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Do you wish that you could read more in a shorter amount of time?

Or maybe you just want to find a way to commit to finishing that next book that you pick up.

Well, today I want to show you a very simple trick to help you do just that.

I'm currently in the middle of reading this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear and I'm really enjoying it, however, because I borrowed this book from my local library, I need to complete it within the next two weeks.

Well, I'm going to do that with the help of this little bookmark, which I create for almost all of my books.

I'm gonna show you what it is, and how you can create it for yourself in just a few minutes.

So, let's dive in.

To make sure that I can finish a book within a specific timeframe, I take just a couple of minutes to create a reading chart, or a reading guide, to make sure I can hit that specific deadline.

Now, you can do this in any type of spreadsheet tool.

Here, I'm within Google Sheets, but you can use this in Microsoft Excel, or almost any other spreadsheet tool.

Now, the very first column, we're gonna create a date column here.

So, I'm just gonna call this date.

Let me just type that in here, date.

The next column we're gonna call day, because I do find it helpful to see the day of the week.

And then, this last one, I'm gonna call page min, as in page minimum.

This is gonna be the minimum page number I need to read to in order to reach my goal.

So, over here in the date field, I'm gonna type in today's date, which happens to be 2019.

It is May the 14th and I'm gonna put it in this date format.

This is usually what spreadsheets like the best.

It's easiest to work with.

And then, if I select this cell, you'll notice in the lower right-hand corner there's a small square or a small dot.

If you click and hold and then drag this down, I'm gonna drag it down 14 cells, because I wanna finish this in two weeks, and let go, you can see that it will automatically increment each date.

And even if I was to go over the month of May, it would successfully know the date and keep going onward.

So, this is gonna be helpful to keep me on track, but I find it's also helpful sometimes to know the day of the week.

So, today is Tuesday, I'm gonna put in Tue, just an abbreviation of Tuesday.

And then I'm gonna do the exact same thing.

I'm gonna click and hold on this little dot here and I'm gonna drag it all the way down and release, and again, now I've got my days of the week.

Now, I'm gonna clean this up just a little bit.

I'm gonna select this cell and I'm actually going to center it, just so it's not right up against the date.

And how about, actually, I take our headers here and I'm gonna bold that, just so they stand out a little bit more.

Now, the last one is crucial.

This is the minimum page number I need to be on in order to reach my goal.

But, in order to do this, we just need to do a little bit of simple math.

I'm gonna go over about two cells and just so you can see what I'm doing, I don't usually put in the title or the name here, but I have 256 pages in the current book that I'm reading.

And, so the next one I'm gonna put down below is the pages per day.

Again, I don't usually do this, but I just wanna type this in so you know exactly what these numbers represent.

So, here's the total number of pages here.

In the cell down below, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select the equals sign, because I'm gonna put in a very simple formula.

I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select the cell above, which is my total number of pages, and I'm gonna say divided by 14, right?

'Cause that's exactly two weeks.

I'm gonna hit enter and it's gonna give me this number.

18.2857 so on and so on.

Now, that's a bit of a messy number, but don't worry.

We're not gonna have decimals over here in our page minimum.

So, we're gonna go back to this page minimum column and we're gonna use this cell.

We're gonna use this number.

So, in the very first cell, on day one, I'm gonna put in another formula, a very simple one.

I'm gonna put equals and I'm just gonna reference that cell, okay?

I'm just gonna reference that cell over here and I'm gonna hit enter, so now we've got that number over here.

But, you know what?

I hate how this is gonna look, right?

We don't want all of these decimal places.

I'm not gonna read like, you know, one-third of a page, of page 19 in this case.

Let's keep it nice and clean.

So, if I select this particular column here I can go up here and you can decrease the decimal places.

So, I'm gonna do this, it's not only gonna do it for the number that I have in there, but any future number, it's gonna remove the decimals as well.

So, on day one I just need to make sure that I've read about 18 pages.

Now, the only thing I have to do next, well, there's two quick steps.

I'm gonna go down to the second cell and we're gonna type in another formula.

We're gonna say equals, and we wanna start with the 18, right?

So, I'm gonna say equals this.

I could really either reference the one above or, actually, sorry, I have to reference this one because it's gonna follow it all the way down, so I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select this cell and then you need to select F4 on your computer and what you wanna do, is you wanna hit it two times so you get that dollar sign in front of the cell.

That means it's gonna follow that cell all the way down, because we're gonna start adding pages on top of one another.

I'm gonna select plus because we're gonna add something to it.

And what we're gonna add is this number over here, right?

We're gonna add our 18 number over here.

I'm gonna select this, but we also wanna hit F4 again.

This time we're gonna hit it just once, where we get that double dollar sign amongst the, in front of the cell and in between the cell so that we are always adding this number, all right?

So, we've got our dollar sign C2, plus dollar F dollar three and I'm gonna hit enter.

So, it looks pretty simple, and you know, you might be saying why did you put in that complicated formula, or for those who are more advanced in Excel, it's not a very complicated formula.

This is basically just doubling that, right?

And because there's decimal places that's why it's not exactly doubled.

It's 37 instead of 36, well, this is the reason why.

Now, just like we did with the day and the date field, I wanna come here, I wanna select this little dot and I'm gonna drag it all the way down to my last day.

And look at that!

It happens to add up precisely to 256 pages.

So, now, I can print off this little guide.

I could have a digital copy as well, but I like it as a bookmark, especially when I'm reading a physical book.

Now, as I go through, and let's say I get to this coming Sunday.

I can glance at my bookmark and say, I need to read to at least page 110 in order to stay on pace, in order to stay on track to reaching my goal.

If I'm behind, maybe I'll need to read a few extra chapters or a few extra pages.

If I'm ahead, well, who cares, right?

If I finish the book early that's great.

But I find this has been a very, very useful tool to make sure that I finish a book within a particular timeframe and, in many cases, just read a book faster.

Even if there's not a due date, even if I don't have to return it to my library.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope that you're getting in as much reading as you would like.

I credit a lot of my expertise and really a lot of the joy in this life to reading a variety of books.

I'd love to hear your input and your feedback on today's video and any other tips that you may have in enjoying reading more frequently.

Thank you so much for watching.

I hope you give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity Channel.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

You spend an awful lot of time on your phone.

Don't lie.

You probably don't go much more than 15 minutes before doing something with your mobile device.

So, doesn't it make sense that we should spend just a few minutes to optimize the arrangement of all of our apps on our home screen?

Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do just that.

I want to show you an easy, three-step method so that you can quickly and easily find the information and find the tools that you use the most.

So, let's dive in.

‍Step 1 Anchor Apps

All right.

So, here we are on the home screen of my phone.

The very first step that we want to take a look at is the bottom of our screen.

This is where you have the opportunity to anchor four, maybe five apps that will always remain visible at the bottom of your screen so that even if you swipe to another screen, to the left, to the right, those four or five apps will remain the same.

Now, when you first got your phone, they probably had a few defaults there.

Remember, you can always change those defaults.

You want to think of not only the most used apps but the ones that you want to conveniently access because most of us are accessing our apps with the thumb of the hand that we are holding the phone, and that makes it extra convenient with those apps at the bottom.

So, in my case, I've got both my phone app and my text messaging app. I've got email, maps, and a timer—a timer, which I use quite frequently. That's why I actually have it in the right corner. I'm right-handed. It's very easy for me to get to.

So, focus on what you want in that anchored area.

Step number two, let's take a look at rearranging the rest of the apps on our home screen.

Now, at first glance, you may notice that I don't have a single folder listed here at all.

Folders

The reason being is that I find that folders tend to be a very inefficient way of organizing your apps on your mobile device. It forces you to go in and out of a variety of different folders. And although it may seem to make sense to group all of your social media apps in the same folder, chances are, you use one or two of those social media apps much more frequently, much more often than everything else.

So, I think you'll be better off putting your most used apps on your home screen.

So, how have I organized my apps and how do I encourage you to do the same?

Well, starting from the bottom and working our way up, you can see that I've grouped things together in rows—or at least for the most part, they're either in rows or maybe in a squared group.

