Email safety check

Doesn't it feel great when you find a website that does that one thing really, really well and it does it fast and it does it absolutely for free? Well, in today's video, I'm going to share with you seven extremely useful websites that you may have never heard before, but I can guarantee you're going to come back again and again because they're just so useful.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's start off with website number one, and it is called Have I Been Pwned?

Have I Been Pwned? My first question for you is how do you pronounce this word? There's a big debate online, whether it's pohnd or pawnd, or do we just say owned because it's based off of someone making a mistake and actually misspelling the word owned.

No matter how you pronounce this word, this is a fantastic website to check your email or phone number to see if it's been involved in a data breach. Now, of course, you've heard of many important and significant data breaches over the years.

Maybe your banking information has been attacked. Maybe other big services, such as Facebook and other social media accounts, have been hacked.

Maybe you've received warnings in the past. Well, you can do your own checks based on your own information.

So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to type in an email address that I use for testing purposes. And I'm going to hit pwned/pwned, you tell me in the comments, and it's going to tell me that, "Oh no, there's been some data breaches."

In fact, there's been 11 data breaches. Now, if I scroll down, the great thing about this website is that it's going to tell me the details of these particular data breaches for my specific email address or whatever you enter in here.

So I can see things like Adobe and Canva, for example. If I scroll down further, Dropbox, Last.fm, they'll even give me the years in which many of these data breaches occurred, and they're telling me that, yeah…

Look at this, email addresses, passwords, usernames, website activity, all of these things were compromised in these data breaches. So what do you do next?

Well, maybe I'm going to log into some of these accounts and change my email address. That would be one thing.

Number two, I should probably go in there for sure and change my password. Even if I want to keep the username or the email address, log into some of these services and change their passwords as well.

Printer friendly mode

The next useful website on our list is called Print Friendly, and you'll find that at printfriendly.com. Now, how often have you been looking at an article or a webpage and saying, 'This is valuable information. Maybe I'd like to save this as a PDF, or maybe I need to actually print out a paper copy.'

So you come up to your browser and you select Print. Now, sometimes this can take a little while because it needs to load all of the ads, images, and other things that are going on in this article.

And even before I saw the preview, I'm looking up here, 11 sheets of paper. Even if this is going to be a PDF, that's, I think, way too long for this article.

Look at all of this menu and website gunk I've got at the top of the screen. And as I scroll down, look at all these advertisement breaks in between.

Here's another Black Friday ad in the middle. I've got these advertisement spaces.

Yeah, this is not very easy to read in this particular format. Well, that's where Print Friendly comes into play.

Let me just copy the URL of that exact same article. I'm going to come over here, paste it, and say Preview.

Now it may take just a few seconds, but here you can see a much more readable file. So here we've got the entire document, and we're done. That's about it.

That looks more like two, maybe three pages at most. I've just got the goods of this particular article.

Now, Print Friendly is perhaps even more friendly if you install the browser extension, then you don't have to be coming back to this website. And the good news is that Print Friendly is available on all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.

So if you want to print just the goods, be sure to check out printfriendly.com.

Bypass content paywall

Now the third website on our list may be a little controversial, but I'll let you decide if you want to go forward and use it or not. The website that we're talking about is called 12ft.io.

And here's the tagline, 'Show me a 10ft paywall and I'll show you a 12ft ladder.' So here's the idea: you come across an article, and maybe it's from a magazine such as Harvard Business Review, maybe it's a news publication such as the Boston Globe, or really anything which is requiring a subscription.

So here I've found an article. I've been searching online, and this looks like a great article, really what I'm interested in or what I need to know.

But as I scroll down, I've only been given about a paragraph, and then it's telling me that I'm out of free articles for this month. And this is going to change depending on the website that you're on, right?

Some may give you a few free articles per month or per day or whatever the case may be. Now, I want to be very clear. If you're getting real value from any publication or any website, I think you should be paying for those services.

That's how you're getting quality content and quality information. However, you might stumble across a website where there's just that one article, right? Just that one piece of content.

You may not be interested in any of the other content that this website is providing, but you would just like to see what's going on here. Well, this is perhaps where 12ft Ladder comes into play.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this URL and I'm going to come back to 12ft Ladder. Now, you actually don't even need to come to the website itself—all you need to do is actually put this little URL in front, the 12ft.io URL in front of it.

But I'm going to paste it in here just for our example here. And I'm going to say Remove the Paywall.

And what it's going to do is stay on that same tab, but now as I scroll down, I have no restrictions. I've got the entire article here in front of me.

And the nice thing is that usually, it will remove everything else, including the ads. So why is this working, and how does this particular website get around this?

Well, if we scroll down to the bottom of the 12ft.io page, you can get the what, why, and how does it work? Essentially, the developer of this website says that he thinks that AdWords has killed the web.

And so that we're too often being served up with things with keywords and things just to grab our pieces of information. But how is it working behind the scenes?

Well, Google is indexing all of their content. So new sites and other publications are giving Google the entire article so it can scan through it and do its Google crawler business.

However, this website is making you somehow, I guess, of the crawler or access to that same information so that they can cache a copy of the site each and every time.

Original headshot images

Now the next website on our list is very interesting and also comes with a very peculiar name. Here we are at thispersondoesnotexist.com, and yes, you read that right, the person we're looking at right now does not exist.

What we're looking at is a headshot or an image made up of many other faces. So this is not a real human being.

This is someone that a computer has put together from a variety of other random images. Let me just hit refresh.

Here you can see someone with some type of hat on top. It's a very interesting website, and the way that you might find it useful is if you're looking for some headshots for your website, if you're looking for something for your demos or maybe a database, especially if you're giving examples to your clients or customers.

I know for myself, I'm often needing a few headshots if I'm putting together a database or wanting to put something together where it looks like I've got some actual avatars or actual profile pictures here. And it's almost eerie on this page because this person, and everyone that we've seen so far, does not actually exist.

These eyes are probably from someone different than the nose, than the mouth, than the hair, the ears, and the chin profile. Let me refresh this once again, and again, someone else who does not exist.

Now, you're probably already recognizing that it's not the most diverse collection here. There tends to be a lot more women in this particular collection and a lot more fair-skinned women as well.

So if you are looking for greater diversity, this may not be the website for you. But even just for a few moments of entertainment, you can refresh this screen and look at an image that looks so lifelike, that looks so real, yet this person does not exist.

Something that may be helpful to you if you're looking for images and not just want to repeat all of the stock images and all those things that you see time and time again, you can go have some fun or use it for your own purposes at thispersondoesnotexist.com.

View old websites

Now, speaking of things that no longer exist, here we are at archive.org, and we are going to take a look at the Wayback Machine. How often have you wanted to go back and see what your website or maybe a competitor's website looked like many years ago?

Or maybe you just want to have some fun and take a look at a website from the past. What the Internet Archive does is actually cache most webpages or at least a large variety of webpages over the years.

It's like taking a snapshot of different websites over the years. So let me give you just a quick example.

I'm going to actually type in my own website because I'm in the process of redesigning it. Maybe I'd like to go back and see, well, how did things get started?

Were there things that were working better in the past or not? Let's go back and take a quick look.

So here you can see, we've got a bit of a timeline here at the top. Yes, my website was actually launched in 2015, but it looks like the Wayback Machine didn't start archiving it until 2016.

These little bars represent the different points in time where things were snapshotted, where things were grabbed over time. If I click on 2016, for example, down below, then I'm given a yearly calendar.

I can see the different months to see what things looked like at that time. So let's take a look at, I don't know, November 27th, 2016.

If I go here and click on the time, that's going to be the specific time when they took that snapshot. What it's going to do is actually bring and present that website to me here within the browser.

And things look quite a bit different than they do now on my home screen. Now, keep in mind that some of the fonts, some of the layout may be a little bit different.

So, for example, this Simpletivity link is actually a logo that was over here. It didn't actually look quite like that.

There might be a few things out of alignment, but I can actually go back and I don't have to save a copy of this or necessarily back up the website if I want to come back and review it.

I can come here and say, 'Oh, wow, so this is what I did. This is what things looked like way back when. Was there anything that I want to come back and revisit?'

Terms of service

Now, the next website on our list is for all of us who don't have the time or effort to read all of those terms of service. And you know what I'm talking about.

Regardless of the software, website, or apps that you use, you're often presented with an extremely long terms of service that, even if you did read it all, would you be able to understand all of the terms and the legalities within those terms of service?

Well, here at ToS;DR, that's termsofservicedidntread.org, you will get not only a summary of the terms of service, but it's actually going to tell you what it means.

So, for example, if we go here to Facebook, it's telling me that Facebook stores your data whether you have an account or not. Your identity is used in ads that are shown to other users.

Now this is the plain speech that we understand. But if I hover over it, it's actually going to give you the specific wording, showing you or referencing the actual terms of service.

On the front page here, you're going to see some of the bigger names like Amazon and Reddit and Wikipedia, for example, but you can search for anything here.

So, for example, if you want to type in one of your favorite tools or one of your favorite services. Let's type in something like, oh, I don't know, maybe something like Todoist, for example.

And here we can see Todoist doesn't have a grade yet. Many of them will receive an actual grade, but here are some of the things that you may want to consider if you want to go forward with using that tool and if there's anything that maybe stands out to you.

So, if you want to go and preview or read some of the things that you couldn't have read in the first place, or let's be honest, you didn't read in the first place, you can always come to Terms of Service; Didn't Read and catch up and determine if you want to proceed or maybe hang back.

Amazon price checker

Last but certainly not least, we are on a website that's going to help you save money and make you feel confident if you are getting a great price on a particular item. Here we are at camelcamelcamel.com, and CamelCamelCamel is all about looking at Amazon products and seeing the price history of those particular products.

Now you can use CamelCamel in a variety of different countries. So even if you're not using the American Amazon site, you can look at a variety of countries down here, including a German flag with a blue on the top.

I don't know why they chose that there, but, anyhow, let's stick here with CamelCamelCamel, and we're going to type in something here like, oh, maybe something like a Blue Yeti microphone, for example. I get a lot of questions about, 'Scott, what type of microphone are you using?' And yes, I do use a Blue Yeti microphone.

So if I scroll down here, here you can see there's a few different models and things that are going on here. And let's click on this first one here.

It's telling me the Amazon price currently is 129.99. But if I click on the item itself, we're going to get so much more detail.

So how am I going to determine if this is a good price or not? Well, if I scroll down, I can see a full price history all the way back to 2014.

And you know, like most products, there's ups and downs, right? There's sales, there's Black Friday, there's a variety of other things here as well.

So there's quite a gap between when it was cheapest at a mere $85, but that was also several years ago, to its highest price of 131. So, really, if I look at this, the average price has been $116.

Maybe right now is not the time to buy this particular item. In fact, it's very close to the highest price it has ever been.

Let's try another product for our example. Maybe I'm looking for an RGB keyboard, in this case. I'm just going to type in those keywords.

It doesn't have to be a specific product. You can actually do much of your shopping right here at CamelCamelCamel.

And let's take a look at this Razer gaming keyboard, which says it's 34.99. Well, is that a good price? Should I pull the trigger and purchase this today?

Well, let's open it up and see what the data has to say. So, once again, I'm going to scroll down. And even before I do, it tells me, 'Hey, this is the best price.'

