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Todoist remains the most popular task manager on both the Google Play Store and also the Apple App Store. But, over the last two years it has faced a strong competitor in TickTick.

So today I'm gonna go over some of my favorite features within TickTick, the ways that TickTick differentiates itself from Todoist in both the desktop and mobile versions.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and I'm doing today's video precisely because you asked for it. So I'm gonna start off by asking you another question, what app would you like me to review next? What's something that you are currently using, or maybe something that you are thinking of using that you'd like me to feature here on the Simpletivity channel? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Alright, so let's get things kicked off here within the desktop version of TickTick.

So TickTick has decided to choose sort of a three-column format for displaying its information, and you know, at first glance it looks very, very similar to Todoist. On the left-hand side we've got different filters, if we just want to look at today, the next seven days, or maybe our inbox as a whole. Down below we can take a look at all of our lists, and of course we can add tags and do some other fun features which I'll get to in just a moment.

In the middle of the screen we have the tasks themselves. So we can easily, quickly add new tasks, we can edit and check things off. But what I really like is the third and final column that as I'm selecting and clicking on these different tasks, I get to see all of the details here on the right-hand side.

So here you see I've got an attachment, I've got a comment I can see immediately. And for someone who makes heavy use of the description area here, this is something that I really, really like, that I can see that at a glance. So here you see I've got some subtasks. Well, I want to see that immediately, I don't want to have to dive deeper into this particular task.

The other thing that I really like is that you can easily convert a subtask or a checklist like we see here back and forth. In fact, this is how I started to enter in these sort of bullet point notes, and then I decided why don't I just make this sort of a subtask of this build a new website? And you can do that here just by selecting this option here, immediately go into subtask mode. And it doesn't have to be part of a project like in Todoist in order for you to have this functionality.

Of course as I'm checking things off here, I can see my progress on the front as well. But let's go back, let's go back to sort of the first column here, the menu here. Now, lists is pretty straightforward, this would be similar to projects within Todoist. But here's another feature that Todoist does not have, at least not as of yet, is that you can have folders for your lists, or folders for your projects.

Here you see I've got both a personal and a business folder, I've got a few different lists in here, and I can have different lists in personal. So if I want to add a new list I can give it a name, choose a color, and then I can say do I want it to be in a folder? It can stand alone if I want, I can put it in one of my existing folders or I can create a new folder and I think that's something that a lot of you might be looking forward to as you organize your various lists. I hear quite often people complain about all of the lists, all the various projects, and they have one huge line that they have to scroll through. TickTick makes it nice and easy for you to minimize that by creating folders together.

Tags, pretty straightforward here. I've just got a few examples here, so I've created an errand tag and an email tag, if you happen to follow the GTD philosophy tags can be a great use for that, so no matter where that project, no matter where this task may be attached to, to various projects, you could have multiple projects here, you can quickly and easily use tags to focus down into these particular tasks.

Now down near the very end I want to show you something really interesting here, as someone who uses the Pomodoro technique or a Pomodoro timer, TickTick actually has one built in. You see there's a 25-minute timer here and I can just hit the play button and it's gonna go. It's gonna do its thing, I can go and do my work. And as long as you allow TickTick to send you desktop notifications, you will get an alarm when this timer is finished.

Now let me just stop it here for a second cuz of course you don't have to stick with the 25-minute default, you can check on your own Pomo Timer settings here and they've actually got quite a few options here as to the types of breaks and durations and the different goals that you may have in a particular day. So I really like that, you don't have to go search for another timer, you can use the one that's built right in here.

Now the last thing I want to show you before we head on over to the desktop version, sorry, the mobile version of TickTick is that some of the features that are still a premium feature in Todoist come built in with the freemium version here within TickTick. Most notably are attachments, as you can see here, and comments, so you can easily add comments and add attachments to your tasks. This is not an advanced feature, this is part of the free or the basic version within TickTick.

So now let's transition and take a look at some of the mobile features and functionality within TickTick.

So just before I open the app here on my mobile device, I want to take a look at widgets, and you'll see that I've got one widget installed right here. That's a frequent question I get when it comes to new apps, does it have a widget so I can see relevant information before getting into the app? And TickTick actually has nine different widgets for you to choose from. So in this case I can actually activate and look at some things here within this widget. If I just want to see today, I can do that. If I want to click and see my inbox, I can do that as well. And of course if I just select the widget itself, it's gonna take me right into TickTick.

Now on this initial screen, it's really hard to differentiate a lot of to do list apps because a lot of them look very much the same. You've got a smaller screen, so in most cases you're gonna be viewing them in sort of this vertical format as we see here. But one of the things that I want to show off here is some of the swipe features for individual tasks. This isn't anything new, Todoist has some swipe features as well, right?

So if I swipe here to the right I can quickly check this off, instead of hitting the checkbox maybe I prefer swipe functionality, I can check it off there, but watch this. If I pull it over even more I can actually change the priority. If I let go at this point, maybe I can make this a high priority. I like how you can have dual functionality here. Remember, halfway across or a third of the way across complete, all the way over, and I can change its priority. I'm gonna change it to low.

Now that means I've got two other swipe features if I want to swipe in the other direction. So about a third of the way across I can change the due date, and I can move this to any of the presets or pick my own date as you see here. But again, I've got additional functionality. If I go all the way over I can choose to move this to another list, and here you see the folders that we saw in the desktop version and I can pick where I want to put that particular task.

So I know swipe functionality isn't for everyone, but as we keep progressing we want to make it easier and easier so we don't have to actually click on the task and get into that view, that we can do more of the functionality right here from the main screen. So that is certainly one of the features that I love here in the mobile version of TickTick.

And even things like what we see down here at the bottom, you can see there is the search functionality, the task list view, we've got sort of this calendar view here which is something that I particularly use most often is seeing my calendar in combination, or the days of the week with how I'm planning out my tasks. You can choose which of these buttons you want to see or not, in fact there's quite a few features, that's the tab bar feature here, in terms of turning on what you want to see. Once again you can see we can turn on that Pomodoro timer if we want, if we want to have that at the bottom of the screen. There's actually quite a few adjustments you can make for the mobile version. I know a lot of times I'm disappointed that the mobile version has very few options that we can tweak, but not so much with TickTick.

So there you have it, some of my favorite features within TickTick. Now I'd love to hear from you next. Are you currently a TickTick user or are you a Todoist user, and which one are you going to stick with? Or maybe you have a story to share, some additional functionality that you'd like to highlight and share with others. If so, please be sure to include it in the comments below.

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.

Finding the right time to meet with someone else can be so frustrating, all of the back and forth communication, finding an opening, finding the ideal time for you and others to meet.

Well in today's video I wanna share with you five of my favorite meeting schedulers to help make booking your next meeting so much easier.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today I'm handing out a few awards in the following five categories, we're gonna look at everything from best public meeting scheduler, to best Gmail plugin, all the way to something extra special that uses artificial intelligence.

Public Meeting Scheduler

But let's get things kicked off right now, and we're gonna start with Calendly, my pick for the best public meeting scheduler.

So what exactly do I mean by that? Well I think the graphic that Calendly has on its homepage is very fitting. This is exactly what we're trying to avoid, all of this back and forth. Can you meet at this time? No, how about this? No, that doesn't work for me. Well, I can't meet on this date. Back and forth and back and forth it goes.

So what does Calendly do? Well, it does a number of things but what I think Calendly does best is it allows you to set up a few simple rules, you tell Calendly when you are available and it will allow you to share that time, either via link, via embedding it into your website. And that probably where you've seen or even used Calendly before, is where you've gone to someone's website and they say, "Yeah, I'd love to talk, want to set up a meeting with me, just click this link and I'll share with you my availability."