Rows

So, the first row we see here, I've got a variety of Google things, Google apps that I use frequently, Photos, Google Podcasts, and Chrome as my web browser, something that I use most frequently.

It's actually very easy to get to. It's central down low with my right thumb. So, I can easily access it.

The next row above it is sort of my notes, projects, my project management, and task list items. I've got a habit tracker, I've got Keep notes, and I've got Trello. So, I've got those three things grouped together as well.

Now when we go up to the next level, I sort of mixed a few different things together. Let's start on the right-hand side. Here you see I've got my three most frequently accessed social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Yes, I could have put them in a folder, but I want direct access to these tools. So, by grouping them together, it's very easy for me to find them on this list.

Left Hand Corner

Now on the left-hand side, I've created more of a square grouping, a two-by-two grouping.

Here you can see I've got a stretching app, I've got a timer app that I use when I am presenting, I've got Stocard, which is where I can place loyalty cards and that type of thing, and then I've got Guitar-Tuna.

Yes, I'm a musician, I'm a guitar player. So, every once in a while, I need to tune my guitar or maybe one of my children's guitars. So, I want to have access to that as well.

These four, I grouped together as functional tools. They have a purpose to them, but they're more functional. They're not related in that I would use them together or one after another, but I know exactly where to find them in that group of four.

Upper Right Hand Corner

Now continuing on to the upper right-hand corner, these are apps that I use less frequently than the ones down below. Remember that's by design because if you're using or touching your apps with your thumb most often, you want to put the most frequently used, the ones that you click on the most in the lower half.

Top Right Hand Corner

But up in the top right-hand corner, I've got both a banking app Tangerine, I've got a calculator side by side, and then I've got a few things related to weather, not just the Weather Network, but I've got my Nest thermostat, I've also got my Ring doorbell,

so some of my smart home technology. And then on the upper left-hand corner,

I've got the Play Store app.

Widgets

As you can see, I actually have space for two more apps here if I want, but I don't feel the need for that right now. The last thing that you'll see here on my home screen is that I've got a widget. That brings us to step number three. Don't forget to use widgets. If you have the capability of adding some additional functionality here, do so. You can see that I've got a calendar widget here in the bottom right-hand corner.

That's why I don't have a calendar app visible.

Using Widgets

I can click on this and go directly into my calendar app. I'm gonna jump back out here. I can scroll through my items, I can click on something in particular. For example, right now, yes, right now (laughs) I'm recording new videos. So, I can actually click on those items as well. Very, very convenient.

But I want to show you another great way to use widgets. If I scroll to my secondary screen, this is my primary home screen, this is secondary screen, I've got a few other apps, and yeah, I actually do have a couple of folders, but they are on my secondary screen. These are less frequently used apps.

You'll also notice that I have an email widget here. This is actually the Gmail widget for Android. What I love about this is that although I have my Gmail app available to me, it's anchored down below in that middle position, I find a much quicker way to browse my inbox is just a swipe.

Just a swipe over and I can glance, and then I can swipe it out of the way. I don't have to wait for the app to load. I don't have to click on anything. I find that swiping is much more efficient. I can quickly see things here.

And I can click either directly on one of those messages. I can also click on the little pencil icon and start composing a new message immediately from that screen.

Investigating Widgets

So, you might want to investigate widgets. In order to do so, at least on an Android device, you just need to click and hold on an empty space in most cases.

And then down below, you're gonna see an area called widgets. And if you click on that, depending on what types of apps you have installed, you'll have a variety of different widgets available to you.

You might want to experiment with them. You'll see here that they'll show you how many squares or how many spaces it will take up. Some of them will have a variety of widgets for you to choose from.

Summary

So, those are my three tips for optimizing your home screen.

Start with the anchored area, most likely at the bottom of your screen. Number two, when it comes to individual apps, I would encourage you to think beyond just folders but to group like-minded apps together, whether it's in rows or maybe in quadrants as in groups of fours.

And last but not least, don't forget widgets, whether it's this calendar widget as you see in this example or having a particular widget on another screen that you can quickly just swipe over and glance and then you can get back to whatever it is that you're doing.

I hope you enjoyed today's video and I'd love to hear your input on how you organize your apps on your mobile device. Be sure to leave me a comment down below. Thanks again for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

In a recent video, I asked you what would you like to see next here on the Simpletivity channel and I got an amazing response. One of those questions, one of those requests came from Zelphia, who says that they want to learn how to create a calendar task/event from info in an email. And many of you seem to agree because this received an awful lot of up votes.

So in today's video, that's exactly what we are going to tackle.

Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Dealing with email and your calendar, often, we are switching back and forth between a number of different tabs. And we often start out by receiving an email and we'd like to convert this into a calendar event. Perhaps we want to send a meeting request or just convert some of the information here into a task. Well in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do just that.

So let's start off with one of these emails, and these are fictitious of course, but hey, Scott, how does 3:00 pm on May 9th sound to you? I'm receiving an email from someone. They're suggesting a date or maybe I want to suggest a date, whatever the case may be. How can I quickly and easily create an event in my calendar?

Well the feature wish has been around for quite some time, but it seems to get hidden, is right up here. These three little dots. You may be more familiar with things like archive, and delete sending things to the trash, even the new snooze button, or the more recent snooze button, but all the way over here these three dots, we have some more options available to us. And one of them is to create an event.

So right from within the email, if I select create an event, what it's going to do is actually open up another tab. I'm gonna show you an alternative method, but this one is gonna open up another tab, and it's gonna do some great things for me.

As you can see, it's going to put the subject of that email here as the title of the event or the event name. And if I scroll down below, you'll see in the description, I have the email itself. Right here's the question, here's the person who sent it to me. So I have all that information at the ready.

Now this can be very helpful in some cases if the subject line or that information in the email is relevant, or in many cases, maybe you just want to scrap it and retitle it yourself, but many times I've received an email and the subject line made sense or was close enough that I could use it right here. I wouldn't have to do much editing.

But I'm gonna say, I'm just gonna call this something really simple. I'm gonna say meeting with Scott. I'm gonna change the title here.

But when it comes to the description, this can be quite helpful because at least it's a reference point for the person that you're inviting. It can be a reference point for yourself as well, in terms of why did you set up this meeting, and if there's an email thread, for example. If there's other pieces of information here.

Now by default, Gmail or Google Calendar will typically just pick the next available slot, like what's coming up in the next 30 minutes. So you will need to decide you know to change the more appropriate date, in this case, we're meeting on May ninth and we're gonna meet at three p.m. If it's an hour or if it's a half hour, you can change that here.

The other thing that you want to remember is that by default, by selecting create an event, it's going to automatically include the person or persons who sent the email. So this includes other people who may have been on the two line or in the CC line. You may have multiple people here.

So make sure to keep that in mind. If you are wanting to create a meeting with that individual, maybe it's just one of the three individuals on that email, or as I'll show you later, if you're creating a task, you'll want to take them off immediately. But it is going to come over here automatically. So that's great. That's one less thing for me to do.

I can hit save. It will prompt me do you want to send invitations? And this is I think a great prompt. I know it may be a little frustrating that you get this so frequently, but I think it's important, especially if you forgot, especially if you forgot that it added other people to this invitation, oh that's right, there's other people on that line there as yes so yes I am gonna say send.

That event is now created. Here it is on my calendar. And they will be sent an invitation as well.

But let's look at an alternative method.

So let's go back to our email here. I'm gonna go back to a different email this time. And here we've got big project with an early deadline. And this person says, let's set up a call so we can discuss this situation in more detail. Can you please send me an invite?

So we've already talked about creating an event here. We don't want to forget about the little sidebar menu here, on the right-hand side of your screen. And of course, calendar is one of those options.

So if you don't want to leave the comfort of Gmail. If you want to create an event directly without opening up a new tab, all we need to do here is click the calendar icon, and we're gonna expand this little mini menu here. And you can view this in a few different ways. You can view this in either the day view, as we're viewing now, or the scheduled view.

I don't have a whole lot here, but here's that meeting that we just created. I actually prefer the day view myself, but you can choose the default that's best for you.

So let's say I'm gonna set up another meeting on the ninth. In this case, all I have to do is select when I would like this meeting to take place. I'm gonna click right around the 11 o'clock mark. And now what it's going to do is that it's already brought in that subject line again.