Well, show me the data. Why is this the best price? Well, look at this chart. Things have seemed to continually come down over the years and I can see that, yeah, this is rock bottom.

This is the lowest this particular keyboard has ever been listed on Amazon. So the average price has been 48.91, the current price is 34.99.

Yeah, let's go ahead and buy this keyboard. Now, if there's a particular item that you're waiting for, the other nice thing about CamelCamelCamel is that you can track those prices.

So if you just enter in your email address and say, 'Listen, I want to be notified when it drops to a certain amount,' you can do so right here.

Now I would love to hear from you next. Which of these seven websites were your favorite? And do you have anything else that you would love to share and add to this list?

Please be sure to do so in the comments down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult; in fact, it's very simple.

Problem with the traditional interview process

Would you like to spend less time managing the job interview process? Would you like to make it easier for both yourself and your candidates so that you can hire the right talent in record time? Well, in today's video, we're taking a look at Willo and why thousands of organizations are using it to hire faster and in less time. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

One of the most time consuming parts of any hiring process is the job interview.

You have to schedule it with the prospective candidate. You have to whittle it down

from a number of different resumes and then you have to organize that with other members of your team. Where Willo comes into play is to reduce the amount of time involved so that you can have your candidates answer their questions in a recording

and then have you review that in your own time. So both parties do not have to connect at the exact same time and then you can zero in on those candidates

that are worthy of a real time or in person interview. So let's take a closer look.

Getting started with Willo video interviews

So here I am within my Willo dashboard where I can both create new postings, but I can also review the video interviews which are coming in. I'm going to start out by clicking the interview section and although I already have something in progress, let's start with a fresh one by selecting the create button here. So first off, we just need to give it a title, right? What type of position are we hiring for? We can include a salary if we want but that is optional. In this case, I'm going to attach it to my sample company, Simple Incorporated and then I can either upload my own video,

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I can add a link or record my own right here within the Willo interface if I want to give them a bit of an introduction or a bit of a welcome. Down below, we have a description area where we can list the entire job description so the individual who is answering these questions knows exactly all the details about this position. In this particular example, I'm going to leave it blank and I'm going to hit next.

Creating video interview questions

Now we move on to the questions area, which is really the nuts and bolts of Willo.

These are the questions that we're going to pose to the candidate and then expect them to answer via video recording. So I can enter in any question that I want, but the great thing is that Willo will actually suggest a variety of questions for me as well. So maybe I want to start off with a tell me about yourself question. Before I add a new question, I do have a few options available to me. By default, it's going to choose video answer as the type of answer, but you can also allow your candidates to upload a file themselves and then on the right-hand side, you have two other choices. The first one is how many times that they can retake their video. Now by default, it is set to unlimited and I would probably recommend that you set it at this limit so that if they make a few mistakes, maybe to make them feel more at ease of using video recording, they can retake as many times as you want. Again, the participant will get to choose which one they want to send to you. You don't have to sift through the many or multiple takes and then lastly, we get to choose what the maximum length of that video will be. Now, keep in mind, if you choose a longer length such as four or five minutes, that expectation may be built right into the question. So if you don't want a five minute answer, you can reduce this down to one or two minutes. Let's ask another question here as well and in this case, I'm going to say what, maybe what motivates you? For example and again, I can adjust it for each and every question. I can add as many questions as I want.

Publishing options for your job posting

When I'm happy with the order and the number, I can hit next and move on to the publishing stage. Now, I can choose a particular end date for this question and for my ability to receive and for participants to record their answers or I can just say no end date at all. Lastly, I can say if I want to request their availability for follow-up

and I'm going to show you in just a minute how they can choose when would be a good time to follow up if you decide to continue with the interview process. Last but not least, all I have to do is select publish and now I've got an invite link which I can send to my prospective candidates directly. I can attach it to a job description. I can post it on my website. I can put it anywhere that I like. So in this case, I'm going to hit copy link and I'm going to paste it in a new incognito window so it looks and feels

Job candidate experience

like what the participant would experience. So here we can see the name of the position, the name of the company and location and the description would be listed here as well if I chose to include it. All the participant needs to do is select get started.

Now, first they're going to be greeted with a how to record a great video and I think this is a great option here just to make the prospective candidate a little more comfortable, especially if they haven't prerecorded a job interview in the past. They can either watch this helpful video, or read these tips down below, or they can simply select get started. So now all we need to do is give permissions to use our cameras and our microphone. In this case, I'm just going to close this helpful hint here, they may need to choose which camera they wish to use. Let's see if this is the right one, there I am. So now I'm ready to go and I can proceed with answering this first question. Tell me about yourself? The great big, purple record row button is here

and it's telling me that I have a maximum of a minute to answer this question. So I'm going to hit the button. (timer beeping) I'm a very energetic individual who is so looking forward to working with you and your team and providing satisfaction to all your clients. They can hit stop record when they're done and then they're immediately brought here with a preview of the entire recording. So they can play it back if they want, see if they're happy with it, or if they're not, they can choose to rerecord it. In this particular example, I'm going to say done and then I'm brought to the second question, which in this case is what motivates you? (timer beeping)

I am strongly motivated by candies such as Skittles or Mike and Ike's. In fact, I can guarantee results if you have candy such as these available to me at all times. Once again, just like we saw in question number one, they can review that video, choose to rerecord it as many times as they'd like or hit done in this case. Now, the video is uploaded, but they will have one more chance to preview all of their answers. So even if you have seven different questions here for example, they can choose to watch and play back any of their answers, choose to retake any of them before selecting next. In this case, we selected the your availability toggle in the settings.

So now the prospective candidate can give us three different options or three different times and when it would be good for us to follow up with them. So again, some additional functionality, some great ways so that you can connect with those candidates when it's best for them and hopefully best for you as well. They can either choose to skip this step or to confirm and now all they need to do is enter in their details and now you can review it on your end.

Reviewing and rating interview videos

So let's go back to our interviews tab where we are managing the interviews that we have sent out. In this case, we're going to take a look at the assistant store manager for Lego and we can see that we already have three responses waiting for us. So if I select on this particular position, it's going to open up and show us all of the results,

including some other information for this particular position. We can always click the invite button if we need to retrieve that link or we can choose to edit it as well. So in this case, I can see that there are three different candidates who have submitted responses. So now I can go into this on my time. It could be the middle of the night,

it could be first thing in the morning and I can review these responses. So in this case, I'm going to take a look at Emma and I've asked three different questions. I can see that she's answered all three and if I want to know what her favorite LEGO set is, well.

- I would say my favorite LEGO set is the Harry Potter Mansion as I am a huge "Harry Potter" fan. - Fantastic, so now I can see the person, I can see how they respond and most importantly, I can see what they had to say about the questions that I'm asking.

Up above, you can also see the availability that she has set for herself, so I can choose an ideal time to follow up with her.

In addition, Willo gives us a variety of different tools so that we can rate or share our notes with other people within the organization. So for example, here, maybe I'm fairly impressed with Emma's responses here, so I'm going to give her four stars. Maybe later on, I can choose to accept this candidate, which would mean that yes, I'd like to proceed with having Emma come in or for us to set up a live video interview, or I can say maybe she's just not right for this position and I can choose reject. Down below, we even have a note section as well so that you can share your own personal feedback, your own personal feelings, with other members of your team, other people within your business who are included in the hiring process. On top of that, Willo integrates with more than 2000 apps,

Willo integrations

including many of the tools that you already use. So for example, if you want to get a Slack notification when a video response is recorded, you can do so. If you use Trello to manage your hiring process, you can integrate Willo with it as well. So if you're looking for a more efficient and effective way to hire the best talent for your team,

I'd recommend that you check out Willo. Be sure to click the link in the description below to learn more. Remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Visual Collaboration

Do you have a product or service that you need to share with the world? How are you going to do that? Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you seven marketing and sales tools that I think you should be using right now, so let's dive in.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen, here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress, and the first tool that we're looking at here is Miro.

Now, Miro is known as an online whiteboard or brainstorming tool, but when it comes to marketing and getting that information out to your clients or your prospective customers, you need to be as clear as you possibly can, so I've been using Miro more and more often to communicate and also work with my clients.

So for example, I was designing a workshop not too long ago and I shared this with the client so that we could work through how the different components and the different areas of that workshop were going to play out.

Miro makes it so easy just to drag and push things around and also create relationships between certain things that you have listed here within your projects. Another good example here is a current website redesign that I'm involved with at the moment, and again, it just makes it that much easier to lay out not only my thoughts, but convey these thoughts with others.

Miro makes it extremely easy

For you to share your information with others, whether you want them to collaborate with you or maybe you just want to send them the link so that they can access and see what you're speaking of.

And speaking of sales, you can use Miro to create a full product roadmap or a user story map, or a variety of other templates which come included with Miro, so this can be a great way to share your ideas and communicate and collaborate with others.

Digital Flipbooks

Now, if you really want to impress your audience, don't just send them a PDF, why not send them a FlippingBook instead? FlippingBook allows you to upload any existing PDF and make it that much better.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. So here's a finished result here. Instead of sending a PDF, which is going to have 28 pages with it, and you know no one's going to be scrolling through 28 pages, why not send them something a little more dynamic and something that actually looks and feels a bit more like a traditional brochure? What I love about FlippingBook is that you'll notice

that we have dynamic images on the screen. Yes, you can have .gifs for example here, you can have links anywhere on the page, you can even embed video. So for example, if I want to play Gail's story here, all I need to do is hit this play button

and now I can go directly to this particular video. So it's an incredibly dynamic experience for those who receive it. Here's another example here, which is a product catalog, which again, instead of just sending them something like a long list or an inventory style website, why not wow them with your products? You can even allow them to click on things, expand the view, and see the other options that are available to them.

On the left hand side, you have a full table of content so they don't have to sift through everything, they can go directly to the area that they're looking for. Over here within my FlippingBook account, I've actually just recently uploaded my own PDF.

Now this is a traditional PDF that I created a few weeks ago, but it looks so much better here within FlippingBook. This is just a tease of a new PDF that I'm putting together, but doesn't this look a lot more enticing? It even highlights the things that I can click on when I'm entering in this particular document.

Not only does FlippingBook make your PDFs look amazing, but you can share them with just a single link. That's right, no more attaching a big, bulky PDF to your emails.

On top of that, everything within a FlippingBook document is absolutely trackable so if you want to see how many people have viewed it, how many people have clicked on something, how many pages, how many time they have spent within the FlippingBook itself, you've got all that information here.

Try doing that with your traditional PDF. Yeah, you have no clue how often it's been shared or how often someone is actually clicking or accessing that information. You get all of these details right here within FlippingBook.

If you'd like to learn more and start using it for yourself, be sure to check the link in the description below.

Free Stock Photos

Now, of course, no matter what type of content that you are creating, whether it's for a email newsletter, whether it's for social media, you're going to need some amazing images, but preferably on the cheap. Well, that's where Pexels come into play. Yes, P-E-X-E-L-S.

This continues to be my go-to for finding the majority of the images that I either include on my website or sometimes right here within my video. So you can type in absolutely anything that you want, it's remembering some of my previous searches here.

So here I've taken a look at digital marketing photos and everything here within the Pexel site is of high quality and absolutely free for you to use. So let's say I actually like the way this is looking, but I want something maybe just slightly different.

