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Searching in Google apps can be difficult

Sometimes it can be hard to find what you're looking for in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, or any Google app product. But I've started to use something to really make my labels pop and make sure that I'm finding exactly what I'm looking for.

Let me show you how in today's video. (air whooshing)

So let's get started here within Google Keep, and then we'll move on to other popular Google products such as Calendar, Google Drive, and even Gmail.

The reason why I wanted to start here within Keep is that perhaps it is the most limiting when it comes to our labels. Here you can see I've got three different labels: Family, Personal, and Work; however, there is not even any color coding beside them.

They just give us this sort of generic label icon beside them. And if you come down here to edit labels, you may say to yourself, "Oh, great. Here, I can add a label. I can just go in and..." No, it's just text-based.

Adding emojis to Google Keep

So this is what I like doing. I will come in here and I'll usually put it at the front of the label.

Now, if you're a Windows user, you can just use Windows + . and that's gonna bring up your emoji icon, your emoji dialogue. So you can start to search and start to type in something or use from one of the more frequently used ones here down below.

Otherwise, you can go to a website such as Emojipedia, which is one of my personal favorites. If you wanna search through and maybe spend a bit more time looking at some particular icons.

But let's do this quick and fast. So maybe under Family, I'm gonna select this family icon.

Now, one thing of note, before you come down here and edit the next one, make sure you hit the check mark here to lock it in. So there you can see that we now have that icon down below.

I'm gonna get to why it shifted to the bottom in just a moment because it's treating this as something special here. But let's go to the other ones first.

I'm again, gonna bring up my emoji dialogue here. And for Personal, I'm just gonna put this individual person here in front. I'm gonna hit that check mark.

And then for Work, why don't we use something like a laptop, I think would be appropriate. Usually, I'll put a single space in between just so it's easier to read the label.

I'm gonna hit the check mark here and I'm gonna say Done. And so the great thing is, is that these really pop. Now I only have three at the moment but what if I had 27 different labels here within Keep?

Now it's gonna make it that much easier for me to find those labels that I'm looking for. And also keep in mind, you don't have to do this for every single one, maybe there's just a particular one.

But even when it comes to the notes themselves, here you can see that they really stand out that much more. I don't have to come down here and read. "Oh, is this a personal label?"

No, I can actually see my little icon on here and see that these two labels are indeed Personal. If I go over here to Family, it's quick and easy to see that I have that label immediately on it.

And even when you're adding labels from within an existing note or taking a new note, right, if I come down here and say that I want to change the labels or add a label, it makes it that much easier in all cases.

Using emojis in Google Calendar

So let's move on to something that we don't often attribute to labels themselves, and that is Google Calendar.

So here I've got a very basic calendar and I've just got a couple of recurring events that are listed here but already, you can see that my exercise time stands out a little more, right? Because I've got this little running man beside it.

So not only do I have it perhaps in a different color, but I've got this icon, I've got this emoji right next to it. If I want lunch to maybe stand out that much more, If I come in here to edit it, and again, I'm gonna bring up my emoji icon here.

And let's see, let's just type in something like, Oh, I dunno, food. We're just gonna search up some food. I'm gonna put in a nice, green, healthy salad here.

I'm gonna say Save and let's do it to the following events as well. So now, again, I've got that icon that emoji, sorry, that is gonna be in front of all of my events.

It actually makes it maybe a little less important that I use the color changes here, right? 'Cause as you know, unless you're using different calendars here on the left-hand side, when you're creating a new event, it's gonna go to your default color.

And yeah, you can select a different color down below. If I go into more options here, I can choose any one of these colors if I want to, but that becomes a little less important when you start adding these types of emojis.

And you can start to build sort of your own glossary or your own index of what these emojis mean. So for example, maybe I've got a very important meeting, right? This is something that is very important.

But if I want it to stand out as something that's gonna grab my attention or something that's going to stand out, maybe I wanna start using this green check mark.

So anything that is extremely important or something that I need to prepare for in advance, I'm gonna use that green check box. So, again, you don't certainly have to use this for all of your appointments or your events but they can really help things to stand out.

Many of you know that I like to use the all-day event area up top, and I'll often use them for things such as tasks or agenda items, not just things like a vacation.

But if I wanna separate out the difference between perhaps something that is just an agenda and a reminder versus maybe I am gonna take some vacation time up here, why don't I start with an emoji?

And let's see what comes up for vacation. Yeah, plane, travel, things that many of us haven't been able to do recently. (Scott chuckles)

And I'm gonna say vacation and it's gonna span over a few days, the whole weekend or something like that. So again, it just stands out that much more.