And of course, the great thing with this tool, and many of the others that we're looking at today, is that it will adjust the time zone accordingly. It doesn't matter where the other person is in the world, they can view it in their own local time zone. So this is ideal for coaches, this is ideal if you want to start a conversation. Maybe this is the first part of your sales funnel, and you want to allow people to book their own time. Again, dependent on your own rules. You tell it what hours or what days of the week that you would like to be available and Calendly makes it so much easier.

But maybe you need something with a few more features. Let's take a look next at Doodle, and Doodle, I'm gonna give the award for best group meeting scheduler.

You can see what I mean right here from this opening image on the Doodle website. Here you can see a variety of people have had the opportunity to vote for the days of the weeks or the times they would like to schedule a meeting together, and Doodle helps you find that out and then book the meeting for you. So this is ideal for those of you who maybe are working with a small team, whether you want to use this internally, or you can do it with other members externally, as well. If you want to give a variety of people an option to vote or select the ideal time.

So again, I think Doodle is best when you're working with multiple people, right, these are meetings with more than just the two of you, more than just yourself and one other person that you can allow them to schedule things and communicate that across multiple individuals.

Alright, next on my list is something I use personally, each and every day, and in fact, I would say that Assistant.to has become a pretty strategic, a pretty central component of my own business. And I'm gonna give Assistant.to the award for best Gmail plugin.

Now it is only for Gmail at this point in time, but the great thing is that it's free. And I don't just mean free to try, I mean absolutely free.

So how does Assistant.to work? Well as you can see from this screenshot here, in each and every one of your emails, once you install the Assistant plugin you're gonna see this little icon in the bottom right-hand corner of every email that you compose. And if you'd like to give the recipient some options as to when you can meet, you just simply select this little icon, and it's gonna allow you to pick the days of the week, the times that you would possibly like to meet with that individual.

And as you can see here, now this is just an example, there's quite a few times here in this three-day stretch, you can pick as many or as few as you like, and then the user receives this in their email and all they have to do is select which one that works for them. And that's the final step, it immediately books a meeting on your calendar and also their calendar. The only thing you have to do next is show up for the meeting.

You can include meeting details and just like we've seen before with Doodle and Calendly, you can view this in your own time zone, so it makes it very easy, very convenient for the user. One last thing I'll point out here with Assistant.to is that if none of these times work they can either say, show more times or say none of these times work, and offer their own suggestions. So they don't even have to have Assistant.to installed or be a user it can provide you with additional suggestions.

This has been again, very crucial for my own business, it's something that I use on a daily basis. Ideal for one-on-one meetings, although it can be used with multiple users, as well.

Now, maybe you need something a little more full-featured

Cutie Scheduling

than what we've seen so far, so the next award I'm gonna hand out here is for the best scheduler that also has a variety of payment options.

And for that title, I have to give it to Acuity Scheduling. Now Acuity has many of the same features that we've seen already with Calendly and Doodle. A lot of these features, in terms of one-touch scheduling, and appointment, and reducing "the drudgery," as Acuity says here, of going back and forth between individuals, but I think where Acuity stands out a little bit more than its competitors is the variety of additional features that it has.

And one of them has to do with payments. In fact, you can see here that you can sell gift certificates, subscriptions, set up packages, and even memberships within the Acuity system. Now you can accept payments with some of the other tools that we've already seen including Calendly and Doodle, but Acuity just gives you so many more options.

So if you need a few more advanced options, it also gives you a little more customization as well, within the interface, so if you need to match your website, match your branding, etc., Acuity does a very good job for that as well. So if you're needing something a little more full-featured you might be looking at Acuity.

Xdot AI

Now last but not least, I've maybe saved something very special for the end here, and that is making use of artificial intelligence.

And you're going to remember this one because it's right in the domain name, X.ai. It might be one of the shortest domains you've ever come across, X.ai. And I'd have to agree with them, that scheduling does suck. But they've done something pretty unique to help you avoid meetings being such a distraction, and such a time suck as you go back and forth with your prospective attendees.

So X.ai is artificial intelligence, and one of the bonuses of X.ai is that you can use it across multiple areas, so not just in email but you can use it within Slack. You can use it on your web page, we've seen that before as well, and of course it syncs with your calendar as well. But I know a number of you are Slack users, and that's the nice thing is that this does integrate directly with Slack, as well.

So how does it work? I'm gonna click on this little link here because there's a really good example that I think explains how it works. So here's a trial, or sorry, a hypothetical email here, and you've got sort of a back and forth going on that yes I'd like to set up a meeting. Well what X.ai does is that it has two AI assistants here and the default one is Amy. You can see that it's bolded here. So Anita, in this example, is a real person, right? I'm chatting or this person is chatting with Anita. I'd like to set up a meeting, and at the end of the email, he CCs amy@x.ai and says, "Amy, please schedule a 20-minute phone call with Anita sometime next week, and title it this, I'll call her."

Now again, this is just bolded so you can see the key points you do not have to bold this in your email, you can just write it naturally, right. You can say schedule a meeting next Monday with Anita, you don't have to say what the title is, that's not necessary, but they've decided to include it here as well. And again, Anita, this is the real person, has no idea that Amy is actually just artificial intelligence, it's not this person's assistant or secretary, but it might make you look like you've got a secretary or an assistant even if you don't have so as well.

So let's go on to step two here. So on step two, the person replies and says, or this is sorry, this is Amy now, this is the AI saying, "Hi, Anita, happy to find a time for you, will this work? But you know, Tyrik is also available at this time, what's the best number for him to call you at?"

And in step three the real person, remember this is Anita, says, "Oh, Tuesday at 2:00 works for me and my number is this." The very next step, Amy the AI agent, creates the calendar for both of you.

So from this first email nothing else was done from the originator, right, from Tyrik in this example. Nothing else was done, he let Amy, his artificial intelligence assistant, take care of everything else.

So this is maybe you could say, a little more advanced but something worth trying out, something that might pique your interest if you want an assistant to help you out schedule your meetings.

Well with that I would love to hear from you, number one do you use a meeting scheduler, and if so did I leave something off of this list? Is there something else I should have included? Maybe there's a whole other category that I should have included in this roundup of my top five.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you give this video a big thumbs up. Be sure to subscribe right here to Simpletivity and be sure to leave me a comment down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

What you'll learn in this video

Can Google Calendar be used as an effective to-do list? Absolutely and in today's video, I'm gonna show you how.

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 how to set up Google Calendar to be a very effective to-do list.

I'm also gonna show you how to use this on the mobile version of Google Calendar and last but not least, I'm gonna cover the pros and cons of using Google Calendar as your to-do list but I think what you're gonna find out is that the pros far outweigh the cons.

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Let me show you three different ways on how you can set this up within your calendar.

How to use All Day Events as Tasks

The first one that we're looking at here is pretty basic and that is using the All-Day Events area to create new tasks.

So I'm just gonna create a simple sample task here. New task 1 and I'm just gonna hit save. It's going to appear here in my All Tasks area. I can see that I want to do this tomorrow on Tuesday, but I can quickly and easily drag it and move it to some other day.

What I love about this technique, about using it here on my calendar is I can see the relationship between this task and all of my tasks alongside my other appointments and where I need to be. So, for example, maybe I'm having a heavy day today. I'm not sure if I can get through all of these tasks and I'm saying to myself, "I don't want to really review this resume that I have to." I'd like to move that out to maybe Thursday or Friday. But then wait a minute, I'm actually interviewing someone on Wednesday. I can't push it out that far. Maybe I can put it out until Tuesday. I can see that relationship and make decisions based on that.

