Date calculator & time zone meeting planner
If you like helpful, easy, and free, then this video is for you because I'm sharing with you seven free websites that you probably didn't even know existed. So, let's dive in. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And the very first website on our list is something that I've mentioned before, but I'm sharing with you again because I use it just so often.
And that is timeanddate.com. Now there is so much more than just finding out a time zone, or what time is it somewhere else in the world. So let me show you some of the features that I use most often.
Down here, we have a section called calculators and timers. And the date to date calculator is one of the tools that I use very, very frequently. So for example, I want to know how many days or weeks are between now, today, and perhaps an upcoming birthday.
I don't know, maybe it's a friend of mine. I'm going to say calculate duration, and I can find out that it's exactly 65 days
between today and that special day. And alternatively, it gives me several other time units including minutes, hours, weeks, and days, and even the percentage of the current year. Another date calculator that I use quite often is the one where we can add or subtract from a particular date.
So for example, again, I'm going to select today, but you can select any date that you want. And how many days is exactly 100 days from right now? Well instantly, I can see that it is October 13th.
That would take me a lot more work to try and figure out on my own. So whether I'm dealing with negotiations, whether I'm dealing with giving someone a project plan, I can confidently tell them and share those numbers with others all by using the date calculator.
The other feature that I use quite often is the online meeting planner.
And this is most useful when you're setting up meetings for people around the world,
or not within your chosen time zone. So let's say for example, I am planning a meeting for next week. So I'm going to select that date. That may be important because remember some countries, some time zones, do recognize daylight savings.
Others do not, and even if they do, they may be on a different schedule. So I've got my location listed here, and let's go and search for a few others. So I'm going to say that one of the people I'm meeting with is in London, I'm going to select that.
And then let's say that the other person that I'm meeting with is in Boston. So I'm going to select that as well. Now you can add many more than just three locations. But at this stage, I'm going to select show timetable.
And what I love about this is it gives me something very, very colorful, so I can see what times are outright and won't work, but also the times that are most suitable. So for example, I'm certainly available at three
or 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon, but that's midnight for my friend in London.
And that's later in the evening for my colleague in Boston. If I look up a little bit earlier, if we meet at eight or 9:00 a.m. my time, that's probably quite reasonable for the people that I'm trying to meet.
So that's perhaps the time that I'm going to suggest first. So it takes out a lot of the busy work. You don't have to do the math yourself, let timeanddate.com do it for you.
Quick & easy whiteboard
The next free website on our list is called Witeboard. Or is it Witeboard? I'm not exactly sure. All you need to remember is to remove or ignore the H, W-I-T-E board. And if you go to witeboard.com, you can immediately start to draw your diagrams.
You can add text, you can add shapes. I especially like this feature. You can see that I certainly cannot draw a perfect circle, but whiteboard.com will make it into a perfect circle with me.
I can add lines if I want to make connections or maybe make some straight edges, I can add text as well. And maybe I want to change that text, I want to have that text in blue, so you can ask me a question down below.
Witeboard is absolutely free, and you can even share it for free as well. So you don't need to sign up for an account.
The only need to sign up for an account is if you want to save your witeboard, if you want to go back and use it again in the future. witeboard.com is especially useful if you want to quickly and easily share your thoughts visually, and don't need to or want to sign into another account.
Temporary email address
The next free website on our list is all about using a temporary email address.
Something that you probably didn't even know might be helpful to you. How often have you gone to a website and you want to have access to their content, or you want to download their free guide, or whatever the case may be, but you just have a feeling that you're going to be inundated with so much spam and unwanted marketing emails?
Or maybe you're worried that they may sell your personal email to other organizations. Well with tempmail.org, you can receive a temporary email address, an email address which will be good for roughly 10 minutes in duration.
Just enough time for you to gain access to that information or access to that service. So in this case, I have this temporary email address given to me, and I'm going to copy it to my clipboard.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go over to Harvard Business Review, and I'm going to register for an account. So let me just put in some dummy information here. My name is going to be Hammersmith at this point in time.
