not nearly as important as some of the other options here. So you can most likely just leave it as GCal.

All right, here we're going to say Connect. And this may take just a few seconds here, it might take a few moments for that connection to happen the first way through. If you ever need to come back and customize those choices that we just made, you're going to have this option here to customize. We're going to see many of those options remain here again, so we can see that, we can make changes as we wish.

So let's close this, and on the Todoist side, we're not going to see much at all, right? Todoist is going to look exactly the same. But now let's go over to Google Calendar. So now that our sync has been successfully set up, here you can see in the all-day event area, I have my tasks, which are synced directly from Todoist.

Now I often recommend that you choose a more unique color, you can come in here, and I'll just pick something somewhat red-like, actually, I don't like that red, I like this red, there we go, Tomato, Tomato red is a lot more like Todoist. So again, you can see the differences between things that are being synced from your Todoist account, and maybe other actual all-day events, or other things that may appear here, or that will appear on your calendar.

Now while you may manage most of your tasks within Todoist, chances are that you're using other tools such as Trello, or Evernote, or maybe Outlook to manage your other tasks, and that's where Pleexy comes into play. Pleexy integrates directly with your favorite project management tools so that you can bring them all together within your Todoist account. To learn more, go to pleexy.com

Do you wanna get more out of Google Drive? Do you wanna be more efficient when managing all of your files and folders? Well in today's video, I wanna show you seven of my favorite tips and tricks to get the most out of Drive. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Keyboard shortcuts for Google Drive

And let's get things kicked off with keyboard shortcuts. And no, not all of the keyboard shortcuts, but two of the shortcuts which I use frequently. The first one has to do with renaming a document.

Shortcut key for renaming a file or folder

Now, of course, I could open up the document itself and at the very top of that document I could go up here and rename that document. Of course, when I'm managing my documents, I can just right-click on it and I can come down here and say rename. But you know what? There's something that's an awful lot faster.

If you just hover over or select something here and press N on your keyboard, N as in rename, you can rename your document right here.

Let's say, "Some questions for you," let's just hit N and boom, we have this little rename dialog that pops up so you can rename your files in an instant.

Shortcut key for sharing a file or folder

The other one that I like to use a lot has to do with sharing. And of course we're sharing files and folders with a lot of different people. I could select this and then I could go up here and select the share icon, I could right click and say share here as well. But, why don't I just hit the period on my keyboard.

As long as I've got it selected, it's gonna instantly open up my sharing dialog here.

One more time, here's my test responses file, I'm gonna hit period, and boom, I can instantly go into this sharing window. So, two great shortcuts to make things easier

and move around a lot quicker and be able to do two things that you probably do a lot already.

Share Drive files but prevent downloading

Now the second one has to do with sharing as well. So why don’t I open up this one here.

Let me hit that period one more time so we can get our sharing window back up. And you’re probably already familiar with how to share a file with one or multiple people, but there’s something here that I want to point out to you.

Let me just add someone here as a test. I’m gonna add a test account here. I could say notify, could add a message. Now here on the right-hand side, we’ve got three options: we can allow them to be an editor, we can allow them to be just a commenter, or we can allow them to just be a viewer.

And in many cases, I often only want people to be a viewer. Why? Because I’m often sharing things such as audio or video with people and I just want to be able to share it with them but I don’t want them to be able to download that video because maybe it’s just a draft or something else.

Well, this is where you want to select the additional settings gear up here because here you’re gonna get two additional checkboxes. The first one we really don’t care about unless we’ve made them an editor. But it’s this second one: “Viewers and commenters can see the option to download, print, and copy.” That’s gonna be checked by default, but in my case, most often, I want to uncheck that option.

I want to uncheck that option because when I send it to this person here, I want them to be able to watch it but I don’t want them to be able to download it and then therefore share it perhaps with other people and that type of thing.

So, if you want that extra level of security, depending on what you are trying to share with people, make sure to select that gear icon and you can always uncheck this option down below.

Using the Explore Tool to search the web and your files

Now the third tip I'd like to share with you has to do with something that you may be a little puzzled by or maybe you’ve seen this within some of your own documents but were curious as to what it actually means.

Here in the bottom right-hand corner, there’s an interesting icon called the Explore icon. Let me show you how it works.

If you select this, you’ll get a little search window that pops up. By default, it’ll try to give you a few different suggestions. Now, I don’t have a lot of text in this document, so these suggestions might be rather poor.

What it allows you to do is search your own documents as well as the web. For example, let me type in one of my other favorite tools, Trello. I’m just going to hit enter here.

You can see I’ve got three different tabs:

1. Web: Here, I could go directly to the Trello Wikipedia page or the Trello homepage from within this document.
2. Images: I could find some images for Trello. In fact, I can just drag an image right into the document. It’s one of the easiest ways to get images directly into your document.
3. Drive: It will show related files from your Google Drive. If it doesn’t find anything, you can try different search terms. For instance, typing "team" might show documents related to that term.

The Explore feature can be really handy. Again, it’s located in the bottom right-hand corner, represented by a little star icon. Just click on Explore to access it.

Let’s go back to my file and folder management here.

Adding color to your Google Drive folders

For tip number four.

And this is something that could make navigation of all of your files, and especially your folders, very very convenient.

So, I've got a very small example here, I've only got five folders staring back at me but you probably have something more like, oh I don't know, 30 or 142, staring back at you as well.

Well, if there are common themes amongst them or maybe if you want one of these folders to stand out, why not change the folder cover to a different color.

So for example, for finance, I can just right click here, say change color and maybe because it's dealing with money I want to make it green.

So now that really pops, maybe if this is something that you know, gets lost in the mix for me, or if I wanna find it that much easier.

And again, if I have 50 or 100 different folders here, I can quickly go to finance.

Maybe I want sales to be something like a red color, I can select that red icon or maybe sales and marketing work closely together so maybe I make them both red.

However you want to group your folders together beyond just their naming conventions, you can use colors to sort of spruce things up and make navigation that much easier.

Save images to Drive from websites

Now the next tip on my list may in fact just be my favorite.

And the reason being is that you get to use this one outside of Drive.

Let's say for example that you are browsing the web and you come across an image, such as this one, and I say to myself, oh, that would go fantastic with this document that I'm working on or maybe a slide show that I'm putting together, but I don't have my Drive tab open.

And instead of going up and opening up Drive, all I need to do is hover over that image, right click on the image and select save image to Google Drive.

What this is gonna do is pop open a little dialog box here.

Now it's gonna give the actual name, right this is what this website has chosen to name this particular image.

But before I close this dialog, I can actually say rename it and so here I'm actually gonna rename the entire thing, I'm gonna say, let's call this a matches image.

I'm gonna hit apply and I can hit close and now, when I go back to Google Drive, if I go to my top level drive and we scroll all the way.