So, again, what we want to do is, using the all-day events area, simply click on that area and you can start adding a new task right away and whatever it is, it's going to appear in that all-day task area. And even if you think that you can't add all the same details as you would in another to-do list, well, hold on just a second. By hitting the edit button in any of these tasks, you can add not just a location, but of course, use this description area to add bullet points, to add an attachment. You can even change the color of this task if you want to highlight it in some other way.

How to use a separate calendar for tasks

That brings me to the second method that we can use for managing our tasks within the calendar, and that is creating a separate calendar just for your tasks.

So, here I've created one called "To-Do List." I'm going to enable that, and what you can see here is that I've added a few other tasks. For example, recording this new video, which I need to make sure happens Thursday morning. But here's another example that I have up above. It's labeled in this green shade or color, which I've selected, so I can separate out my tasks from everything else.

That's a second method if you want to keep your tasks on a separate calendar. Google Calendar makes this very easy to do. All you need to do is click "Add New Calendar," and then you can add as many calendars as you want. Of course, you can toggle through those calendars on the left-hand side to view or hide them as needed.

How to use Google Calendar Tasks feature

Now, the third way to implement a to-do list within Google Calendar is to use the built-in Tasks function.

You'll notice on the right-hand side of Google Calendar, there's a Tasks feature where you can create tasks and check them off directly from this side menu. To see these tasks on your calendar, just enable Tasks on the left-hand side.

For example, you might have a few tasks aligned with your week that appear on your calendar. If you drag a task to a different day, it will reflect the change on the right side as well. However, be aware that on the mobile version of Google Calendar, tasks do not integrate directly. You'll need to manage them within the Google Tasks app. So, keep this in mind when using the Tasks function across different devices.

How to use Reminders in Google Calendar

You may or may not like that as a part of your workflow.

Now one other thing that you can always add to enhance your to-do list here within Google Calendar is the reminders feature.

So I'm gonna enable the reminders feature and here you see I've got a couple that appear.

Now, what is the difference between reminders and tasks and the all day event tasks which we have created here?

Well, reminders will always carry over. So if I don't complete this particular reminder on Monday, it is going to carry over to Tuesday. I'm gonna have to address it eventually and check things off.

Reminders can be day specific or time specific, as you see down below here.

If you don't know how to create a reminder, let me show you how to do so.

If I wanna create a reminder here, let's say nine AM on Wednesday, all I need to do is click on that space and instead of starting to add the title of this event, I'm gonna first click reminder. You can see just below the title, event is the default selection, but I'm gonna select reminder.

So now, I can add in a new reminder here. I can just hit enter on my screen and there, I've got that reminder.

Now if I wanna change this reminder to an all day reminder, I can so so as well. All I need to do is select it, hit the Edit button, and now I can select the all day option.

Here you can see that that reminder now appears here at the top of my list.

Now, one caveat I'm gonna talk about a little bit later on in the video is one of the things that you need to watch for.

How to use to-do list on the mobile calendar app

Before I do that, let's jump to the mobile version of Google Calendar.

Alright, so here we are within Google Calendar on our mobile device.

As you can see, at the top of the screen, I have my all day tasks. Technically they're all day events, but I'm using them as tasks at the top of my screen.

What I love about this is that whether it's early in the morning or if I scroll all the way to the end of the day, those tasks always remain visible. They're always at the forefront.

If I scroll over here to the next day, you see I have a combination of tasks, appointments, and a couple of reminders as well.

So if you wanna add a new task within Google Calendar, we're gonna hit the plus button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and we're gonna select event because remember, we're using all day events.

So here, I'm just gonna call this one Task 2. The only thing you need to keep in mind at this point is that we wanna hit the all day toggle. Unless you want this task to appear at a specific time, you wanna select all day and hit save. Now that task will appear at the top of your screen.

Now if we wanna add a reminder, again, we're gonna start with that plus button but this time we're gonna select the reminder option.

Let me just type in a quick reminder. Let's call this one Reminder 3. If I wanted it at a specific time, I can select that here. I can select this to be at 8:30, for example, or I can hit the all day option and again, it will be all day as well.

Now, don't forget, you may need to hit the down arrow here to reveal all of your tasks. Now, this will stay sticky, meaning that the last time you've selected it or chosen that option, it's gonna remain that way.

So, here you can see I have a few reminders that I need to look at along with all of my tasks.

Now this is one of the, I guess, both pro and con of using reminders. Here you can see that it will never combine your all day events. We can see them listed out individually but you will notice here that it has combined my reminders. I've got two here. If I select it, I can now read and see those two, but you cannot, by default, expand those reminders.

Pros & Cons of using Google Calendar as a To-Do List

Lastly, I wanna cover some of the pros and cons of using Google Calendar as your to-do list.

Now I've already highlighted the pros of seeing your tasks up above and always having them stay in the forefront as you go about your day.

But one of the things that you wanna watch out for is that of course, these all day events which we are using as tasks will not roll over. At the end of today, these two green tasks will not roll over to Tuesday like this reminder will.

Now, this is a con, but in some ways, psychologically, it is also a pro. What I mean by that is that it forces you to engage with your calendar and specifically with your to-do list. Too many of us don't engage with our to-do list often enough and then after a day or two, we end up deferring a large number of tasks to the never next day.

Well in this case, this sort of forces you at the end of your workday or at the very end of your day to review what is leftover and have it move over. Drag it over to a more appropriate day where you can accomplish that task.

I hope you enjoyed today's overview of using Google Calendar as a to-do list and I would love to hear your experience as well. So be sure to leave me a comment down below.

Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to 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.

What is all the commotion about Notion and how do you create a template within the Notion application? Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you just that. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress,

Notion

and without question, Notion has gotten an awful lot of attention over the past year.

Now, if you haven't tried out Notion, I encourage you to do so. Notion advertises itself as being a bit of a, all in one productivity system, and here you can see I've opened up their template gallery. They've got a notes and document section here. They've got a knowledge base section here.

They also tote themselves as being an excellent project management tool, and even a light database, or spreadsheet tool, and I'm just sort of sifting through a couple of their examples here, which are all editable.

These are all templates, or you can start from scratch. Now I think Notion can be an excellent personal, or team note-taking tool. I also think it's gonna function as a fantastic knowledge base. I'm not exactly sold how great it is as a project management tool, or a light database, or a spreadsheet,

Templates

But today we're gonna take a look at how we can use it to create templates.

So let me get over to my team home screen here, and of course, one of the great things about Notion is that you can edit absolutely anything on your page. If I want to change the cover here, I'm just a click away. If I want to change the title of this team homepage, I can do so.

So here I've got a very, very simple template. I've got some basic information about the company here, and Notion works under the premise of subpages. I can always go back to the high level here. I've got an office calendar, actually a pretty powerful calendar here within Notion, but you always have this breadcrumb trail up at the top of the screen.

But what I want to focus on is a section I've created called "Meetings," and you can see here I've got a couple of meeting agendas for upcoming meetings. Let's say that I would like my team to follow a standard format.

So what I've created is a "Create a Meeting Agenda" button, and this is a template I'm gonna show you how to use. We're using the meeting agenda as our example, but you can create a template for absolutely anything within Notion. So let's quickly first take a look at this example.

Let's say I want people to create their own agenda and follow a few different guidelines immediately, right? I have a certain way that I want the team to conduct their meetings. I also want to give them a few reference tools as they're planning ahead. So with just a single click, it's going to create this meeting agenda here. Like I said, I've got some checklisted items—here are some things I want them to always do—and here they can quickly type in that we're going to talk about a new product at that meeting, and we're also going to talk about late payments from customers. Whatever it is. If I just hit enter, I get a nice new checklist here. I can keep adding to this meeting agenda.