One of the things that I love about Pexels is that if I scroll down below, it gives me a lot of other options that are related to this particular picture. If I scroll almost all the way down to the bottom, you can see I can also search by certain tags as well. So if I'm looking specifically for an Apple iPad, I can go directly to that result.

Maybe I do want two people sort of looking at technology, well, I can look at some of these suggestions down below and here it's going to give me a suggestions of other people who are grouped together, maybe even these same two actors here that are in this particular picture, so a lot of great choices here.

When you click on any of the graphics, you'll also have the ability to download it in a variety of different formats.

Maybe you don't need something this large, but you can do something either as a custom size or as one of the other defaults, so quick and easy, a great place to find content for your next promotion.

Infographic Maker

Now, if you'd like to combine some great graphics and animations with your data,

then you're probably looking to rate an infographic, and for that purpose, we're taking a look at Venngage. Venngage is all about creating things in short order,

but things that are actually interactive and things that people can click on and do so much more with. Now, there's a large collection of different templates that you can choose from, so, no, you don't have to start from scratch, you can something right here and input or change some of the data.

For example, I started with this basic template, but I've removed a few things here on the right hand side because I'd like to add a map of some detailed data. Now, everything is click and drag and drop,

so it's very, very simple to edit, but what sets Venngage apart from many infographic design software is all of the engaging widgets you have access to here on the left hand side.

So for example, maybe I want to include a map of the US here, and I'm just going to resize it so it's going to fit in this space. Now, you can see that some of the states are shaded differently here. Well, what I can do is I can select Edit Map and I've got access to all that data.

So maybe I can copy and paste something within a spreadsheet that I already have so I can tell what my viewers are actually looking at.

But it actually gets better than this 'cause not only can I adjust all of the settings

and the colors, but when I go to publish it, let me just show you a quick preview. It's more than just colors, it's actually going to be interactive.

So when we see this map here, as I drag my cursor over top of each state, not only does the color change, but it tells me the actual number represented for that state.

`And you can do this with almost anything within Venngage, so if you'd like to really spruce up what you are sharing, especially if you're dealing with data and figures, Venngage may be the solution for you.

Graphic Design

Of course, when it comes to promoting and marketing your products or services,

you don't want to forget social media and a great place to produce your social media content is Canva, even if you just use their free account. Now of course, Canva has a variety of different things that we can produce and convert, but the great thing when it comes to social media is that it has the defaults built right in so if you're creating an Instagram post or a Facebook post for example, you don't have to worry about the specific dimensions, let Canva worry about that as you can create your content.

For example, I recently created a variety of Instagram posts right here within Canva to promote my reset productivity masterclass. All I did was take an existing template that I thought would work well and then simply changed some of the text.

So in this case, it encouraged people to click through and scroll to the right, so that they could learn more about the program, they could learn more about this particular course.

The only thing that I changed were some of the colors so that this blue matched my Simpletivity blue, and then of course, the text so I could outline what they would learn and what I was trying to convey in this message. So whether you're just looking for inspiration or you need to produce your own digital content,

be sure to add Canva to your digital toolbox.

Form Builder

Now, when it comes to marketing and communicating with all of your clients and potential clients, you want to be collect information, so you're going to need a form,

whether that's on your website or maybe just a standalone landing page, and for that, I recommend Jotform. Why Jotform? Well, Jotform is not only one of the most flexible and easiest to use, but Jotform has so many amazing widgets and addons

and integrations that you can add to any of your forms. So for example here, I've created a student registration form where I can customize all of these fields, but on top of that, I can add payments directly to this form so I don't have to send them somewhere else, I don't have to wait for their email and then send them an invoice,

I can actually add that directly to the form. But Jotform also can create some pretty fantastic and pretty amazing-looking forms at the same time. Let me preview this form for just a moment to show you what I mean.

I mean, you're used to some traditional forms, right? And probably most of your clients are, but why not wow them with something like this, where they they can hit the start button, where they can enter in their name, let's enter in a dummy email address and hit submit, and then maybe wow them with a big thank you? Something that guides them along the process and also makes it a little more intriguing when it comes to your product, your service, or your brand.

JotForm has a variety of different tools to help you and your business, including tables and an ability to create your own mobile app. So if you'd like to learn more, be sure to click the link in the description down below.

Email Marketing

Last but certainly not least, when it comes to marketing, you absolutely need an email marketing solution. Now for many years, I was a Mailchimp user and you're probably familiar with Mailchimp, at least with that name, but in the past year, I have found something so much better, so much simpler, and also more cost-effective.

So I am now using MailerLite and I recommend it to you as well, especially if you're just getting into email marketing or if you are tired of some of the limitations of what you're currently using.

Mot only does MailerLite have a very simple interface here that really anyone can use, but really the form builder is what is so powerful here. I can create as many either embedded forms or popup forms as I like, so I can capture more email addresses and then be able to reach out and communicate with those who are interested in my products or my services.

If you'd like to see my full review of MailerLite, you can click the link in the description down below. So if you're ready to wow your audience with your marketing materials, be sure to check out some of the tools mentioned in today's video.

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

Great copywriting is not easy

If a website can do something faster than how I can do it, that's great, but if it can also do that thing better than I would ever be able to do it, that's fantastic because that means I can spend more time on other areas of my business.

So in this video, we're taking a look at a website that creates amazing copywriting and marketing text using artificial intelligence. So whether you're wanting to create Facebook, or LinkedIn ads, or maybe a landing page or even a blog post from scratch, Anyword has you covered.

So let's dive in and take a closer look. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen in here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And I know when it comes to my own marketing efforts, I often find it very very challenging.

Why? Well, I don't have a background in copywriting, I'm not sure which words or which phrases

are going to help convert my advertisement or my content and encourage people to click and learn more. Well that's exactly where the website Anyword comes into play.

Anyword is constantly analyzing millions of ads, landing pages, product listings and many other sources and then you get to tap into what is working best.

Creating a Facebook ad with Anyword

So let's take a closer look. Here we are in the first screen which is called data driven copyright, and we've got a few different categories here including advertisements, landing pages, including social media posts and even emails as well.

Let's get started with perhaps a Facebook ads. So I'm going to click on this and I'm going to say let's start a new project. Now, the great thing here is that

I only need to tell it a small amount of information. So for example, I'm going to use my own course, my own online course, as the example here, I can tell it whether it's a product or a piece of content, I can choose from a number of different categories.

So it can use that experience. Remember all of that data that Anyword is collecting to my advantage. Here's my URL, here's the name of the course and the product description.

So I've given it very little information as you can see, I've only given it a small amount of information but what I'm going to do next is I'm going to select create a project. So it's going to take that information including some of the text,

some of the existing information on my website and bring it into Anyword. Now on the left hand side, we have a few different ways in which we can create or view that content. Now, remember, in this particular example, we're looking at a Facebook ad,

so there's not going to be a ton of texts, we're going to look at some other examples a little bit later but already you can see I've got a wide variety of choices here

Generating copywriting examples

in terms of the type of style or the type of tone that I would like to use. Let's just get started with the default here, and all I need to do is come all the way down to the bottom and select generate. Now I can choose how many want them to generate at a time, I'm just going to stick with the default of five and then we'll play around and look at some of the other options.

So I'm going to select generate here and in a matter of seconds, it's going to analyze that information, that small amount of information, which I gave it and it's going to produce some Facebook ad copy. Remember, I haven't created any of these myself.

So let's take a look, forget about everything else and focus on yourself. If you're feeling burned out, this course is for you, click here to learn more.

Work smarter not harder, no more struggling to stay productive, join us for reset and learn how to take control of your time management and productivity register today.

So what you'll see is it's producing great and proven Facebook ad copy which I can use as I'm putting together my next campaign. And remember, I didn't give it all of these words and terms, it's actually pulling it partly from the landing page itself, but also from looking at other successful courses and other successful Facebook ads.

Copywriting scores and data metrics

Here on the right hand side you'll also notice that Anyword gives us a score. So it's giving us a predicted score based on the information here. If I decide to click on any of these scores it's actually going to pull up some additional information here as well.

So for example, is this going to appeal a little bit more to a younger demographic

rather than an older demographic? Does it have slightly more of a feminine tone of voice? You may not be thinking about this when you're creating your own copy from scratch, but trust me, professional marketers certainly are.

So is your target audience more female than male? What's the age demographic of your target audience? That's all going to come into effect here as well, but let's say that I'm not totally happy

with any of the results here, or maybe I just want to save one of them. I'm going to save this first one here at the top, why don't we look at some of these other options here as well. So in this case I'm going to choose the one that's called conversational. So I'm going to select that one, and once again, I'm going to hit that button generate.

Now it's only going to take a few additional seconds as it takes that same information and say, okay, you know you need to get more done in your day but you're not sure how we've got the secret to making it happen.

So you can see that this doesn't have that same register now or click here to learn more, it is more conversational in tone. Now, as I'm going through these options and perhaps I'm missing some key details, I can always go back to the brief by selecting this button.

Here I can change the name of the product or content, and I can give it a bit more of a description to go on,

Adding keywords to include in your copywriting

but I can also add some keywords as well. So in this case, I'm going to add the keyword focus. So I want to see this in my next selection. I really want that word focus to be included. Let's go with a hard sell, let's this time around, I'm going to hit the generate button and let's see what it comes up with.

So now in my results you can see how do you focus on what really matters, imagine the freedom of being able to focus on your work. Are you ready to focus on what matters most?

So I can add some tweaks, I can add some further customization to make sure I'm getting the right copy for my needs. Let's take a look at another example and how we can use the whiteboard feature

Write an awesome landing page from scratch

so we can create an entire landing page in just minutes. So in this case I'm going to select the new landing page copy option and I can either tie this to an existing project like the one we saw before, or we can create a new project.

And when you're thinking of projects, you're really thinking of either campaigns or certain products or services in which you're offering. So I'm going to say new product in this case.

This time I'm going to pretend that I'm a realtor, I'm going to call myself Friesen realtors,

for example and product description, let's just give it something brief to go on, the one stop shop for all of your real, all of your home buying and selling needs. How about something like that? I won't stop here, I want to add something in there.

Perfect, so I'm going to create project, very very simple, you'll notice this time around, I didn't even give it a website. It's just basing it off that text. Now on the left hand side, you can see because we're dealing with a landing page, it's actually separated out

into five different components, right? Because you're going to have a headline, a subheader, maybe some call to action, benefits and features. So we can go through this one at a time but then use their whiteboard feature to easily bring it all together.

So here are some of the results and this one stands out to me,

Anyword whiteboard for saving and editing your copy

we'll take care of everything. So when I'm speaking of the whiteboard, if I come up here to the top right hand corner, here is our list view, but if I bring over the white word view what I can do is start to craft and put these different components together.

You can think of this as sort of a notepad where you're actually doing the work and pulling these ideas. So I'm going to say, yeah, we'll take care of everything,

I like that as the header, let's move on to maybe some of the calls to action.

So I'm going to select generate here, once again, it might take a few seconds

to generate some ideas, but it's time, yeah that's a call to action. Sell your home now these are maybe some bullet points that I'm going to add to it, or maybe I'll have some images around it. Let's add get started.

And then last but not least, let's identify maybe some features of my particular service, and I want to make this a little more playful. So I'm going to select playful and I'm going to hit generate, and let's see what some of the options are, that Anyword generates for me.