In many cases you may have to scroll all the way down to the bottom, you may even have to refresh it if you're doing it immediately.

But here, if I refresh my screen, you'll see at the bottom I've got my matches image, so now I can take this, I can manipulate this, I can put this directly into the files or the other types of projects that I'm working on here within Drive.

So even if you're browsing somewhere else, remember, you can right click over an image and select save image to Google Drive.

Search files within a specific Drive folder

NNow my next tip has to do with finding a particular file or folder within Drive.

Now remember, if you've got a large quantity of files, sometimes the search bar at the top of the screen may bring back too many results.

And yes, it's true, you can filter by the type of file that you are looking for but sometimes you've got a much better idea as to where that folder is.

So what you can do is for example, let's say I know that the file that I'm searching for is within development, all I need to do is right click on it and I can say search within development.

Now, I'm still gonna use the search bar up here, it's gonna open up that particular file, but I can go up to the search bar here and start typing in the words that I'm after.

And now, it's not gonna bring back every single file or document that has team within my entire Drive, it's only gonna search within this file folder.

So if you've already narrowed things down, right, if you already have a good idea as to where that file may be, you can just right click and say search within that particular folder just to narrow down your search results.

Now the last tip that I have for you today is something

Use voice typing to create content faster

That is not used often enough, I don't think, in my case.

And I've been using it a lot more frequently lately, so I wanted to make sure that I shared it with you as well.

And that has to do with voice typing.

All of our devices, whether it's mobile, whether it's our desktop or tablets, are doing so much better when it comes to translating what we have to say.

And Google Drive is no different.

In order to use voice typing, all you need to do is put your cursor where you want to start and hit tools.

And under tools, about half way down, you will see that there's the option of voice typing.

Now it's not going to initiate immediately but all we need to do is click this button.

And immediately it will start to transcribe in real-time what I am saying, period.

So you can continue to write your documents the way that you want, period.

And then you can stop and edit them as you wish, period.

Now when you're finished all you need to do is click that big red button there, over the microphone.

And yes, you may need to come back and do some editing and punctuation and that type of thing, but what I'm so impressed with is how quickly, how quickly it transcribes what I am saying and also how accurately it happens to be as well.

Well, I hope you enjoyed these tips and I'd love to hear from you next, what was your favorite Google Drive tip?

And did I miss anything? What's one of your favorite tips that you'd like to share with me and others here in the Simpletivity community?

Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

How to Build a Trello Master Board (2-Way Card Sync)

Wouldn't it be great if you could spend most of your time in a single Trello board

and have all of your cards sync to other projects, other Trello boards that you are currently working on? Well, in today's video I'm gonna show you how to create a master board right here within Trello which is gonna make your life so much easier.

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

Overview

And what I've got here is an example where I have a master client board and I've got a few other boards here.

I've got something called a red client board and a green client board.

Now in this example, I've got a few different clients here.

I've got a red client that I'm working with here.

I've given them access to this board as we work together.

And the same thing for the green client.

I've given them access and I'm gonna be working with them as well.

But I don't wanna be bouncing around these boards or dozens of different boards as I work with my various clients.

That's too much back and forth.

I'd rather work with them all within a single Trello board, i.e. a master client board.

And here you can see my labels.

I've got my green client tasks and I've got my red client tasks.

And the beauty of this setup is that anything that I do here is going to sync directly with these particular boards.

So let's take a look at an example here.

Let's say that I want to move this red client task, cancel unused subscriptions into In Progress.

Well, it's pretty simple.

I'm just gonna drag it and drag it over into In Progress.

Let's take a look at what happens on the red client board.

Red Client Board

And boom! There it is.

Now it's moved from the To-Do to the In Progress list on the red client board.

And I've never even visited this board.

I did all of those actions within my master client board.

What about in the opposite direction?

Let's take a look at the green client board, and let's say that my client is wanting me to review this.

So he's gonna move this starting task into this In Review list.

So he's gonna drag it over here and now if we go back to the master client board, now it's ready for me to see as it is moved from In Progress to In Review.

So as you can see, everything is synced two ways.

No matter what I do here on the master client board, it is going to sync to these individual client boards and it knows which ones it needs to sync to based on these labels.

Now master boards can be used in so many different ways.

You can use it for a sales process or any type of workflow where maybe you want someone, a particular board to receive it or be assigned to someone only in a particular list.

Maybe if you want to assign not just a label but maybe an individual member and then you want them to pop up on a particular board somewhere else, you can use a master client board in so many different ways.

Board Sync Powerup

Now in order to achieve this, what we're using is the board sync power-up by Unito.

Now to enable the board sync power-up, you wanna come down to power-ups and I recommend that you type in Unito.

Now Unito actually has several different power-ups as you can see here. The one we are looking for here is the one called boards connected and synced with Unito.

Now there's several other different power-ups that they provide. You can see that Unito actually provides syncing capabilities with products such as Asana, GitHub, Jira, Wrike and many, many more.

But for our master board example, we want boards connected and synced with Unito.

Benefits

Once you have that set up, I'm gonna show you step by step how you can create this sync for yourself.

But just before I do, let's talk about some of the other benefits of using this type of setup. Not only is there no more back and forth between myself and these other boards that I have up here, but anything that I add in terms of a description, in terms of comments, in terms of a due date, attachments, checklist, anything you name is automatically going to sync two ways back and forth with its respective board.

The other thing that I love about this setup is that as I'm setting up, let's say I'm setting up a new task here. Let's just call this new task for the green client.

Now you can see that I haven't assigned a label yet, meaning that nothing's gonna happen yet because I haven't assigned that particular label. So I can build out a number of different cards here. I can go in here and add a detailed description. Maybe I want to take my time building out a lengthier checklist and so forth. I can do that. I don't have to worry about this being synced to one of my other boards, one of my client boards immediately. I can take my time and build out this or multiple cards.

Now when it's ready to go, all I need to do is apply the appropriate label and in this case it's gonna be for that green client. So I'm gonna apply the green client label.

Now if we jump back over to the green client board, now you can see that that new task for green client has synced over. Now they're ready to take it on and start to move it through the process, move it through the workflow.

So, so many different ways in which we can use a master client board.

Setup

Let's show you how to set up your own client board, your own master client sync.

Here I've got a third client called the yellow client and this one is not synced just yet. So let's go ahead and show you how to set up this particular sync.

So what we wanna do is select that board sync option here and you can see that I've got a few already enabled here. I've got the green client and I've got the red client, but we're gonna set up a new one. So we're gonna select add sync.

So in this case it's gonna ask us which tools do you want to connect? And because we're already in the master client board, that's gonna come up as the default. That's great. That's one of the ones that I do want to sync. Let's come over here and select the board that we want to sync to. Now let's get a list. It's gonna give you the option of all of your boards with this particular account, but you can search by name. So I'm gonna pick the yellow client board there. Perfect. So those are the two boards that we wanna sync in this case. And we do want a two-way connection. We want information to be flowing back and forth.