I'm going to paste that email address, remember that's my temporary email address.
And then I'm going to have to add a password here, with some special characters.
I am not a robot, and I'm going to select register. What is going to happen is I should be receiving information from the Harvard Business Review. All I need to do is go back to tempmail.org. And down below, you can see I've received my welcome email.
I'm going to click on this arrow to view it, and I'm going to get all of the same information that I would expect from a regular email. I can see who it's from, I have the date. And I have all of this information that they would've sent to my personal email address.
But the great thing is, is that now I can access this information or get that unique code or that unique link without having to share my actual personal email address. Keep in mind that this temporary email address will only be applicable for roughly 10 to 15 minutes.m So I could repurpose it, I could reuse it.
And maybe HBR is going to send me some other information in the next 10 minutes, that's going to show up here in my temporary inbox as well. But if you need something in a pinch and you don't want to give up your own email address, TempMail may be the solution for you.
Now despite all of your efforts, it can be rather difficult to reduce the amount of spam and unwanted email you receive. But there's a reason why I only have eight messages here
in my inbox, and not 152 like I did just a few days ago. And that's because I'm using SaneBox, the easy and simple way to better manage your email inbox. With Sanebox, SaneBox gives you some very customizable folders that actually learn from your behavior.
So rather than just adding a new label, like I would typically do here within Gmail, SaneBox has actually added some customizable folders which have some pretty special powers with them. So for example, there's a lot of email that I don't want to start here in my inbox. Rather than creating a number of individual filters,
what I can do is train Sanebox to send certain messages to these SaneLater folder, where I can come and review these messages whenever I need to. And if something ends up here in my inbox that I want to see in the SaneLater folder going forward,
all I need to do is drag it over and it will learn from my behavior. But there's so many other great features as well, including the ability to snooze your emails into one of these three categories.
SaneTomorrow, Sane NextWeek, or SaneNextMonth, and let it do the work for you. So rather than having too many emails staring back at me here, I can take some selected ones and perhaps move them to NextWeek.
And then when it's time for me to engage with them, they will automatically appear right here in my inbox. Now I've got a special offer just for Simpletivity viewers.
You can get started with SaneBox, whether you use Google, Office 365, or Apple Mail, right away. But if you decide you like the service and sign up for SaneBox, my friends will give you a $25 credit towards your subscription.
That's like getting 50% off of their initial plan for the entire year. So be sure to head over to sanebox.com/simpletivity, or click the link in the description below.
Profile picture creator
Next on our list, we have a free website, which is going to make you look good no matter where you put your profile picture. Sometimes it can be difficult to stand out,
whether we are on social media or if we just need to upload a great looking headshot to maybe the number of project management, or video conferencing services that we use on a regular basis. But Profile Pic Maker makes this so much easier.
To get started, all we need to do is hit that big green button in the middle of the screen. And I have an image, I have a fairly simple one, I want to start with. Here is a headshot of myself.
Now you can select any picture that you like, but what Profile Pic Maker will do is actually remove the background as a part of the process. And in just a few seconds, it will generate a number of both professional, but also creative ideas for us to select with our profile picture.
Because remember, there might be a big difference between your Instagram profile and something that you want to put on LinkedIn. So here is that image where it's automatically removed that background, and given me a lot of, some a little more crazier, a little more maybe outlandish for me.
But there's some others that I really like, I kind of like this simple border with that color in the background. You can see at the very top, we can go between more creative ideas and maybe some that are a little more professional.
Now earlier when I was playing around, I really sort of liked this idea of just a very simple sort of color change, just sort of this simple round border. But there's some additional features which are amazing here, and it's all for free.
Number one, if I click on this little eyeball icon, I can actually download a matching background which will go with the profile picture which I've just selected. Now that particular one perhaps makes me feel
a little dizzy, but I like something like that. It's the same color, it's the same shading.