Look at this, look at how detailed some of this is, nothing but the best, we have the best agents, the best marketing, the best technology, our focus is on the people not on the property, a dedicated team, we work hard to make sure our agents are topnotch, they're the most amazing, dedicated and loyal team you'll ever meet.

So once again, if I like this one, I can say copy to the whiteboard and now it's input here. I can either save this or I can just copy everything at once and then paste it on my website, landing page, social media wherever I think this is relevant, I can let Anyword do most of the work.

Managing your copywriting projects in Anyword

And under the projects tab, Anyword makes it very simple and easy for me to find all of my previous projects. So maybe I wasn't quite finished with creating my ad content here, I can always come back into it and also collaborate with others.

So whether you're needing to write high converting sales copy, maybe a blog post from scratch or a product description, Anyword has you covered. You can customize it as much as you like, and know that you're getting data driven results, things that actually convert in the real world. If you'd like to learn more about Anyword

and start using it for free, be sure to click the link in the description down below. And if you like this app review and how to video, you'll love the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel.

Remember being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

3 reasons to use a password manager

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Ah, shoot. What's the password for this website? Ah, is it this? No, incorrect password.

Ah, you modified your password 867 days ago. How about? Could it be that? Ah, incorrect password. Um, what about this? Oh yeah, this is the password I use for so many other sites. Could it be that one? Argh, there has to be a better way. Well, good news, there is. So in this video, I'm going to share with you why you should be using a password manager and sharing with you password manager tools. So let's jump in.

Why should I be using a password manager? Well, here are three key reasons. Number one, you are referencing your password sor you're keeping track of them on pen and paper. Maybe you have a notebook, maybe you have some sticky notes off the side of your desk. This is a big no-no. Number one, of course, it's not that secure.

Someone else who could be visiting your office or walking by your desk could obviously see your passwords. But number two, what are you going to do when you're not near your desk, or you don't have that cheat sheet or that notebook with you? What if you need to log in and access something when you're away from that particular location? You are going to be of no help. Number two, if you keep track of your passwords within a online document, such as Google Keep or a spreadsheet or any other tool that you use. This is also a big no-no. Why? Well, what if someone hacks this particular account, then they have access to all of your passwords, right?

If someone was to access this account, they would see all of my passwords for these particular services. On top of that, it's a big hassle. When I have to go and change any of these passwords, then I got to come back in here and I have to change

and remember to change these passwords here as well. And the third reason why you need a password manager is if you use the same password again and again.

I don't know how many times I meet someone who uses the exact same password,

even though the password itself may be quite strong, a long number of characters, including special characters, numbers, capitalized letters, and everything, but no matter how strong that is, if you're using it for a number of different sites, well, hackers only need to find out the one and then they can go and use that same password to attempt, and probably be very successful, in accessing all of your other accounts.

How a password manager works

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So in order to make your life a whole lot simpler and more secure, let's take a look at of my recommendations when it comes to password managers. The first tool that we're going to look at is RoboForm. And really, the RoboForm website gives us all of the key reasons why a password manager is so much more convenient. One click convenience, meaning you don't have to remember your username or the password itself, you can simply click in the field and then log into that service. Multi-platform support. This is going to be essential in all of the tools that we use. So regardless if you're at your desktop, your laptop, or on your mobile device, you can access those passwords. When it comes to security, you want to be able to create stronger passwords, and rather having you come up with something rather difficult, other than just pounding the keys on your keyboard, tools such as RoboForm will create much stronger passwords that you will never have to remember before. Remember, we're letting these software remember these incredibly strong passwords for us so we don't have to. And lastly, the ability to share logins securely. So if you do need to share access with someone else, don't share the password, that's not very secure,

but with password managers, such as RoboForm, you can do so. So let's dive into the RoboForm account

Recommendation 1: Roboform

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and let me give you a bit of a tour. So here I am within my RoboForm account. And essentially how most password managers work is that you create one strong master password. And that's the only password that you need to remember and then you can create as many complicated and as strong passwords, or more importantly,

let the password manager itself create those passwords for you, and then they will give you access to those accounts. You remember one master password, that's all you need, and because it's encrypted, you can then safely access all of your other accounts here. So here you can see the collection of tools that I have set up with my RoboForm account. And if I want to log into Todoist, I could come here and say Click to log in, but there's an even simpler way from the screen itself. So here I am within the Todoist log in screen, and the email and password fields are ready for me to enter. But instead of having to remember what I've used, because perhaps I've even forgotten the particular email address that I used for this Todoist account, with the RoboForm extension installed, all I need to do is hover over this logo. I can choose Todoist. Yeah, that's the screen that I'm on. Let's add that there. And now my information is automatically added and I didn't even have to select Log in. It's brought me directly to my Todoist screen. So essentially one click to go exactly where I want to go, and I didn't have to remember my complicated or strong password. The other feature of RoboForm, which I particularly like, is this section called Safenotes. So beyond just logins, when you're accessing information online, you may also need a secure place to keep information, such as pin numbers or a safe combination or maybe just a very detailed note. So, for example, if I want to remember my safe combination here at home, I know that this is encrypted and protected by my master password. So this is so much more secure than writing it down on a piece of paper

or in a tool which is much more open and vulnerable to hacking. Now you can use RoboForm for free, but if you'd like to use RoboForm everywhere, I have a special offer just for Simpletivity viewers. By clicking the link in the description down below, you can get RoboForm everywhere for less than $17 a year. For more information, be sure to click that link down below.

Recommendation 2: LastPass

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Next up, let's take a look at how easy it is to create new, stronger passwords when you're first setting up an account. So here I am trying to sign up for the ClickUp service, and I have LastPass installed on my machine. So I've already filled out my name and my email address, but now when it comes to choosing a password, what am I going to do? Use something that I've used everywhere else and make myself vulnerable to hackers or to leaking information? No. With LastPass installed and with many of the other tools that we're looking at today, you can see this little icon here,

which is a little bit of a lock with a arrow around it. So I'm going to click on that, and it's going to offer me a strong password. So here you can see I've got a collection

of letters and numbers, some are capitalized, some are not. I would never come up with this on my own, but if I don't like it, I can generate something else. Okay, let's go with that. And I'm going to say FILL PASSWORD. So now, not only is it added, but up in the top right, it's going to include that information. It's asking me, "Should we add this to LastPass?? I'm going to say yes, add. And now it's locked in my LastPass safe. So after I continue to create this account, and now have a login, I'm never going to have to remember this very strong and unique password. All I need to do is access this LastPass icon and it will fill it in for me. Now while the layout of the LastPass interface

is very different from what we saw in RoboForm, many of the same features are still available to us. And just like in RoboForm, if we need to go and see further information, so if you ever need to reference the name, the username, or the actual site password, you can do so here. You can see that by default, the site password will be hidden, but if you need to see it, we can hit that eye icon, and here we can see this incredibly strong and secure password for this particular site. We can even add some advanced notes down below

Recommendation 3: Dashlane

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if we want to. Now the third password manager that I like to recommend is Dashlane.

And yes, it has many of the same features, which we've seen already, but one of the added advantages of a password manager is the ability to access this information directly from your browser or browser extension window. So here, for example, using the Dashlane account, I can quickly and easily access these sites. In fact, you can almost use it as a secondary bookmarking system, if you want to go directly to those pages. Dashlane also has the option to autofill certain information and you can customize in terms of what it will autofill. Do you want it to autofill your name, and address, and phone number, or maybe limited to just log in and passwords, or maybe there are particular websites where you don't want it to autofill information.

Dashlane also has a very robust generator. So if you'd like to use this password for other locations, you can do so. And what I like about this particular setup is you can customize the length. So, for example, maybe I want something super-duper strong.

I'm going to set it to a length of 30. And I can say, if I don't want to include symbols, for example. So here, it's met the requirements that I've set here, but if I don't want to use symbols or maybe I do want to add symbols back in, I can make that choice right here from the browser extension.

Recommendation 4: Bitwarden

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Now the last password manager that I like to recommend is Bitwarden, which is a very flexible tool and also very easy to use. And what I want to show you is, when you first log in to any of these password manager services, is how important that master password is and exactly what it does for your account. Now, what makes password managers so secure is that because of their encryption, they actually do not retain information about your master password. Therefore, they can't actually send that master password to you. That's why it's important to not only remember your master password but to include a master password hint, because they can send you a hint, a reminder, maybe to trigger your memory, maybe to trigger some of the key components of that password, so that in the event of you forgetting or having trouble accessing your password manager account, you can regain access. Depending on the password manager service that you are using, they may also have phone support and some additional ways to retrieve your account. But remember, your master password is what's keeping you secure from others accessing all of the other passwords and information contained within. This is a safety feature. This is not meant to make it difficult for you but to make your life both easier, and more importantly, more secure. Now, if you've made it this far into the video, I'd love for you to prove it by including the words strong password in the comments down below.

And while you're there, be sure to ask me a question about passwords or anything related to password managers. And if you enjoyed this video, you might like the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.

Text explanation

It's a brand new year, and I want you to save time and get so much more out of your technology. So in this video, I'm sharing with you seven free apps that are going to help you be more productive and help you get more done in 2022.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And when I say free, I mean free. Each and every one of these tools is either 100% free

or they have a free forever version. So no, we're not just talking about a trial period.

You can actually use this day in and day out as you try to be more productive this year. So let's dive into app number one, and we're taking a look at Text Blaze. Now, text expansion is probably one of the easiest and fastest ways to save time online.

You can take a very complicated email response or a template and whittle it down to just a few keystrokes on your keyboard and then input it wherever you want. So let me give you a quick example.

Here I am within my Text Blaze dashboard where I can create and manage all of my snippets. Now, a snippet is again, just a few different keystrokes here on my keyboard, but they can contain so much information.

So let's say that I need to respond to a quote and it's always the same question and I'm always giving the same answer, but I don't want to type it all out. Rather, I would just like to put in these three keywords. /qo for quote options and look what I've got.

I've got an entire email here, including links, including bolding and some formatting that I can use again and again, instead of having to write this out, instead of having to go find it somewhere else and then right click and copy and paste it, I can just use these keystrokes and I've got everything here waiting for me, but there's a variety of other ways in which we can use this as well.

How often are you sharing your video conferencing link, for example? Well, how about if I go /vc,

there is my link and I can put this wherever I need to. Now the other great thing about Text Blaze is that you can do more than just having the same information, you can actually customize and actually ask for certain things to be filled out in advance.

So here you can see I've got a snippet called the review process. So I'm going to type that one in here just to show you what's going to happen. Before it inputs it into my email or my Google document, or really anywhere where I want to include this.

It's actually going to ask me a few questions because maybe I want to customize and address this person. So in this example, maybe it's an email response. I'm going to say, "Hi, Jane, thanks for sending over these files.

I will review them and get back to you by January 1st." Now, you'll notice that January 1st is highlighted, that's because I've actually said that my standard turnaround time or my standard response is going to be three days.

So if I come over here and if I click on the review process, here, you can see the nuts and bolts of this snippet. So here I want to customize it. I want to address the individual by name, but I've also put in a very simple formula saying, listen, put this out by three days.

So that's going to be my standard turnaround. I don't want to have to do the calculations in my head, especially if it's two weeks or 45 days or whatever the case may be.

Just put this into my response, save me so much time, make it easier for me to reply and put this into whatever I'm doing. So whether it's email, whether it's social media, whether it's anything else online, Text Blaze may be the ideal text expander for you.