Now you can set up a one-way sync if you only want information to flow in one direction. But in this case, we want that two-way sync. I'm gonna select next.

And the next thing that we need to decide is what kind of tasks do we want to filter? Now in this particular example, we're only gonna choose one side of this. And this is on the master client board. The reason being is that we only want cards that have that yellow label, that yellow client label to sync over to this board. If we left this as is, everything on my master client board would show up here on the yellow client board. We obviously don't want that.

So what we're gonna do from this dropdown menu, we've got several options. We can use labels, which we're gonna use, but I just wanna show you some of the other things we can do as well. We can sync cards only from a particular list, that could be very, very helpful or from a particular member. So the instant that you add a member, maybe it goes to their own personal Trello to-do list board or something of the like.

But let's come up to labels. We're gonna say only sync cards with any of the following labels, and all we have to do next is select that label. If I scroll down, there we go. There's that yellow client label that I created earlier. I'm gonna select that. So now only things with that yellow client label are gonna be synced to that yellow client board.

We're gonna hit next here. Again, there's nothing else we need to do there. We have a few options here that is very helpful to only sync new cards when you're testing things out. When you're first wanting to test a sync here with Unito, auto sync is highly recommended because you don't wanna go in and click the sync button from time to time. You want that to happen automatically.

And then we can customize a few other things if we want to. But in this case there's nothing else for us to do. So let's just hit create sync.

Now your first sync may take a few moments for it to make those certain connections. Here you can see the gears are working here. You can also see this little label here that's telling us that only new cards are going to be syncing. Like I said before, that's very helpful when you're first testing out your sync just to make sure that everything is working well the way that you want to. And then after it is, you can take it out of that test mode.

Testing

So let's go and use an example here with our new sync. Let's make sure it is working well.

So if we go to the yellow client board, you can see that there's nothing in there just yet. I'm gonna go to my master client board and let's say here's a new task for a new client, which happens to be my yellow client. So I don't have a label on it yet. Nothing's gonna happen. It's not gonna appear anywhere else, not in the red, not in the green, and not in the yellow just yet.

However, if I come down here and let's apply a label, let's apply that yellow client label. Now we've got that yellow client label. Let's see what's happening in the yellow client board. And beautiful. Now we have that task represented here. We have it in both places, the master client board where I created it and now my client can see it and access it and start to move it through this workflow.

So many different uses for the board sync power-up by Unito. So if you are interested in creating a master client board or to have a two-way sync between one or multiple boards within Trello, I recommend that you check out Board Sync by Unito.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next. How are you planning to use this type of power-up, this type of connection in your own Trello boards? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Are you wanting to add a virtual background to your Zoom meeting? Do you want something a little flashy or perhaps some branding, like your logo in the upper left-hand corner? Well, in today's video, I want to show you everything you need to know about virtual backgrounds in Zoom. I’ll also show you how to create your own custom background using a tool you probably already have on your computer.

Hello, everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. The number one reason for using virtual backgrounds in Zoom is to hide whatever else is going on behind you. But let’s get started with some prerequisites. Some of you have asked why you don’t see the virtual background option. I’ll include a link in the description below for all the prerequisites so you can check them yourself. The main reason often comes down to your processing speed. If your machine isn’t fast enough, you might not have virtual background capability.

To make sure you have virtual backgrounds enabled, log into your Zoom account on your desktop browser. Go to Account Settings under the Admin section, then Account Management, Account Settings. Scroll down to In Meeting (Advanced). Make sure Virtual Background is turned on.

Once that’s set up, go back to your Zoom desktop client. Open Zoom and click the gear icon for settings. You might think it’s under Video, but to upload or adjust your virtual background settings, you need to go to Virtual Background. Here you can play around with a few presets or choose a video background. Be aware that video backgrounds require more bandwidth and processing speed, so a static image might be safer.

To add a background, click the plus button to upload an image or video. Select the image you want and upload it. If you want something more custom, you can use PowerPoint to create your own background.

Here’s how:

1. Open PowerPoint and set up a 16:9 canvas.
2. Find an image you like from a site like Pexels.com and copy it.
3. Paste the image onto your PowerPoint canvas. Resize and position it as needed.
4. Add any custom elements, like a logo. Insert the logo by going to Insert > Pictures > This Device. Resize and position it in the top left corner to avoid it being covered by Zoom controls.
5. Go to Full Screen mode in PowerPoint and press Print Screen to capture the image.
6. Open Microsoft Paint, paste the screenshot, and save it as a PNG or JPEG.

Back in Zoom, go to Virtual Background and add the image you just created. Ensure "Mirror my video" is unchecked if your logo appears reversed. Don’t check the box for a green screen unless you have one.

With proper lighting and a darker background, you’ll get the best results with Zoom virtual backgrounds. I hope you found this video helpful. If you have any questions about Zoom virtual backgrounds or anything else related to Zoom meetings, let me know in the comments below. Thanks for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.

Emails, emails, and even more emails. Will it ever stop? In today's video, I want to show you how to reach Inbox Zero right here in Gmail with the help of SaneBox.

Hello, everyone! Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. You’re likely receiving more email today than ever before, which means less time for your most important tasks. One of the first things I tell my clients is to follow the principles of Inbox Zero. The goal isn’t necessarily to keep your inbox at zero but to manage your emails effectively. When you open an email, make a decision: reply to it, or move it to a folder where it can be dealt with later.

This is where SaneBox comes in. Unlike Gmail’s built-in filters, SaneBox uses artificial intelligence to learn your behavior and sort emails accordingly. It places important emails in your inbox while moving less urgent ones to folders like SaneLater or SaneNews. Here are three key SaneBox features that help with Inbox Zero:

1. SaneBlackHole: If you drag an email into SaneBlackHole, SaneBox will remember that sender and prevent future emails from appearing in your inbox. This is perfect for unwanted spam or newsletters that won’t unsubscribe properly.
2. SaneLater: For emails that you want to address but don’t need to act on immediately, move them to SaneLater. This keeps your inbox clear and allows you to handle these emails at a more convenient time. Unlike Gmail’s Snooze feature, which can end up cluttering your inbox with snoozed emails, SaneLater helps maintain a cleaner inbox.
3. SaneNews: Use this folder for newsletters and other non-urgent emails. This way, your inbox remains focused on important messages, and you can read newsletters when you have time.

SaneBox also offers a dashboard where you can adjust settings and receive smart suggestions. For example, it might suggest moving certain emails to the BlackHole based on your behavior. Another useful feature is Do Not Disturb, which lets you pause incoming emails during specific times, so you can focus on other tasks without interruptions.

