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Ultimate Guide to Google Calendar Settings Google Calendar is where I spend an awful lot of my time, and there's a good chance that you spend an awful lot of time here, organizing your day, setting up your meetings, and seeing all the things, and places, where you need to be.

Well, in today's video I want to show you everything you need to know about settings within Google Calendar. We're talking about notifications, we're talking about defaults.

I want to show you how to get that daily agenda as well, which can certainly help you with your productivity. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and after today's video, I don't want you to have any questions about settings in Google Calendar.

Well, maybe I'm just kidding. If you've got questions, please include them down in the comments below.

I always love hearing your feedback, and I'm curious what other questions you have for me after watching today's video. So, let's get things started by clicking the Settings icon, but just before we select the settings option, I want to go over the other options that we have here, just in case you're not sure where to find these options.

So, the first one is Trash. Anything that you delete here within Google Calendar, as long as it has been deleted within the last 30 days, will show up here, so if you need to review something

which has been removed from your calendar, and if you'd like to restore it, you can do so here. This is especially helpful if you happen to use some of your events as tasks, and perhaps instead of crossing them off or using some other method, you just delete them, you can always go back here and review them as well.

So, that's where you'll find them, in the Trash. Now, you also have the option to change some of the density and color.

So, this is the default set here, modern with white text. You can always change that to classic with black text.

Now, you can also get into a lot more detail if you want at an individual calendar level, but these are just your defaults for your main calendar, and lastly, your second option here is if you want a responsive design, so as you minimize or adjust the size of this window, everything will be responsive, or you can go back to the compact design, which sort of squishes things together a little bit more so, but I prefer the responsive design here.

Addons Last but not least in this particular list, I want to get to the Get add-ons section. A lot of people don't realize that almost every Google app has the ability to add some additional features to it, so if you happen to use Cisco Webex or GoToMeeting, for example, for your video conference calls, you can actually add them directly here, and now you know where to find them.

General Settings All right, well, let's jump into settings, and let's start with the general settings. Basically I'm gonna be going over two different areas here within the Settings window.

General settings, which apply to all of your calendars, and then I want to show you the settings that are particular to individual calendars down below, but let's start with General. Language and region, pretty straightforward.

Language, country, time format, if you prefer military time or 24-hour time, you can make that change here. Time zone, also pretty straightforward.

You want to have this first one set to your local time zone, and this is probably coming from your Google account, when you first set up your Google account, but a lot of people don't realize that you can set up a secondary time zone, so I'm gonna check this box for an example here, and I had previously selected New York, Eastern Time here, so you can see that displayed down below. So, perhaps you work with colleagues, or perhaps you travel back and forth

between two different time zones. This can be helpful to show a different time zone

in addition to the one that you're currently in, and you can also add some labels here as well. So, perhaps I want to call this one Home.

These are custom labels, and this one I'm just gonna put NY for New York. Now, everything is saved automatically, which is nice, I don't have to go finding a Save button like in Gmail.

So, let's go back to our calendar to see what that looks like. So, here you can see on the left hand side of the screen I've got my Home time, the default time, but now I've got New York time beside it.

Now, this is really the only place where you're going to see that. When I open up an event here, I'm not going to see additional times.

If I go to edit it or change the time it's not gonna show me that Eastern Time, but it can be helpful to see that here on the left hand side of the screen.

So, let's jump back into settings here. I'm gonna leave that one on for now, but I do like that you can change these labels.

They even give you a nice button here if you want to swap those time zones. All right, the last little checkbox, Ask to update my primary time zone to current location.

This can be important when you're traveling, right? So, instead of using this as the primary all the time, it is going to make changes when

you're traveling across time zones, and you can read the details by clicking this link here. So, in the next section down below we've got some more world clock options,

and this is one that I was not terribly familiar with, but again, depending on who you are working with, other countries or other time zones that you need to deal with regularly, this world clock may be very helpful. By checking this box, you can add a number of additional time zones, I'm not sure about the limit.

You could probably add as many as you like, but if I go back to my calendar, you will see here, below the mini calendar here, I have the three time zones that I selected, so I've got some UK time, I've got Anchorage here, and I've got New York as well. So, this is the current time, so as I'm working, as I'm going about my day, I can glance over here and know exactly what time it is in these other time zones.

Now, again, by default this is turned off, so if you want to uncheck it, you can do so here.

I'm gonna turn it back on just for today's example. We'll see that on the left hand side of the screen.

Events Now, the next one is a pretty important one. This has to do with events, and the defaults for your events.

Now, all of these things, almost all of these things can be changed when you're creating an event, but in order for you to work at your productive best, I think it's important that you are setting default settings that make the most sense to you, so you don't have to waste time clicking other boxes or selecting other dropdowns.

So, the first one is default duration, and it's important to take a few minutes to decide what is best for you. Is a 60-minute meeting, is that typically the type, or the length of event that you're creating, or are you typically creating 30-minute meetings?

Remember, every new event-- If I set this to 30 minutes, what's gonna happen is I go over here and I'm gonna click on Friday, you can see immediately by default it's saying 9:00 to 9:30. Of course, I can change that, I can make it to a full hour, but I think it's important within Settings that you pick the duration of time which is most common to you.

I'm gonna leave it at 60 for now, and down below we have this Speedy meetings checkbox, what on earth does that mean? Well, there's actually a brief description here.

If you turn Speedy meetings on, 30-minute meetings will be five minutes less, and longer meetings, 10 minutes earlier. So, you remember I had selected 60 minutes, but now it's set for 50 minutes, so if I open up this dropdown,

everything is just somewhat reduced. 15, 25, instead of 30, 40 instead of 45.

You sort of get the idea here. The idea, really, is to encourage you, and maybe more importantly, other people who you've invited to that meeting, that hey, let's wrap this up before the top of the hour.

Let's give everybody a little bit of time to get to our next meeting, or to get to something else.

I'm not exactly sure how effective this is, but even psychologically, if you were to receive a meeting like this, it might help you to be more, a little more efficient, make sure that you're making the best use of your time.

So, really up to you, your personal preference if you'd like to choose Speedy meetings. Now, the next three dropdowns, the first one is Default guest permissions, so when you are creating an event, what do you want to allow others who you've invited to do?

Can they modify the event, can they invite others, and can they see the guest list?

Remember, you edit all of this within the individual event, but what is most typical? What in the average situation when you create a new event, what do you want to allow guests to do or not to do?

So, you can make those changes here. The next one has to do with automatically adding invitations.

Three options here: Yes; Yes, but don't send event notifications unless I have responded "Yes" or "Maybe"; No, only show invitations to which I have responded. Essentially what this is doing, and you can hover over this question mark to give you a further definition, or description, is that when you receive an invitation, do you want to see it on your calendar?

Not that you've accepted it, but do you want to see it there? I, personally, like this option because I want to see if someone… Maybe I haven't gone to my email first, and so, the first time I'm seeing it is on my calendar,

and I can choose right there within my calendar if I want to accept it or not, and it will be shaded in a different color. You'll be able to tell if you have not accepted that invitation or not, and the last one here has to do with notifications, what types of notifications would you like to receive?

Do you want Alerts, do you want Desktop notifications, or do you want them turned Off altogether? I choose to have alerts for my default here, because in most cases I do want to be reminded of those options.

I think if I choose Desktop notifications, that's where this Play notification sound will turn on. I can talk about On or Off, but I'm just gonna leave this one at Alerts, Video Calls and the last option in this area is Automatically add video calls to events I create.

Let me show you how this works, so if I select this box, I'm gonna check it, and I'm gonna go over here, and let's say I'm gonna create a a new event.

I'm gonna say MORE OPTIONS, you will see that automatically they have added Hangouts, Google Hangouts, to this invitation. Now, I can say No conferencing if I want, but remember, we're just talking about defaults here.