It's something that I can add to the back of my LinkedIn profile or Facebook page, or something like that. You can either choose to download a square image or a round image, and you're ready to go. In just a matter of seconds, you've got a fantastic looking profile picture where you can use anywhere on the web
Color palette from picture
or in other applications. Now sticking with colors for just a moment, the next free website is going to allow us to pull out the key colors from any image that you find online. Here we are at Color Palette Generator. And as you can see in this example here, it's pulled out the different hues of pink and green from this image of a flower.
I came across this image not too long ago, and I like sort of the fiery reds and yellows.
I like the mix, I like the feeling that's going on in this image. And maybe I'd like to apply it to my own website. Or maybe a social media campaign, for example. Well all I need to do is right click and copy the image address, and come back to my Color Palette Generator. And I'm going to paste in that URL and say, Color-Palette-ify it,
that's the term that it uses there for that button. Now I've got some of those key colors
from these images and their hex codes. So I can copy and paste and bring these directly into the editor or to whatever I'm using, where I can input that information.
Now it may not grab every single color from the image, but these are definitely fits with the theme of the image on the left. It'll even give you a mix of both duller
and more vibrant colors, so you can choose between the two. But simply double click and copy these hex codes. And you can paste them in Adobe or any other editor of your choice.
Clear recipe instructions
Now the next free website on our list is all about food, which you might find surprising because I don't talk an awful lot about baking and cooking in the kitchen. But I'll tell you one thing that I get frustrated by, and that is when I am searching for a recipe online.
Now don't get me wrong, there are so many wonderful recipes. But when I click on a recipe, I often end up on some type of blog, which is so incredibly lengthy.
Look at the search bar here in the right hand corner. This page is so long, it is full of many different pictures and stories and what this person felt like when her grandmother made these waffles. And yeah, I get it.
I understand how dry ingredients get mixed first. I just want the goods, I just want the ingredients. I want the recipe. Well rather than having to scan all the way to the bottom of this screen, all I need to do is go up and copy the URL of any recipe page. Come back to justtherecipe.com,
and paste in that URL here and say, get recipe. And immediately, everything else is shed away. And now I just have the recipe. The ingredients here on the left, the directions here on the right, and I can get to making these delicious Belgian waffles.
One step further, we can click the edit button if we want to make adjustments\ to any of these ingredients over here. Maybe we try it one time and we say, actually we need maybe 3/4 teaspoon of salt. And maybe we need to bake it in our waffle iron
for a specific amount of time. We can do that here and edit anything as we like. I even like that the format with Just the Recipe is actually a lot better than most of these bloggers' pages. If I keep going down to the actual recipe, here it is, that's what the actual recipe looks like. I've got a huge ad in here, I've got other things that are sort of distracting me and taking me away. This is so much easier for me to read,
whether I'm doing this on my iPad or a tablet, or even on my phone. Now everything is absolutely free. You can even save your recipes if you want, but you will need to sign into an account. So if you're frustrated with all the noise of blog recipes,
justtherecipe.com may be the site for you.
Honest software reviews
And when it comes to websites that provide me with an immense amount of value, and I sometimes can't even believe that it's free, g2.com would be near the top of that list. g2.com is all about software reviews.
And whether you're looking for a simple to-do list manager for yourself, or a complete CRM system for your business, I recommend you head to g2.com first. Here you can see some of the more popular categories, including video conferencing, eCommerce, marketing, and online backups.
And on the right hand side, we can see some popular tools which you're probably already familiar with. Now you can use the handy search bar to type in, well, literally any software that you can think of.
Or you can click on one of the images here on the right to see a deeper dive. So for example, when it comes to Trello, they have over 12,000 reviews from real users. And you can read their testimonials, but better yet, it's going to give you a summary of both Trello pricing and what people like the most about using this software.
I also like that it'll provide a helpful comparison tool, here on the right hand side. So if you are comparing a piece of software to something else, or you just want other ideas, you can do a side by side comparison. So here, I can see the pricing side by side.
I can see the ratings from members. I can see what people like more in one piece of software, and what they like more in the software that I'm evaluating as well. So before you install or start paying for that next piece of software, I encourage you to check out g2.com.
Now if you enjoyed this video, you are going to love my seven extremely useful websites video, which is on the screen right now.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