To try SaneBox for yourself and receive a $25 credit, go to Sanebox.com/simpletivity. I’d love to hear how you keep your inbox clean. Share your best tips and comments below.

Thank you for watching, and remember, being productive doesn’t need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.

Why Zoom Breakout Rooms are valuable

Today's video is brought to you by 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 look at 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.

(Subtle electronic music)

Are you using Zoom for teaching or training purposes, or perhaps you just want to spice up your meetings and break off your participants into smaller discussion groups?

Well, in today's video I want to show you everything you need to know about breakout rooms in Zoom.

Hello everyone

Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity

Helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress

And here I've set up a bit of a fake meeting, I've got four different people, shall we say they're just four different devices at this point.

And what I'd like to do is I'd like to break them off into smaller discussion groups.

Now before we get into selecting breakout rooms here.

How to turn on Zoom Breakout Rooms in Settings

I want to make sure that you have breakout rooms enabled.

So in order to do that, where we need to go is in your web browser, login to your Zoom account.

And when you're logged in, we want to come down to the Admin section, we are going to select Account Management, and then Account Settings.

Now this Account Settings page is pretty lengthy, so we have to scroll down almost halfway down this page to find what we're looking for.

We're going to come to a header here called In Meeting Advanced.

And the very first option here is breakout room.

So make sure that you have this turned on.

So let's jump back, now that things are enabled, let's jump back into our Zoom meeting here.

And let's say that I have kicked off the meeting, and I've given a bit of a lesson, or instruction, or maybe there's a very important topic that I want them to talk about.

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom meeting

Amongst themselves in a smaller group.

So in order to do so, I need to come here and select Breakout Rooms.

Now we're going to get this little small window that's going to pop up in front of us on the screen.

And don't worry, Zoom is going to do all the math for us here.

So here, it's gonna say assign four participants into one room.

Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Because that would basically just kick myself out, they'll go talk amongst themselves, and then I would just be here sitting all alone.

Maybe there's a purpose for that, maybe you might use that in some case, but it's always going to do the math for you here.

So here, it's gonna tell me down below that there's going to be four participants per room.

If I start to toggle this, I can say, well, actually, this is what I want, four participants in two rooms.

It's gonna tell me there's gonna be two participants per room.

I can keep changing this number. Yeah, there's gonna be one to two participants.

Well, that's just basically gonna split everybody up into an individual room.

There's not actually a limit here, so it's not going to keep track of how many attendees you actually have.

So just be careful, they don't keep pushing this up, here you can see zero to one, you're gonna have a bunch of empty rooms if we keep doing that.

So let's break this down into two rooms, because that's what I want today.

And the only other option that we have here, or that we need to consider is if we want Zoom to automatically split these rooms up, just randomly split those four individuals up, or do I want to pick them myself.

Now the good thing is, is that the reason why automatically is set by default, because especially if you have a large group, you might want to quickly just do this and just let it do the math itself.

But even with the automatically option here, we can still make a few changes before those breakout rooms go live.

So I'm going to leave this at automatically and I'm going to say Create Rooms.

How to Edit Breakout Rooms before opening them up

And that's going to open up this dialog here.

So here you can see it's already automatically randomly split up my groups.

I've got Monica and Ted here and I've got Alex and Jane down here.

Now a couple of things that we can do, right off the bat you can see as I'm hovering over these names, I can move people to different rooms, or I can exchange them.

So what's the difference between these two?

Well, let's say Monica, I don't want Monica in the same room as Ted for some reason, I'm going to say Move to. If I select this, it's going to say, well, where do I want to move her to? Well, it's pretty obvious here, I've only got one other room.

So I'm going to say Breakout Room 2.

And there you can see that Monica is now moved into Breakout Room 2, let me just move her back here for this example.

And let's say rather, I want to exchange her with someone else. Well, that's the Exchange one here.

So if I select Exchange, I can now see, well, is it Alex or Jane? Let's swap Monica and Jane, so I'm going to select Jane.

And now you can see that those two swap out of those rooms.

Now you'll have a lot more options, of course, if you have many more rooms and many more participants, but this is a great easy way to quickly fine tune those breakout rooms before they go live.

The other thing which is nice here is that you see

How to Rename Breakout Rooms in Zoom

If I hover over the breakout rooms themselves, I can actually rename them.

So I could call this, this is the Blue breakout group.

And this is the Red breakout group, for example.

It could be the topic that you want them to discuss, whatever the case may be, you can rename them if desired.

So now I've got my room set.

These are the two people that I want to be paired up together for the small discussion, but we still have a few more options down here below.

How to Recreate Breakout Rooms in Zoom

You can see here in the bottom left hand corner, we've got a Recreate button.

Now if I select that, we're going to see the exact same dialog that we first saw before coming in here.

And this is basically sort of like a do over button.

This is saying, wait a minute, if this really is a mess, either you've messed it up, or Zoom has messed it up in some way, you can start all over again and say, let me divide up the rooms in a different way.

I want to pick them manually from the get-go, I can pick them manually from the start. I can do that here as well.

But don't worry about having to close this dialog, you can just come down here and say Recreate All Rooms if need be.

Advanced Breakout Room Options

The other thing that we have here is our options drop-down or menu here.

And let's go through each of these rather quickly, just so you understand what they each mean.

So the first one, Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically. I usually always have this checked.

And what this means is that when I say Open All Rooms, I want them all to jump into those rooms. I don't want them to have to select something to put them into those rooms, I like to try and keep it as simple as possible.

So by leaving this checked, when I say Open All Rooms, they're automatically going to be placed in those rooms.

Second one here, Allow participants to return to the main session at any time. When I say Open All Rooms here, I'm going to be the only one left here in what's called the main room.

If I have this checked, this allows participants to come back and rejoin me at their discretion, when they would like to.

So there may be some cases where you want to have this unchecked, that you want to keep them in their breakout rooms or maybe not accidentally have them rejoin you in the main room.

So this is allowing what kind of control you're giving those participants.

The third one down here is basically a timer, Breakout rooms close automatically after, and you can input any type of duration that you like.

So maybe you want them to go and spend some time talking amongst each other for 10 minutes, well, you could put 10 minutes in here, and Zoom is going to do the work for you.

They're going to count the timer down and then automatically bring everyone back together at that time.

Now if you do have this selected, the checkbox down below will become enabled, notifying you, the host, when that time is up. I can leave that unchecked for now.

And then the last one here is a countdown after closing the breakout room, and I really like this feature.

What it's going to do is that when I say, hey, it's time for us to get back together, what's going to happen, I can change the duration here. There's a few different defaults. I'm going to use 30 in our example.

What's going to happen is that they're going to see a countdown timer when there's 30 seconds left.