Now, for those of you asking about this button up above, I already have Zoom Meeting, the Zoom Meeting Chrome extension installed, so that's why you're seeing this here. It has nothing to do with the option that I just selected.

It really has to do with this one down below, so if you want a Hangouts meeting to be added automatically be default, you can have that checked. In my particular case, I have that unchecked, not only because I use Zoom, but I usually make the distinction if I'm going

to be inviting someone to a video meeting or not. View Options We're almost near the end of this list.

Here we are into View options. A lot of this is pretty straightforward.

Do you want to Show weekends, do you want to Show declined events, things that you have turned down, week numbers, you can Reduce the brightness of past events. This can sometimes be helpful just to see what you've done and be able to clearly see the day that you're on, especially if you're looking at the Week View or Month View.

View calendar side by side in Day View, and a couple of other default view options. Which day of the week do you want to start it on, how many days out do you want for your custom view?

I don't really use the custom view, but if you do, this is where you go to change it, and if you want to show some alternate calendars. Last but not least, we have an area here to automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar, so that's going back to receiving that invitation via Gmail, and if you want to enable keyboard shortcuts you can turn this on or off, and let me just show you by hitting the question mark, here is your full list.

Just by hitting the question mark key you can get a full list of all of the shortcuts here within Google calendar.

I'm not gonna go over these, but if you want to see them and review them for yourself, just make sure that this option at the bottom is checked, and then you can select the question mark. Individual Calendar All right, we're gonna jump down now to an individual calendar, and in this case mine is called Scott Test Calendar, and there's some really important stuff here.

There's some really great stuff to help you be more productive and efficient with all of your events, and whether else you're keeping track of here within your calendar, so of course you can change the name of your calendar, and you can add a description. I'd say the description is probably only helpful if you're going to make this calendar public, if you want to share some further

information about this calendar. Otherwise, I typically leave this blank.

You can change the primary time zone for that calendar, and just some basic Google information as to who is the owner. Here is where you can make that calendar public,

and you'll see when I check this box you actually get a warning because if you make it public, everything will be visible to the world, including via Google search, are you sure?

You want to make sure that you're sharing this with the world. This can be very valuable if you are sharing a calendar that is intended for the public, like a community calendar, something that you want to make available to everyone else, but this is where you go to enable that.

If we want to share this calendar with specific people we simply select this option and invite them to have access and to share this calendar with them.

Event Notifications The next three sections, though, are where I want to spend a lot more focus, because this is where a lot of the great stuff is. So, Event notifications, how often in advance do you want to be notified of events on your calendar?

Now, the default here, I believe, is 30 minutes. I don't believe I've changed this since coming in here, but there is a bit of a distinction.

We've got Notification, and then we've got Email, so a notification would give you an alert here within the browser, or an alert on your mobile phone, and then of course, you can select how far out you would like that time, so maybe I'd like it to be a little bit closer to the event, so I'm gonna change that to 10 minutes. Of course, you can change this to hours, days, or weeks, but keep in mind you can add multiple notifications.

What if you want a notification and an email? This is not an either/or option.

If I also want an email notification, I just need to select ADD NOTIFICATION, and here I will now get an email notification, and maybe this one I want a little further out, like 30 minutes, so for the same event, remember, this is gonna be the default, for the same event I'm gonna get an email notification 30 minutes out, and then I'm get an alert either on the desktop or on my mobile phone 10 minutes out.

Once again, you can change this at the individual event level, like if there's a particular event you don't want notifications for, you can turn that off when you create that event, but this can be very helpful if you want to discern the difference between an alert or a notification versus an email, and again, you can go further out. You can say, "Well, I also want a

"notification two days before," and so on. Just clicking the X here will remove that notification.

All-day event notifications, by default they're turned off, right, if you have something listed as an all-day event. Some of you may know that here at Simpletivity, I recommend that you use that all-day event area for your most important tasks, and so therefore you may not want a notification of all the things that you have stored there, or maybe you want to be known the day before.

The nice thing about the all-day event notifications is that you get to choose the time, all right, in terms of when you'd like to receive those notifications, but again, you don't have to turn this on if you don't wish to. The next section here has to do with General notifications, and there's a lot of goodies here, but there's also a few things that

you may wish to toggle or turn off. New events, do you want to be alerted when someone sends you an invitation to event?

I recommend that you keep that on. Changed events, someone changes an event.

Again, probably worthwhile, right? You don't want to be showing up too early or miss the event, so you probably want an email notification for that.

Canceled events, probably goes for the same thing. All of these choices, almost all these choices are either None or Email.

Event responses is maybe a little bit different, when guests respond to events for which you can see the guest list. So, do you want to know when someone has accepted your event?

And this can be a little bit different depending if you have a long list of invitees. Do you want a notification for every time someone accepts, or do you want to check in on your own?

But the last one here, Daily agenda, can be so helpful, and sometimes people forget that this is an option, or forget where to find it. The daily agenda, if you have this turned on, Daily Agenda you will receive an email with your agenda everyday at 5:00AM in your current time zone.

Let me show you what that looks like, so here I am in my Gmail. Here's the subject line: Daily Agenda for Scott Test1 as of 5am.

It's important to know that you can't change this time. This will be attached to your calendar's primary time zone, so you can't make it any earlier or later, but I think for most of us, 5:00AM is a fairly safe time.

So, down below you can see my entire agenda for that day. I've got my travel itinerary, which I had listed as an all-day event, so that appears up top, and then I've got my meetings and other things spaced out below, and they even do a good job of sort of recreating that spacing, right?

There's a bit of a difference. There's a four-hour difference here between these two events compared to the two-hour difference between these two events here and the one up above, so you get a snapshot of your day first thing in the morning, and I'm not suggesting that you're necessarily dealing with email at 5:00AM, but whenever you do open up your email you can have your agenda waiting for you there, so by selecting the Email option here… Oops, I just toggled it off.

By selecting the Email option, you will receive the daily agenda for that calendar. Now, the last section on this page looks a little intimidating.

I'm not gonna go into too much detail here. This is where you will find the public URL to your calendar, so if you want to share this with someone else, particularly when you make this calendar public this is what you'd want to share.

If you want to embed this calendar on a website, on a webpage, this is the embed code here, and then we also have some iCal formats down below.

Perhaps you're working with someone using Outlook or another iCal format, and Google does a pretty good job of showing you and explaining the details of these different areas. Last but not least, if you want to get rid of your calendar altogether, here is the DELETE option.

This is gonna remove everything, including guests, from this calendar as well, so it's gonna absolutely obliterate every single event that you have listed within the calendar. Well, there you have it, an exhausting list of all of the settings, all of the notification settings, within Google Calendar.

So, I would love to hear from you next. What is on your wishlist of things that you wish Google Calendar could do, or did I miss anything out?

Was there something that I didn't cover, or you'd like me to go over in more detail? If so, be sure to leave your comments down below.

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 note in the comments below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

When it comes to working with Trello, one of the most common questions I receive is how can I sync cards from one board to another. I only want to see a fraction of the cards on this particular board or maybe I want multiple boards to filter up into a single board.

Well, today I'm going to show you how to do just that.

Overview

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

Today we are taking a look at one of the most powerful power-ups on Trello and more than just Trello. It is called Board Sync and it's brought to you by Uneeda.

As you can see here from the Uneeda website, you can do so much more than just Trello. You can sync Trello to any of these other applications including Asana, Basecamp, and many more.

But perhaps one of the most common uses of Board Sync is to sync one Trello board to another or multiple Trello boards to one another. So let's take a look at an example.

Sync Multiple Boards

Here I have an example team board—a team project. And as you may already know, when you are working with others, sometimes your boards can grow into more than a hundred cards, and you've got multiple members.