We see similar behavior here. It's brought it automatically. I'm gonna leave that this time because that is maybe a little more relevant than the question that we saw in the previous example. The time is already what I want.

Remember I selected that on a previous screen. Now in this case, it doesn't bring over anything further in the description. So I'll have to add that myself. And under guests, it doesn't bring anyone else over either.

Now, again, this might actually be preferable to you depending on how you like to work. This is a little bit quicker in that it doesn't have to open up another tab, in some cases, but you can see we don't have all the same information that is brought over either.

So if I need to add another guest, then I would just need to click on that icon or click on this area and add this guest in this case. So let's do that. We've got the person there. And so now we can see that we've got both myself and that other individual.

I can do further editing if I want to open up another tab. But in this case, everything looks pretty good. I'm gonna hit save. And I'm gonna get the exact same prompt that we saw before.

And I'm gonna say yeah, let's save it, just send it over. This expanded calendar, this little mini calendar on the side will continue to stay visible, unless I hit the X, right. Unless I minimize this myself, which again you might like as you're dealing with your email and as you're adding other projects along the way.

It's a great tool to see just a quick snapshot of your day, again without having to go back and forth between tabs.

Now the two methods that I just showed you remember can also be used for tasks, because long-time subscribers of the Simpletivity channel probably know that I recommend using your calendar as a very, very effective to-do list.

So what we just did there can be replicated for tasks.

So let's take this first example again. This case, I'm gonna close the tab that we created later. If I say create an event, typically what I will do in this case, it's gonna bring over that information, and it's really this stuff down here, the description, right the body of the email that is what I want, but I'll convert it as an all-day event, is what I'll do. I'll convert it as an all-day event, and then I'll select which day I'd like to complete that task.

The one really important thing that you need to watch out for here if you are creating tasks in this way, is that remember it's gonna automatically bring those individuals over.

So I'm gonna have to remove that individual if I just want this to show up on my task list. But yes we're gonna leave that tab there. But there's another way that you can do this as well. It might be fairly obvious that I could go over here to my tasks pane, or my tasks view, and I could open it up, and I could just say add task, but let me minimize that for just a second.

Because if we go back to the little three dots, the little more options here, we also have add to tasks. So if you happen to be a Google Tasks user, you can select that option, and then what it's gonna do, it's gonna open this up once again, but let's see if I scroll down.

Here we go, here's the can we meet Thursday. So it's added it under my no dates.

Right, these are the things that are due or have been due in the past. But it's gonna bring it in here as a new task. The subject comes over, but I think the really valuable thing is that it creates a link, a direct link, to that email itself.

Right so if I go about my day, and I'm working away and I see whatever this task is and I've probably will rename it in something that's more actionable, I can always go back and click on this, and immediately here to my left, it's gonna bring up that original email.

So if I need to go back and retrieve an attachment, or find a link or something along those lines, then I can access it there as well. And remember you can always access your tasks and view your tasks within Google Calendar as well.

Thank you so much for watching today's video, and don't forget, if you'd like to see one of your questions answered, just let me know in the comments down below.

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

One of the most common questions I receive is, "Scott, what are the very best power-ups that I should be using with Trello?"

Well, one of the first questions that I ask in response is, "What exactly are you trying to do?"

And for many of you, you want to have some advanced reporting. For many of you, you want to be able to sync cards between different boards. And for many of you, you want to create sub-tasks or dependencies.

Well, often in the past, I've had to recommend several different power-ups to use, but today, I'm sharing with you one of the power-ups that I am recommending on almost a daily basis, and that is Placker, or more specifically, Projects by Placker.

In fact, Placker, I think, is perhaps the best all-in-one power-up.

So, let's dive in, and let me show you the features of Placker.

So, in today's example, I've got three different boards, creatively named TEST Board 1, TEST Board 2, and TEST Board 3.

And as you may notice, I have the exact same list across all three of these boards. You can envision these as maybe different teams or different departments or maybe just different people, right? They're all working on their own separate To-Do list.

But one of the things that we are often asked for, or wanting to do within Trello, is to be able to see things at a higher level. You know, you manage more than just one board. I'm almost assured of that.

How can you see multiple boards at a higher level?

Walkthrough

Well, by installing the Placker power-up, you can do just that. You can see here in the top right-hand corner, I've got three links to go directly to Placker Board, Placker Gantt, or the Placker Track view.

Let me just open up this Placker tab here, and I want to show you what things look like. Now, at first glance, you may say that this looks pretty much identical to TEST Board 1. It's the same cards, we have the labels, you can even see my face, which cards I'm assigned to here, but just wait for it because it gets so much better than this.

Yes, you could start managing your projects here within Placker. If I click on any one of these cards and I go over here to this preview pane on the right, I can change dates, I can add a checklist, I can do almost everything that I would regularly do within the Trello interface. But here's where things get really, really neat.

In the top left-hand corner, you see something that says Select Boards. Right now, I'm just viewing TEST Board 1, but what if I'd like to see how all of these boards are performing in a more concise view? Well, I'm gonna select this option, and I'm going to add TEST Board 2 and TEST Board 3. I'm gonna say Load Selected Boards, and now, what you will see is that I've got all three boards right here on the same page, right? So, I don't have to switch between tabs. I've got all three of my boards viewed in front of me.

But I think it gets better even yet, because you will notice that there is a combined boards setting. Remember, each of these boards has the exact same lists, To-Do, In Progress, and Complete. I'm gonna select Combine Boards, and look at this. Now, I've got everything in a concise, user-friendly single board. I've got all three of these boards condensed into one.

So, I can manage and move my cards around, I can change things here across three boards, but just in a single view. I love this, and many of my clients love it as well. That's why more and more of them are starting to use Placker.

Now, it gets better. On the right-hand side, you can see we can actually view this information in a few different layouts. So if I go over here and I just want to, you know, list it by member, I can select this option here, and I can quickly see just all of the things that are assigned to me right here, and the left-hand list is just all the things that are unassigned.

I can go down to, well, let's list it by label. Let's just filter everything else out by label. Of course, you can search and filter and do something similar within Trello, but not in this manner, right? Not by separate lists, not in the way that things are laid out here within Placker.

So, this feature alone, this ability to combine boards—let's go back to that default view for just a moment—I think is worth the subscription price to Placker alone, and I have more and more of my clients that are using it just for that reason.

Gantt View

But, let's keep moving on. Here, let's go to the Gantt view. And I know a lot of you prefer, or at least enjoy, having a Gantt view of your projects.

Now, this is just a sample project, so it may not make sense, all of the different tasks that I have laid out here, but you can see each one of these icons here or durations represent a task within Trello.

The great thing is, whatever you do here, it syncs automatically back to your original Trello board. Now, just for simplicity's sake, I'm actually going to remove two of these boards, just so I can go back and make sure that I'm interacting with the right tasks over here. So, I'm gonna remove those other two boards. We've just got TEST Board 1 here working, and let's look at Task 4.

Here, it's about to start, it's about to be finished around February 14th. Let's say there's a delay or something like that. So, Task 4, let's go back and make sure that it's synced up here. Task 4, February 14th, there you see it. But let's say I prefer this view, and I say, I really need to push that out. There's other things going on. I'm just gonna drag this out about a week from now. It's gonna be due right over here along the 22nd.

If I go back, Task 4, look at that. It's changed it automatically. February 22nd. An instant sync between the Gantt chart and my view here. Let's go one step further and say, you know, it's actually gonna take longer. It's gonna take more than a day. Let's set a duration, because that's what a Gantt chart is all about, right? Start time and end time.

Now, you're probably saying, well, you haven't changed the end time, Scott, so isn't it gonna just look the same within Trello? Well, you're right, it's gonna still show February 22nd as the due date here, but if I click on the card, you're gonna see something special under the covers, and that is the start date is February 15th, and we still have our due date of the 22nd. It even tells me the duration, one week and one day.

I can edit that either here if I want to, or I can edit that here within the Placker interface. For those who are wanting start dates and end dates, Placker can do that for you as well.