And so they know, I don't have to broadcast out a message, I don't have to go into each room, they know that, hey, we should probably start winding down, we're going to be rejoining that room.

Okay, so I've got my options, they're here. I could add another room, if I wanted to, if I wanted to say, actually, let's add one more room or I have more participants, I can do that here as well.

How to Launch Breakout Rooms for all participants

But let's go ahead, this is the big show, right?

Let's actually break out, I'm going to say Open All Rooms, you're going to see a few different areas here.

What's happening, it might take a few seconds, you see those little colors, those little circles change from zero to green.

Now that they're in green, they are actually in those breakout rooms.

Let me just move this dialog here for a second. You can see on the right-hand side of my screen where the participants are, I'm the only one left here in the main room, no one else here is with me.

They are all here within these rooms.

So essentially what it does is it actually sort of creates separate Zoom meeting rooms. They're gonna see essentially what you and I see right here as they have their small discussion.

Now as the host, what I can do is I can join them,

How to Join a Breakout Room as a Host

Here you can see this little Join button here beside these rooms.

Let's join the Blue group here for fun. I'm going to select Join, confirm, Yes.

We're going to get a little message here, it might take just a few seconds, and essentially what you're gonna see here, it's gonna pop open, and you're not gonna see anything too special, actually, because it's just another Zoom meeting room.

Now it's myself and these two participants within this room, so I can check in, how are things going, do you have any other follow-up questions? What else do you need from me?

If I want to leave this room, remember, we can always select, let me close that for a second, always come back down here and select Breakout Rooms.

And I can see what's going on elsewhere. I can say, you know what, let's check in with the other group here. I'm going to say Join this one, which is obviously going to automatically remove me from the room that I was just in.

It might take a few seconds and here we are again. If I open up my participants now, I'm with the other group, I can check in and see how they are doing.

Now I'm going to leave this one here. I'm going to leave this group and go back to the main session, there's the notification telling me where I'm going with all this transitioning.

Let me open this up again, just open up manage my participant list, just so you can see that it's only me here at this point.

Now one thing I want to point out here

How to Send a Message to Breakout Rooms

Is let's say that you want to send a message to the groups, you want to give them an additional question, or you want to tell them to please wrap up in the next five minutes.

What you don't want to do is select Chat here from the main session room. Because if I type something in here, if I say, hi everyone, I might think that I'm talking to everyone but I'm only talking to everyone here in the Participants list, which in this point in time is just me, it's only me.

So don't think that you're speaking to those groups if you use the chat window here.

What we want to do is open up that Breakout Rooms dialog once again, and you can see down below that there is a Broadcast a message to all. This is what you want to select if you want to say something.

So here I can say wrap things up in the next five minutes, please.

Okay, so now I can broadcast that out. Now those other rooms, all of the participants are going to receive that message, maybe I want to send a message, does anybody need any help or something along those lines, and they can raise their hands.

I can't really mimic that for you here in real-time. But if these were real individuals, they could raise their hands and let me know

How to Close All Breakout Rooms

And actually send me a message back as well if I need to jump in and if I want to join them.

Last but not least, let's say that time is up, it's time to close all our rooms. I'm going to select this red button here.

And what's happening here is you can see that that 30-second timer has now started, they are still in the rooms as we speak, none of them, as you can see, have joined me yet.

They can manually say at this point, okay, we're done here, let's go back to the main room, they can jump in a little bit early if they want.

But if not, now we're down to about 10 seconds, what's going to happen is that when we get down to zero, they are automatically going to come back into this room.

So let's watch and see how this happens. Again, it might take just a few seconds here, Alex, Jane, Monica, Ted, they're all back, great. They're all back.

And the great thing about using breakout rooms here in Zoom is that everything that we've done here from the names of the rooms, from the pairings, it stays the same.

So if we want to come back and have some more discussion with all of the participants, we can go back into those same groups if we want to.

Well, I hope that you found today's video helpful, and I'd love to hear from you next, what other questions do you have about Zoom meetings? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

Let's be honest, we spend an awful lot of time right here within our web browser,

so isn't it about time that you optimized your bookmarks? In today's video I wanna show you several tips on how to get the most out of bookmarks, right here in Google Chrome. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here, at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress.

Bookmarks Bar

And let's start off with a very, very simple tip.

Is that if you don't see your bookmarks here, if the bookmarks bar as it is called is not displayed, make sure that you have it displayed, because you want these available to you in just a single touch, you wanna be able to access this as quickly as possible.

So to do so, we just need to hit our settings up here, come down to Bookmarks, you can see that my Show bookmarks bar is already checked.

If I uncheck that, yeah I do gain a little more real estate here, but I don't have that quick access to my bookmarks. I can go over here and select Bookmarks, and I can scroll through this list if I want to, but Show bookmarks bar is certainly essential.

Organize Bookmarks

Now, next up is how I organize my bookmarks, and remember you can just click and drag anything in here, into whatever order that you want.

By default, it's gonna add those new bookmarks usually to the end of your list, but I highly recommend that these first, you know, five, six, seven spots that you have here, you should use for your most frequently used websites, or most frequently used apps.

So I've got things like my calendar, and Gmail, a couple of different email addresses here, things that I go to most frequently.

Create Folders

And then a little later on you can see that I also use some folders, and I think folders are very important to use here as well. Now, if you don't know how to create a folder,

well it's pretty simple. I recommend that we actually come in here into our bookmarks, our bookmarks manager. So once again, I've come down to Bookmarks,

and under Show bookmarks bar, we can click Bookmark manager. I just find if you're spending a few minutes editing, and revising, and optimizing all of your bookmarks,

might as well come in here and get a cleaner or better view. so once again, we can drag things around, right? We can drag things, Gmail to the first spot, or a calendar for the first spot here if we want to. Here, I've got a couple of my folders as well, but all I need to do here is click here, is the right-hand corner, and say Add a new folder, and by doing so I can give it a name, and start adding things into that folder as I want.

Bookmark all tabs

But there's a couple of other things that you should know as well, and that is when you are creating a new bookmark, if I come up here, and again, I'm gonna hover over bookmarks, not only can I say Bookmark this tab, and we can use Control + D if we want to, as a shortcut key, but we can also say Bookmark all tabs, and this is really, really helpful, because if you've got three, or four, or a group of websites that you typically use all at the same time, you can bookmark them all at the same time as well.

But it gets even better. Let me click off of this for a second, and let's say for example I come up here to my social media tab, and let's say I'm often spending time with all of these open at the same time.

So do I wanna come up here and then select Facebook, and then come back and then select LinkedIn, and then come back and select Twitter? What if I right-click on this, and say Open all four. I'm gonna click that, and instantaneously, here you can see in four new tabs, I've got all of those websites opened up.