You've got many different people working on that board, but perhaps you want a high-level view. You just want to work on your own board so you can focus in on your tasks.

Maybe you even want multiple boards filtering up into that. So what I've done is I have created a personal board—a separate board which is only going to show me the tasks that are assigned to me from this board.

Better yet, I'm gonna have a bit of a cleaner view because this first list is just called Ideas and I don't really want to see this. This is sort of in an incubator mode; I don't need to see this just yet.

So I don't want to see that on my personal board. So let's go over to my board—obviously, a much cleaner view because I only have the things that are assigned to me and I don't have that Ideas list at the beginning.

But what Board Sync has done—and you can see it's enabled here in the top right-hand corner—is it has created a true sync between this board, my personal board, and the team project board. It has not just duplicated these cards.

When I make a change or an edit to this card, it's gonna reflect here on the team project board and vice versa. And you can choose to set that up if you want a dual sync, right, both directions, or if you just want a one-way sync.

Board Sync will allow you to set it up that way as well. Now let's take a look at a few examples of how this works. So let's say that here are my tasks; I want to focus in.

I'm back on my personal board and I want to talk to Karen about spelling her last name. So I take this task and, let's say I've completed it. I'm gonna drag it over here into the Complete list.

But remember, this is my personal board. Is the rest of my team going to know that I've completed this task? Well, let's go back over to the project board.

And look at that—I didn't click anything. We did see it better just for a split second. It automatically synced and moved it over to this Complete board.

So I don't even have to spend any time—or at least very little time—in the team board. I can focus on all of my work here on my personal board and when I make changes and drag things over, it's going to be reflected over here.

Let's take a look at another example—this time making a change on the team board. So here I have that Ideas list and remember, I've chosen not to see it on my personal board.

But let's say that my manager assigns this task, assigns this card to me. So what they're gonna do is they are gonna come in and drag this over into the Tasks list over here.

But perhaps I'm not looking at this board. Am I going to miss out, or am I going to be assigned this task as well? Well, let's go back over to my personal board.

And there it is—there it is. Took it just a split second, but now I have that new task. It reflects in my Tasks list just like the master Tasks list.

I can see it there within my own personal board. Now remember, it goes far beyond just matching lists to lists. You can create filters based on labels and you can create filters on a variety of different criteria.

So let's take a look under the hood to show you what the setup looks like within Uneeda. So here I have my sync and I have auto-sync turned on.

But what you may find is that sometimes it may be as much as a five-minute delay depending on the size of your boards—how many cards, how many boards you are syncing at a time.

But in this case, let's go into the Edit window and I want to show you what I've got set up here. So here you can see I've got my team project board.

I've got a dual sync so we're syncing both directions with my personal board. And the nice thing is that it keeps a nice history of your sync history.

So here you can see all the operations—if it found an error or not, what is going on with that particular sync. Now the Filter Tasks area is really the key part and also the Map Fields is really the key part of Uneeda's Board Sync.

So here are the filters which I have applied. So from my team project board, I only want to sync cards with the following members. I only want to sync cards with me—the ones that I'm assigned to.

And remember how I hid the Ideas list? I don't want to sync cards that appear in this list, and you can add multiple lists. In fact, one way that many people will use Board Sync by Uneeda is that they'll create an executive board.

So let's say that you have a team project that has multiple steps on a long, large workflow—maybe twelve different lists. But the executive team, they only want to see the approval list or maybe two or three of those steps.

Well, you can do that. You can create that here within Board Sync. And I'll just give you an example of some of the other filters you can apply.

So here's the labels—only sync or don't sync. Lists—only sync cards in the following lists and of course members, which we've also applied here at the top.

Now the last one I want to show you here as a part of the setup is Map Fields. Now within Trello, you're gonna see a lot of things that are the same—members to members, due date to due date.

It makes sense because here we are. List is a little bit different as you see here because one of the lists is not coming over. We've chosen that specifically.

But where this page will become more useful is if you decide to use Board Sync to sync Asana to Trello. Right, because Asana and Trello use slightly different terminology.

Depending on members, due dates, labels, lists, and what you—what is a label in Trello, you could map that to something completely different within Asana. So think about that for just a moment.

I'm going to click over here back to the Uneeda homepage. Think if you're working with a team that loves Asana—they love Asana, but you love Trello. Well, that's fine.

You don't have to limit yourself. You can continue to work in Trello and then they can work in Asana and have your tasks and your projects sync back and forth.

So if you would like to learn more about Board Sync, you can either select the power-up here within Trello or you can go directly to Uneeda.io and find out all the different ways in which you can sync your Trello projects.

But also multiple projects with all of the different apps that you see here. Now I would love to hear from you next. What do you think of syncing cards within Trello or with other project management tools?

Be sure to leave your comments down below. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you give this video a like, be sure to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel.

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

Not long ago, I gave a review of all of the new enhancements to Gmail. Steve replied with this comment: he says, "I like the new features, but I've been hoping for a sticky note feature that would allow me to put notes on an email that only I can read."

Well, Steve, I think that's a great enhancement to Gmail. I'd love for Gmail to add that natively as well, but in the meantime, I think you're gonna enjoy today's video because I've found an extension that will allow you to do just that.

Simple Gmail Notes

It's called Simple Gmail Notes, allowing you to add your own notes to any email within Gmail and keep them privately. You're not sharing them with anyone; you don't have to reply to yourself or any of that kind of hokey stuff, which is only gonna make your inbox more of a mess.

So let's take a look at this. Let's go into my dummy inbox here—yes, this is not my usual inbox, just some emails that I can play around with for today's example.

Sticky Notes in Gmail

I've already installed the Chrome extension. If I go and click on one of my emails, you'll notice something a little different at the top of the email. Yes, I've got a sticky note area.

This is a place where I can add text-based notes, maybe a reminder of something regarding this email, even after I've replied. Maybe I just want to remind myself of something if I ever go back to this email.

Or if you use a method such as inbox zero, maybe you just want to give yourself a quick note because you might not reply to this email till another hour from now or even a few days from now. So in this area, I can add whatever I want, and again, it's all text-based.

You can't bold, you can't underline, but remember, it's a sticky note feature. That's what you want; you just want to give yourself a brief reminder. You can copy and paste information in here if you want or not.

Previewing Notes

Whatever I write in here, if I click out, I'm going to go back to my Inbox. The nice thing is that you can actually see a small preview of your note, and if you hover over it, you can actually read the entire note.

Now, this is one feature that I particularly like because you want to know which of these emails may have a note. It's gonna be displayed very similar to the label area, and I don't recommend that you use this to replace labels.

But it's nice to be able to see a preview of these notes and hover over and see the full note. But it doesn't stop there. Let's go back into this particular email.

Of course, I can immediately go back and change the note, but it also gives you the opportunity to change the color of the note. So let's say these types of notes, I'm going to give it more of this teal or this light blue color.

Then I'm gonna go to the email just down below, and I'm gonna add a new note here. So add a new note, and let's say I want these ones to be more of—I'm gonna show you that feature just in a second.

Let's say I want to change the color of these ones to like this green shade here because maybe I have a system for my different notes. Right, and so here again, we see that preview: blue notes—maybe this is something personal, maybe green, this is something more business-related or maybe I add financial information.

So I'm gonna make those notes green, so you can customize the color of your notes as well. Now the next thing I want to show you, you're probably wondering, can I search these notes?

Searching Notes

And that's a very important question. Right, what if you have a keyword in the notes, not the email itself, but the notes. So why don't I type in the word “whatever”?

Let's do that up here. I'm going to type the word in “whatever” up top, and I get a hit enter, and, uh-oh, oh, it's not there. Yeah, it didn't search for it there.

Well, that's okay because Simple Gmail Notes allows you to search for these notes specifically. So let's go back into this email, and you'll notice some of the additional options that we have here.