Now, just before we go back to the normal Trello view, I wanna show you some other enhancements, some other features that Placker adds to the Trello interface. I don't want to miss out on the Track view. So, Track is the third view here within Placker, and here you have so many different ways of viewing and looking at your cards.

For example, here we've got sort of a summary of the end dates here, where they are in this workflow, when they are due, and which ones are overdue. If I click on this, I'm gonna see exactly which of those two cards are overdue. If I click on it again, just like we saw before, I can go in here and edit almost everything that I would normally see in Trello. In fact, more and more often, I find that clients are using Placker as a day-to-day tool.

They're going less and less within the Trello interface and more and more here within Placker, because there's just so much power. There are so many different views and graphs. This is just a sample of some of the graphs you can see here. Here, you see all of the different widgets, and there's even a Card burndown, for example, if you want to see where you should estimate and where you should track.

There are too many to cover in just today's video. But you can have a lot of fun just looking at the different graphs and the different ways that you can view your data here within Placker.

But I do want to jump back to Trello to show you some of the other things that get added here within the Trello interface. So, here, under Power-Ups, you will notice that Placker actually adds a few additional buttons, including mirroring and adding a dependency. So, in this case, mirroring, you can think of as syncing with another card.

I want to give this card sort of a unique name here. Let's just go Task 423 just so we can see this show up in a different board. So, Task 423 here, as we see within the Trello TEST 1 Board, does not appear in TEST Board 2 or TEST Board 3.

So, I want to open this up, select Mirror, because let's say I do want to sync this with my second board. I just need to select that board. I can select the list and where I want it to be, and I'm gonna say, Add Mirror. It may take just a few seconds, not very long, though, and you can see there's even a little link here, saying that I can show that card. I can click here and go directly to it. I can edit the mirror as well.

I'm not gonna click either of those. I just want to go directly over to board number two. Boom, there it is, Task 423. I've got a sync between those two. So, no matter what I do, either on this side on this board, or within my original Trello one board, I'm going to get a true sync between the two. You don't need to use another power-up just for syncing capability. You can do that here within Placker as well.

The other great thing is that you can also have it sync movements. So, if I move this from In Progress to Complete, another nice thing you'll see here is that it's gonna automatically check it off, because I've told Placker when anything moves to Complete, I want you to say that it's checked off.

Now, I haven't done anything. I haven't even visited Trello board number two. I'm gonna click on it, and guess what's in my Complete list. That's right, Task 423. If I move this all the way back to To-Do here in TEST Board number two, it's gonna uncheck it, right? We're not complete anymore, we're still in the To-Do phase.

Let's go back to TEST Board number one. Look what's waiting for me. A true sync with this card across multiple boards. The last one, which I'm not gonna get into in as great of detail, is the Add dependency. So, if you need to complete a particular card before something else, you can do so.

For example, here you see that this card actually has a dependency. Task number one needs to be finished before task number two. That seems to only make sense, right, one before two.

But let's see what that looks like on a different card. Task number six, I don't think has a dependency, so let's say I'm gonna click on Add a dependency. It can either be a predecessor or a successor. Let's say, well, let's add a predecessor in this case, and let's say task number five. Gotta do task number five before we accomplish task number six, so you can see that here. You can see that identified here within the Trello card. It's also identified within the Placker interface as well.

So, whether you want to create a true sync, create dependencies, or sub-tasks, or like I mentioned before, I think just combining boards, selecting multiple boards and seeing them in a single view, is one of the best features of Placker.

I would encourage you to check it out for yourself. They do have a free trial so you can test out all of the features I've shown you here to see if Placker is the right solution for you. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I look forward to your questions about Placker or about any other Trello power-ups.

Don't forget to leave me a comment down below and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

 Groups, labels, Google Contacts. What is it all about and why should you be using labels? Well in today's video I want to show how you can save time by creating groups within Google Contacts. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress

Why Use Groups

and when you create labels, formally known as groups within Google Contacts, you can save yourself so much time. If you have a team or particular group of people

that you contact on a regular basis, isn't it easy just to select one group here and then boom! All of their email addresses are input here on the to line. But this isn't the only place where you can use groups. You can use it in other Google applications as well.

Getting to Google Contacts

Now, let's get started by going back to Google Contacts. I want to show you two ways to get there because this is a question I get frequently.

Number one: If we go to the top right-hand corner, we have our Google Apps icon (the grid of dots). By clicking this, you should be able to find the Contacts icon. Now, if you don't see it up here, you may have to scroll down below. And let's not forget, you can drag these icons around. So, if you happen to find Contacts somewhere down below and want it in that top row, you can just drag it up and click it here.

But an even easier way to get into Google Contacts is to use a keyboard shortcut: simply type G C on your keyboard. This will immediately bring up Google Contacts—G for Google, C for Contacts.

Creating Labels

Alright, so let's talk about labels. You'll see labels over here on the left-hand side, and you can see that I've already created two labels: one from a Gmail example called "ABC Work Project," which includes four individuals, and another one called "Client Team," also with four individuals.

But let's start by creating a brand new label. You'll find this option at the bottom, indicated by a little plus sign. All you need to do is select a name for the label. I'm just going to keep it simple and name it "New Label," then click "Save."

Now, I've got my "New Label," but if I click on it, you'll notice that I don't have any contacts with this label yet. At this point, my only options are to either rename the label or delete it.

So, let's go back to my contacts. Let's say I want to select a few people to add to this new label. I'm just going to randomly select a few contacts—let's grab this one here and then select these three in a row as an example.

Applying Labels

So I've got these three selected and what I can do is I can come up here to the top

and when I click on manage labels, all I need to do is select the one that I want to apply it to so I'm gonna select New Label. Alright the check mark is there and I'm gonna select apply and now if we come over here you can see the New Label,

when I hover over it, I see these two icons but if I come over here you'll see there's a number three beside it. That's because, that's right, I've got those three people. They are now part of this group.

So when I use the New Label in Gmail and some other applications, all three of these individuals will be attached to it. Now it's very easy to remove people from a label as well. Very much similar as we did before.

If we check it, we can come up here and we can remove them from the label. I can uncheck such as that, apply, and now that person is no longer here.

Adding People to Labels

Now, Google actually gives you an additional way to add people to labels as well

and that would be if I grab someone like this, and I drag them into the label. You see that that is now gone from four to five because I've dragged that individual into this Client Team so you can drag people into labels as well.

And remember, you can change these and edit these at any time that you want.

If your Work Team changes over time, someone leaves the company, someone joins your team, you can change that on the fly. You don't have to change the name at all

and that's going to apply everywhere else.

Using Labels in Google Calendar

Now I've already shown you how you can use this in Gmail, right, you can just search.

You can just start typing just like you would any other name, any other contact name and that label should appear. But that's not the only place you need to go. There are other advantages of using such a label.

If we go into Google Calendar, we can also take advantage of Google Contacts. So let's say I want to invite the entire team to a new meeting. Let me just call this New Meeting 1. Give it a real simple name there.

I'm gonna select on more options and you're probably familiar with the add guests area. This is where you would typically start typing in the name or the email address of everyone that you want to attend. Well in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start typing in the name of, there's my Client Team that I want to add to this. So there it is. It appears in this quick search.

I'm gonna select it and immediately I have all the members of my client team. All five members are now added to this invitation. Another tip that I like to share is that even if you are not always needing the entire team but maybe you need just three out of the five or four out of the five, it's often quicker to add the team and then now, I can select remove for the particular individuals that I don't want to attend this particular meeting.

It's a lot faster then me trying to type in four separate email addresses, right, one at a time. Might as well just add the whole team and then quickly remove that particular person. So, now I've got those people here. I can send this meeting off and invite the whole group.

Using Labels in Google Drive

Another place where you can make use of labels and groups within Google Contacts is within Drive as well and probably the most typical example is when you're sharing information.

So let's say I want to share this JPEG file here. I've got it selected. I'm gonna come up here and go to share. That will bring up the share with others dialog and here again, we are recommended to enter in a name or an email address, but when it comes to names, we can use our labels. Here I'm gonna type in ABC for my ABC Work Project. It even tells me how many contacts are in there. I can select it

and now all four are input here into this screen. I can hit send and share it with everyone immediately. Now, keep in mind, in my examples, I've only used a few small groups, right? Of only about four or five individuals.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no limit on the number of contacts you can put inside a label. So if you have a much larger group or a much larger team you can do so, but please no spam.