So if you have a need of opening a group of websites all at the same time, or you're dealing with, or working with a number of websites at the same time, why don't you put them in a folder, and then you can open them up all at the same time as well.

Now there's another benefit of using these folders as well, and I'm gonna stick with my social media example, is that is, these remain an additional click away from me, and maybe I'm spending too much time on social media, so I kinda like the idea that they're hidden a little bit. I have to hit Social first and then come down.

I don't see these logos on my bookmarks bar all the time. So maybe if there's something that you use, or that you need, but you spend a little more time, or it's a little too tempting, you can use folders for that purpose as well.

Use Emojis

Let's stick with those folders for a second here though, and I wanna show some other things that I've added here.

You'll notice that this little folder icon is the default, and in fact it's really our only choice when it comes to creating a folder of bookmarks, and you know, if I didn't have these little emojis, they wouldn't stand out as much.

So what I often recommend is going to a website such as Emojipedia. Emojipedia was the place that I happen to go, there's other websites you can go to as well, where you can search up things.

So if I search up a laptop, let's say, that's what I used I think from our marketing example here, I can find a laptop emoji, I can just hit copy, and then paste it. If I come up here and right-click, and say Rename, I can just paste it directly into the name.

And I like to put it at the front of the name, so it's consistent with everything else, and then things like marketing, money, and social, just stand out that much more, beyond just the folder here itself.

Shorten Bookmarks

But there's another thing that you might wanna keep in mind, and this is not just about folders, but this has to do with all of your bookmarks, is the length of the name that you give it.

So if you go into any of these bookmarks here, and if I right-click this, I can say Edit, and change the name. So Nimble, which is my CRM system at the moment, maybe I wanna change that and shorten it. I could just say CRM, right? Because I know what the Nimble icon looks like. I'm gonna say CRM.

By shortening this I might be able to fit a few more things here within my bookmarks bar. You know, money, for example, that money emoji that I've included, I think that's pretty self-evident, so why don't I go up here, and I'm gonna say Rename it, and this time I'm actually just gonna delete the label altogether, and just hit Save, and now I've got the icon, I can still have access to all of those pages there, but I've reduced the length of that title, and now I might be able to fit even just a few more here on my bookmarks bar.

Now of course, if you've got too many to fit on the bookmarks bar, you can just click these arrows, and you'll find the spill over here on the right-hand side as well.

Well, I hope you enjoyed some of these tips for getting the most out of your bookmarks. Many of these tips will apply to other web browsers as well, including Safari, and Firefox.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next, because I'm sure you have some very creative ways as to how you manage your browser bookmarks. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

It doesn't matter if you work remotely, if you work from home, or if you work from an office, chances are you are using video conferencing more and more often.

So in today's video, I wanna share with you seven of my favorite tips for getting the most out of Zoom meetings.

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

Mute all Zoom participants keyboard shortcut

And let's dive right in. Here I am within my Zoom meeting. And I'm sharing the screen here at the moment. But my very first tip for you has to do with one of my favorite shortcut keys.

So let me actually stop sharing for just a moment here. And I'm gonna open up my participants window here.

So often, I'm on a call with five, seven, 10, 20 or more people, and suddenly there's some background noise and it's interrupting either my presentation or something that I'm saying at the moment.

So one of my favorite shortcut keys is the ability to mute everyone, instantaneously.

Now yes, here, I can select that Mute All option, but I don't always have this window open, I may be in the middle of showing or doing something else. So all I need to do is select Alt+M on my keyboard, that's Alt+M, and that will immediately mute everyone else. Alt+M, of course, for PC, it is command control M, if you happen to be a Mac user. And if you just hit it again, of course, you're going to unmute everyone as well.

Now this can be really helpful, especially if someone else is working remotely, and you hear a dog barking or some other background noise on someone else's line. You'll notice here in the manage participants area that that microphone is moving when I'm talking. But it stops when I'm not talking. So this can be a clue for you to help find that individual if you just wanna mute that one person. But if you need to, or if you don't need the time, don't have the time to identify that individual, you can use Alt+M to mute everyone else.

So let's go into sharing my screen.

Hide floating Zoom control panel

I'm gonna share my entire desktop at the moment here. And one of my pet peeves for the longest time with using Zoom, when I'm sharing my screen, is that this little floating menu here, which is very helpful as I make different options here, it sort of hides many of my tabs.

You can see, I've got a tab open right here. You don't know how many times I've accidentally stopped sharing because I actually wanted to select this browser tab, but I hit Stop Sharing instead.

Well, there is a way that we can minimize this all together. And what you need to do is come over here to More, and come all the way down to Hide Floating Meeting Controls.

Now yes, there is a shortcut key Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H, I don't know how much of a shortcut that is, if you need four keys to do so. So I usually just select this manually. But if I select this, you can see that that floating Zoom menu is gone.

So now I can go here, I can click through all these tabs at ease. Nothing is in my way. And if I need to get back to that menu, all I need to do is select Escape on my keyboard. Very quickly, one more time Hide Floating Meeting Controls, it's telling me right here, press Escape. If I need to show it again, I can go about my presentation, I can use my computer the way I want. And then I can hit Escape to get that menu back and visible to me.

All right, let's go back at this time around.

Turn off Zoom video by default

I’m gonna stop sharing, and I’m actually gonna go into my settings here, my Zoom meeting settings. Let’s go back; here we are in the desktop app. Let me just move my picture here for a second.

And what we’re gonna do is hit this little gear icon, which is called Settings. Now, there’s an awful lot of settings that you can tweak and adjust here within Zoom, but I wanna focus on two important ones, or at least they’re very important to me.

The first one is under Video. Yes, you can preview your video, you can choose a different camera if you need to here as well. But the one that I always turn on is this one: Turn off my video when joining a meeting.

By default, whether I’m the host or whether I’m joining someone else’s Zoom meeting, I want my video to be turned off. Now the reasoning for this is that I wanna make sure that I initiate that video. I don’t want to click a link on something and then forget that, "Oh, yeah, that’s right, I’m on video, and what’s behind me or what’s going on? Do I have my mic set up?" All of this type of thing.

So by default, I wanna have my video turned off when I either host or join any type of Zoom meeting, and then I can initiate it, right? I can initiate it with a single click.

Virtual backgrounds for Zoom

The other tip that I wanna share with you here within settings has to do with video, but it concerns something called Virtual Background. This is a feature that Zoom has had for a while, but maybe you’ve never experimented with it before.

So here you can see I’ve got nothing in the background—just the background of my office. But what Zoom allows you to do is upload other images to use as your background, and you don’t need a green screen.

You can select from one of the default images, or you can upload your own images or even video backgrounds. For instance, here are some options like the Northern Lights and a tropical seaside. But the one I use most often is one that I created. It’s very simple—mostly black with my logo in the corner.