I'm not going to question, "Oh, am I really flying somewhere? Am I really going somewhere?" Well, yeah, you added the emoji, Scott. That's why you put it there in the first place.

Adding emojis to Google Drive

Let's move on to something else that many of us are using and that is Google Drive. And here I've got a test folder where I'm already using some color coding, right?

I'm using green for my finance folder and I'm using red for sales. And if you come up here and just right-click, of course, you can change the color on any of your folders, right?

Any folder, doesn't matter what level, you can choose a different color, and that can be very helpful, right? That can be very helpful to make sure that things are in place here or that certain things stand out.

But maybe I wanna come down here to Support and I'm gonna select Rename in this case. And at the beginning here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring up something like maybe a phone, maybe something like that. Phone, support, would that make sense in this case?

And I'm just gonna hover over this for just a second. It says telephone receiver. Okay, so I just wanna know what the actual name is.

I'm gonna say OK here. The reason why I wanted to see that is 'cause number one, you'll see something with an emoji, in most cases, will sort to the very top.

It's gonna treat it almost like a special character. So you wanna keep that in mind as well as this one sorts to the top. But the other thing you want to consider is that if you are using multiple emojis here,

Is that whatever that emoji name is, so in this case, this was telephone receiver. It's gonna sort it by that T in telephone. So let's come down to Development and use this as an example.

So I'm gonna click on it and I'm gonna say Rename, and I'm gonna come to the front of it just like we have been so far, and this time I'm gonna choose this question mark, right?

So I'm gonna choose the question mark, I'm gonna give it the space, I'm gonna say OK. Now you'll see that it's actually not sorting this based on the D in development, because, yeah, D does come before S.

It's actually sorting it on the Q in question mark, instead of the T in support. If we come down here to support and say Rename, and let's purposely get rid of the phone, and let's do something like, oh, I don't know something like a baseball, like the letter B in this case.

So what we should see now is that yeah, the B in baseball is now sorting this ahead of the Q in development. So you wanna keep that in mind if you do want your folders or your labels or wherever you are using emojis to sort properly.

Now, of course, the easy way to get around this is to put the emoji at the end and not the front. The challenge there is that sometimes it can be a little out of balance because your emojis, some will be way out here and some will be a lot closer in and so forth.

But again, that can be another way to just highlight certain things within your folders.

Using emojis in Gmail

Last but not least, let's jump into Gmail where many of us often have a long list of labels here on the left-hand side. And yes, Gmail gives us the ability to add color coding, but sometimes we wanna go one step further.

So if you come over to any label you select the three dots and say Edit, what we can do here is again, add some emojis. And if this is a newsletter, maybe I'll select something like a newspaper.

That seems appropriate in this case. I'm gonna hit Save. Now, if I come down here and actually select the newsletter's label. And I'll just open up and sample email, you'll see that that emoji carries over everywhere.

So you're gonna see that label here. If I wanna come up here and change my label, the emoji is going to be listed there as well.

So you don't have to worry that it's gonna appear in some places and not others. A helpful way to keep everything organized.

Now, keep in mind that you can apply these same emoji tips to almost any other application, whether it's on your mobile device or on your desktop computer.

Now, I would love to hear from you next. What are some creative ways that you are using to help you stay more productive? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

And if you enjoyed this video, you may also like the video that YouTube is recommending to you right here. Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

My Mailchimp History

For the past four years, I've been using Mailchimp for my email marketing, but recently I quit. In this video, I'm gonna tell you why I've made the switch and what I'm using instead. (upbeat music)

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And it's true.

For most of my business, I've been using Mailchimp as my email marketing tool. In fact, when I think back of one of the things that I wish I had done earlier, that would be to have started to grow my email list that much sooner.

And the reason why I first started to choose and work with Mailchimp is that it's fairly easy to use. It's relatively intuitive and it was one of the most popular tools at the time.

It continues to be a very popular email marketing tool, a way to grow your email list. However, over the years as my list has grown, my needs have also changed and I'm not that wild about the direction where Mailchimp has gone.

So let me show you some of the things that I do like, but a number of things that really led me to move to something completely new. Now having an email list is so important because it's something that you actually own.

Unlike your subscribers or followers on social media, this list is something that you can take with you. It's also a much more direct relationship as you are sending communication and messages directly to someone's email inbox.

Rather than just having them swipe through or maybe not even see the majority of your posts through social media. Now it's pretty easy to get started here with Mailchimp and Mailchimp is relatively generous with giving you up to 2,000 subscribers in your account before you need to transition to a paid account.