Don't put a hundred or a few thousand. I don't see the purpose or why you would need to manage that. There's probably much better tools such as MailChimp

for example if you are using it for a newsletter or email marketing. On that note, I do know that there is a limit of 25,000 contacts that you can keep within the contacts for a single Google account.

You probably could put all 25,000 into a label, but I do not see why you would ever want to do so. As always, I'd love to here from you next.

Which of the tips that I shared is most helpful to you and how do you plan to get more out of labels and creating groups here in Google Contacts? And as always, if you have other suggestions for future videos here on the Simpletivity channel, please let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to leave me a comment or a question down below.

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

Today's video is sponsored by Paymo. Paymo is the easy way to manage all of your projects and stay on top of your tasks.

Whether you work together as a team or perhaps you're a freelancer, Paymo has a task management solution for you. And they also have time tracking and time sheet reporting built right into the application, so you can always stay on top of all of your projects.

To find out more, see the link in the description below or visit PaymoApp.com.

When it comes to your work day, do you sometimes feel more like a firefighter putting out all of the fires and crises and emergencies that pop up during your day?

Well, in today's video we're gonna be talking about a weekly review, and how we can prevent these types of emergencies just by taking a little bit of time out of our week to not only plan ahead, but also look behind to make sure that we haven't forgotten anything.

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

And I honestly believe that the weekly review is the most important meeting that you will have all week.

Now you may have heard of a weekly review before. It was popularized in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, however, David Allen's weekly review included 11 things on a checklist, and I think 11 things sounds like overkill.

It's too many things. So today I wanna give you an easy four-part checklist so you can have a very effective weekly review.

And you know what? I wanna remind you that if you're not the only one participating in this, it's simply not a weekly review. I think you deserve as little as 30 minutes a week just for yourself so you can set yourself up for success.

Mind Dump

So let's take a look at the checklist.

First off, you're gonna want to reserve a minimum of 30 minutes each week for your weekly review.

Now you can reserve a little bit of extra time if you'd like, but I think you can have a very effective weekly review in as little as 30 minutes.

Now at the end of today's video I'm gonna answer some frequently asked questions including when you should hold your weekly review, but let's dive into the checklist itself.

The very first thing I suggest is that you start with a five minute mind dump.

Now if you're not familiar with that term mind dump, sometimes it's referred to as a mind sweep or just think of it as a brainstorming session.

But this is your opportunity to get all of those ideas, all of those concerns, and all of those thoughts out of your head.

So you can either take out a blank piece of paper. You can use a whiteboard or a chalkboard, or you can take out your favorite note taking app, such as Google Keep or perhaps Evernote, and just write down all the things that are on your mind right now.

Now I suggest that you use a timer as a part of this process, because you might end up spending a lot more time than five minutes, in fact you might spend the entire 30 minutes just dumping everything out, but set a timer for about five minutes, and in most cases, the most urgent or the most pressing items will be the first things that come to mind.

You wanna make sure that you capture those ideas so that you can have a clear head as you go through the rest of the process.

Calendar Review

Now the next step I recommend you engage with is reviewing your calendar for the past week.

Now, what I do as a part of my review is that I will open up my calendar and literally take my mouse cursor and hover over top of every single event or appointment that I've had in the past week, and this is just a very brief mental jog of all of the things that I've been engaged with.

I'll hover over something and say, okay, I met with Lucy and we talked about that project. I met with the team and we talked about this.

But you know what? The real value in this is that without fail, there's at least one thing that I come across and I'll say to myself, you know what? I've forgotten to follow up with so and so about this item.

Or, you know what, I promised so and so that I would give them a call back 48 hours after the meeting.

This allows me to not forget those things in the past, but now I can do something about them.

I can add them to my to do list or I can add them to my project management tool, and in some cases I can do them as a part of my weekly review if it's something very, very quick, otherwise I'll add it to the appropriate area and do it later in the day.

But this often takes as little as two minutes just to review my last seven days or perhaps my last five business days just to make sure I have not forgotten anything in the past.

Future Review

After we're done looking in the past we wanna look into the future, and I recommend that you review your calendar for the next coming two weeks.

Now you can review further than just the next 14 days, but I recommend two weeks at a bare minimum.

This gives you enough time so that you can prevent those surprises and prevent walking into the office or opening up your laptop and saying, oh my goodness, was that today or is that meeting happening this morning?

That's exactly what you don't want happening next week or even tomorrow.

So as a part of your weekly review, just like we did in step two, we wanna take that cursor or just take your finger and just do a mental jog of every single commitment or meeting or event that you have on your calendar, make sure that you can prepare in advance.

Do you need to send a reminder to others about an upcoming meeting?

Do you need to prepare some travel time for perhaps a meeting or location that you're not familiar with?

Do you need to rearrange a meeting because you've double-booked yourself sometime in the next two weeks?

This relieves me of so much stress as I take again just a few minutes to look ahead and make sure I can either clear my calendar or adjust my calendar appropriately.

Now the last and final step in the weekly review checklist is to open up your project management tool or maybe you have some other place where you keep track of all of your goals, and you want to review all of the deadlines and all of your key commitments.

This is an opportunity not to actually do things or to get the work done, but just to review the status of everything within those projects.

Do you need to negotiate a new deadline depending on where you're at with that project or how other projects are going to affect your work?

Do you need to give people a status update of where things are at?

Whatever you need to do, this is an ideal time to get that high level view of all of your projects and key commitments.

When

Alright, so now some of the common questions that come up with a weekly review, I would say one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is when is the best time to perform a weekly review?

Which is the best day of the week and what's the best time of day?

Now, I typically recommend starting out and doing your weekly review on a Friday morning.

Not just because that's when I do my weekly review but for most of us, Friday is the last day of the work week, it's our last day before the weekend, and on top of that, we wanna do it early enough so that if we come across something that is urgent or that is very, very important, we've still given ourselves enough time to do something about it before the weekend, or before others leave work for the weekend as well.

It also makes it nice and clean when you're reviewing your calendar for the last week, you're basically just looking from Monday through Friday.

You're doing a mental jog of something that's still fairly recent. You're not going so far back in time or over a hump like a weekend. You can go back and review and remember what was going on in those meetings and events.

Now when it comes to looking forward, another nice thing of having your weekly review on a Friday is it sets you up fresh for Monday morning, and I know a lot of us sort of struggle with Monday morning and what's going on. We're thrown back into the whirlwind.

Well, the nice thing about doing your weekly review on Friday, you can set yourself up for a great start, and no surprises, remember, you're gonna look ahead at both Monday and Tuesday, see if there's anything really significant or big and scary, and make adjustments or plan ahead accordingly.

Now of course you can pick any day or time of the week that works best for you.

In fact, I'd love to hear from you if you're already performing a weekly review, when do you perform it? When do you schedule it into your calendar? And do you actually add it as a real event?

That would be my last tip for you is make sure you actually include this on your calendar.

If you don't add it, if you don't give it the priority it deserves, it simply won't happen.

So I wish you all the best as you perform your weekly review.

I want you to be so much more productive within Gmail, and I'm gonna show you how to do that by introducing you to some new Gmail extensions. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity,

Scott Friesen

helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress.

And today I want to show you some extensions, some Gmail add-ons from CloudHQ. Now CloudHQ actually has nearly 40 different Gmail extensions to help you be more productive,

Vbut I want to share with you three of my favorites, and we're gonna get things started with Gmail Tabs.

Gmail Tabs

Here at the top of the screen you will see that I have a few different labels.

These are called Gmail Tabs, and once you have the extension installed, the first one you're gonna see is your default, your inbox, but you can now add additional tabs at the top of your inbox.

So a few weeks ago I showed you a very simple Gmail workflow using a couple of labels that I have here: Action Required and Waiting for Response.

But you'll probably recognize if you're a Gmail user that after you have about five or so labels, this can get really difficult to manage here. You're scrolling up and down, and you may even have some that are hidden down below. Where do you go to find those labels?