Easy video recording

Now, the next free tool on our list is Loom and Loom is all about video content. You know as well as I do that in 2022, video is king.

In fact, video has been king for quite some time, why? It's just so much easier to record a brief video and to respond to someone personally, but also to maybe show someone, if you're doing a screen cast or maybe a screen recording, if you're helping somebody out or you want to show them exactly what you are experiencing on your end, Loom is the perfect solution for you.

In fact, I've been using Loom a lot more often these days to record a personal message to many of my clients. So here within the Loom dashboard, all I need to do is select the new video button. And in this case, I'm going to select record a video.

Now, on the right-hand side here, I can adjust my settings in terms of

what microphone I'm using, what camera I'm using. I can see a preview of myself here in the lower left hand side of the screen. Now, we can adjust a few things here.

Maybe I don't want myself to be quite as large, no problem. I can make that a bit smaller or a bit larger. I can also change my background as well. So if I want to use something a little more plain or a little more flashy, I can do so.

Sometimes the backgrounds, you know, they don't always work as well. The blur feature is maybe my recommendation because it does a much better job with our faces and our heads and our hair.

So I'm going to say use the settings. All I need to do at this point in time

is say start recording. It's going to give me a brief countdown after I say what I want to share, I'm going to say share my entire screen. Here comes my countdown. And now we're recording, so it will record my cursor. I can go around and highlight things.

I can click on things and show people what I'm doing or what I'm experiencing. In this particular demo, it may look a little choppy because I'm not only making a Loom recording, but I'm recording this video as well. If I wasn't doing so, it would be a lot smoother.

When I'm all finished, all I have to do is come down here and either hit pause, if I want to move to somewhere else on my screen. I can hit cancel or the check mark to say finish that recording.

I'm then taken to a preview of my video where I can edit it, I can trim it. I can even add a call to action button. And the great thing is, is that I can just copy and paste this link and send it to basically anyone.

I can embed it within an email. I can send it via a text message and people are now understanding exactly what I'm talking about, or maybe I can help them that much faster with a solution.

So if you want to get involved with video recording and especially screen recording, quick and easy and free, be sure to check out Loom.

Flexible project management

Now, when it comes to project management or taking notes or task management,

you have an awful lot of tools to choose from, but there's one tool out there that is not only free, but can actually cover all of these areas and allow you to be as flexible as you want and that tool is Taskade.

Now Taskade really allows you to manage your projects or your personal tasks any way that you like Here I'm within my personal project workspace. And I'm going to click on this project roadmap for just an example.

Now, one of the great things about Taskade is that you can view your information in so many different ways, whether you're including links and tags

and other checklists within your notes area, you can really customize the look and feel, yes, you can assign due dates. Yes, you can assign and collaborate with others.

But if you don't like working in this list view, no problem. We can come up here and do a board view. So if you prefer a Kanban style of managing your tasks, working from left to right, you can do so as well. Taskade also has what they call an action view,

which is almost a bit of a combination of a spreadsheet or a database type view so that you can really take action on all of those tasks and projects that you've been creating, but it doesn't stop there.

We also have a mind map view, so you can break things out by different sub categories and really brainstorm amongst yourself or with a team.nn And last but not least, it even has an organizational chart view as well. So if you're needing a very flexible project management or brainstorming tool in 2022,

and don't want to be restricted by a limited number of projects or workspaces, Taskade may be the choice for you. Be sure to click the link in the description below to learn more.

Connect apps together

Now the next app on our list might just be the most powerful, but don't let IFTTT intimidate you. There are an awful lot of options here, but it's actually a lot simpler to use than you may think. Now, IFTTT stands for if this, then that.

And the whole concept around this tool is that you decide what the trigger will be. Let's say, when you receive a particular email, or if something happens on your calendar or maybe something happens within one of your favorite productivity apps, then you want something else to happen.

You want another application to be notified, or you want to receive a text message for example, but let's take a quick look at some of the most popular recipes from the past year.

Just to get some of your creative juices flowing. So right off the bat, one of the most popular ones from the previous year was to get a weather forecast every day at 7:00 AM.

Now, of course you can customize this in terms of when you receive this and maybe you only want to receive it on weekdays, for example, and not on the weekends.

As I'm browsing through some of the options here, you can see that lost phones is maybe a common one, text your lost Android phone to turn the ringer volume up to 100%. You know that when someone says,

"Hey, why don't you just call your phone? And you're like, "Oh, actually my phone was on mute or the ringer was way down." Well, you can actually create a recipe for that.

Tell Alexa to find your phone. Okay Google, call my device. Yeah, losing your phone is certainly a bummer and IFTTT might make it easier for you, but again, you can combine social media accounts together.

If you want to have your tweets and your Instagram photos to be in sync, you can do so as well. So a wide variety of different responses, different recipes, a lot of things pertaining to smart homes and smart devices.

So if you're looking to get so much more out of your tools or want to combine things together, be sure to check out If This, Then That.

Presentation live polling

Now the next tool on our list is one of my favorite ways to engage my audience, whether I'm presenting live in person, but especially if I am giving a video conference,

a webinar, or maybe just a team meeting.And for this, we're taking a look at Slido. Now, Slido is all about live polling, but also allowing your participants to ask questions anonymously, if they want to and make your video meetings that much more engaging.

So here within my dashboard, I can create a variety of different multiple choice questions, word cloud questions, open text questions here in advance.

But when I go to my present view, all participants have to do is go to slido.com, enter in the room number, which you create in advance or use the QR code on screen. And now they can ask me questions here and I can manage those questions in real time.

I can even highlight the question that perhaps I'm addressing here and I can check it off when I'm done. But as I just showed you, I can also do a variety of live polling. So in this case I had 37 participants and this is how they answered this question.

And the great thing is, is that it's live, so these bars and these numbers actually adjust in real time, which really increases the engagement when I'm delivering a training or conducting a meeting. Here's an example of a word cloud, where I asked a question,

in one word, how would you describe your to-do list? And just like any word cloud, you can see that multiple people chose the words helpful and chaos, but then a variety of other words here as well. So a fantastic way to engage your audience.

After the meeting is over, as an administrator, you can even go back and capture

all of this information for later. So if I want to capture all of my audience Q&A, I can do so, Slido even gives me some fantastic analytics. So I can take a look and see how engaged were my participants.

I can copy this word cloud and some of the key words that came out of those questions here as well. So I can maybe adjust and improve in the future. If you really want to engage your next meeting, big or small, be sure to check out Slido.

Meeting scheduling

Now the next tool on our list is already very, very popular, but if you're still new to Calendly, make sure that 2022 is the year that you take advantage of this service.

I can almost guarantee that you have booked a meeting using Calendly meeting,

that someone else has sent you to their booking page. So for example, here, I'm going to click on my 60 minute meeting booking page, for example, and you're probably already familiar with this format and it's just so convenient, right? To send a single link, or you could embed something on your website, for example, and then people can go and look and search for a time that works for them.

So they can click on your calendar on your available dates and then confirm a time for that upcoming meeting. The great thing about Calendly is that it will cross reference your personal calendar or multiple personal calendars so that you are never double booked.

So in this particular example, I've got a lot of open spaces here, but if I decided to, let's say, take Friday off on the 14th, of course, that would not be made available to me.

Now, within the Calendly dashboard, you can adjust the settings for each and every one of your event details. So for example, here, I'm within my 30 minute meeting, but it's already set for 60 rolling calendar days. And maybe that's too much for me.

I don't want someone to book me out a full two months in advance. So what I can do is I can come in here and say, you know what? Maybe the next three weeks works for me.

I'm going to allow them to go within 21 days and how frequently, well I don't want it on the half hour, maybe I want it on the hour itself. So there is so much that you can customize here within your Calendly experience to make sure that you only allow

or accept meetings when and where you want.

Content title ideas

Now, the last tool on our list today is for all of us who are creating eye catching headlines that are going to make people either click or interested in our articles,

our content, our products, our services, whatever it is that you are trying to convey to your audience. And for that, we're going to titlegenerator.com. Now the whole concept around title generator is that you put in some key words and they will spit out 700 unique headlines.

So for example, I'm going to type in real estate in this case,

all I need to do is click the big get headlines button.

And what it will do is generate 700 headlines titles and content ideas. Now, as you scroll down, you'll see there's actually three different pages for you to review, but this is going to give you a variety of different things for you to consider or think about when creating your next headline.

Now be careful, be sure to read each and every one of them, because some of them may not necessarily be grammatically correct. Do real estate better than Barack Obama, yeah, I don't think that really makes sense.

But believe in your real estate skills, but never stop improving, the lazy man's guide to real estate. Got stuck? Try these tips to streamline your real estate.

Now, while a certain percentage of these headlines may not be relevant and may be a little funny as you read through them, many of them will get your creative juices flowing.

So whether you're creating a blog post, whether you're creating a video, a social media headline, whatever it is that you're creating, maybe you're wanting to create a catchy landing page for your website.

You're going to find some interesting ideas here and with your keywords input into those titles. Now, I would love to hear from you next. What do you feel are some of the essential apps or tools that others should be using in 2022?

Be sure to add your recommendations in the comments down below.

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

 If you're a small business, you probably fall into one of these two scenarios. Either you're using outdated tools, like a spreadsheet, to manage all of your customers and projects or you're using an enterprise level CRM system that was designed for hundreds of employees.

Well, there's a much better and simpler solution, and best of all, it's free. Here I am within Bigin by Zoho CRM, and if that name Zoho sounds familiar to you, it's because they already build one of the best enterprise level CRM systems out there.

But Bigin is different because it's specifically designed with small business users in mind. So one of the first things that you'll notice is that Bigin is designed under a Kanban or board style view. Now that's nothing new for CRM systems, right?

Starting with a client here on the left hand side and then dragging or moving them through the different stages or the different funnels of your sale or your deal or your booking. But this type of design becomes even more powerful, because we can manage other things than just deals and sales.

We can manage projects

and other customer related activities. On the left hand side, you can see that we can quickly take a glance at all of our contacts. Many of your contacts of course, are associated with companies, but we can also manage our products, activities, and even see a high level dashboard.

So you can see everything that is going on at just a glance. But back to our pipeline's view, I really appreciate the cleanness of this view and Bigin doesn't add anything additional that we don't need if we're a small business user.

If I want to start or add a new booking, I can simply click this button

in the top right hand corner and input the relevant details. And of course, I can set up in advance, which of these fields are required and which are not. But let's jump into an existing booking and just see how clean and easy it is to see and access the information that we need.

Of course, we've got the size of the deal and the name at the very top. We have contact information here on the left hand side, so we can see details like the stage history, when did it move into a different stage, how long did it remain in that particular area, and who made the change itself?

Are there any relevant notes that I want to go back and reference and what is the full timeline of this particular deal? The other thing that I really appreciate about this view is that we can still see those different phases in a visual manner at the top of the screen.

Of course, we should be able to move things along or move things back, but I especially appreciate that they keep that Kanban, or pipeline feel happening even within the record itself. So I can either jump directly to one area of my pipeline or see exactly where it is within that particular phase.

But to call Bigin simply a CRM system, isn't giving it justice because it's real strength is allowing you to manage the other customer relationships and other customer activities that happen after the sale or the contract or the booking. Often there is some customer onboarding involved

or maybe the delivery of a product or a service or a request for a refund. Well, you can continue to manage the entire customer life cycle, along with other projects right here, from within Bigin.