Drawbacks to Using Mailchimp

However, the big thing that I felt was a major drawback for me when it came to Mailchimp was the variety of ways in which I could get people to sign up for my email list. Here under my audience tab, I'm under the sign up forms and you can see that Mailchimp gives us a few different options here including a form builder and also a subscriber pop-up.

However, here was the major drawback for me. If I open up this form builder, let's say I want to edit my current form, this is the only one that I have.

Mailchimp doesn't allow you to create multiple forms

It's gonna force you to either use another application or build something else or one of its many integrations with other applications.

But if you wanna create another form to use on a different part of your website or to add for a different group, but include them in the same audience, you can't do that here within Mailchimp and I felt that that was a major drawback.

If we go back to sign up forms, the same thing happens with the subscriber pop-up. If you want to create one, that's fantastic, but if you wanna create more than one subscriber pop-up for your page, you are out of luck.

Now don't get me wrong. I realize that Mailchimp has many larger organizations that have… And then have an entire team that is dedicated to social media marketing.

They are using other applications to build custom forms and landing pages. But if you're like me and you're running a small business, if you have a relatively small team or maybe just a team of one, you want something that can be doing this for you and doing it with ease.

Mailchimp Features I Didn't Find Useful

The other thing that I noticed over the years that I have spent with Mailchimp is that they decided to add a number of other features that just weren't that relevant to me. So in terms of creating a website, well many of us already have a website or are using another tool for that.

And if I come over here to the content studio, you see that there's a variety of different ways in which I could create, you know, social media posts, I could create product descriptions and integrate with social media.

However, none of these really fit my needs. As someone who is selling services and not physical products, many of these things fell flat and it just seemed like Mailchimp was going in a direction which was very different than my own.

But probably the biggest thing, compounding all of these things that I've shared so far is Mailchimp's pricing because once you exceed that free limit, it is not cheap.

Now for someone like myself with a relatively meager email list of under 5,000 contacts, I was paying $53 U.S. per month. Now in contrast to the other tools that I use as a part of my business, whether that's a project management tool, whether that's other add-ons for my email accounts and other productivity suites, whether that's other things just to keep a website running, this is a very expensive cost.

In fact, it's one of my most expensive business costs that is recurring month after month. $53 for a relatively small list can add up over time.

Email Deliverability Data Research

So what did I do? I went searching for something that fit my needs that much better, was of course simple and easy to use and met all of my form building needs so I could be that much more creative and hopefully acquire and more easily acquire new subscribers such as, oh, I don't know, possibly yourself.

One of the places that I turned to was a website called EmailToolTester and I came across this report that they publish each and every month. What it's about is all about email deliverability.

That's a tough word to say, deliverability. A lot of syllables in that word.

But when it talks about deliverability, this is really key when it comes to email marketing because really it is these services such as Mailchimp who are actually delivering the mail to your subscribers. You may be using your email address, that's what the receiver sees,

But it's these services that need to get through spam filters and other such things. And what I discovered here is at the very top of their rankings here, they put a product called MailerLite at 97%, even ahead of such more established products such as ConvertKit, HubSpot, Constant Contact.

And yes, a little bit further down the list is something called Mailchimp. But it gets even more interesting here. In the second factor here, you could see that when it comes to the least versus most likely to be flagged as spam, MailerLite ended up in the top three.

Meaning that only around 2% of all of their messages may be flagged as spam whereas the ones that are most likely, well, Mailchimp is in that category with nearly 13%. That's a pretty significant difference.

So I started doing my research myself and what I found is I absolutely love MailerLite.

Favorite MailerLite Features

Now I wanna be very clear. This is not a sponsored video. I have never been sponsored by either of these products, but so far two months in and I am loving everything that I'm coming across here within MailerLite.

First off, even just by looking at the dashboard here and the menu up top, it is a much cleaner feel. It's so much easier for me to navigate around and get to where I want.

Here on the dashboard, I can see my last campaign and I can see some of the statistics of my most recent subscribers and subscriber growth. And no, this wasn't just a massive change or addition of subscribers.

This is when I transitioned over from Mailchimp here to MailerLite. But the great thing as I pointed out is something that was lacking in Mailchimp is its forms ability, both pop-ups and embedded forms.

So for example here, I've got four different embedded forms which are live for different purposes on different parts of my website. This one actually is particular to Facebook.

And so I can customize them for their different areas, for their different purposes and also for people who I want to add to perhaps a different list or a different group within that list.