Well, why not have the ones that you use most frequently at your fingertips at the top of the screen?

If I select Action Required, it's just going to immediately go to all of those emails there. If I want to select Waiting for Response, it's immediately gonna show me any of the emails with that particular label.

So how do you use it?

Well, let's say I want this Completed label to be up top here as well. All I need to do is select these little three dots, which gives me some more options.

And once you have the extension installed, you'll see this little CloudHQ menu addition. In this case, I'm gonna select Add to Tabs, including Sublabels, and you can see immediately, I now have it at the top of my screen. I can click on it, and all of my emails that have that particular label will appear.

Now on the right-hand side, there's an Edit Tab function. If I want to clean things up, I can remove that asterisk. The only reason I added that asterisk is that I wanted this to sort at the top of my labels because I knew how difficult it was to manage labels over here.

So I'm gonna remove that asterisk. I'm gonna hit Save. Now it's a lot cleaner, and you can also rearrange these as well, right? I can rearrange the order of my tabs. So let's drag it.

I want to drag that all the way to the end. Let's move it over there. There we go.

So I can drag things around if I want to, hit Done, and now I've got my tabs here at the top.

But let me click over to the inbox for one more second. I want to show you an additional way to add a tab here because you don't have to have an existing label.

You don't have to use labels at all if you don't want to. I'm gonna type in BestBuy here in the search bar because I know I've got a bunch of emails here by BestBuy, and let's say this is something that I'd like to review or I'd like to take a look at on a regular basis.

Well, you'll notice I now have another option here called Add to Tabs. So I get to select that option, Add to Tabs, and immediately I've got this filter. So even if I get new BestBuy messages going forward, it's gonna show up underneath this tab.

And if I don't like the way that it looks there, let's go in here. I'm gonna hit Edit, and let's give it the proper capital B space, capital B, we'll hit Save, we're gonna hit Done.

So I've just immediately created this filter. It's not a particular label, but now I've added it to my tabs area.

So you might want to check out Gmail Tabs.

Alright, let's move on to extension number two. And this all has to do with saving time.

Gmail Snippets

when you are crafting a message within Gmail.

So here I am, I've opened up a brand new message, and I think perhaps the most common scenario for this particular add-on is gonna be when you're replying to someone, and think about some of the questions that you reply to very, very often, right? It's the same set of wording. It's the same sentences that you use time, and time again. Well, why not just save those phrases? Maybe you could even save an entire email, and then retrieve it with just a few clicks.

So at the bottom of the screen here, you'll see I have this little T-plus. That lets me know that I have Gmail Snippets installed, and all I have to do is select the backward slash on my keyboard, and it's gonna pop up this tiny menu here that is showing me all of these preloaded phrases, which either I've created, or the ones that we're looking at right now are some of the default ones. So I can either use my cursor, but probably what's easier is just to use the arrow keys, because I already typed something into my keyboard, and I can select this answer one, hit enter, boom, I've got that phrase right in there.

Let's hit backslash again, and I'm gonna say, thanks for using our app. Boom, there it is. Now those are two very, very short sentences. You can craft an entire email if you'd like to.

So let's go down to the settings here. I'm gonna click on this, and I'm gonna say you've got two options here. We can either create a new Snippet from this message. That's actually a really smart idea. If there's a particular email that you do quite frequently, or phrases that you use quite frequently, you can actually create it from the particular message. But let's select browse Snippets here, and here you can see all of the ones that we have installed so far, each has a shortcut itself, a name, and then the content itself. And of course you can always edit, and delete these ones as well.

I'm gonna select add just to show you how easy it is to add a new Snippet. Just gonna call this one Test. The name I'm gonna say Test as well, and I just gonna say this is a test Snippet from… Yup, CloudHQ. Alright, now remember again, you can add a lot more texts than just a single sentence. You can have paragraphs in here, you can have line spaces if you want, and at the bottom you can even add a few variables as well, including name, including email, or day of the week. I'll show you that in just a moment.

So I'm gonna save this one here. You can see that it's been added here to this list, and if you get a really long list, you can even search for all of your Snippets here as well. I'm gonna hit done, and I'm go back to my emails. I'm gonna go down a line, I get to hit backslash again, and I don't see test in this menu, right? It's only gonna show you about six here in this first preview, but if I start typing in T, well now I just get the thanks with T, and hey, Test. There's my test one. So I can input that one immediately.

Let me show you this other one that has this day of the week built right into it. I'm gonna go back slash, and this one. Oh, what is the day of the… And yeah, that's right. And have a fantastic, it's blank here, because it's gonna be built into this functionality. If I hit a return, and have a fantastic Tuesday, and that's right, it is Tuesday today. So no matter what day of the week it is, it's going to automatically input that into this particular phrase.

So you might want to check out Snippets, especially if you want to save time replying, and writing those very, very lengthy emails.

Alright, I'm gonna close up this message for just a second, but we're gonna get back into that for our third, and final Gmail extension. And that has to do with email tracking. And I want you to think of how many times have you sent

Email Tracker

an important email, or maybe you've reached out to a particular client, and you just, you wish you'd know when they opened up that email, because when can you follow up with a phone call? When can you follow up with another email? When would be the ideal time to check back in with them? You want to know when they have read the email. I don't mean reply, but when have they read the email.

So let me type in an email address to a test account that we're gonna use here. And I'm just gonna call this a test tracking in this case, and I'm not even include a message, I don't need a message for this, because we just want to track when this person has actually read this particular email.

So down below you can see there's a little, it almost looks like a wifi signal, but this is the icon for email tracking options. So if I click on this, I have a few different ways, a few different selections I can choose here, I can get it to automatically send me a reply, or send me an email if this person doesn't reply in a couple of days. But really what I'm after here is this, send me an email upon open. When they open it, I want to be notified of it. And then there's a few other options you can choose from here as well, including send me a text message, and get a text alert if you want. But I'm just gonna keep this one selected. Send me an email when this person opens this particular email.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go right ahead. I can get a select send. Alright, so just sends the email like a normal email. And then what we're gonna do is I'm gonna switch over to this, to that test account here. And of course, email is not always instantaneous, but let's see if I can… There it is. There's that email. This is this test tracking email. So of course it's unread at this state, right? I haven't clicked on it yet. So I'm going to click on this message. Of course now it has been read.

Let's see what happens if we go back to our original account. So let's go back to our Gmail account, and it may take a few seconds. I mean it may take up to a minute, or so. I might just, I'm gonna refresh my inbox here to see how quickly it's gonna actually come back, and notify me that that particular message has been read.

Alright, so there it is. Here at the top of my email, I've got an email from, it's given me a notification saying that this email address has just read, and here's the subject line. Now if I click on the message itself, it's gonna give me some more details. So and so has read your email less than a minute after it was sent. So it's gonna tell me how long it actually sat in their inbox before they read it. It's gonna give me details sent on read on location, if it can give it to me, and it's even gonna give me a small preview of the message down below. So if I'm curious like what? Like which email was that? What was that email about? It's gonna let me know here down below as well.

So regardless if this is a sales conversation, if you need to follow up with confirming a particular date, maybe now that you know that they've read it, you're gonna follow up with a different message. Are you gonna give them a phone call an hour from now?

So if you want a very useful, and free email tracking tool, you might want to check out the tracking tool from CloudHQ. I'll be sure to include a link to all of these tools so you can try them out yourself.

And I'd love to hear from you next. Which of these three are you most excited about? Which of these three are gonna be most helpful to your workday, or most helpful to your business? Be sure to let me know down in the comments below.

I want to thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Please give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment, or a question down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

If you're not using the Trello mobile app as a part of your project management experience, you may be missing out. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And in today's video I'm gonna show you a number of tips so you can get really, really comfortable

with the mobile version of Trello.

Create a New Board

And we're gonna get things started off with remembering that we can create new boards directly here from within the app.

Now, I realize that most people do not start their journey with Trello in the mobile version. There's a good chance that you first signed up and use much of the Trello services and features from a desktop computer.

But when you need to start a new board, don't forget that you've got this green button here in the lower right-hand corner.