You can edit almost anything in this list here. Maybe one of the first things I'll want my team to do is to add a date or maybe to add what we are talking about in this particular agenda. I'm just gonna add a date in this particular case.

But the other great thing is that you can have subpages within subpages. So here I've got a section called "Follow-Up." Perhaps as we're going through this particular meeting, right? As we're going through these agenda items, we've got some action items. Well, to keep it nice and clean and separate from this page, I can click on "Action Items," and you can list them out here. I can keep that on a separate page.

Let's go back to the meeting agenda. I've got another one called "Remaining Questions." Maybe there are some things that we don't have assigned, but we've got some questions from this meeting. I can keep that nice and clean and separate on another page.

Last but not least, you can add links to any page within Notion. Maybe for some new members of my team who aren't exactly sure why we're using this format, or how they can make their meetings more effective, I've got some live links here down below to some articles I think will be helpful to them.

Now if I go back to my team home, this is my top level. You can see here is the meeting agenda that we just created, so now the entire team can have access to it. I can share it. I can add more notes or add more details to this as well.

But how exactly did I create this template button? Well, let's do this together. I'm gonna use the "Operations" section here just for our example, and all you need to do is hit this plus button here. This plus button is going to allow you to add a variety of things, and if you haven't toyed with Notion, if you haven't tested it out, this may feel a little overwhelming, but this is the full list of all the types of content you can add to a Notion page.

Now we want to go all the way down to the bottom here, and select "Template Button." But just before I do so, I forgot something. I wanted to actually change the template for this new example, so I'm gonna go into this meeting agenda here because we had to use this as our template, and just so we can identify it easily, I'm going to call it "Template." There we go. Okay, so now we've got this. It's got all the action items, everything that I want to see here. The reason why I came in here is I wanted to remove a little date field that I had, and I didn't want that in my new template button or my template agenda.

So let's go back to the team home, and again we're gonna hit the plus button, and we're gonna scroll all the way down to this list, and select "Template Button." Now here, this may sound or look a little intimidating, but all you need to do is first, start off by selecting the button name. That's what I suggest. What are you going to do? And let's say we said "create" last time. Let's say "Add a Meeting Agenda" in this case. Where'd my cursor go? "Add Meeting Agenda." That's what we're gonna call this button.

And down below, what they'll usually do is input what was above, or in this case, they've just input like a to-do list. But we don't want that. So I'm gonna select this option here, the little six dots, and we can say "Delete." So now we've got a blank space here where we can drop in a block or drop in another page. So let's go all the way over here to the left-hand side, and under "Team Home," this is where I have my meeting agendas, and here you can see the templated one, right? This is the one that we just renamed. I'm just gonna click and drag, and I'm gonna drop it right here.

Okay, I'm gonna drop it right here. So when we click this button, we are going to create this meeting agenda. I can click anywhere that I want outside. Now, I could add more things if I wanted to. I'm gonna hit the close button here.

Okay, so now we've got this button. It's gonna function essentially the same as what we did here, but I just created this one so you could see how it was done. So when I select it, when I click this option, it's just like we saw before: here is this new meeting agenda template. And now I can come in here and say this is our "Sales Meeting for Q2," let's say that's what we're gonna call it. And again, I can go in and add the action items that I want, the things that we want to talk about. I can review some of the things here if I want to get some hints on how to run a more effective meeting.

And when I go back to the team home, there is my new meeting agenda, which I can reference, pull up, and use. And again, I can use this template over and over again. Make sure that other people within my team are using it.

And that's just one example. In this case, a meeting agenda example, but you could use this for a calendar. You could use it for a to-do list. If you want someone, you know, under "Office Health and Benefits," to submit a particular form, or to answer a certain set of questions, you could create a template button for that as well. This was just a sliver of some of the functionality here within Notion, but again, if you haven't tested or tried out Notion, I would encourage you to do so and explore. There are many different templates to help you get started.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next. Are you already a Notion user, and if so, what are you using Notion for? I would love to know how you are using Notion, and what you think Notion is best suited for. Be sure to leave your answer in the comments below.

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.

Oh my goodness, so many emails in my Inbox. How am I gonna get this under control? Well, in today's video I wanna show you a simple, yet very powerful and effective way to help you get all of your emails under control within Gmail.

Overview

Hello, everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today, I want to show you a technique using labels so you can easily identify which emails you should be dealing with right now. So let's get started.

On the left-hand side of my screen, you will see the labels area. We've got a few different folders—standard ones like Inbox, Snoozed, Sent, and Drafts—but you will notice I have three color-coded labels: Action Required, Complete, and Waiting for Response. This is really the key to this system—using a few particular labels to help you identify which emails you should be dealing with.

Sometimes, as we're perusing through our Inbox, we have a mix of both read and unread emails, and we're wondering, "Which ones do I need to reply to? Which ones have I dealt with already?" These labels are going to help us keep on track.

Now, two things I want to point out here. First, I'm not going to get into the details of how you create labels within Gmail. If you'd like to learn more, I'm going to leave a link to my video showing you everything you need to know about labels and filters within Gmail.

But here you will see that I've got an asterisk at the beginning of these labels. Now, this could be very important. The reason being is that we want these labels to show up at the top of our label list. We don't want them to get missed or lost, especially if you're using a large collection of labels or other labels as part of your email system.

Example

Let me just open up this email as an example.

So if I go up to the top and I select the labels, here you can see my three Action Required, Complete, and Waiting for Response are always gonna show up at the top, even though I've got a variety of other labels that I can apply down below.

Now, you don't have to use an asterisk, you could use a period, you could use some other special character or even add numbers, but I just like the asterisks because it sort of stands out and it looks like a bit of a star here.

So more on that in just a second.

The second thing you will notice is that I've added some particular colors. And this is important as well, because I wanna be able to easily see when I'm in my Inbox, when I see a variety of emails, which ones, which label is corresponding to these particular titles.

Alright, so here I am in an email, and let's just say for this example that I need to do something with this, maybe I need to go and shop here, maybe I need to ask someone about this.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up to my labels, and I'm gonna say Action Required, I'm gonna apply that label.

So now when I go back to my Inbox, it's very, very easy for me to see that I need to do something with this particular email.

Now, you don't have to go into every email to do this, sometimes when you're scanning you already know that okay maybe I need to do something with that, and I need to do something with that, and, oh, I need to do something with this as well.

Remember, you can always apply multiple labels at a time.

So now I've got all three of those labels, or sorry, the same label applied to three additional emails.

Now, you're probably thinking, okay, this is a little bit helpful, I can see these emails among my vast amount of additional emails here.

But it gets even better.

If I go over here to the left-hand side and select Action Required, now all I see are those four emails.

I know that these are my Action Required emails, so I can sort of hide my Inbox for a few minutes and just focus on the emails that I need to do.

Now, how do the other two labels come into play?

Well, let's start with Waiting for Response.

I'm gonna go back to my Inbox here.

And let's say this very first message here, I've actually forwarded it on to someone else, I'd like to get their input on it, so I'm asking them a question, "Do you agree with this article?"

Now, if I just leave it as is, this might get lost in the mix here.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to apply the Waiting for Response label.

Now there's one additional thing I wanna show you here, and that is you don't always have to be clicking the label here.

If you select L on your keyboard, that's going to immediately bring up the label list.

So I can select Waiting for Response, I've applied that label, I can go back to my Inbox, and now I can easily see that I am waiting for a reply on that email.

And just as we saw before, if I select Waiting for Response here, you might have a collection of seven, or 10, or maybe more emails that you're waiting for a reply.

You can quickly and easily see which of those emails should you maybe need to poke them again, give them another gentle reminder if they haven't answered you in a certain period of time.