Over here under pop-ups, I may only have one active at the moment. I can quickly see the data that I'm interested in, but if I want to add further pop-ups, maybe a different pop-up for a different page on my website, I can do so here as well.

And when it comes to price, price is about half, half of what I was paying over in Mailchimp. Now it's true, I'm only about 2.5 months into my adventure here with using MailerLite as my primary email tool, but so far I have absolutely no complaints.

Now if you'd like to try MailerLite for yourself and explore its features, be sure to click the link in the description below. You can sign up for free and stay free up to 1,000 subscribers.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. Be sure to give this video a like and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Basic way of sharing slides in Zoom

This video is brought to you by SaneBox. Stay tuned to learn more about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox.

Do you want more flexibility when it comes to presenting PowerPoint within Zoom? Or maybe you wanna add a little pizazz and impress the people that you're presenting to. Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you three different ways that you can present Microsoft PowerPoint so you can see everything, your notes, your participants, and present the way you want to.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's get things started by jumping into our Zoom console. I've got a Zoom meeting started here already.

Of course, probably the easiest way to share PowerPoint is just to share your entire screen, right? We can come down here to share, we can click on Basic and say, share screen, and we can just say share. Now, I'm sharing my entire screen.

Now in this case, I'm gonna have to put myself into presentation view if I want to share my slides. At this point, I can use my Space Bar or my mouse or whatever I want to continue with the presentation. But the big drawback here is that I can't access anything else.

If I need to go back, I'm showing people my slides here. If I need to go pull up some notes or another document they're gonna be seeing everything that I'm sharing here on my screen. So let's stop here for a second and show you three better ways in how to share PowerPoint.

Sharing only the PowerPoint app in Zoom

The first one I wanna share with you has to do with just sharing the PowerPoint file or the PowerPoint application. So if we click on Share here, instead of selecting share screen, as in your entire desktop, we wanna come down here and actually find the PowerPoint application.

If we select this and hit Share, it's true, at this point they are seeing this preview pane here within PowerPoint. However, if I was to click on my browser here, for example, if I'm here to click on something else within my computer, no one else has seen that. They're only going to be seen what I have here within my PowerPoint presentation.

Again, I'm gonna have to go into slide mode here if I wanna show it in full screen as I'm going through my presentation. But at least in this case, I know that anything else that I click on they are only gonna see what's happening here in PowerPoint.

Share using Presenter Mode in PowerPoint

But let's take it one step further. And the second tip I wanna give you here is that you can actually present in Presenter Mode here within PowerPoint. Now, number one, you wanna make sure that you're only sharing the PowerPoint application for this to work.

Now, I can go into my Slide View again, and again, you're probably very familiar with this view. But if we come down to the left-hand side and click the More button, we can go into the Show Presenter View.

Now, some of you may be familiar with this view already, especially if you're used to working with dual monitors or perhaps hooking up your computer to a projector such as in a live scenario. However, what's important to note is that when you're using Zoom only the slides itself, only what we see here on the left-hand side is actually being shown to people on Zoom.

So we get all the benefits of PowerPoint Presenter View. We can use the arrow keys down below here. We can see a preview of the next slide in the top right-hand corner. And although I don't have many notes here on this particular slide deck.

If I did, they would all be visible to me but they're not visible to my Zoom participants. So this can be a great way to present online. Only my Zoom participants are seeing this screen here. I can see the preview, I can see my notes and confidently go through the rest of my presentation.

Share slides while using other apps on the computer

Now, there's another one that we wanna look at as well. And that has to do with... Let me get out of my presentation view here for a second. I know for many of you, you may want to access your notes which are not included within PowerPoint.

Maybe you have a separate file, maybe you wanna be referencing something else, maybe you just need to be doing a few things off the side as you're presenting a PowerPoint slide deck. Well, here within PowerPoint, if we go to the Slide Show menu and then we come here to say set up slide show we have an option here called Show Type.

Now by default, it's gonna be presented by a speaker. It calls this a Full screen view. But if you want to access other pieces of information on your screen while only showing your viewers your slide deck, you can choose this second one which is called Browsed by an individual, meaning that it's actually gonna just pop up in an individual window.

If I select this and say, okay. And now if I launch the Presenter View, what I can do is I can actually minimize this and I can resize this window if I need to. I can drag this over here to the left-hand side and then I can have other things going on on my screen.

I can pull up other applications. Let me minimize this word document, just as an example. So let's say that I have all my notes over here. I can access this. Maybe I want to view the chat window here on the side of my screen.