When you're viewing your boards, when you're in the default view here on the main page, you can select that green button and start by creating a new board. I'm just gonna call this one New Board 2 Sample there. I can select and I can assign it to a particular team if I want, or I can just say No Team and select Create. And there we go. We've got a brand-new board.

So when I've got a new project or I want to dump some notes into Trello, often I'll start off with a fresh board depending on what that project will entail.

Now, that brings me to my second tip here and that is the importance of selecting an appropriate background, and also starring our boards as well.

Let's start with by picking an appropriate background. As I scroll through my large collection of boards and you might have a large collection of boards as well, it's important that you pick either a color or a distinctive image so that you can easily access this.

So if I go back to this new board which I just created, I've got the default Trello blue here. But you know what, very quickly I'm gonna be adding a number of lists and a large number of cards. The blue background isn't going to matter so much.

But on this screen, it is going to matter when I want to go and find it.

Board Settings

So, when you're within your board in the top right-hand corner, we've got the three dots, which are gonna open up the menu, and about halfway down we want to select our board settings.

And here, about the fourth option down, we have background. So I'm gonna select Background and I can either choose a distinct color on the left, or I can select a stock photo. And in many cases I encourage people to select a stock photo.

Now, you can search for something up in the top right-hand corner. You can search for a particular image. In this example, I'm just gonna pick something. Now, this is kind of interesting here. What is this, jelly fish? I'm gonna select this jelly fish one here. And then I can go back. It will be applied here to my board.

Again, I'm probably not gonna see much of this image when I'm working on the board but when I come to the front here, it's gonna make it stand out a little bit more.

The second thing I want to encourage you to do is don't forget to star certain boards. When we go to our home screen here, here you can see I've got about seven boards that I've starred which essentially pins them to the top. So these are gonna be my most frequently used boards, the ones I want to be able to access all the time.

So when I open up this New Board 2 Sample, I'm gonna select Menu once again and just below Board settings we have Star board. I'm gonna select Star board and if we go back to the home screen, there you see New Board 2 Sample is now as a part of this collection.

So don't forget to star the boards that you need access to most quickly and picking a unique color or a unique image so that you can quickly and easily grab those boards. Just for example, you'll notice I've got a home improvement board here and the image I've chosen is a hand with a bunch of color swatches. It's pretty self-evident that that's a renovation or a home improvement board. I don't even have to look at the label anymore, I know which one I want to select.

Filtering Cards

All right, now let's go into another one of my sample boards here, and I want to give you a tip about searching and filtering cards on mobile because you can do the same things that you do on the desktop version here in mobile.

If I select the magnifying glass in the top portion of the screen, I can enter in a keyword, such as task, and now I can see all of the items that have task in their card title or somewhere within the card. It even helps me out by giving me a number to the left. So in this case it's telling me there are a total of three cards with the word task in them.

But you can also filter cards by other ways. One of the ways I'd like to do it is by member. So if I type in the at symbol here, in this case I'm the only one who is assigned to this board so I'm the only member that comes up. But if I had other members a part of this board, they would also come up as well and I can find them. So I'm gonna select myself in this case and I can see that there're seven assigned to me. Let me just hide my keyboard and I can scroll over. Now I'm only viewing the cards that are assigned to me.

So, I use this a lot filtering cards down so I can only focus on the things that I want to. Let me close that for a second or I should say cancel that particular filter.

The other one I use quite frequently is filtering by label. And to do that you want to enter in the number sign. And here everything, all of the labels that are applicable to this board are gonna be presented to me, and let's say I just want to look at urgent cards. I just want to work with urgent cards right now. I'm gonna select urgent. It's telling me that there's only five, I'm gonna hide my keyboard again, and now I am just dealing with those cards that have the urgent label attached.

So, beyond just a text search don't forget that you can also filter by members, you can also filter by labels. All right.

Attaching Images

Now, the next tip I want to show you is how to take a picture and attach it directly to a card.

Because let's be honest, our mobile phones tend to be more of a camera more so than anything else, and when you're away from the office, you're away from your desk, you still might want to take a picture or grab an image of something and put it within a Trello card.

So, I'm gonna open up an existing card. You can obviously add a picture to a new or an existing card. Once I'm within the card itself in the bottom right-hand corner we want to select the green button here.

And we're given two choices. We can either add a checklist at this point, or we can add an attachment. We want to select Attachment. And the very first option here is Take photo. We can do other things, such as attach a file from our phone, link it to things like Google Drive or another link, but in this case we want to say Take a photo.

I'm gonna select that option. It's gonna open up my camera. I'm just gonna pull back for a second, take a picture of my microphone, and Trello is gonna say hey, does this look okay or do you want to retry it? I'm gonna say that's fine. That's fine for this example. Let's say okay.

And now you can see it's attached that image directly to this card. If I want to tap on the attachment itself I can click on it and see a bit of a bigger image if I want. And if I have Card Covered Images enabled, you can see now that I'm in the board level view I can see that image on the front as well.

So don't forget that you can take pictures and add them directly to any card. It's quick and it's very, very simple.

Last but not least, I want to show you how to get information into Trello from another area of your phone, such as a web browser or maybe some other application that allows you to share information.

Sharing Cards

So let me just exit here for a second. I'm gonna open up my browser here. And let's say I've come across an article. I've come across a blog article and I'd like to reference this for later. I'd like to come back to this, so I'd like to add it to a particular Trello board.

Well, in the top right-hand corner of my browser, I've got three dots and it's gonna give me some other options. And the one that you're looking for is Share, whether it's a web browser or perhaps some other application. So here you see Share about halfway down. I'm gonna select that option and on my phone, it gives me a few different options. The first row are some of the people that I've texted with recently so maybe it assumes I want to share this with them. But I've got many other options down below including to share it via social media, Gmail, or a variety of other apps.

But the one we want of course is Add Card to Trello. I'm gonna select that option and what it's gonna do, it's gonna give me two choices here. It says well, first of all, which board do you want to add it to? And I want to add it to the one that we're in, my Scott's Tasks and Projects. And then the second dropdown is which list within that board do you want to add it to? And in this case I am going to say To Do.

And now, last but not least, I'm gonna select Create in the top right-hand corner. It's gonna bring me back to where I was, which is great, 'cause maybe I do want to read some of this article right now.

But let's go back to Trello and let's go back to that board, for example. And if I go to the bottom of my To Do list, there you will see that article, How to Find a Trustworthy VPN, and it's got the link there so I can click on the link and go directly to that webpage.

So yes, you can easily share and get information directly into a card, into a Trello board when you're browsing or doing other things within your mobile device. I hope you enjoyed today's tips on getting the most out of the Trello mobile app. But I'd love to hear from you next. What do you think? And how do you use the Trello app to be more productive? Be sure to leave your comments down below in the description.

I want to thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribed right here to the Simpletivity channel. Give this video a thumbs-up, and don't forget to leave me a question or a comment down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Let's get so much more out of using checklists within Google Keep. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Convert Notes to Checklists

And I know for many of you, using Google Keep is one of your preferred tools because it is so simple. It's quick and easy to get those ideas out of your head and put them in a place where you can review and you can organize them for later.

Well, in today's video, I want to show you how to get the most out of checklists here within Google Keep. And we're gonna start things off by taking a first note or an initial note, where maybe you're just writing down a bunch of things at a time, right. You're just a stream of consciousness. You're writing down a few ideas, just a few bullet points here and there.

And at some point you may be saying to yourself, you know what, I'd actually prefer if I could check these things off. Or if I could create a checklist. Uh oh, do I have to go back again? Do I have to close this one out or delete this note and start a new one by selecting new list?

No, no you certainly do not. Let's open up this initial one right here, and if we come down here, to the more options, the little three dots here, you can see that there's an option that says show check boxes. If I select this, it's going to instantly convert the notes that I have here into a checklist.

And so now I can start checking things off as I go down this list. I can revert them, I can bring them back. I can instantly change any text-based note into a checklist format.

Now if I change my mind, no worry, I simply go back here again down to the more, and I say hide check boxes. And now I'm just back to my regular text-based list. But if you're just quickly writing down a number of things and you want to quickly convert them into a checklist, don't forget, you can always do that. You can select show check boxes, and convert anything into a checkable list.

Start a New List

Now, the next thing I want to show you here is how to quickly start a new list.