And that L shortcut that I mentioned, that actually applies to your main Inbox view here as well.

So let's say I've got a few more that I'm waiting for, I'm gonna select just three here.

I've selected three, I'm gonna hit L on my keyboard, and, again, that's gonna immediately bring up my label, I can select Waiting for Response, and now I've applied it to multiple emails here.

Now, the last label that I've included in this system is called Complete.

And this may not necessarily, this may not be necessary for everyone, but if you don't have the habit of archiving your emails or moving them out of your Inbox, this may be helpful to you.

So let's say that I open up this one again, this one that said Action Required.

And let's say that I've done the action on this.

I've replied, or I've purchased, whatever it is, I'm gonna go back to my labels, I am gonna uncheck Action Required, and I'm gonna select Complete.

So now I've got my red Complete label.

When I go back to my Inbox, it's easy for me to see that that is done with.

I no longer need to open this up or come back to it, this particular email is complete.

Like I said, I generally recommend that you use the Archive function within your email, that's this little icon here, instead of the label, because archiving it is gonna take it right outside of your Inbox, so you don't have to see it here in your Inbox at all.

But I know everyone works a little bit differently, so you may prefer using the Complete label.

Now, just before we wrap up today's video, I wanna give you one additional tip that sometimes gets overlooked here within Gmail, and this feature has only been added within the last year, and that is the ability to snooze a message.

This is very powerful when you're trying to get your Inbox under control as well.

So let me open up this email here that doesn't have a label on it, and let's say that you know what, I need to do something with this or I'd like to review this email again, I just don't wanna deal with it now, and I don't want it clogging up my Inbox.

Well, what you can do is select this little clock icon, which is the Snooze icon, and when you select that, it has a few different defaults here, right?

I can say Snooze Later today, Tomorrow, Later this week, This weekend, Next weekend, or I can pick a particular time.

I can be very specific as to when I want it to come back.

Let's just say that I don't wanna deal with it today, so I'm gonna select Tomorrow.

I'm gonna select Tomorrow, it brings me back to my Inbox and that email is gone.

It's not here anymore, but it will return tomorrow.

It will return tomorrow, 'cause I told it to.

Gmail's gonna bring it back and I can deal with it then.

Now, if I wanna go and look at all of these emails that are snoozed, I can simply select that label here on the left-hand side, and I can quickly and easily see it, I can reply to it, I can do whatever I want with it here, even when it's in that snoozed state, but if I leave it alone, it's gonna come back to me tomorrow.

In fact, it's even telling me it has the date there in red, January 22nd, that is when it's gonna return to my Inbox.

I hope you found this video helpful.

I would love to know how do you better manage your emails, specifically your emails here within Gmail.

Be sure to let me know in the comments below.

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.

Google Keep is one of my favorite tools to help me stay on track. It's such an easy app to capture those quick notes, those ideas, all those things that bounce around

in your head each and everyday. Now here on the Simpletivity Channel, I usually focus most of my videos on the desktop version of Keep, but today I wanted to focus on five of my favorite mobile tips when using Google Keep. So, let's dive in, and we're gonna start with images. Now, you can add an image to an existing note,

Adding Images & Pictures

or you can even start off with an image. If you have an existing note, like this blank one that I'm starting, you can always hit the plus button down below and choose

take photo or choose image, but even when you're not within a note, in the the bottom right hand corner you have the little picture icon and again, you can choose to take a photo. I can grab a photo right here on my phone, or I can choose that option again, and choose an image, and in this case, it's gonna open up your gallery.

I'm gonna choose this one here, and now I've got my image ready to go. I can add multiple images if I want. They're always going to appear at the top of your note.

But that leads me to my second tip, or the second thing that I love to do on my mobile app, and that is annotating images, something that often gets overlooked.

Annotating Images

So if I click on the image itself, it's gonna open up a new screen, and you'll see in the top right-hand corner I've got a little paintbrush icon.

When I select that paintbrush icon, what I can do is start to make drawings, little swirly things on my image.

Now, I've got a few options down below. That was sort of the pen option. I've got one here that's more of a marker, and the one on the far right is like a highlighter option, but the great thing is that you've got a lot more options if you actually click and hold.

So, if I click and hold for a second on the pen, I can change the color of the pen. I can change the width of that pen. So, now I've got a red, it's slightly narrower than the one I had before, and you can do that with all of these options, including the highlighter.

If I hold on that for just a second, I'll just hold on that, it's gonna bring up more options down below.

Now, if I choose the eraser, one of the things that I like here is that I don't have to drag my finger across the screen, I can just select the different annotations that I want to erase, and in fact, if I hold down on the eraser option, I even have the choice to clear the canvas.

So if I had other annotations, let me just show you an example of that. If I draw here, if I draw there, if I go here and say, hold down on it, and say clear canvas, it's gonna get rid of absolutely everything.

The last one I wanted to show you here, let me just put a little red S on my image, is the selection tool.

So what this allows me to do is I can select that annotation, and I can drag it. It keeps the annotation, the exact size and color and everything, and I can put it where I want it to be.

So, actually a lot more options here when it comes to annotating your images than you may have already thought.

And of course, those annotations are going to save. You can even see it here on the front screen, on the preview screen. So you can keep those annotations. You can continue to edit them as you go.

Now let's stick with images for just one more second for my next tip, and that has to do with converting images into text.

Convert Image to Text

So, here I've got a note which is actually an image. It's something that I've captured from my website, but let's say I'd like to extract that text. Let's say you've taken a picture of a poster, or a label or anything with text. Again, we're gonna select the image itself. That's gonna bring up this view where we see the little paintbrush icon,

but this time we're gonna select those little three dots, and you can see our very first option here is to grab image text. If I select that option, almost immediately down

below it has grabbed all of the text in this image, and it's brought it into the note itself.

Now I can cut and paste this into an email, into a document, wherever I would like to use this text. Now, it's not always perfect. You can see down here, I've got like a capital S on the end of less, but the rest of it looks pretty good to me; it almost looks like it's got it almost perfect from what it is above. And sometimes it may even keep the layout, the spacing, so you might need to adjust that,

depending on sentence structure, but a great way to grab text, if you're taking a picture of something, you can immediately pull it into your note. Now the next tip I want to share with you has to do with a feature that I use quite a bit here on the mobile version. When I'm out running around, sometimes I want to take an audio note. That is often the quickest way that I can

Record & Transpose Audio

Get my thoughts and ideas into Google Keep, but I don't just want an audio recording, I want a transcript of what I had to say.

On the bottom right-hand corner, you can see that there is a microphone app. When you select that, immediately you can start recording what you are saying, and Google Keep will do its very best to convert your text into words so you can use them later.

Alright, so here you can see it immediately started to record everything that I just said, and it did a very, very good job of doing so, as well.

But what I love about this feature is that it is twofold. Not only has it converted my words into text so I can copy and paste this somewhere else, but it's actually also kept the audio file. You see there's a little play button there, so I can actually listen to it.

Now I really use this feature, but maybe you would like to use it. You know, maybe you're practicing a part, maybe you want to practice how you're delivering a speech or something like that. Maybe it's important that you get the different cadences and the volume for your recording.

So, what you can do is you can keep both the audio and the text itself.

Now, sometimes you don't need both. You'll see there's a little X button here. So, I can actually delete the voice recording. I can delete that but I've kept all of that good text which I can use later.

So, if you haven't tried it out, be sure to check out the recording audio notes feature.

Now, the very last tip I want to give you today with the mobile version of Keep has to do with reminders. Now you may be familiar with reminders already.

Time & Place Reminders

Let's see here, I've got a simple checklist.

Let's suppose that this is a grocery list here and so I want to remind myself to pick up those groceries before I run out of milk.