You saw where I changed the color. Well, next to it is a search function, so if I click that, what it will do is give me my own search bar. So I am just searching my Gmail notes.

But also, what's nice and convenient is you can see all of your notes down. Now, I've only added to here my green note and my blue note here, but now I can quickly and easily see all of these notes.

I can see when they were last updated. If I select them, I've got a few other options if I want to do a bulk delete, for example, I can do so that I can do that here as well.

So don't fret, you can search your notes. Just remember you can't use the default or the standard Gmail search. This is only going to search the contents of the mail or the senders or receivers.

But if you want to search your notes as a part of this Chrome extension, you can do so here. A couple of the other features here as well: you can immediately send this email and note to Google Calendar.

Other Features

So it will include the note if you're looking for that as well. There is also an option to sync to mobile because you're probably wondering, can you get these messages? Can you get these custom sticky notes on your mobile device?

Now you can, but it seems like there's a bit of a workaround. You're gonna need to install Simple Mobile CRM. It is available to iPhone, iPad, and Android users; however, I've not yet tested out this feature.

So I can't give you a good, bad, or otherwise review. But the short answer is yes, you can have it sync and have it appear on your mobile device, but you will need to use this other app in order to do so as well.

Lastly, I just want to briefly show you some of the preferences because maybe you don't want your notes at the top of the email. That's okay, you can have your sticky note appear at the bottom of emails or even here on the side.

If I click on the Preferences bar here, you can see there's actually quite a few options. You can even change the default background color or font size, how long do you want to see that preview, what about the note height.

I've changed it to three; you can do a number of others. Look at that, you could have a full paragraph visible. It doesn't mean that you are limited by that number of lines but just how many do you want to see at a given time.

So if you are wanting the ability to add some sticky notes, some custom notes that are just for you, remember, you're not replying to yourself. Stop doing that—it's just adding more garbage, more notes, more stuff to your inbox.

You can add custom sticky notes to any of your emails here in Gmail. So if you want to learn more, I'll leave a link in the description below. But all you need to search for as a part of the Chrome Web Store is Simple Gmail Notes.

You can find out, read more reviews, quite a few users; you can see it's got a 4.7 rating with nearly 500 users. So, 33 thousand users—enough people are using it, and I've been impressed with my initial test, with my initial review.

So I'd love to hear from you next: what other features would you like to see within Gmail? This is one of the things that Steve wanted to see. What are some of the things that you wish you could do here in Gmail?

Perhaps I can do a video just for you in the future. As always, thank you so much for watching right here at Simpletivity. I hope you give this video a thumbs up, make sure to subscribe, and leave me a comment down below.

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

Quickly and easily convert your speech into text. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Today, we are taking a look at a simple speech-to-text app and also a web page where you can actually do this on any of your browsers. You don't even have to install anything in order for you to convert your speech into text.

Now, I know you may be familiar with this on your mobile device, but recently I was introduced to SpeechNotes. I'll tell you a bit of the background.

One of my sons was doing a homework assignment and, very much like myself, he's not too wild about writing text. He doesn't love to write long essays or even just short book reports.

So, I thought I would find something for him that would make it that much easier so he could record something on his device. We came across SpeechNotes, and you know what? He absolutely loved it.

He spent a few minutes reciting, talking out the story or the report that he had to give. He could edit it right within the app and then quickly pasted it into a Word document, applied a little bit of editing, and boom, his homework was done.

Today, I wanted to take a look at the web version of SpeechNotes to see how it performs and to see how it might be helpful to you. Whether you're crafting emails or writing a longer report, maybe you're not wild about writing and you would like to just get your thoughts out using your voice only.

When you get to SpeechNotes.co (and yes, it is .co), you're going to come to a page like this. It gives you a little bit of instruction here on the left-hand side.

This is where you're going to see your text appear once you start recording. But a really important part is what you see here on the right.

This is some of the punctuation and some of the things that you can include. For example, if you want to add a period or a comma, I think a new line or new paragraph are very important.

Some of the other things that you'll see here I would probably go back and edit myself anyhow, but it's helpful to have this as you're recording. So how do you get started?

Well, it's pretty simple. You've got this big red record button here, which is a start/pause record option.

You will have to give SpeechNotes.co the ability to record from your system. Now, let me give you just a quick example, and I'm gonna be doing this somewhat off the top of my head, but let's say I'm replying to an email in this case.

So, let's see how it works. I'm just gonna start by hitting the record button and then I'll see how far I can get with dictating this message.

Hi Eric, comma, new paragraph, I wanted to talk to you about the meeting this coming Friday, period. Jane and I are going to need to reschedule this particular meeting, period.

It seems as though our developers are not getting as much attention as they deserve with this particular project, period. So, we need to have an emergency staff meeting this coming weekend, period.

New paragraph, we'd like to reschedule for next Wednesday and hope that you can make that date, period. Please reply and let us know if that's a possibility for you and your staff, period.

New paragraph, looking forward to hearing your reply by the end of the day, period. Okay, I've hit the pause button, so it's gonna stop recording and transcribing my text here.

So, I'm just doing a quick review because I actually wasn't looking at the text that often as I was recording. I was trying to think of the message, and of course, this is just a fictional conversation that I'm having here.

I did feel a little weird because I knew it was gonna be transcribing immediately what I was saying. It doesn't really give you that option to, you know, sort of go back.

I could hit the pause button and go back, and of course, I can go back and edit anything at this point. But as you can see, it actually did a pretty good job of transcribing word-for-word what I was saying.

Even when it came to the new paragraph option or adding a comma like I did at the very beginning, it did a pretty good job of doing that as well. Now, you might be thinking, is this a little pointless?

Why would I be crafting an email here and then I'd have to copy and paste this into my message? Now, they do give you a fairly large icon here, so if I hit copy to clipboard, now it's copied to my clipboard.

I can go and paste this anywhere that I want. But remember, you could use a service such as SpeechNotes for anything.

It doesn't have to just be an email. You could be writing a report or an introduction, an executive summary, or something of that matter, and then paste it into that document.

So, this is obviously not the only option available to you. I do like to review something that is a little browser-specific.

This isn't specific to Mac or PC or to a particular device, although you may want to check out the SpeechNotes app if you'd like to make use of this on your mobile app as well. So, I'd love to hear from you next.

What do you think of this type of software? Do you have a recommendation of other speech-to-text applications or services out there?

How do you use them? Do you use them for email replies? Do you use them for writing a report?

Are you like me, and you really don't like typing out? You don't like the act of writing, so you'd rather just talk about it? I'd love to hear from you next.

As always, thank you so much for watching today's video. Be sure to subscribe, give this video a like, and leave me a comment down below.

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

If you are ever curious as to what other people are searching and asking questions about, you can always go to google.com and start typing in some keywords. Just the other day, I typed in Trello how to and look at what came up at the very top of the list: how to delete a list, how to delete a card, how to delete a board. It looks like a lot of you are curious not how to necessarily archive them but how to get rid of them for good. So in today's video, I'm looking at all three of these things: how can we delete lists, cards, and boards within Trello?

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Here we have a sample board, sample board number two actually, that I'm not afraid to delete at the end of this video.

How to Delete Trello Cards

Of course, when it comes to Trello, there are basically three key terms that we need to know: boards, lists, and cards. So, let's take a look at each of them in order to see how we can delete those items.

Let's start at the smallest form, and that of course is a card. Here's a card I no longer need, so how do we go about deleting this card?

Well, you may already be familiar with archiving. You see that a lot within Trello, and I think it's a smart move.

Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you want to go back and still search for a card or information within the card. So we can hit archive here if we want.

We can click on the card and, of course, near the bottom we have an archive button as well. Now, as soon as we hit that button, you will notice at the top it's telling us that this card is archived.

Even in the background, I can already see it's been removed from this list. But there is a red delete button, so this is how we go about and permanently delete this card.