I can permanently have that open there, and I'm not obstructing anyone else's views and they're not seeing my whole screen either. All they are seeing is this window here, which you can see is encapsulated by this green color.

Now, the one thing of note is that it will also share the header which is gonna show the title of your PowerPoint slide. And it's also gonna show the total number of slides and these navigation options down below.

So you can either choose these arrow keys, you can still use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the Space Bar on your keyboard to navigate and advance through your slides. But you can access your notes over here, you can take a look at other things that are going on in your screen, and all they are going to see is this window here.

So this can be really helpful for those of you who want to take advantage of other applications on your screen without sharing everything else. Remember, the key in this particular example is that you have to share only the PowerPoint application first when you hit that Share button and then you can choose this option within the PowerPoint.

Let me hit Stop Share here for just a second.

Share PowerPoint as a Zoom Virtual Background

And I wanna show you perhaps the most powerful way and the most impressive way of sharing PowerPoint here within Zoom. Recently, Zoom has introduced a brand new feature which is really impressive and actually puts you in front of your slides.

So let me show you how it works. Once again, we wanna come down here and select the Share button. But instead of staying on the Basic tab, we wanna come over here to the Advanced tab and select PowerPoint as a virtual background.

Now, in this case, once we hit the Share button, we're actually gonna have to go and find the file itself. It's not like just sharing your screen or sharing the PowerPoint application. I do need to go and find the PowerPoint presentation that I want.

I'm gonna select Open. And then Zoom is not only going to load it right here within my meeting, but as you can see, I am now in front of my slides. So I don't have to see, or I don't have to question if my participants can see me, if they've minimized my view, I can ensure if I'm sharing my PowerPoint slides I'm right here in front of them.

And I can continue to navigate through all of my slides just as I normally would. Now, there's a few different options you have here. I can click on my image and actually I can move it anywhere I want.

So if I'm on a particular slide and my image is actually in the way of something, I can move it. If I want to resize myself, maybe I wanna make myself a little smaller put myself in the bottom left-hand corner, I can do that as well.

Now, I can continue to navigate by selecting these arrow keys down below. But the other important thing is if I get to a slide like this where there's already a picture of me, what I can do is select these three dots and say split video from PowerPoint.

So that's gonna remove my overlay. It's gonna remove my video on top of this slide. And then perhaps when I navigate to my next slide where I do wanna be front and center, I come here again, and this time I'm gonna select Merge Video and PowerPoint.

Here I am again, maybe I need to make myself a little bit bigger, just so I draw people's attention, and I can continue on with this presentation. This can be a fantastic way to not only engage your audience, but make sure that they're seeing you at the same time that you're presenting these slides.

A tip would be that you wanna make sure that you, number one, know your slides very well. And perhaps that you have a lot of your written content for example, a little adjusted to one side of the slide. So you're not always having to go and click and drag yourself and resize your window.

That may be a little both confusing, a little nauseating for some of your viewers as well, but this can be a really effective and impressive way to present PowerPoint via Zoom.

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Why a Decision Matrix Can Help You (logo powering up) - Do you sometimes struggle with making decisions? Maybe you've got an awful lot of ideas on your plate but you're having trouble deciding which one you should pursue first. Well, in this video I wanna show you how to use a decision-making matrix so you can make smarter decisions and choose the things that are best for you.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Studies would say that we have something like 50,000 different thoughts each and every day. You probably have a number of projects that you'd like to pursue, but you're not sure where you should be focusing your time and effort. It's really important that we choose correctly because you only have so much time this week, this month, or this year.

So in this video, I wanna show you how I use a Decision Matrix, right here within Notion. A little later on, I'll show you how to create your very own so you can customize it for your own needs.

How I Use a Decision Table in Notion

So here we have a fairly simple Decision Matrix. The idea of such a tool is to help you quantify the different projects and ideas you're considering pursuing and help you decide which one you should focus on next. I've got a few very simple columns here but they're gonna help me get to a better decision down the road.

On the left-hand side, I've got the names of my different projects. Yes, I've just been very creative (chuckles) with my latest ideas, cool ideas, things like that. But of course, these are real projects for you and real projects for my business that we are trying to evaluate here.

In the next four columns, I have different criteria in which I'm going to evaluate these projects. The first one is Impact, meaning how much of an impact is this going to have on my business? The second one is Effort, in terms of how much time and effort it's going to take me to complete this project.