So, here in the top right-hand corner, you'll notice that there's a little bell icon. If I select that, I can select the exact time, maybe I'm gonna choose tomorrow during my lunch break, and I can choose if I want this reminder to repeat or not, which can be very, very helpful.

If I hit save, there you can see it's gonna show me when the reminder is set. I can still see that on the front of the note, and the additional bonus is that this will also appear on my Google Calendar. So, I can see this, I can even access this directly from Google Calendar.

But what I wanna do is I wanna show you the alternative way of setting a reminder which can be very powerful, and that is a location-based reminder.

So, at the top, you see by default time is selected, but I can select place. So, in this case, I can either enter in a specific address or a specific store or location.

So in this case, again, let's suppose that this is a grocery list, so I'm gonna select a local grocery store. It's gonna input the name but it's already saved that specific location that I just chose.

I'm gonna hit save, there I can see what that location is and how this is going to work is that when I'm in close proximity to that particular location, I'm gonna get a notification. I'm gonna get a reminder.

Now, I'm not exactly sure of the distance or the proximity, I'm not sure if it's a half mile, if it's a full mile, I'm not exactly sure what the proximity is, but when I'm nearby, it's gonna give me an alert telling me that, hey, maybe you should check this one off of your to-do list, or pick up these items because you're nearby.

So, something that can be really, really powerful. I mean, how many times have you driven past a store that you needed to get something from, but you just weren't thinking about it at that time. Now you can have Google Keep give you that reminder when you are walking or when you are driving by.

So, there you have it, my five favorite tips for the mobile version of Google Keep.

Now what I'd love to hear next is which one of these five were your favorites, or did I miss something completely. Do you have an additional tip that you would like to share with others? Be sure to leave your answers, and include your comments down below.

Thank you so much, everyone, for watching today's video. I hope you give this video a like, and if you haven't yet subscribed, be sure to do so. We release new videos each and every week.

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

How should you set up a brand new Trello board?

Well in today's video I'm gonna give you a seven-part checklist, the seven things that I do for almost each and every Trello board.

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

Today I thought I would take you through a full walk-through from a brand new board.

Here I've created a new board setup.

I haven't done anything with this board just yet and I want to walk you through the different steps that I take to set up a board, to not only set myself up for success but especially if I'm gonna be collaborating with others.

Changing the Trello Board Background

So let's dive in and start with something that you may be surprised with, and that is the board background.

Now of course the board background is so much more than just what you see here in the background, and you want something that represents the board that you're using.

But the reason why I think selecting an appropriate board background is so important is that it makes it easier, so much easier, for yourself but also other people as they go and look and find that board.

Here you can see a collection of some of the recent boards which I have been using, and look at this one with this sort of pinkish color, how it just sort of stands out, it sort of jumps out; and the ones that I have images on, that might make it that much easier for me to find that board in the future, especially if I have a number of boards which are named in a similar fashion.

Or maybe I want to purposely use the same color or the same background for multiple boards.

And remember, this is even more apparent when you start using Trello on your mobile device such as your phone.

So make sure that you choose an appropriate background.

From the menu we can select change background.

We can either choose a static color, we can choose one of the photos which Trello provides, or if you are a business class user you can upload your own picture, your own custom background.

So be sure to start with the background.

Create your Trello Lists

Alright, next up we want to get into our lists, and of course, this is going to vary depending on what you want your board to do.

I'm just gonna create a very, very simple workflow here.

Idea, confirmed, let's say doing, and then complete.

Compete? No, we're not gonna compete. (laughs) Complete, alright.

So just a very, very simple, straightforward, we're gonna move things from the left to the right.

Of course, that's not the only way in which you can use Trello, but in most cases, people are using a Kanban method, moving from left to right.

But before you start adding any cards, make sure that you take the appropriate time to make sure that you have enough lists for your particular workflow, that things make sense before you start adding pieces of information.

Now at this phase, you may be thinking...

Add List description cards in Trello

that I'm probably gonna start adding cards immediately.

Well, I am going to start adding cards, but maybe not in the way that you think.

Something that often gets overlooked is that as we share this board with others, are they gonna understand the differences between these lists and how they should be using them?

Now, in today's example, this is pretty straightforward, but you may have a process that has 10 lists involved in it, and maybe some of the lists are very, very similar.

So what I often recommend is that the very first card is a description card where you actually take the time, and I don't mean just write the word description, but you write a little bit of detail such as "place tasks which we have committed to doing this quarter."

Alright, so that you've actually got something to tell people what should be going on within this particular card.

You can add this for each and every one here. Now again, complete might be pretty straightforward and doing, but you can add just a very short paragraph at the top of every one of your lists.

Now Trello doesn't give you the opportunity to pin this card at the very top; it's true, someone could drag it down somewhere else within this list.

But what I usually recommend is that you pick a particular colored label. Now I like blue for a couple of reasons, not only is it the Trello default color in terms of the Trello blue, but it's also the last one in this list, so I find often we don't use this color as often as the other ones above.

So I'll often pick something like blue, and I'll put that for each and every one of the top cards here; so if I'm adding a description at the very beginning of each of my lists.

And remember, this can be a full paragraph, it can be a lot longer than just what we see here. Again, let's go into maybe a little bit more detail here.

For description, I can say "add a detailed description of what you want to do." Alright, that adds a little more detail there.

Doing, "place tasks which you (laughs) are engaged with currently," how about that?

Okay, and then "cards that have been finished" or something along those lines. Again, what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna add that blue label to each of these areas here.

So again, these are intended to be things that remain here, they're just adding a little bit of further description to what's going on in this list.

As we start adding other things within these lists, everything down below is going to adjust, are going to move, are going to move between lists, and they might be dragged up or down in that particular list.

But the idea here is that this label always remains at the very top.

It looks like I had the expanded function on there. If you click on the label, for those who don't know, you can get not just a bigger view, but you can actually start to see the text which is very next in my checklist.

Define your Trello Labels

Once I've designed my list, once I've added some descriptions, even before I start adding my cards, the very next step I will do is start editing those labels.

So what I mean by that is actually adding some text examples here.

For example, for the blue that we just created as the description, I might just add that in, right?

I might just say, well, that's a description label so people realize why I chose that color.

Green may mean approved, green may mean that things are good, green may mean go in this particular example. So I'm gonna start adding that label.

Yellow may mean wait for approval, for example, in this particular case; and red means, let's say it means urgent in this particular case.

You're not limited to just these six colors. You can have more labels and actually duplicate these colors; so you can have multiple green for example, and each of them can have a different label.

I think this is especially important before you start adding team members or before you start adding other individuals to this board that you have designed the labels appropriately.

Again, you're giving them that much more information so as they start engaging with this board, they know what the labels mean and how to start using those labels.

So don't forget to take a look at the labels.

Review Email Settings for Trello Board

Next on my list has to do with email, and something that I may not do for every single one of my boards, but especially if it's a board that is crucial to my work, if it's something I'm gonna be using on a daily basis, I want to take a look at the email to board settings.

Now in order to do that, you want to select menu and then select more, and about halfway down we have our email to board settings. I'm gonna click this and what you can see is that I have this unique email address for this board.

Now, probably one of the easiest things you can do is select this option to email that address to you so you immediately will have it in your inbox, and for many cases many of our email clients will automatically add it to our contact list. Then of course, you can give it a more appropriate name such as maybe Trello New Board Setup or whatever the name of this board is.

But the next important step here is to determine when you forward or send an email to this particular address where do you want it to appear?

Now in many cases it's often the first list, so yeah, I'm gonna stick with idea, that's where I want it to be; but maybe I don't want it to be at the bottom of the list, maybe I want it to be at the top of the list.