If I never want to see this card again, I can hit the delete button. It's gonna ask me one time if I am absolutely sure, and then I can hit that delete button, and it is gone for good.

But why don't we look at another example there within the card, in case we want to archive something and go look for it again. I know a lot of you are also wondering about that too—where does it go exactly when I hit the archive button?

So, in this card, I'm gonna hit archive as well. It's telling me that the card is archived.

If I click out of here, actually maybe there's one more thing I'll say: if you need to send it back, you can always hit this button here, Send to Board. But let's close this card, and it's gone.

Let's say what we do want to go back and retrieve it—where do we go? Well, it is searchable if we want to search for it, but an easier way, I think, is to go into the Show Menu.

Number one, you can look at your activity. So here's the card that we just archived.

It tells me that I archived it. I can select it here, and now I'm right back in the card.

I can hit Send to Board, and I've brought it right back. There it is, back in the list.

But let me archive it once again and click out of here. So here it is in my Activity Feed.

But there's another area which may be more useful to you, and that is if you select the More option. You can select Archived Items.

Here you can see, because this is a sample board, I only have one that I've archived at this point. Here, I can see that card again.

I can click on it if I want to look at the details, or I can send it back to the board immediately. Here's another way in which you can delete that card.

In this example, I'm just gonna say Send to Board again, and there we are back in list number one. Alright, so let's move on to lists.

How to Archive Trello Lists

Now, of course, here's a list, let's say list number two, and let's say I no longer need it, but maybe I want the information within it. I can archive it.

You'll see that there's no option here to delete. There is a difference between archiving all cards in this list and archiving this list, right?

If I select this option, it's just gonna archive all of the cards; the list will remain the same. But if I select the last option, Archive This List, it is gone, right? It's removed from this board.

How to Delete Trello Lists

Now, what if I want to go back and delete the list? Well, here's the catch—you can't actually delete lists.

I'm gonna repeat that one more time: deleting a list is not currently possible within Trello. However, if we do want to go back and resend that list or have that list reappear in this board, we can go back to our menu.

We're back to archive—let me just show you that one more time—archived items. But you will notice that we need to select this link to switch to lists.

Here is list number two. It's important that you notice the switch to cards—we don't have any archived cards at the moment—and switch to lists.

So now, here is list number two, and my option is to send it back to the board. There it is, it's back on the board, but I can only archive this list—it's not actually possible to delete that list.

So, something that you learned, hopefully, as a part of today's video. Alright, last but not least, let's take a look at deleting a board.

How to Delete Trello Boards

Again, by default, Trello is going to encourage you, or at least as a first step, to have you archive the board. So if we go back to menu and select More, we can come down here and say Close Board.

Now, closing the board is very much like archiving the board. If I select that, I can reopen the board by clicking the Boards menu from the header, selecting View Closed Board, finding the board, and clicking Reopen.

Okay, so I'm going to select Close in this case. It's telling me that it is closed.

I can reopen it by this link here, but here is our option if we want to permanently delete the board. If we never want to go back and find those cards, look at those lists, or rearrange anything, we can select Permanently Delete the Board.

One more warning—it's good, right? It's good to have a number of warnings, it's good to have red colors, red buttons to make sure we know what we're doing.

But I can hit delete, and now that one is gone, it's out of the way. So, there you have it—how to delete a card, how to almost delete a list, and how to delete a board.

I hope that you found today's video useful, and I hope that you give this video a like and you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

Here on the Simpletivity channel, I talk an awful lot about productivity tools, things such as Trello, maybe note apps such as Google Keep, and of course, email. It's something that we still can't get rid of here in 2018—ways in which we can be more productive and efficient with our communication.

But you might be surprised that one of the most frequently used tools in my arsenal isn't a web app at all. In fact, it's not even a project management tool.

It's something here that lives in my taskbar, and it's called Gadwin PrintScreen. Now today, we're talking about print screens in general, but I'm going to show you the one that I use, why I use it so frequently, and if you're not using some type of print screen resource or some type of print screen utility, why you should think about it—why you should consider it.

And no joke, I probably use this utility up to 10, 20, maybe 30 times in a given day. So how often are you on a particular website, or you might even be in a document on your computer, and you want to grab something?

Well, we know if we hit print screen on our computer, we can get a screen print of everything that we see. But in most cases, I just want a certain section—maybe I just want a quick print screen of this particular list.

Print Screen

Well, I use Gadwin PrintScreen. It allows me to hit the Print Screen button on my keyboard, just like you normally would, but then select the specific area that you're after.

And once I'm happy with what I have selected here, all I need to do is hit this check mark here, and it is copied—it's copied to the clipboard. I'm just going to open up Paint to use a simple example, and now I can paste it.

I can paste it there, I can paste it into an email, I can paste it into a document, wherever I like. I use this tool so frequently when I'm either grabbing something I need to share with someone else, or I want to import it or bring it into some other document.

I really use this a lot for my graphics. A lot of the thumbnails here on the Simpletivity YouTube channel start with a screen grab, with something as a print screen.

So let me show you some of the print screen options that you can use. Obviously, it's pretty simple to set up, right?

Print Screen Options

You hit print screen to grab that particular area. I can just click and drag right where the cursor is.

I can just click and drag over it, and if I want to redo it or if I want to scrap it, I can do so as well. If I don't want to hit the check mark, actually, I can just hit enter on my keyboard, which is sort of a nice alternative that I use quite frequently as well.

But let's see what other options we have with this print screen utility, some of the things that you may want to consider or think about. So, there are a few different things here.

You can see we can capture full screen, the window that you're in, or a rectangular area. It's this last one that I find so helpful and what I use most often because I can quickly just get a small portion of the screen.

But let's go look at some of the other options that it gives us because I may not be using all of these options, but you may find them helpful. So yes, I've got things to run at startup here.

A lot of these are more just sort of preferences here—a countdown. I've never thought this to be terribly helpful; I want to capture it immediately when I do so.

But I have a lot of these things turned off because I want it to be as less intrusive as possible. So, I don't want to see a widget anywhere on the screen.

I don't want that countdown timer, as I said. I don't want a notification message, and I certainly don't want a camera shutter sound, or I don't want anything audible to go along with it.

Now, our second option here has to do with hotkeys, and really the only one that I care about is the capture rectangular area. You can actually assign this to other hotkeys or shortcuts if you like.

I like it to be assigned to the typical or the standard print screen button on my keyboard, so that's what I use here. But I could reprogram that if I wanted to; I could choose another key or another combination of keys like you see above.

Now, when it comes to the image itself, this is probably most helpful if you want to capture the mouse cursor or not. Sometimes, if I need to show someone how to change a setting, maybe like this particular example, I want to show them which checkbox to click.

Maybe I would want to tick this off so that my cursor could be placed in that particular place on the screen and show them exactly where I want them to click. But in many cases, I don't want the cursor in the way.

I don't want to remember to have to, you know, move the cursor somewhere else, so I usually have this unchecked. We can resize the captured image, so by default, you can make it larger or smaller.

You could add a watermark if necessary. I believe in this case you can change what that watermark looks like, but I don't want a watermark.

I don't want a shadow, and no, I'm typically not printing this on a black-and-white printer or some other need to convert it into grayscale. But it might be helpful for you to know the number of different options that you have here.

And then lastly, we have post-capture options. So, a couple of things that can be helpful, but again, you'll see I have most of these things turned off.

Preview the captured image—I just want to be able to hit print screen, grab it, and then paste it immediately into the document or wherever I am placing that screen grab. Copy capture to the clipboard—this is pretty much a no-brainer because you need to get it somewhere else, right?

You want to be able to paste it or place it somewhere else. You can capture it to a designated folder, right?