Here on the left hand side, you can see that I have other pipelines that I'm using, including cancellation requests, which of course are very different than my booking requests. And rather than creating a board or a pipeline that is 27 phases in length, I can break them up in a much more reasonable manner.

I have reschedule requests here, I have refunds and support, and in this last one here,

perhaps I have a form on my website which feeds directly into my customer feedback.

So either myself or other members of my team can reply in a timely manner  We can manage it here within the same system, within the same screen, and without having to bounce back and forth between other applications. Think for a moment how many other tools you either currently use or you're thinking of using just for one specific function.

And if it's just for one specific function, you're probably only using a fraction of those total features, but you're paying full price. Here, we can keep as much if not all of our customer related activities in one place and set up as many pipelines as we like. Down below, you can see that there are a number of templates

that can help you get started quickly and easily. The sales pipeline is going to be the most standard, but like we've seen before, we can manage refunds, we can recruit. So if we want to use Bigin to hire new staff, we can do that all here as well.

What better place to gather and manage contact information than within a system that was designed nfor contact information?

We can even do a website launch or other project management right here from within the system. And there are additional templates designed specifically for industries as well. So for example, if you are providing

some type of consulting, we already have a template ready for you to go, and of course you can edit any of the fields or any of the phases within this pipeline. But what exactly are you getting with the free version of Bigin and what are the other versions available to you?

Here we can see that the Bigin Free Plan gives you a single pipeline and up to 500 records, and of course, you only need to upgrade when you need to.

The Express version at only $7 a month, gives you up to three different pipelines and 50,000 records but it also gives you a lot of additional features, including email integration, custom fields, and customizable dashboards and KPIs.

But wait, would you like to try out all of the Premier features of Bigin for absolutely nothing? If you click the link in the description, you'll get exclusive access to a 15 day free trial and can experience all of the features of the Premier Edition.

And if you have further questions about Bigin, CRMs, or managing your small business, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

Gmail Extension 1

There are so many different Gmail extensions to choose from, and over the years, I've recommended and tested out many of them. But today, I'm doing something a little different.

I'm going to take a look at one, two, three, four, five different extensions, which I have never used before. We're going to take a look at how each might be able to help you and if it's worth adding it to your Gmail setup.

Now, the first extension on our list is something called Dictation for Gmail. And by looking at the screenshot here, it looks like it's going to give us a new button

so we can start dictating, we can just start to speak our emails here.It looks like it's also available in 50 plus languages. So let's go take a look. I'm back in my Gmail account,

and I'm going to select Compose, and yes, it looks like we have this new microphone button and we've also have a dropdown for Languages. Let me just maximize this so we can take a better look.

So let's see how this works. I'm going to start the microphone button here. Hi Jane, comma, I just wanted to follow up from our meeting last week, period. Are you able to join me and the client for a quick call later this afternoon, question mark? New paragraph.

Let's keep in touch, so that we can finish this deal before the weekend, period. Wishing you all the best and talk to you very soon, period. All right, I'm going to hit the Toggle button here. And so far, not too bad.

I was a little surprised at where it jumped the cursor down. You'll notice that these two lines here are actually being generated from the email signature and for some reason, it came down below that. It didn't put it up above where the cursor was originally, it came down below.

Now, I could just delete that and move everything back up, so that looks a bit more tidy there,

but I was impressed that it did respond to periods, question mark. I told it to come down here for a new paragraph. And from a spelling and dictation point of view, this looks fairly clean.

Now, let's go and reply to a message just to see if it responds any differently. So here I am within a reply, and let's see if that cursor jumps anywhere else. Hi Scott, comma, thank you so much for passing along this additional information, period.

I look forward to meeting with you early next week, period. So I've got no issue with the dictation and how quickly and accurately it is,

but yes, once again, it seems to automatically jump that cursor down, which is interesting.

I don't know if that's a bug. I don't know if that's a piece of behavior that is intended here,

but that is Dictation for Gmail. So a quick and easy way for you to dictate your messages. Would love to hear someone else's feedback as to some of the other languages in here and if it's as accurate in their language as well.

Gmail Extension 2

Next, let's take a look at an extensioncalled Simplify Gmail. And I must admit,

this opening screenshot that it has on the extension page is rather puzzling to me because it looks vacant. That's a little boat here in the ocean.

I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to represent, but if I go over, I believe the idea here is to remove some of the buttons and maybe some of the other options that we typically see within our Gmail inbox.

So just before turning it on, here is my standard Gmail inbox, and you'll notice I have the extension installed. It's currently off, so you can easily toggle this on or off. Let's see the difference.

I'm going to say toggle on, and it has certainly removed some things, and it seems to have condensed my messages here in the middle.Probably the most noticeable  is that that Google sidebar has now been disappeared.

It is no longer here on the right-hand side. But I almost have to go back and fort to see the differences. So it's certainly condensing the messages, making it a bit more narrower, the logo has gone. Let's take a look at this left-hand side. What else changes there?

Yeah, it just sort of removes that big Compose button, which I don't think is maybe the most helpful. I would imagine I would want the Compose button there. But even if I open up one of these messages, I guess it's brought everything in a little bit. Maybe it's a little more focused,

a little bit easier to read. If I click up here to my Simplify Gmail options, you can see that there's a number of things in which we can toggle. One of the ones that stood out to me is the message font.

So this is something that you can't control natively within Gmail. So Gmail's default is a 13 size, but we could punch that up. So if I wanted something like 19, for example, so that might make it that much easier for me to read, right, depending on my eyesight or visibility.

So that might be helpful. You can also change the actual font itself so you don't have to stay with Gmail's default, but there's an awful lot of options here. So the conversation list here, you can see, is changing the list width, which might be helpful because if I turn this off again, you'll notice everything is always stretched to the full, right? Even if we go to our inbox, everything from the sender here to the left, all the way to my Snooze button and the date on the right-hand side

depending on your screen size, that's an awful lot of real estate. So maybe that is going to be helpful for some of you. Let me turn it back on here to go to this default view. Now, there's far too many options to cover in this video. You can see they break it down by conversation,

by message, by compose, by navigation, and even chat and some of the other features as well.It looks like you could toggle off some of the shortcut keys as well. So an interesting one here, I'm not sure if it's made as big of a difference as I thought. I'm not sure if you can hide some of your labels on the left-hand side as well, but at the same time, I'm not sure how helpful

or productive that would be as well. So maybe if you're looking for some increased font sizes,

maybe if you're looking to minimize and just go to the icons here at the top, that might be helpful for you. But at first glance, I'm not sure if Simplify Gmail is worth installing. Now, just before we get to our next extension, I want to thank today's sponsor, SaneBox.

SaneBox is not an extension, but it is a complete way to manage your entire inbox. SaneBox actually uses artificial intelligence to get to know your behavior, so you can separate those distractions and unwanted emails from everything else, so you can focus on what's most important to you.

SaneBox actually uses something called Trainable Folders, meaning that the more that you use it, the more that it gets to know what should be kept in your inbox and what can be saved for a later time. In particular, I've been enjoying SaneBox's latest feature called Email Deep Clean.

As a Gmail user, you know how important it is to stay within your storage limits, and Email Deep Clean allows you to quickly and easily identify which messages are taking up the most storage

or which senders you no longer want to hear from. To learn more and to start your free trial with SaneBox, go to sanebox.com/simpletivity1.

Gmail Extension 3

Next on our list, we have an extension called Streak Email Tracking for Gmail. Now, you'll find an awful lot of email tracking extensions here within the Chrome Store. And pretty straightforward, at least by these screenshots here, is that there's going to be some type of indicator where we can turn email tracking on or off. And then we should get some type of notice

when someone has opened or viewed that particular email. So I'm going to come here into Gmail. Streak is now turned on. It looks like they have both a Basic Free plan but also a Pro plan. And I'm going to hit Compose. Let's open this up a little bit further.

And down below, you can see there's three different orange icons. Now, this first one is called Add to Box, and I was playing around with it a little bit earlier. It looks like this is something CRM-related.

I'm not going to go into those details because this is why I installed, and this is really what this extension is advertised for. So Streak view and link tracking is on. It's on, I guess, by default for all of our emails.

And let's put together a test email here. (keyboard clacking) So I've just created a very quick test email here because when it comes to email tracking, you want to strike when the fire is hot.

And let's say in this example, I want to see if this person has taken a look at the proposal and I really want to know when they open up this email because maybe I can follow up with a phone call just a few minutes after or send another email shortly after I know when I'm confident that they have seen, laid eyes on this email. So the tracking is already turned on.

It looks like I could toggle it, I could turn it off at any time if I want to, but let's turn it back on, and I'm going to hit Send. The only other thing we will notice is that it has created some additional folders or additional options under our Send or Sent area here.

So under All Tracked Emails, it's going to take a look at the different emails here. Now, I happened to have used the exact same subject line for a previous test.

This is one that I sent, and you'll notice it's telling me it was viewed seven minutes ago, but the one above, the one that I just sent, has that little cross through the eye, meaning that it has not been viewed yet. So let me jump into my test email account.

And here is that email that we just sent. I'm going to click on it. So it has now been opened. I'm going to jump back to my inbox and I'm going to pretend that I'm just going through my other emails for the day. And let's see what happens.

Now, we can anticipate that there's going to be a short delay as information is passed between accounts and along the web, but I should receive some type of notification. I believe there should be some type of pop-up letting me know.

So nothing yet, it's taking a few seconds here. I would imagine that we should be notified within about two minutes. If it's going to take more than two minutes

to let us know when something has been opened, then I'm not sure how valuable that service is. Under All Tracked Emails, it's still showing that that one has not been opened. But again, let's let it do its thing, and I'm just going to wait here until we actually see the the popup. Okay, so now, even though I allowed my notifications,

my desktop notifications to be turned on, I never actually did see a pop-up notification here within my screen, but you will notice that it has tracked that one. It's showing me that it was opened two minutes ago here by the indicator on the right-hand side.

So when you open the email, you'll notice that there's this little green icon. And if you hover over it, it will give us this little dialog. So it's telling us that there has been one view and the latest view was three minutes ago.

It's even going to tell us where that view happened and approximately at one time. So although it didn't give me a push notification or something visual on screen, it is letting me know that it has been viewed.

I do appreciate the fact that it creates this other area. Rather than just seeing everything that has been sent, you can see all of your tracked emails here

and see which ones have been viewed and which ones are still pending. I imagine we can choose the default for this if we don't want it to be on at all times. Let me just go ahead and delete that.

If I select Compose, it looks like that is going to be on again. If I click on Streak Basic and if I click on Settings, here you can see we can choose if we want to make that enabled or disabled by default. So all in all, it does work.

It's a fairly simple tool. Some of the other features such as the CRM is not what I'm looking for, but if you're looking for a basic and an efficient email tracking tool,

Gmail Extension 4

this might be the right one for you. The next extension on our list is called Gmail Sender Icons. And it looks like this is all about more easily identifying who has sent those emails.

It looks like it's going to add both a logo and the name of that particular sender, so you can more quickly and easily identify who has sent that message. So I've installed the extension, and here I am back in my inbox.

And you can see right here to the left of the subject line, it has added a logo or it looks like it's the favicon.