Now, I want to be careful because with these description cards here, of course, a new card is gonna go above it there, so you know what? On second thought, I'm gonna say bottom in this case.

But remember, the choice is yours. You can determine which list these emails go to and what position, whether it's going to be top or bottom.

Enable Trello Power-Ups

Now while we're here in the menu settings, the next thing on my checklist is power-ups, and I am never complete, I am never finished setting up a Trello board without looking at power-ups. Now depending on which version of Trello you have,

whether you have the basic version, whether you have business class, for example,

you may be limited on how many power-ups you can use at a time.

But there is one that I use almost every single board, on every single board, and that is the custom fields power-up so I'm gonna add that right away here. This is a great opportunity for me to go in here and what I can do, if I select edit power-up settings,

is I can start adding my fields, right? So maybe there's a checkbox here and I want to

just give it a name here, so I'm gonna start adding a checkbox. Maybe there's a start date, I don't just want the due date which is default. A variety of options here in custom fields. I'm not gonna go into the details, if you'd like to learn more about Trello custom fields I'll leave a link to another one of my videos in the description below.

But whether it's custom fields, whether it's calendar, whether it's some other integration that you need, now is the time to set that up, especially before you start inviting other members to your board.

Invite Team Members to Trello Board

So, once we've set up our appropriate background, we've designed our lists, we've added a few descriptions, a few helpful pieces of information at the top of the cards, we've decided what labels we are going to use, our email settings, and yes, our power-ups.

And if you don't want to see, oh, there's my custom fields button right there so there's my power-ups.

The very last thing is to start inviting other people to participate with us.

The quickest and easiest way to do that is to use this invite to board link at the top of the screen. You can either paste in email addresses or use their Trello username, but perhaps the easiest one of all, especially if you're adding a large group of people, is just to send them a link, and you can select this create link button.

Here I can copy this link that they're giving me and then I can just paste that into an email. I can just send that directly to the 12 or the 20 or whoever it is that I want to join and participate here in this board.

Well, there you have it, my checklist of how I set up a brand new Trello board from scratch.

I would love to hear from you next. Are there certain things that you do when you first set up a Trello board? Was there something that was missing from my particular list?

Please be sure to leave your answer in the comments below.

Thank you so much for watching, I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Be sure to give this video a thumbs up and leave me a question or a comment down below.

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

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

Todoist is arguably the most popular to-do list app in the world right now, and actually, I would say it's probably the very best pure task manager that is available. So then why on earth don't I use it? That's a common question that I receive, and so today I wanted to give you a few reasons why.

Now up front I wanna tell you this video's not intended to try and convince you to not use Todoist, especially if you currently are a Todoist user or you're thinking of using Todoist. I simply want to explain why I choose not to use Todoist as my primary task manager.

So, first and foremost, whenever I am thinking of adding a new system or app or workflow, I'm very cautious of how many additional tools I am bringing or including in my productivity system. If you're a longtime subscriber here to the Simpletivity channel, you will know that my primary way of managing my tasks is within my calendar. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail in this video. You can see some of my other videos, and I'll leave links to those in the description below, but I think it's key, I think it's crucial, that you see your tasks on the same screen as your meetings and events and other things that you have going on in your calendar.

Now, it's not to say that Todoist doesn't have an integration with online calendars. In fact, right here you can see these little orange tasks at the top are actually synced with this particular Todoist account. So I can see all of these tasks within my calendar. I can move them around as well if I want to, and the sync is actually pretty good in terms of changing those tasks, and sometimes it can take a few seconds or maybe even a couple of minutes, but you can make those changes. There you go. There you can see that that one was moved back to December 17th.

Still, if I want to get the full feature and functionality out of Todoist, such as using labels and adding comments, I have to come back here. I can't do that within my calendar. I can see the task, I can see what date it's on, but if I want to change those details I need to come back here into Todoist. So that is one of the key reasons why I don't just use Todoist. I don't use other dedicated task list managers because of the lack of seeing my events, seeing my calendar on the same screen.

Now a couple of other reasons why I choose not to use Todoist is that sometimes I find the AI features and some of the features that are meant to be helpful, I find can actually have a negative effect on our productivity.

So let me give you just a couple of examples. If you select the three dots here on the right-hand side of any task you get a number of options available to you here, and near the top we have some scheduling options here. Now the first one here is a suggested date as to when you should complete this task. Now I don't know all the factors that are going into the selection that Todoist is making. Now in this case, it's saying that this task is overdue. So this is probably a pretty straightforward one, right? That the suggested date should be today because it's no longer December 17th.

Let's click down to something else. Let's see if it gives us a different date. So this one it's saying not today. Even though it's due today, it's suggesting tomorrow. Maybe because it's a blog article about cute kitty cats. Maybe it's looking at the text and making that assessment here. Here's this proposal for a Florida client. It's saying today. So I'm sure there's some smart function going on here looking at things like maybe proposal and client, and here it saw that there was cats in the title, and that's why it's saying we would postpone that one a little further off into the future.

But again, when we start to rely on this, we start to often think that the computer or the artificial intelligence is smarter or knows something that we don't, and that's why I'm often cautious with this type of technology.

But there's something else I wanna point out here, and that's these two features here. The one is postpone to tomorrow, and the next one is next week as in postponing to next week. Now these are meant to make our lives easier. That in just a single click I can postpone this to the coming Monday, and I can postpone this to tomorrow, and of course, I can actually do this to multiple tasks at a time, especially if I have a bunch of things that I didn't get to yesterday. I can quickly bring everything to today or postpone them all to next week.

Well, that is precisely what I think is the problem. When we make it so easy to defer or postpone something, what I often find is that we no longer think clearly enough or carefully enough about the task itself, and I think, when it comes to deferring and moving our tasks around, you need to be careful. You need to put in some careful thought as to, you know what? Maybe I'm not gonna get to this today, but should I really defer it till next week? Just because it's so easy for me to do so. No, let me think more carefully about this. Maybe I need to actually block out some specific time because this particular task is so important.

I think there's something to be said to actually putting in a little bit more manual effort so that you're not so quick to defer things on your to-do list.

Now, like I said, I want to be very clear. My intention of today's video is not to try and convince you to stop using Todoist or to not use Todoist at all. I simply wanted to answer some of the most common questions available. I think there's a very good reason why Todoist is one of the most popular apps. If you go to the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, there's a reason why Todoist is always near the top of the productivity category.

But these are just some of the reasons why I choose not to do Todoist. With that, I'd love to hear from you next. Two things. Number one, if you are a Todoist user what do you love about Todoist? What are some of the features that you absolutely love? What are some of the reasons why you think others should consider Todoist? And I'd also love to hear the opposite. Are there some additional reasons why you don't use Todoist? And if not, what do you use as an alternative?

I would love to hear your answers in the comments below.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Be sure to give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment below.

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

What is the best way to name your files? Let's find out in today's video.

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

You probably already know that the way that you structure your folders is important, but what's so much more important is how you name your individual files so you can go and find them and retrieve them when you need to.

So in today's video, I'm gonna show you three different components that you should include in each of your filenames.

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When it comes to naming your files, there are many different approaches that you can take, but I think you only need three key components, a date, a file subject name, and a unique identifier or some other special code.

So let's take a look at all three of these components, see why they are important, and also look at the different ways in which we can order them.

Here you can see in this example I have a few files that have a date at the beginning and this is great if you are managing files that need to be sorted by a particular date.

Now it's true almost every file system will include a last modified date and also you'll be able to find when that file was first created.

It doesn't matter if you're in Drive like the example I'm showing you here or if you are on a Windows or a Mac computer.