Now I know it's already pretty quick if you just select new list here. It's gonna open up a new list for you to start with.

But let's say you're playing around, you're opening up this thing, you're opening up that thing, and suddenly it dawns on you, you know, I need a new list.

Well, there's actually a shortcut key on your computer, and that is L for list.

And if you select L on your keyboard, it's immediately going to open up a new note and the list mode is going to be enabled.

So let's say in this case, I want to start a shopping list.

I'm going to say I need to get some bread. I need to get some buns here. I need some fruit so I'm going to get some apples. And I'm going to get some bananas as well.

So I've got this list here but then it dawns on me, you know what, there's actually a few other things I need to get as well. Fish, let's get some fish and let's get some chicken.

You know what, I'd like to break these out into subcategories. You know it's something that a lot of us are needing or requesting that we can have sub-tasks within our task list or in our note-taking tool.

Well, Google Keep has you covered there as well.

In fact, it's even given you a helpful reminder here to indent, drag the items on your list, or use the shortcut control plus.

I'm just going to say got it to hide that for a second.

So in this case, I've got some things from a bakery, right?

So let me put in something, let's say bakery here. Let's say under this one, I'm going to put produce. Let's not forget the P.

And let's say down here I'm going to say meat.

So those are the different areas that I want to go in. But I still have just a single list.

Well, all I have to do is select this option here to the left of the checkbox and drag it over.

And not, oops I don't want to check it off, hit the checkbox there, I want to drag it over.

Now I've got a nice sub-list under bread.

I'm going to do the same thing for my fruit here, under produce. I'm going to put my fish and chicken, I'm going to nest it underneath meat.

So now you can have true sub-tasks or an indented checklist here within your Google Keep note.

And the great thing is that it will always keep it together.

Let's say that produce is first in my grocery store so I want to put it ahead of bread.

All I need to do is drag produce up to the top and it's going to keep everything that's nested within it together, right?

So it's not going to break things up. I can move meat here in front of bread. It's going to keep everything nice and together here.

Now, the way that the checkmark function works in this mode, if I check chicken, you can see chicken goes off, fish goes off, but if I check both of them it's still not going to check off the parent or the high-level checklist there.

This is only going to go away if I check this one off completely. However, I'm going to uncheck those for a second.

Let's say I have gotten these two items. All I need to do is select the top level and it's going to check everything off. Here you see that both fish and chicken were checked off.

So it does make it convenient in that respect as well so, play around with indenting your checklists here within Google Keep.

Don't forget the L shortcut on your keyboard if you want to start a brand new note, and of course, you can also convert your notes back and forth from a checklisted item, even if you want to go back to just a text-based item you can do so as well.

Well, I'd love to hear from you next.

What other tips or tricks would you like me to share here on the Simpletivity channel?

Be sure to let me know down in the comments.

I want to thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to Simpletivity.

Give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment or a question down below.

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

How to Share Drive Files with a Single Link

Do you need to share the same files or folder with a variety of different clients? Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do exactly that right here in Google Drive.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Today, I'm going to show you exactly how I use Google Drive for my own business, how I can just share one single link with a variety of clients and make sure that they're always getting the most recent or most up-to-date files.

But first, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, Icecream PDF Editor. If you're looking for an easy way to edit your PDF documents, you should try Icecream PDF Editor. It's 100% free and it will allow you to edit your text, edit your objects, and perhaps one of my favorite features is rearranging and managing multiple PDF pages. So, if you'd like to try Icecream PDF Editor for yourself, be sure to click the link in the description below.

So, let me show you exactly how I use Google Drive to share certain files and folders with my clients.

Example of Why Sharing Publicly is Valuable

First, let me give you my use case. I'm a speaker, and a big portion of my business involves speaking at conferences, giving keynotes, and delivering workshops. After I engage with an event planner or someone who has hired me, I want to share particular documents with them.

If we go back to Google Drive, I've got this folder called "Folder for Client Resources," and when I click on that, I've got a few things that I share with everyone who hires me. I've got things like my headshot, a few pictures that they might want to include in their marketing. I've got my bio, which will usually be included in a printout, handout, or on their website. And maybe a few different things that I include in the workshops themselves, such as exercises that they may need to have access to so that they can print them off in advance.

This collection of information needs to be shared with a wide variety of people, but it's not exactly private. I really don't care if you have access to this or if someone else stumbles upon it. There's nothing secure or private here, but I don't like including this information on my website because I'd rather not have someone just stumble upon that site and wonder what it is and what its purpose is. I also don't want to manage an extra webpage on my website. So, instead, I've created this folder here within Google Drive.

Opening the Share Settings for a Drive Folder

Here is the text with the sentences separated:

Now, if we go up here to the folder name, we can right click and select share.

Now, you might be familiar with this pop-up that comes here and probably you're used to entering in a name or an email address of the people that you want to share with.

And of course, I could do this as well.

I could just keep a long list, just keep adding people who need access to these files, but that's gonna be very tedious.

I'm gonna have to come in here each and every time, find the email address and in many cases, I'm dealing with just one individual and they want to be able to share this with other members of their team, so then they need to ask for additional access and that type of thing.

So, in this case, instead of entering any email addresses,

How to use a Drive Shareable Link

Here is the text with the sentences separated:

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click up here and say get the shareable link.

And what that's gonna do is that anyone with the link, this is the default option that comes up, anyone with the link can view.

So, it's generated a unique link here.

All I have to do is copy that link.

I can copy that link, I can hit done down below.

Now, again, you wanna make sure that it says only can view.

We're not giving people access to edit.

The default choice is view, so let's make sure that we continue with that option there.

But I've got my link now.

I've copied it already, I'm gonna say done.

And then just to show you what the guest or what my client will receive, let me open up a new incognito window here and I'm gonna paste that link in the window, in the URL.

This is exactly what they will see on their end when they click on the link, they're gonna have access to these files and they can open them up, they can click on my bio, they can download it, they can print it out if they want.

Of course, they can't edit it, they can download my pictures.

Here are all the resources that I need.

And remember, I've just got the one link.

This is just the one link available here.

I just need to remember or copy this link and use it multiple times pretty much as how long.

Managing a Publicly Shared Folder in Drive

Here is the text with the sentences separated:

I would like to, for the next coming years, if I want to.

Now, the great thing is that whatever I do within this folder, it's going to automatically update and anyone who has access to this is gonna have the latest information.

For example, maybe I no longer want this file, for example, available.

I'm just gonna hit delete on that.

I'm gonna put that in the trash can and maybe in the future, I'm gonna update my headshot.

So, I don't have to go out and email a variety of people and say, by the way, could you please now use my updated headshot or can you put this in the program.

If they have this link that I've given to them in advance, they're always gonna have that updated information available.

4o

How to Share a Shareable Link in Email or Website

To them.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, Scott, I don't wanna share that big long nasty link.

That looks intimidating, it looks very ugly and yes, it is very, very long.

Well, no, I don't recommend that you share the link in its natural state either.

I'm gonna copy that link one more time, so when I'm dealing with a client, I might share it in the following way.

Here I am, I'm sending an email. Please use the link below to access my speaker resources and I'm just gonna call this Scott Freisen Folder, something like that.

All you need to do within Gmail or almost any other online editor is just highlight the text.

I'm gonna come down here to the bottom and select insert link and it's here that I'm gonna paste in that Google Drive link.

This is the folder that I'm gonna send them to.

I'm gonna hit okay and now I've got a nice clean looking link.

It looks straightforward, it tells them exactly what it is and when they click on this link, they can get all of my resources.

So, do you have a need for such an open shared folder?

Remember, I only recommend this for documents or for files that you really don't mind the rest of the world gaining access to.

Maybe there's a particular questionnaire that you send out to clients.

Maybe there's some other documents or data that you like to share and it's alright if other people have access to it, but they don't really need access to it, until they become a client or at some step in the relationship.

This is a great use for this type of shared folder within Google Drive.

Well, I'd love to hear from you next. What other tips would you like to learn how to do right here within Google Drive?

Be sure to tell me down below in the comments.

Thank you so much for watching today's video.

I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity Channel.

Give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to leave me a comment down below.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.