This is the icon that is associated with that domain and the name of the domain as well. So it's awfully quick and easy for me to see that this is from LastPass and it's the only one here from LastPass.

And if I scroll down, here's from Todoist, here's from Jotform. Now, there's a bunch in here where if it's not coming from perhaps a marketing or an official domain, it may be just saying something like gmail.com and have a picture of the world.

Now, looking here at some of the options, it is pretty straightforward. You can either choose to show both the domain icons and the text, like what we see here, or maybe I don't want to see the text.

So if I toggle this off and then just choose to refresh my screen, now you can see we are only seeing the icons. And of course, I could just choose to show the text and not the icons if I wanted to as well. Let me refresh that once again.

Now, if I click on the message itself, it doesn't look like there's anything added here so we're only going to see that in the Inbox view. And this is not clickable, either. So for example, if I click on this LastPass, it's going to be the exact same as opening up the email.

So it's not like it's giving me any additional functionality, but it is essentially doing exactly what it promises. It's just making it a little bit easier by adding these sender icons.

Now, if we do start to add some labels to our messages here, those labels are always going to be to the right of it. So the labels are still going to easily stand out. But if you're wanting to weed out maybe some of those marketing emails or from some of those key senders

Gmail Extension 5

this might be a good extension to check out. Now, the last extension on our list might work very well with the previous one where we're wanting to identify things which we would like to unsubscribe.

This one is called Trimbox, and it promises to unsubscribe from emails with just one click. And at first glance, it looks like it's going to add a little scissor icon besides some of our messages, so we can unsubscribe without even having to open up those messages.

So now that I've got the Trimbox extension installed, let's take a look. So you can see here in my inbox, we have several of our messages with this little icon beside it. Now it's very, very visible, which is what I like.

It's very quick for me to identify what might be a marketing email or a newsletter if I want to unsubscribe. And if I hover over it, we actually don't click on it immediately, it looks like. If we hover over it, it's giving us three options. Do we want to unsubscribe?

Do we want to delete all emails? Now, this, I think, is both very helpful, but you might also want to be very careful with this because it's going to delete all of the emails

from the sender. And then, I guess, if we want to keep this off of the list if we don't want this little icon beside it, we could choose this last option. I'm actually going to test this out first. If I select that, okay, now that little icon is gone, so, and it's given me a little bit of a message there at the bottom letting me know. But this one up here,

if I hover over this and I'm going to say Unsubscribe, it's going to unsubscribe from that. And then it keeps asking me delete all emails from this mailing list. I guess that's always the secondary option.

Here you can see that that icon has now changed, so I no longer have the option to unsubscribe. I could either unblock the sender or I still have the option to delete all emails. So this could be a very helpful extension.

Maybe something you don't need all the time, but maybe you just enable it from time to time when you need it. If I click on the icon here, you can see that I've unsubscribed from one list and deleted zero emails.

Unlock unlimited access to all features. So I'm not sure of what all of the features are. I'm not sure if there's a limitation in terms of how often I can use this, but this would certainly be a quick and easy way for you to unsubscribe from an awful lot of emails.

Now, if you enjoy today's video and are looking for even more features to get the most out of Gmail, be sure to click on this video next where I take a look at seven missing features within Gmail and the extensions, which you can use to improve your experience.

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

Creating a note

Whether you're a brand new Google Keep user or perhaps you've been using this note taking app for many years and want to make sure that you can get the most out of Google Keep this video is for you because I'm going to go through every single feature so you know how to get the most out of Google Keep. (air wooshing) Hello everyone.

Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And we're going to start with the notes section, of course, but we're also going to make sure that we know how to search, how we can use all of our labels,

and even get into some specific settings. So first things first, taking a note is right here at the top of the screen and by entering in our cursor we can start to take our brand new note. Now you'll notice that the cursor goes directly into the note field.

It is not a requirement for you to add a title. So if I select close at this point you can see that that new note is still very visible. And if I click on it, I could give it a title. Let's call this one Title 1 and I'm going to close it.

The title may actually appear a little smaller in this case because I don't have a lot of text, but keep in mind that a title is not a requirement. So whenever you have that idea or want to grab that new note,

you can simply enter in your cursor here. Now, we're going to go through the different details of what you can do within our note but remember that's not the only way

in which you can take a note. If you want to start with a checklist, we can check the checklist option. If you want to start with a drawing, you can choose that option as well. And last but not least, if you want to upload an image, you can do that here as well.

So you don't have to start with something text-based and then add these components. We're going to get into the details of each of these three in just a moment, but I wanted to point that out from the start.

Setting a reminder

So let's open up our new note here and go through the various options down below.

The first thing we will see is this remind me option. And by selecting this we have a few options available to us. There are going to be a couple of defaults which we can change within our settings. So if we want to quickly remind ourselves later today,

tomorrow, or next week, it's going to give us our default settings. But of course we can also pick a particular date and time. So if I want to be reminded tomorrow, for example and let's say I want to be reminded in the evening I'm going to hit save.

You also have the option to make this a repeating note as well, which can be great

if there's something that you need to do on a weekly basis, a daily basis, or some other interval. I'm going to hit save and it will declare or show that reminder right here within the note. You'll see in the top left hand corner of the screen we have an area for reminders.

So if we need to filter just our reminders that's where we will find that new note and anything else that has a reminder as well. But for our example, let's go back to the notes main screen.

I'm going to open up this note again but this time I'm going to delete the reminder which I can do by just hovering over that little icon.

But you may have noticed within the remind me icon there's one additional way in which we can set a reminder and that is by selecting a place. If I select this option

I can start to type in any address I want or maybe the name of a store. So let's say I'm creating a list of items that I need to buy at my local Staples store. So by typing in the word Staples, that's my nearest store, Now, what Google Keep is going to do on my mobile device is remind me when I'm within a close proximity of that address.

Now, I'm not exactly sure of the exact proximity that Google Keep uses for this reminder, but I believe it is roughly a half mile or a full mile in terms of when it will notify you when you're close to this location. Again, we can hit X if we need to remove that reminder.

Sharing notes with others

Next, we have the ability to add a collaborator and this is as easy as simply adding in an email address. Now, the collaboration functionality within Google Keep is very, very simple. Essentially you've given this other individual access to this note where they can do really anything with it including the ability to delete the note as well.

So you are truly sharing the note as equals. If you need to remove this individual,

all you need to do is click on their profile and then you can hit X beside their name and then hit save. But this can be a great way to share a list or to collaborate with others in a very simple manner.

Adding colors and backgrounds

Next, we have the ability to change the background color. So if you want to change what this note looks like, maybe I want to give it a bit of a dark blue shade and maybe all of my notes with a dark blue shade are going to be work related or they're going to be related to some other topic.

Of course, I can change from a variety of different colors or leave it in the standard white. Down below, you can also see

that there are some more creative backgrounds that we can add. So here is a recipe background perhaps, here's something else that is food related.

Maybe this is a little more fun related, so we can add that to our cards as well. So here you can see that this note really stands out with that background. You'll also notice that most

of these features are also available from the front of the note, so you don't always have to open up the note, but we can make those changes here as well. You may notice that you can actually add both a color but also a background as well

and that can be important. Later, when we get into the details of our search functionality you can see that we can filter by specific colors, but you cannot filter by specific backgrounds.

So if I want this particular note to be in the same category as this red note down below I would perhaps give it that same shade, but the background is more of a fun or creative way to make your notes stand out.

Adding and editing images

Next, we have the ability to add an image to our notes. So in this example, maybe I'm going to add my logo because perhaps I'm in the process of redesigning my logo.

And so I'm going to take some notes about what I like or dislike about this image.

You are not limited to just one image per note. If I select add image again, maybe I'll add this other element of my logo and now you can see I have both images added.

But that's not where it stops when it comes to images. If we do open up this note, you can see if I hover over either of them, we have this trashcan icon. So if we need to remove a note we can do so quickly and easily. But if I click on that image, we also have not only a full screen preview of that image and the ability to print that image,

we can also edit any of our images. So by selecting the edit option now I can take a pen for example and I can start to highlight the things that I don't like. Maybe I don't like the arrows at the end or maybe I want to highlight some other component

for someone to take a look at. It even gives us some more advanced options including adding rulers or dots or a grid if we're doing something a little more intricate. And at any time you can always choose the back, the undo and redo options.

Or if we come back to the top left and choose this second option we can choose to clear the page. So here I've removed all of my drawings. I think one of the most useful tools here within this page is that we can add a drawing. Let me just put a X between this for an example, and then in the top right hand corner we can say new drawing.

So what it's going to do is actually save the previous drawing that I just had and now I've got a blank canvas to start something else. I can start to draw something, attempt to draw my signature in some fancy way or do something else here if I'm sketching out an idea.

So a lot more power available to you here within the drawing world. We can delete the current drawing, we can export it as an image.

So a lot of fun features and helpful features here within the image options. And whenever you're finished you can come up here to the top left and hit the arrow

which will return you to your note. And here you can see that that image now has that faint little X in it which I added while editing.

Archiving notes

Next to our image, we have the ability to archive our messages. And where does the archive go? I'm going to select this, which is going to remove my note from my main notes home screen and I will now find it in the archive folder.

Now, nothing in the archive folder will automatically expire or be deleted. Things in the trash will be deleted after seven days, but within archive you can keep anything that you don't want to appear in your main notes screen.

This can be a very helpful way to keep this area current, up to date and more manageable, but still have access to everything in your archive. And yes, this is all searchable and filterable as well.

If you want to unarchive something, all you need to do is select the unarchive button beside it

and now it will be returned to the main notes screen.

Selecting multiple notes

Now just before I get to the more option here in the lower right hand corner,

I want to take a look at this check mark and also pin, which you will see on each card

including the ones that you hover over. So what we can do is select multiple notes at one time. So here you can see I'm going to select these first four notes and maybe I want to change them all to a single shade.

So now, in the top right hand corner I can come up and change my background options. I'm going to make them all a yellow shade, so this can be a very efficient way to make changes in bulk to multiple cards.

Or maybe I want to come up here and give them all the same reminder. Or maybe I want to archive them all at once. So that is what this check mark is doing at the top

of each note, you simply need to select it or any of the notes on the screen

Pinning notes to the top

and then you can apply those bulk actions. The other icon that you'll notice either when you're hovering over a note or when you're within a note is this push pin icon.

And this allows us to pin a note to the top of the screen. Here you can see that this note is now separated from all of the others on this screen. And I'm going to hit the pin for this one and maybe this one as well.

Pinning notes to the top of the screen is a great way to never forget those notes, but can also be used to prioritize certain notes

that you want to appear at the top. And yes, you can pin or unpin in bulk

Adding labels

if you need to as well. Lastly, when it comes to features within the note let's go to that more option. By selecting this, you'll see that there are seven options available to us.

First, is where we can delete this note. Second, we can add a label. By selecting this, we can either choose a label we have created before or maybe we can start a new one. So I'm going to say that there is a new label, I want a new label, and that has now been created for me.

It will also be listed here on the left hand side. Now, you're not limited to just one label per note. So maybe this is not only new but it's also related to work. So I'm going to select that option as well.

And if you want to remove the label you can either come back here and select change labels or you can come over here and select the X to remove the specific label that you like. Below changing and add labels, we have the ability to add our own drawings.

So just like I showed you within the image space if I select this, this will immediately bring me to the drawing space where once again I can start to create any drawing that I like.