You can send that via email, you can send that capture directly to the printer, and it looks like it does give you the opportunity to add some other custom actions as well. But for my needs, in most cases, all I want to do is hit print screen on my computer and say, you know what, I just want a screen grab of this.

I'm gonna hit checkmark, and then I can bring it somewhere else and just paste it immediately into that other file format, that other document. Like I said, many times it's an email that I'm pasting these images into.

Now, this video is not about recommending necessarily Gadwin PrintScreen. There are a lot of screen grab or screen capture tools available to you, both for PC users and for Mac users.

And recently, on my Samsung S9 phone, I've realized that they have a nice handy widget that I can use to do screen grabs on my mobile device as well. So I don't have to capture the entire screen; I can just do portions of it.

So I would recommend that you check out a screen grab tool. You might want to start with Gadwin, but there are other such tools, such as Snagit, and a number of other tools available to you.

So, if you're not already using one, I would recommend that you do so.

Hello everyone, thank you very much to Scott for having me here on Simpletivity. It is so good to be back.

I'm going to talk in today's video all about Things 3 and how we can use the project management functions to coordinate your own personal projects, which is quite exciting. For those who don't know, my name is Francesco.

I run a YouTube channel called Keep Productive here on YouTube, and I do reviews on productivity apps and resources. It's very much a complementary channel to Simpletivity, and vice versa.

Scott will be doing a video over on my channel all about Trello power-ups, which I'm really, really excited about posting. So without further ado, guys, let's dive over to the laptop and explore Things 3 for project management.

Things Overview

Now, in today's video, I wanted to dive into Things 3. This is an application available for macOS and iOS.

It's really for all others—a simple to-do list application. But what I wanted to talk about specifically is the project side of things.

Obviously, you can only share personal projects here; you can't share with other people. But I think it's a great visual application for planning out a new project.

I wanted to dive into what it exactly means, how you can get started with it, and a little bit more about the application. So guys, we have Things 3 in front of us.

I'm obviously viewing the macOS version—it's only available on that platform at the moment. Of course, if you're a Windows lover, it's a bit of a shame.

On this left-hand panel, we have a new list section. You can do typical things inside of the actual Things 3 list building.

You can create a new project, which is a time-based project, which is quite exciting. We'll be talking about that in a moment.

And there are areas, which are a group of projects or to-dos based on a responsibility. I've already created two: I've created Work and Personal.

Obviously, that tends to be a lot of people's situations, although there are tons of areas you can create. There are some great examples out there if you check social media like Twitter to see how people are using this—it's really extensive.

Create a Project

Let's go ahead and create a project. Let's say a kayaking event or tracking activity.

We're looking at kayaking next month, I think by the sound of it. If we scroll this one down and drag it under Personal, it now becomes a personal project under the area Personal.

You can do that with the same, so for example, you could create a project for work. So, for example, I could say Conference—I always go with conferences as my demo project.

I'm gonna drag it down to Work. If I just pop it in Work, it appears there.

You can add as many projects as you'd like to the different area sections, which is something a lot of people love inside of this application. So if I go to kayaking, you can see here it's a very simple project.

Pie Chart

It looks like a task, but it's actually not. Here is a pie chart—we'll be showing you this near the end.

It's a pie chart for the completion of a task. So once a task is completed, you can actually see it.

For example, if you've added all your project tasks to this project, you can see this partially filled. So, for example, if you're getting planned and organized, this can be a great way to visualize what you've got left and how much you have left.

Projects

Let's go into the project options. You have a host of different options.

You've got Complete Project, which will allow you to complete the project and now go into your logbook. Your logbook is accessible in this left-hand panel.

But the great thing is you can actually complete a project inside of Things 3. In some other applications, you've only got the ability to archive a project, which is a bit of a shame.

But again, it's something that serves as a bonus of Things 3. You can add a When date to it.

For example, let's say we were going on the 10th of November kayaking. As you can see, the actual project disappears from the actual personal section—it turns into Upcoming.

So if you don't want it to actually appear in Upcoming, you can add a deadline to it instead. For example, let's say we want to add the 10th of November to it and actually remove the When of the tasks.

It should appear back in this personal area, and that's because once you've assigned it there, you've given it a fixed date. Whereas this is a deadline, and actually, you can still use it as a project.

It becomes less accessible through the personal area section. Let's just explore a few more of the benefits you can advocate.

Benefits

You can add a When deadline, you can add tags to this project. For example, you could say Fitness and add a tag to it.

When you are searching stuff, you can actually find it. For example, if you had multiple fitness ones, you could click in this area and actually filter down, which is very helpful.

We also have Move, so you can move it to work, for example, or another area. You can repeat, so you can actually repeat an entire project.

So this is like if this was a monthly event and you planned for it. I don't know what it could be—it could be a newsletter for your website.

Then you could have a week or sort of monthly tabling, a monthly plan, and obviously, all of the tasks in here. You can duplicate a project, which is quite easy to do.

You can actually delete it and share it, but again, the sharing abilities aren't great. Now, as you can see here, you've got notes, and down here you can sort of go crazy.

Personal Projects

What I recommend for a lot of people when they're starting personal projects is to use this button down here, which is the heading area. This is something that ToDoist doesn't have.

It has it, but in this really strict format, which I don't necessarily like. So, for example, I'm going to put Planning here.

I'm going to add another one called The Day, so I'm gonna drag that one down there. You can see here that these are movable, archivable, removable—all from there.

Once I create a to-do, it opens up into this lovely, beautiful panel in which I can add notes to, I can add a date, tags, checklists, and the like. So, for example, in the planning process, maybe when we're planning for kayaking, I can call the sports center.

In my notes, I'm gonna put Ask for two kayaks to rent, and I'm gonna put this one on the task list for Wednesday. As you can see, you can add checklists if you want and even a deadline.

Now, if I drag this and put it under Planning, it is neatly organized under there, which is lovely. And of course, I haven't completed anything yet, so you can see that this is my chance to open.

We'll be demonstrating how it works in a minute. So, we're gonna put an Invite List to send the invite list out, and I'm gonna add a tag to it.

For example, I'm gonna put Easy because that's gonna be quite easy, apparently, to do, and I'm gonna give it a due date of Friday. So I'm gonna drag that one down there—this is all part of the planning process.

Then I'm going to put, for example, in The Day, I'm going to put Pick up all team members, and I'm gonna drag that one down there. As you can see, it's actually added the Friday to it.

But I'm gonna give it another day, and I'm actually gonna put that on the day of completion. So you can see here you can start building a lovely outline of a personal project here, or it can be work—whatever you want.

As you can see, it's a great way to do it. If you wanted to, you can add in a few details about the event up here, which makes it really accessible.

Now, let's say today I got the call center thing done. I called the sports center, and as you can see up here, what's been updated quite nicely is the pie chart for the completion of the projects.

You can see a nice outline of exactly when it's been completed, and that task disappears. You can even see the logged item below and when you did it, which is quite exciting.

And of course, the actual header that it was under. So if you're looking for a great way to coordinate a project in personal situations, this could be your best bet.

As you can imagine, Things 3 is a bit of an investment—it's $49.99, which seems simple but provides enough access. This could be your bet again—it's worth the investment.

Anyway, guys, hopefully, that gave you a nice outline of everything. As you can imagine, once you click Upcoming, you can actually see the tasks and the project linked to it.

Anyway, guys, hope this gave you a nice outline of Things 3. I will hopefully be doing more videos on this very soon over on my channel.

I've done a Skillshare course on it recently, so you can definitely check that out. Anyway, guys, a big thank you to Scott for having me here on the channel.

Please do join me on the Keep Productive YouTube channel and feel free to subscribe to Simpletivity, the awesome channel over on YouTube. Anyway, guys, big thanks for stopping by today—make sure to have a great week.

Keep productive, and I'll see you guys very, very soon. Cheers.

reminders and tasks in Google Calendar. what's the difference and what should you be using them for?