The reason I use this virtual background frequently is that it hides any distractions in the background. I might be working from a busy cafe or a kitchen island at home, and I don’t have to worry about what’s behind me, like a fridge or a dirty stove.

Another nice benefit is that it allows me to add some branding. You can see my logo in the top corner here. You can also add your full name, an icon, or your preferred colors. It’s a great way to keep things professional and consistent with your brand.

Zoom calendar add-on for Google & Outlook

And the next one on our list I wanna show you is actually something that I use every single day.

In fact, this is probably the most used feature that I use when it comes to Zoom.

And it has to do with scheduling your meetings.

So I'm gonna jump into Google Calendar, and I'm gonna open up this little fake meeting that I set up here, and I'm gonna go into the edit mode.

Whether you use Microsoft Outlook or whether you use Google Calendar, I implore you to download and use the add ons or extensions for your calendar.

So in this case, I have the Google Calendar, the Google Chrome extension installed.

You can see up here I've got that little icon, this allows me to schedule a meeting, if I want to, or I can start a meeting immediately.

It even gives me conveniently the option to start with video off, or start with video on.

But the other bonus, as you can see here, as I'm creating this meeting within Google calendars, I have an additional button, called Make it a Zoom Meeting.

So as I'm adding the title, and my guests, and maybe a few other details, with just a single click, I can say make it a zoom meeting.

And here I've got that meeting link here, under the location area.

And if I scroll down to the description, it's got all this other great information, which my guests are going to need, whether it's the link, I mean, they can click this link right away, but depending on where they are, they can use the one tap mobile option.

If they need to dial in by a phone, if they can't connect by audio, by their computer, they can choose one of these dial-in numbers as well, all in a single click.

And then when I come back in here, when it's time for this meeting, all I have to do is select Join the Zoom Meeting.

I don't have to click somewhere else, I don't have to go to the Zoom interface, I can just say Join the Zoom Meeting, and it's gonna launch it for me, and dive right in.

So whether you're an Outlook user, or a Google user, please, please download the extension

New Share and Pause Share when sharing Zoom screen

So that you can get even more out of this tool.

Now the other thing that I wanna show you, and we'll just stick on this dummy meeting invite here, is a couple of settings here, a couple of options, I should say, with this floating menu.

And the two in particular are New Share and Pause Share.

So at the moment, I'm sharing my screen right now, pretty common, pretty standard here within Zoom.

But a lot of people are not familiar with what these actually mean, or how they should be using them.

So in this case, if I wanna move from this, showing you my browser here, and I wanna go to say a Word document, all I need to do is select New Share, and now I can go and find that other document or that other place, that I would like to share.

So let's say it is a Word document, so I'm gonna click on this Word document.

Remember, no one in my meeting is seeing this window.

I'm seeing this because I'm the organizer and I'm wanting to share something at the moment.

As soon as I click on this, this Word document and select Share, I'm instantly taken to that Word document, and so is everyone else that is viewing this screen share.

So they don't see any of that me selecting it, they don't see me looking for a folder, nothing along those likes.

And if I wanna go back up here, and I say New Share, and I wanna go back to the web, I can select it and say Share, I'm instantaneously brought back here.

So you can remove all sort of that clunky feeling of minimizing, maximizing, finding the thing that you wanna share next, make it a really smooth transition for those people who are on the meeting with you.

The other one is Pause Share.

Now this can be used very similarly, if I want to say, you know, just pause, and here you can see your screen sharing is paused, and then I could go and find that document.

But the other great thing I find about the pause function is that, let's say I'm giving a presentation, I want to review some notes, or I want to go look something else up, but I don't want everyone else to know that I'm looking that up or I'm finding this special number or whatever the case may be, I can hit pause and they can remain on this screen, it's as if nothing else has happened.

I can go back and find some information, go reference a file, that type of thing.

And then when I'm ready, I can just say Resume Share, and here I am back on this screen.

I can hit pause, and I could go somewhere else as well if I want to, but take a look at both New Share and Pause Share to make your presentations and make your screen sharing just a little more polished.

How to annotate in Zoom

And then the last thing, the final tip today that I wanna share with you has to do with annotations.

Something that I think it's overlooked.

Here it is, it's the very last option before More, and yet it's so valuable.

If you click Annotate, there's a variety of different ways that you can highlight things on your screen.

A few of my favorites, one would be Spotlight.

Here, it adds a little red spotlight, so if people have trouble following your cursor, you wanna make sure people know exactly what you're talking about, they can follow you along with this little red spotlight.

There's also this little arrow, it's like an arrow stamp.

So if I want people to look at this Guests field, I can click over here, or I can highlight and then click.

Do you see this little white arrow, no one is seeing this, no one on my meeting is actually seeing this.

It's not until I click on it, it's gonna put this little stamp here with my name, so they know that I'm the one who placed it there.

Because remember, you can allow other people to annotate as well.

And if you want to undo or redo, you can always click these buttons here as well, or hit clear to clear all of your drawings.

You can draw, you can add text, you can add other stamps.

This arrow is a little bit different.

This allows you to keep permanent arrows.

So instead of one at a time, I can go down a variety of fields here.

And again, I can hit undo if I wanna go back, or just clear all my drawing.

So Annotate can be a really helpful one as well.

So I'd love to hear from you next.

Which of these seven tips were your favorite?

And did I miss anything?

Is there a special Zoom meeting tip that you love to use?

Make sure you share that with us, and with the rest of the Simpletivity community down below.

Thanks so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple!

There are over 100 different power-ups available for your Trello boards.

But have you ever gone through this list, thought that you found something perfect, only to discover that it had an additional cost?

Well, in today's video, I wanna show you five of my favorite Trello power-ups that are absolutely free.

But first, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, SaneBox.

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So let's get to our list, and the first one that I always recommend, no matter what type of board that you are using Trello for, is Custom Fields.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields is an absolute necessity, no matter what you're using Trello for.

Here, for example, if I open up this card, you can see that I have two different Custom Fields that I'm using.

I've created a dropdown here called priority, and here I have a start date as well.

This can be really, really helpful, especially in this priority list, because I know a lot of us may want to use and save these labels for other purposes, such as departments as you see here.

I can do that and create my priority level here that also can have color coding.

So if I need to demote this from high to medium, it can change to this yellow color here.

And, of course, I can turn this off altogether if I want to.

But let's turn it back to medium here for a second and show that it actually appears on the front of the card as well.

I know that start date is another custom field which is very helpful for many users because, of course, the due date, the primary due date, for any Trello card is what's going to trigger notifications and trigger other things that we are looking at on a day-to-day basis.

But sometimes, it can be helpful to record that start date.

Or maybe you'll have multiple dates that you'd like to record and reorder in any way that you like.

Number two on my list has to do with lists, and in particular with list limits.