We also have the ability to make a copy of this note and down below that we have the option to show checkboxes.

Using checklists

By selecting this, it will convert any text within our note into a checkbox. Now, within Google Keep, you cannot have a combination of checkboxes and simple text. It's either all or nothing.

So here is the standard note, but I can come here and say show checkboxes and maybe if I'm making that list at the computer store, I need to buy a new mouse and I also need to buy a new keyboard, I can start to create that checklist right away.

As you saw earlier, we can start with a checklist by choosing the new list option directly here from the top of the screen. But let's continue our example within this existing note. Now you can add as many checklist items as you like.

and as you start to check off those items you will see them crossed off down below.

If you want to minimize that, you can choose to do so. It will tell you how many things have been checked off and you can always expand it if you want to see the full list.

Keep in mind if you uncheck something it will be removed to the top. So this can be a great way if you want to repurpose a particular list. But there's a few other features we want to take note of here within the checklist area.

Let me move this one back to the top of the list. On the left hand side, of course, we can rearrange any of our checklist items, so maybe getting the keyboard and then the mouse are most important, I want to put that at the top of the list.

But we can also indent our checklist items. So for example, maybe I want to change this new note checklist and I'm going to create a section called computer tools. Here, I'm going to drag this to the top,

but now what I can do is click and drag and indent the keyboard and indent the mouse. So now they are a part of this master checklist at the top. Let me add just a few more items for our example here so you can see how it works.

By indenting certain items not only does it make it easier to read and group certain things together, but if I've already put the keyboard and mouse into my cart, I can come up here and select computer tools and now everything is checked within that category.

So it keeps everything nice and together. If I uncheck it, everything will be unchecked up above as well. So a nice time saving tip when it comes to using checklists within Google Keep.

Grabbing image text

Returning to our more dropdown, below the check boxes option. We have the ability to grab image text. Now this is only going to be available to you if you have an image attached to your note. In this case we do, and the good thing is we have some text

within those images as well. So I'm going to select grab image text and look what it's done. It's brought in two S's, attempting to mimic these two logos and then it's brought in Simpletivity as well. So this is a fantastic way if you are taking a picture

of something when you're on the go or if you've uploaded other things into your note

and you want to get all of that text into the note itself, you can simply select grab image text. Lastly, we have the option to copy to Google Docs. So if you have perhaps a lengthy note, maybe the start of an article or a blog post or a lot of information

you can quickly and easily convert that into a Google Doc by selecting this last option. Lastly, each note also has an undo and a redo button. So if you want to go back and maybe remove certain text or remove certain labels, you can quickly go back and forth with these options as well.

Using the side menu

(air wooshing) Now that you know everything about taking and editing your notes, let's take a look at searching and categorizing our notes as well. Let's first start in the top left hand corner where if we select the main menu option it will either minimize or maximize our options on the left hand side.

This can be a great way to gain a little more real estate on your screen and especially if you're comfortable with these icons. Of course, by dragging your cursor over it will automatically expand.

I'm going to expand it here for our case and notes is our first option,  our main screen here within Google Keep. Next up is our reminder section where we're going to see a separation between a reminder which is past in this case, this has happened in the past.

and we will also see our upcoming options here as well. You'll notice if something has been past we can choose to mark it as done and that will remove the reminder and therefore remove it from this screen as well.

Down below you will find all of your labels. Here is the new label which we created just a few moments ago

and since I removed it, we have no labels here. But if I click onto some of the other labels here you can see what notes are listed.

And yes, things such as pinned or archived will be listed here as well. You'll notice that most of the ones that I have

in my example are archived, but it doesn't mean that only archive notes will be listed here. So for example, I'm going to come back to my main note screen and select three additional notes here and I'm going to come up here and apply the same label to them.

I'm going to make them all as work. Now you can see there's actually a third category, not only the one that was pinned and will remain pinned here. We have all of our other notes down below and our archive notes. So a nice clean separation

between those three distinct areas. Below that, we have a choice to edit our labels

either if we want to create a new label or if we want to edit an existing label. Down below that we have our archive which we've seen before. And then last but not least is our trash. And yes, anything in the trash will be deleted after seven days, but if we like we can go ahead and empty the trash right away.

Searching and filtering notes

Now while it can sometimes feel overwhelming to manage so many notes on a single screen, even if you are using labels, that's where the search feature comes into play.

By selecting our cursor at the top of the screen our display changes so that we can not only search by a basic text search but we can also use a variety of filters.

So if I type in the word simple it will actually bring a variety of different notes. Here you can see that I have a note that actually uses the word simple, but it is also bringing back these two notes because simple is a part of the image.

Even if you have not grabbed the text from that image Google Keep will search for any text within those images. Last but not least, as we look at this archive note you may think that it has made a mistake 'cause I don't see the word simple and I don't see an image that says simple.

But if I hover over this collaborator, you can see that his name is listed as Simple Scott. So yes, that is being returned as a part of the search results as well. Let me clear this out and quickly look at some of the other filter types that we can use as well.

So if you want to filter simply by reminders or checklists or images, you can do so. But keep in mind, in order to make use of any of these filters, we need to select them first. So I'm going to select images which will bring back all of my images, but now I can continue that image search by selecting simple. And now we only have these two returned.

You can see that we can also search by any notes that have a URL. So anything where I've included a link, it will be displayed as a part of the results. Down below we can search by labels.

We can also search by things and this is using some smart technology to quickly identify things such as food or groceries. Here you can see I have a list which is quite obviously a shopping list. 

So this can be a quick and easy way for it to find things that you may not have thought of. Lastly, we can also filter and search by people or by specific colors, just not by those backgrounds.

Viewing notes differently

(air wooshing) Next, let's move to the far right hand side of the screen where we start with a refresh button. If you are frequently taking notes on your mobile device or other machines you can always select this option to make sure that all of your Keep accounts are up to date.

Next up, we have the choice to alter the way that we view our notes. Here we are looking at the grid view which we can still click and drag

and move things around into different orders. But we can also transition to a list view

which is more of a top down view where everything is in order. This view may be more preferred for people who want to prioritize or stack rank their notes into a particular category, but we can always return to the grid view

Settings and special features

when we wish as well. Lastly, let's select our gear icon and go to settings where we have a few other options where we can customize our Google Keep experience.

The first one is the add new items to the bottom option and this is pertaining to checklists. You'll notice here with this selected, any new item will be displayed below. If I was to uncheck this item when I'm adding a new checklist, that will always be apparent at the top of the list. So this really comes down to personal preference.

Next up is moved checked items to the bottom. (air wooshing) In my example, you saw that as I checked things off they are moved to the bottom of the list and I can even hide them if I want. But if we go back to our settings and let me de-select this option, don't forget to hit save down below. When I come here you can see

that those checked items will now remain within my list. So again, something else

that comes down to personal preference. Our third option is to display rich link previews. With this selected, you can see that I have an article here which is showing a preview of that image and the website where it's coming from.

But if you don't want to see these previews and you only want to see these links, all you need to do is come here and deselect this box. Lastly, if you prefer a dark theme and hit save you can convert Google Keep into that dark theme.

Below notes and lists, we have our reminder defaults for morning, afternoon, and evening. So when you are setting a reminder, you will recall that I had these times available to me.

Now pay special attention because what you change here is actually going to be attached to your Gmail account as well. So for example, you'll notice that my reminder defaults are 7:30, 2:00PM and 8:30. I'm going to hit save and jump into my Gmail account.

Here if I come over and select the snooze option, you can see that 7:30 and 8:30 are the default times that are being displayed here. But if I jump back to my Google Keep account and let's say I want to change my morning reminder time to 5:00 AM and I'm going to hit save.

Now when I return to my Gmail account and select snooze, 5:00 AM is the default time which is presented to me as well. So when editing these defaults within Keep, you may want to pay special attention as to where these will affect you the most either within your email account or here within Google Keep.

Last but not least, we have the ability to disable sharing.

So if you don't want to accidentally share your notes with anyone, you can come in here and uncheck this box. After hitting Save, you can see that that icon is still visible, but it has been grayed out so we can no longer share within this account. (air wooshing) So now that you know every single feature and function within Google Keep, I would love to hear from you next.

Do you still have questions on how to organize and set up your Keep account?

Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

in fact, it's very simple.

Efficient file organization is crucial for productivity, enabling quick access to necessary documents and reducing time spent searching through cluttered directories. Two effective methods to streamline your digital filing system are the Three-Level Method and the ABC Method. Implementing these strategies can help ensure you locate any file within three clicks or less.

‍

The Three-Level Method

The Three-Level Method emphasizes maintaining a shallow folder structure, limiting it to three tiers deep. This approach prevents the complexity and confusion that often arise from deeply nested folders.

1. Top-Level Folders

Begin by creating a minimal number of top-level folders—ideally no more than five. Each should represent a broad category relevant to your work or personal life. For instance:

• Admin: Contains subfolders for accounting, legal documents, taxes, budgeting, and other administrative tasks.
• Clients: Houses individual folders for each client, storing related tasks, projects, and correspondence.
• Projects: Includes folders for internal initiatives or endeavors involving multiple clients, such as developing an online course or redesigning a website.
• Topics: Encompasses folders for various subjects or resources you reference periodically, like feedback surveys, presentations, or social media ideas.

2. Second-Level Folders

Within each top-level folder, create subfolders to further organize content. For example, under Admin, you might have:

• Accounting
• Legal
• Taxes

Under Clients, each client would have a dedicated folder:

• Client A
• Client B

3. Third-Level Folders

The third level is used to categorize specific details. For instance, within a client's folder:

• Ad Campaigns: Stores marketing materials and strategies.
• Invoices: Contains billing documents.
• Meeting Notes: Includes records of discussions and plans.

By adhering to this three-tier structure, you can swiftly navigate to any file without wading through excessive layers of folders.

‍‍

The ABC Method

The ABC Method organizes files alphabetically, assigning each top-level folder a letter from A to Z. This system focuses on the initial letter of a file or folder name, facilitating direct access.

1. Top-Level Alphabet Folders

Create 26 folders, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet. This setup serves as the primary directory.

2. Second-Level Folders

Within each lettered folder, store files and subfolders that begin with the corresponding letter. For example, in the B folder:

• Banking Information
• Blog Resources
• Branding
• Budget
• Business Cards

Similarly, the S folder might contain:

• Surveys
• Sponsorships
• Social Media
• Sales Cycle

3. Navigating the ABC Method

To locate a file, select the folder corresponding to the first letter of the item's name, then browse to the specific file or subfolder. This method reduces the time spent searching through unrelated categories.

‍

Advantages of These Methods

• Simplicity: Both methods offer straightforward structures that are easy to implement and maintain.
• Efficiency: Limiting folder depth and organizing alphabetically streamline the process of locating files.
• Flexibility: These systems can be customized to fit various personal or professional needs.

Implementing Your System

1. Assess Your Current Structure: Review your existing files and folders to identify areas of improvement.
2. Choose a Method: Select the Three-Level Method or the ABC Method based on your organizational preferences.
3. Reorganize: Move your files into the new structure, ensuring consistency in naming and categorization.
4. Maintain Regularly: Periodically review and update your system to accommodate new files and remove outdated ones.

By adopting the Three-Level Method or the ABC Method, you can create an organized, efficient, and user-friendly filing system that enhances productivity and reduces the frustration of misplaced files.