Find out in today's video. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And, up until recently, you had to make a hard choice between reminders and tasks. Yes, for the longest time you had to choose, do you want to use reminders on your Google Calendar or do you want to use tasks, but unfortunately Google Calendar didn't allow you to use both.

Well now you can. You can have both reminders and tasks on your calendar and I'm gonna show you the difference between the two.

Calendar Event

But let's actually add Events into the mix here just so we are clear on the differences between these three.

So in my example calendar here I've got one event, it's shaded here in blue, "lunch with Ted. " So I'm gonna receive a reminder if I have that enabled,

here you can see it's set for thirty minutes before. Of course, if I select the edit button I can add a location.

Here I got actually an add on added to my calendar where I can make it a zoom meeting or if you are using some other type of video conferencing tool. A fair amount of option within a calendar event, you can add guests of course to a calendar event.

But let's not spend too much time here, right an event is something where in most cases you have to be at a physical location or maybe it's a phone call, it's a meeting, it's some actual event of activity that you're engaged with. Now you'll notice on the previous day I actually have a reminder here, a reminder to, if I click on it to expand it "Pick up Todd from school".

Maybe there's an early dismissal and I need to pick up this child at 1 pm. So what's the difference from a reminder than an event?

Well, this might not necessarily have to do with a physical location, maybe I just want to remind myself to call someone or I wanna remind myself to send an email somewhere else.

Now it's going to remind me at a specific time, this one is assigned to 1 pm and I can check it off, so when I complete this task, I can say "Mark as done" and what's interesting here it's actually put it up here in the Monday you're probably wondering why has it done that? Well today happens to be Monday so although this was scheduled for Wednesday and I said I had completed it, that's where it's put it, here in that Monday just to track it if I want to.

Now I can go back and say "Mark as not done" but you see what has happened there and I want to show this in particular you can see that it adds it here back to the Monday where it was last, right we know that it was originally scheduled for the Wednesday so something to keep in mind is if you do check it off, it's going to go and keep track of it in the particular date that you checked it off when you checked it off. But if you undo it, it's not going to bring it back here or if it was an all day reminder, it's going to bring it back where it was last.

Grouping Reminders

So another thing that you're going to notice here and let's look at Monday again as an example, is that I have three all day reminders and then I have two specific reminders at 8 a.

m. One of the things that I don't appreciate about reminders and Google Keep is that they group them all together.

If I want to see what these three reminders are, I need to click on it and now I can see a breakout of those three reminders, I can tick them off one at a time, or delete or edit them but I don't actually have a way to auto expand them at least not in this view. Now if I do change it to, I believe it's the Daily view, no it's still gonna be there, it's still going to be all of those grouped together in that fashion.

So that's one of the things I don't like about reminders, that it continues to group them. Here at 8 am I've got to do what, I've got to go click on it and now I can find out what is exactly associated with that time.

Tasks

But you will notice that tasks behave differently.

Here I havea couple of tasks on the 16th on the Tuesday and although I have multiple tasks, it will not group them together, it'll actually treat them as separate items. Now tasks cannot be placed at a specific time so that's one of the biggest difference between reminders.

reminders can be either all day or at a specific time, but tasks will not have a time associated with that. It'll have a date associated with it, but not a specific time, if I wanna change that to the 17th I can add a description, I can add a little more detail

to this but it's always gonna appear at the top of the calendar, now for those of you who may have watched some of my previous videos, here on Simpletivity you will know that I recommend to a number of my clients to keep their to do list within their calendar because

View Tasks

they're spending so much time in their calendar anyhow, this also keeps your tasks in the forefront. They never go hidden no matter where I go or scroll as a part of my day, I'm always going to see those tasks upfront and of course it's pretty easy to just drag them to a different date or to drag them back as well.

Now you will also notice that you can view your tasks in a few additional ways. On the right hand side, in the recently redesigned Google Calendar, we have a tasks widget and if I open that up, you can see I have these tasks, along with some other tasks that I have here assigned.

The ones down below, here's a blank one lets get rid of that one. We don't need the blank test one there.

The ones down below you'll see don't have a date assigned. So you can have a number of tasks which are not assigned to a particular date but the ones above you can see, are the ones we see in the calendar to the left.

They are assigned to a particular date. If I go over here, let's check this "email Steve"

and I say Mark complete, it is going to cross it off up here so I can see it on the date, but you will also know if I expand the completed section it was also crossed it off down below as well. Sorry this wasn't the Steve one this was the Susan one, just for clarification, this was the Susan email so it's crossed off that task below there as well.

So you might like to view or to use this little task window because it can be very helpful to see all of your tasks in the same place and of course we don't always have tasks which are assigned to a particular date or time. So I'd love to hear from you next, How are you using reminders and/or tasks within Google Calendar?

Do you have a preference and what are some of the rules that you use when selecting the differences between these three? Be sure to let me know and share with others

in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video.

I hope you subscribe right here to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up and I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

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

Hi everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And you're probably wondering, why am I whispering?

Well, I'll tell you in a bit, but today I want to talk about ASMR. And if you have no idea what that acronym stands for, I want to tell you about it.

First off, you may be thinking it's weird that I'm talking about ASMR on a productivity channel such as Simpletivity. But because my goal is to help you to get more done and enjoy less stress, I wanted to focus on something that helps me to feel less stress on a regular basis, and that is ASMR.

So first off, what exactly does that mean? ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

Yeah, it's a mouthful. You can see why it's more commonly referred to as ASMR.

In summary, individuals who are affected or triggered by ASMR may feel a tingling feeling or other pleasurable sensations from soft sounds such as whispering, but other soft sounds as well. Now, by this point in the video, you may already know if you are affected by ASMR or not.

There are many, many people like myself who are, but there are just as many people who are not affected by ASMR. Now, my intent for producing today's video was not to have a trending video or a higher performing video here on YouTube.

Over the last two to three years, ASMR has really taken off within the YouTube platform. But for me, roughly once a week, I will enjoy an ASMR video to help me relax.

In my specific circumstance, once a week, perhaps I'll have difficulty sleeping. And I find by listening to an ASMR video for several minutes, while it won't put me to sleep, it will certainly help me to relax both my mind and my body.

And so, if you are affected by soft sounds, you may want to look at this as a way of stress relief after you've had a very hectic workday or a challenging or difficult day. You may want to look to ASMR videos to help you relax so you can unwind and finish your day and set yourself up for a great night's sleep.

Of course, ASMR can be used in a variety of different ways to relieve stress. So, if you're new to ASMR, some of the things that you may encounter…

Number one, often ASMR artists will use a stereo microphone like I'm using right now. And if you happen to be listening to this with a good pair of stereo headphones or stereo earbuds, you can see and you can feel the differences as I'm going around the microphone from the left ear to the right ear.

Of course, there's a lot more to ASMR than just whispering. Some ASMR artists may use their fingers such as this.

Some do a form of tapping or scratching. I'm not so triggered by those, but they'll often also use a variety of objects to trigger certain sensations.

It's just a piece of paper I had lying around beside my computer. And if you do decide to explore or do a search for ASMR videos, you will find an endless supply of objects and sounds and different ways that these types of triggers can be produced.

So, I realize today's video was very different than what you've come to expect here on the Simpletivity channel. But because this is something that I have found helpful, I wanted to share it with you.

And I'd love to hear from you. Are you affected by ASMR?

Do you happen to watch ASMR videos from time to time? I'd love to hear your experience in the comments.

And if you're still watching this video and you're not affected by ASMR, I'd still love to hear from you as well. What is your opinion or what is your feeling?

You know, as someone who loves cilantro in my meals and my dishes—I love Mexican food, I love Indian food, and I love cilantro in both of those dishes and many others—I find it amazing that there are some people to whom cilantro tastes like soap. And maybe you're one of those individuals.