But in many cases, the last time that the file was edited or when it was created is not the most important date so you may want to include something more specific.

I'll give you an example. I give a lot of presentations and so for me I don't care so much as to when it was last modified or when I first created that file.

What I'd like to know is when did I last present that file. When did I actually deliver that as part of a speech or as part of a live workshop?

So I will often include a date at the beginning of those files.

Now we wanna go one step further and make sure that we list our dates in a proper order.

Here you will see I have things listed in year, month and then day order and we're using two digits for both month and day. Now this is really, really important.

This has nothing to do with where I live in the world or the country, whatever date format that your country follows, the reason why we want to follow year, month, day is because it will always sort properly.

As you can see in these first four files here, I'm starting in 2017 and things are sorting properly down to 2018 including at the month and the date level.

And that's always going to be the case if we follow this format.

Now I've seen some people who omit this little dash in between so the numbers are all together. You've got an eight-digit number.

I prefer to have a small dash in between. I just find it that much easier for me to read.

But as I'll be showing you a little bit later on in today's video, you don't necessarily need to start with the date. We'll look at the pros and cons of having that at the beginning of your filename.

Now the second component of this filename includes a subject line and I'm gonna spend very little time here because this really depends on so many different factors as to what does this file include, what's the purpose of this file.

I think the key thing here is that you should be adding a few keywords letting you know and perhaps other people that you may be sharing this file with what exactly should they expect when they open up this file.

In this case, I have labeled this Client_Email_List and you'll also notice that I've added underscores between the spaces within that filename, but also between the date and the unique code or identifier at the end.

This makes it a bit easier to read rather than this one down below where I've had no spaces and I've just got VendorTrainingContract all smashed together.

The reason why underscores are still important in this day and age is that there are some file systems who may replace a space with a funny character.

You may have come across a situation where a filing system has thrown in a percentage sign in between any original spaces or they will try and put in underscores themselves, but if they can't, sometimes they will simply collapse those spaces and the entire thing will end up looking like this with everything jammed together.

So you may want to get used to adding underscores to your filenames. Not only does it make it easier to read here, but as you share your file with others or as other people share them with you, you can keep that proper spacing in between.

And remember, you don't know what type of system where you are sending this file to. You don't know what they are using and so how it may convert the name of your file.

Now the last component here is what I call a unique identifier or a special code. And I've got a few different examples here.

I've got this one which I've labeled draft letting us know that this is the draft version of this particular file.

In the next two, I've added some initials. So here SDF I can see that I am the author or the creator or maybe I was the last person to touch this file so I've got my initials at the end.

Here I've got someone else's initials signifying that perhaps they are the author.

And then I've got one last example here. This one is VER2 as in version two letting me know the version status of this file.

And as you can notice, I've put everything here, this last component in all capitals unlike the subject name itself which is just in regular text.

This makes it stand out that much more that I've put this in all capitals. I can tell that this is a different component or an add-on of that filename.

Now again, you need to decide what it best for you in terms of what makes the most sense. Does putting a version number make more sense to you?

Does having the initials of yourself or someone else, does that make more sense?

Let's take a look at a few other examples down below here. Here you can see I've put the subject name first, then the unique identifier and then the date at the end.

Now the nice thing about this format is that if I have a bunch of contract templates or maybe I have a number of different things that start with contract, maybe this next one is a contract email template and maybe this is a contract paper template, something like that, I know that everything is going to sort properly with contract first within this folder and that may be most important to me.

Here you can see I've got the different version numbers showing up next and then I have the date at the end.

Last but not least, I've got one last revision or different ordering of these three components. In this case, I have the code or unique identifier at the beginning.

I've got the subject name in the middle and then again I've got the date at the end.

And again, this can be great for sorting purposes. In this case, I've got some purchase order numbers and maybe that's what's most important to me or to my team is that we sort in the order of purchase numbers.

So in this case by starting with that code or that unique identifier, it's always going to sort properly here and I still have my other information to the right.

So no matter what you do as a part of your business, maybe you're an educator, maybe these are just your personal files, I would encourage you to include these three components, a date and don't forget that order, the subject name or the filename with some descriptive keywords and then a code or a unique identifier as you can see here at the end or in our examples here at the beginning of the filename.

As it pertains to the precise order, well that's up to you and it may also depend on the folder that you're keeping these files in.

I hope you enjoyed today's video and I would love to learn from you.

What do you think of these three components and do you have some additional ways in which you order your files?

I'd love to hear from you so be sure to leave your answer in the comments below.

I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity YouTube channel. Please give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to leave me a message in the comments below.

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

Does the Pomodoro technique actually help you to be more productive? Let's find out.

The very first video here on the Simpletivity channel was all about the Pomodoro technique, but I actually haven't talked much about it since that time.

It's been nearly three years. So in today's video, I want to go over what exactly the Pomodoro technique is, how you can implement it, and does it actually work.

Is it gonna help you to be more productive? Alright, so first thing first.

What is the Pomodoro technique, and where does that name come from?

Well, pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato. And in Italy, a very popular type of kitchen timer is in the shape of a tomato.

That's the history or the origin of the name. Now the Pomodoro technique really involves some very simple steps.

It basically involves grabbing a timer, and you could use something as simple as your smartphone, setting a determined period of time in which you are going to focus.

You are going to focus exclusively on one task or one project.

And then when that timer goes off, you take a short break.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to say goodbye to that task, but at least re-evaluate where you are in your day.

Does that particular project need a little more time? Or should you be moving onto something else?

And the great thing about the Pomodoro technique is that you can use it for almost anything.

It's more than just project work. You can use the Pomodoro technique when you're dealing with emails, something that I use the Pomodoro technique with quite often.

Let me give you an example. A lot of us say that hey I'm gonna spend a little bit of time with email.

But there's a big difference between spending 20 minutes with email and 20 focused minutes with email, when you're gonna do nothing but email and processing your inbox.

And to make sure that I don't spend most of my day in my inbox, I will use a timer to set a limit.

Now a traditional Pomodoro duration is 25 minutes. Setting a timer for 25 minutes and working exclusively until the timer goes off.

But you don't have to restrict yourself to just 25 minutes. In my own work day, I will often set the timer for twice that length, 50 minutes, especially when I'm working in the morning.

During the morning hours is when I have a greater amount of energy and I want to accomplish a lot more before I break for lunch.

So I'll often set my timer for 50 minutes and then also follow that by taking a somewhat longer break.

But you may want to experiment with what is the ideal time for you, and also adjust that time depending on the activity or the project that you're engaged with.

But perhaps you don't want to use your smartphone because when you're doing focused work, you like to put this on mute or maybe put it away completely.

And perhaps you don't want to install another application on your desktop computer. Well, there are other devices that you may find helpful.

Right here on my desk, I have something called the GetProductive Alpha. Now this is a brand new product which is designed specifically for those who want to make use of the Pomodoro technique.

Now one of the nice advantages of using an external timer such as the GetProductive Alpha is that that is all it does.

You don't have to be searching for a separate app or doing something additional on your computer.

Yes, it does make it a bit of a uni-tasker. It is basically only a timer and a stopwatch, but once you've found the duration that works for you, all you have to do is press a single button.

And the GetProductive Alpha will tell you when your time is up.

Now this product is so new, it's actually in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign.

So if you'd like to learn more and perhaps be one of the first people to own a GetProductive Alpha, be sure to check out the link in the description below.

So I want to hear from you next. What do you think about the Pomodoro productivity technique?

Have you used it before? And if so, what types of activities are you using a timer for?

The Pomodoro technique is not really ideal for every single thing you do, but when you need that focus, when you need to block out other distractions, that's where the Pomodoro technique can be so helpful.

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.