List Limits

The second one on our list is actually called List Limits, and it can be a really powerful one to make sure that you don't have too many things going on in a particular list.

So let's take a look at this testing list, for example, and let's say that I really need to keep this to about a maximum of three. Otherwise, we're gonna have big issues, and we're gonna have a big backlog, and people are gonna be angry at us.

So what do I do? Do I just need to keep a count every once in a while? Do I need to just come in here and manually count up my cards? What if I have 100 different cards? What if you're dealing with a very, very long list?

Well, this is exactly where List Limits comes into place.

At the top, once you've enabled List Limits, at the top of your list, you will see an additional setting here called Set List Limit.

Now by default, of course, you're gonna have none on any of your lists because you don't have to apply this to every list. Maybe there's only specific lists that you'd like to add this to.

By selecting this option, I can say, let's have a maximum of three cards in this list. I'm gonna hit save, and now you can see at the top, I've got a number.

You might actually wanna use List Limits just for the purpose of seeing the number of how many cards you have in a given list.

But if I add another card, let's add, let's just call it New Card, okay?

So now I'm at three, I'm at three of three.

What if I move this card over here? What happens here if we go over that three?

Ho, we've got a color change, something visual, something that is hard to ignore!

Now I can see that yeah, we've got problems. We're four of three. We need to address this backlog.

So again, you can come in here, you can change and adjust these limits as necessary, and you certainly don't need to apply them for every single list on your board.

Maybe there's just one, or maybe there's just two key lists where this would come into play.

As soon as I move one of these cards over here and out of the way, I should say, into its next phase, hey, that's perfect. We're three of three. That color goes away.

So you might wanna check out List Limits.

Number three on my list has to do with cost and has to do with tracking financial figures, whether it's a budget, whether it's expenses, however you are managing or perhaps working with money here within Trello, and this power-up is called Costello.

Costello

Now what Costello does is that it gives you an additional field within all of your cards to add a cost.

So, for example, if I open up this card here, you can see on the power-up side below Custom Fields and this other power-up I've enabled, I've got something called Total Cost, and here it's labeled at 500.

One of the things that I like about the Costello power-up is that they actually haven't indicated a traditional dollar sign. So whether you're working in pounds, in euros, no matter what type of currency that you're working in, you don't have to worry about having something that maybe doesn't align (laughs) with that number.

So here, I can enter in a new cost. Actually, I underestimated it. It's not 500 anymore; it's actually 900. So here I have that Total Cost information right here within that card.

And you'll also see that it appears on the front of the cards as well. Here's one with a total cost of 300.

Why don't we add a cost to this one as well? Let's add a new cost here. I'm gonna say add total cost, and let's make this one $250, for example.

So that's great and all. I've tracked the cost, and I can see it at the front of my card, but it gets better. Here in the top of the right-hand corner of the screen, you can see that there's a Total Cost summary.

So what it's actually doing, it's actually summing up all of that cost data across the whole board. So no matter how many different cards, and especially how many different cards that have this cost data, you can see that total up here in the right-hand corner, making sure that you stay within budget or hit your targets, whatever that number means.

But it gets better. If I click on this, I can see the three different values here, and in my example, I've got three different cards for what that value is. But I can also summarize it by label or summarize it by column.

So if I click on Summary by Column, here you can see oh, yeah, I've got the most in the queue. I've got some in Development and Testing. And so if you want to be able to see a snapshot of where the cost data is, either by column or by label, you can do so with Costello.

Now the next one on my list is something that's relatively new to Trello. It's only been introduced in the past year, but it can really be used in so many different ways, and that is the Map power-up.

You can see here at the top of my screen, I already have it enabled. I can click on this and show a map of everything here that has a given location.

So, for example, if I click up here on this map, you can see that I've got a few different things here. I've got cards associated with areas in the Bay Area.

But before we dive into this map view, let's go back to the card level. So here you can see some of my cards have this little push pin icon because this map does integrate directly with Google Maps.

And if I click on this one, you can see I've got a small snapshot here, here of the Googleplex. Not only do I have this miniature map here, but if I want to, I can go in and change that address. If I click this location here, the great thing is is that it just gives me a search bar here, right?

So instead of having to know the exact address, I can just say, well, what about Facebook? Let's put that in there. And now I've got my new address. I just click on the results, and now I've got that new address located here.

And I can click on the map if I want to to get a larger view of what's going on there and then go back to the card, but the nice thing is is that, when I click this Map button at the top of the board, not only do I get this big snapshot here but I can actually click on these different push pins.

So, for example, I can click on this one here, click on the card, I can work within this card, and then go back out. And now I can click on this one down below, I can see what's going on with this card, I can click in it, I can make a few adjustments, make a few changes, and then come back out.

I can actually work within this Map view for a while if I want to.

So think about it. Could it be client visits? Could it be something you're doing? Maybe you're visiting a particular location. Perhaps you're involved in real estate in some manner. Whatever makes sense to you with location, this can be a great way of doing so.

So don't forget to check out the Map power-up.

Now the very last one on my list today is yes, just like the previous four, absolutely free, and it has to do with activity, in particular, tracking your activity.

Activity

And how long you are spending on particular cards.

Let's take a look at this Testing list a little bit closer. You can see on this first one here, I've got something with a stopwatch. It says 29 minutes, and then I've got another here with a slightly different stopwatch icon, and this one's all in red, and it says 14:14.

So what exactly is this telling me?

Before we dive in deeper, I wanna let you know that the Activity power-up uses a 24-hour clock. The reason why this says 14:14 is that it represents 2:14 PM, meaning that I started the timer on this card at 2:14. This one's still active, which is why it's displayed in red, while the other card shows I've spent 29 minutes on it, but the timer is not currently running.

Let's go to this active one. If I open up this card, you can see down below that 38 minutes have passed since I first initiated this timer. That's what's going on here. If I want to pause the timer, I just need to click it. When I click it, it turns green, so now the timer's no longer running.

Over here on the right-hand side, it shows me the total time spent on this card. If I click on it, it breaks down the activity among different board members. In my example, it's only myself, but if other team members were working on this card and initiated the timer, we could see the breakdown between multiple members.

If I want to start it again, it's as simple as clicking it, and now the timer will continue. You can see when I paused it, it gave me a few quick buttons. Maybe I started work on this and forgot to start the timer, so I can just add five minutes or add 15 minutes if I need to. It also has an edit icon, so I can update the total time or even reset the timer if I want to.

This Activity power-up, although simple, can be a great way to manage and track how long you've been spending on each of your cards.

Well, I'd love to hear from you next. Number one, what was your favorite of the five power-ups I showed you today? And number two, what did I leave off this list, or which Trello power-ups are helping you the most right now? Be sure to share that with me and with others because they'll find great value in the things that are benefiting you right now.

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