To me, because I don't have that same type of sense with my taste buds, that just seems amazing to me, almost absurd. And I imagine if you are not affected by soft sounds such as whispering, you may think that ASMR is pretty absurd too.

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

Let's find our focus with Workflowy. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, and today I'm doing something a little differently.

Yes, today I'm gonna be taking a look at Workflowy. It says it's going to help us to break big ideas into manageable pieces, then focus on one piece at a time.

But what makes this different is that I'm going to be reviewing Workflowy in real time. Actually, I've never spent a single second with this application.

So why am I doing this? Well, number one, several of you have actually recommended Workflowy and asked me to review this application.

And number two, I've never actually done this before—actually gone through a product and reviewed a piece of technology in real time. So let's do this.

Everything from the sign-up process to creating our first… I don't know if it's called a note. I don't know what's gonna happen behind this screen.

So I'm going to start out by putting in some email addresses in here. Let's create a password and hit sign up, and let's see what happens with Workflowy.

Let's see how long it takes and if it gives us some introductory information here. I'm gonna say never—let's get our LastPass stuff out of there for now.

Welcome to Workflowy, where you'll just have a blank page. I'm gonna show you what I do here.

It's only turned that way, but you know what, like I like to do with most of my pieces of technology, I just want to dive in and see what happens here. You can see it is a very, very blank screen.

I've got a bullet point here, I've got a little star here on the right, and we've got a little toggle here—Show Completed and Search Home. I guess I can maybe filter by stars, and I've got settings here as well.

This is somewhat what I expected because I believe Workflowy is a brainstorming or mind mapping tool—a great place to get down those quick notes. So here's bullet point number one.

Brainstorm

Here's bullet point number two, and yes, I realize I added some additional fun in that first bullet point. If I hit tab, okay, I can tab and add more notes, additional notes down below.

But I think the real power of Workflowy, if I am not mistaken, is that you can click on these tabs, and look at that—you can go back in and out. So here you can see I'm a few sections deeper into this note.

So here's some additional text, maybe one more bullet point here. One more bullet point—you'll see why I need spellcheck so often here.

But then I think I can go back somehow. So this is notes; what are these arrows doing in here?

There's some way I can get back out of this. I think I can complete it; I can add a note or duplicate it over here.

Additional Notes

What happens if I click on it itself? Hmm… If I hit Home—okay, there we go.

If I hit Home, I go all the way back to the top level, but you notice here there's now a plus sign beside that note. So if I hit that and expand it, now I get some additional notes as well.

Those are those additional notes that I added. I can keep adding them here.

But I think one of the benefits, what a lot of people enjoy about Workflowy, is that you can minimize that. You can go into so much greater detail down below here and then go off on a tangent, right?

You can add additional things here, but if you don't want to see everything else, if I just click on the bullet point itself, now I zoom in. And if I do that again, I think, there we go.

So additional text, more text, even deeper down the trail. All right, so you can go in and out.

Expand Notes

Now you can see the breadcrumbs at the top. I can go back to the notes, okay, and then I can go back to Home.

So here we can see this one is now expanded, so there's even more things that you can expand here as well. Let's take a look.

You'll notice as I hover over these notes, there's a few other things here: Complete, Add Note, Duplicate. Complete—what does that look like?

Let's say if I have completed this one here, I can either hit Ctrl + Enter or Complete. Okay, a strikethrough makes sense, right?

I'm done with that; I can still go in here and edit it, I guess. Now can I change that? If I hit Complete again—there you go, just to undo it.

Okay, so that's what Complete does. What else do we have here? Share—okay.

Duplicate, I think, is pretty straightforward. Adding a note is just gonna add another space down below.

Oh, it didn't add a bullet point that time, so I guess it's adding some further text or further information below that note. But let's go to Share—let's see what that gives us here.

Share Notes

Okay, we can enter in or paste in an email address. We can get a shareable link, and here's a nice and simple toggle: Can we edit this or not?

Back or forth, and then add that person there. I'm not gonna go through with a specific—actually, you know what, let's paste in something here.

I'm gonna use my other Scott Test, or ScottFTest2, Gmail address, and sure, let's say you can edit. And I'm gonna say add—I just want to see what this looks like.

Really, how can I see this later on? I can add more people if I want.

I'm gonna hit X here, so I've added that one there. Can I—okay, there we go.

There's a little different icon there. I have to click on it to see who I have shared it with, but that's how you can share some of these individual notes.

And I'm assuming, the way bullet points and indentation work, that they're gonna be able to have access to everything here, right? If I select this, they're gonna have access to everything down this particular path, so to speak.

Export Delete

Not this bullet point, but of course this one here that says "more text even deeper down the trail." We can export and delete.

Delete looks pretty straightforward. We do have a timestamp at the bottom, so that's interesting—it does keep track of when that particular point was last made or edited.

If I say Export, what kind of options do we have here? Okay, formatted plain text, plain text, or OPML.

Okay, so we can even grab the code if we need to. Plain text removes the formatting, and then we've got some formatting here such as the rounded point.

I guess this is just a simple copy and paste, and then you can put it somewhere else, or there's a click to download button as well. All right, let's star a few things.

Stars look over here on the right, and look at that—when I hit that, something happened down below. Let's hit that again.

If I hit that, there's a home—hmm, interesting. I don't know what that does.

Quick Links

Let's do that with another one. If I've got my cursor over here—no, does that star only appear at the top?

Okay, maybe I need to create a new one, because that seems to be the same as what we saw earlier. If I go here, what if I star that one?

Okay, so now I've got some—it looks like I've got some—they're almost like Quick Links. Ah, I get it—they're sort of like Quick Links down here at the bottom.

So if I put that star—I'm gonna put—let's put another one down. I'm going to zoom into this one, I'm gonna hit the star.

So now you see that I've got some sort of Quick Links down here at the bottom. So if I want to go to some special places—and I guess I have to click that, do I?

If I hit Home—oh, and here's another way. So there's how those stars appear as well.

Now, if I hit the star in the top left-hand corner, I can go directly to those areas as well. I'm not sure how to recreate what we saw down here—do I have to click on this again?

It's almost like you have to double-click it there if I want to see this view, but I guess the intent is that once you've starred what you like, then you'd go up here and go directly to that.

Home, as I've shown before, is just gonna bring you to the highest level. Show Completed—let's mark one off again.

And so in this case, it's showing strikethrough. I'm assuming as soon as I hit this, oh, it's actually gonna hide it—okay, nice.

Okay, so now I can see what I've crossed through here. If I toggle that, it's actually gonna hide it in my bullet point as well.

Search—I'm sure it's pretty straightforward, so I'm not going to even toy with that. And under Settings—some basic undo, redo, and so forth.

So this was a super quick overview of Workflowy, but really interesting here. As you can see, it follows a bullet point path.

And for those of you who may be looking for some type of mind mapping, some way of diving in deeper into your notes, I do like this functionality of being able to hide higher levels.

Minimize Levels

Or, let's do this again—if I keep clicking on those dots—you know, this could be a full page of information, right? This could be a full page of notes, meeting notes, ideas, things that you're thinking about.

But then you can go back up and hide that, right? If we go back to the notes level here, if we want to minimize that, pretty simple—we can just cinch that out.

Let's go back to that home level here

, where we have a bit more of a breakout. And I can just minimize all of that, so I can keep going down with other ideas, other brainstorming options.

And if I need to go and check out what I've done before, I can do so. I can expand this, I can expand that.

So there you have it—a live, real-time review of Workflowy. I'm sure some of you who have used this app before know much more than what I have just seen in these first few minutes.

So if you have some special tips or some ways in which you like to use Workflowy, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for watching today's video.

Be sure to subscribe right here to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up and leave me a comment down below.

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