This is really important when you're deciding on what you should be pursuing next because if something is going to have a major impact but it's also gonna take an awful lot of time, maybe there's some other things that will take you less effort and time but have just as much impact.

As we see in the next column, maybe it can also increase your profits or whatever criteria you want to evaluate your projects on. Profitability is pretty straightforward in this particular example. What is the potential to bring in additional revenue or to be profitable?

The last one that I have here in this example is something called Vision, meaning how much does this particular project or idea align with my vision or my values or what I'm striving to do here within the Simpletivity training business? Last but not least, we have a Score, which is really great because we want to either average out or sum up these numbers so that we can decide which of these projects we should be pursuing next.

As you can see, I've already given all of these projects a score, and they really do vary. Right here, I've got something like the idea that came in a dream, which is going to have a major impact on my business, or so I think. But here, my really big idea, although it's a great idea, I've got lots of energy around it, I've only given it a score of one. I really don't think it's gonna have as much of an impact.

Later on here, and I wanna clarify what Effort is defined as in this case. Again, you can customize this for your own needs. In Effort, I'm giving a high score for something that is actually going to take the smallest amount or the shortest amount of time. The reason being is that if you are going to sum up these numbers or average out these numbers, you want a positive score or a great score here in all of your categories.

So the higher the number, in this case, the better. So when I have a five or some of these fours, this actually means that it's not going to take a significant amount of effort, compared to my really big idea which I've given it a score of three. If I've given something a score of one, that means it's gonna take an awful lot of effort and therefore not get as high of a total score.

What I've done here at the end is I've decided to average it out. Since I've given everything here a score from one to five, I've decided that my end score should be reflective of that. You could choose to use this as a sum total, and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

Here I can see that this one here, this idea that came to me in a dream, has an overall score or an average of four. You can see why. It's got a five for effort, two fours, and a three. Now I've got something here above it, this cool idea which is rather close, set at 3.5.

It's still not gonna take a whole lot of effort, it should have a big impact, scored the highest when it came to profitability, but it perhaps didn't align with my vision quite as much. That's why it resulted in this 3.5. The other thing that you may want to consider when using this approach is that you may want to weigh one or two of these criteria a little heavier or lighter than others.

For example, if we look at something like Profitability and Vision, maybe I shouldn't give them equal weight. Maybe it's important that their vision is close to or in line with my own vision, but maybe I want to give extra weight to Profitability in this case.

One of the key reasons why I use this in Notion is that not only is it very easy to set up and create but it's very easy to add a new idea and also not be skewed by the data that's already existing here. Let's say that I'm accumulating these ideas as I'm thinking about what I want to do in the next quarter or maybe in the second half of this year.

Instead of just typing in new here and starting to go across here in a horizontal manner and giving these scores, that might skew my perspective because I'm gonna see the other scores right up here above.

Instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the new button here in the top right-hand corner. The great thing here is that it sort of blocks my vision of the rest of the table. So I'm gonna say my Latest Idea for Q2, that's what I'm gonna call it here.

Then I can come down and look at these criteria one by one. Effort, I'm gonna say, this is gonna take actually minimal effort in this case, so I'm gonna give it about a four. Remember, the higher the score, the less effort in this particular case.

When it comes to Impact, I'm gonna say maybe not as much, I'm gonna give it a two. Profitability, sort of middle of the road, I'm gonna give it a three here. Lastly, I'm gonna say when it comes to Vision that this is pretty much in line. So I'm gonna give this a four.

Now you'll notice that this isn't quite in the right order that I want it to be. The great thing with Notion is that you can drag and drop almost anything. So I can have that score here at the end. I can add some further notes here, further details about this idea or this project as well if I want to.

Now, I can come back to my table, and here is my latest idea for Q2. I can see that it's got an overall score of 3.25. Now, does this mean that I'm automatically going to pursue this one that has the highest score? No.

You should keep this in mind as you play around and decide to use these types of decision-making tools. It should just really give you food for thought. It's gonna give you some quantitative data here to help you decide what you should be doing next. But I do not recommend that you automatically select the one with the highest score. This is really just a means for you to evaluate and perhaps refine your decision-making process.

How to Build a Decision Matrix in Notion

First thing we'll need to create a new page here within Notion. So I'm gonna call this one a Decision Table, in this particular example. Instead of just creating an empty page, we want to come down to Database and select Table here within Notion.

Now, by default, whenever you start any table within Notion you're going to start with a Name column and a Tags column, but it's so easy to edit these things as we go about this process. Instead of Name, I'm going to call this Project or maybe Idea in this case because that's what we're evaluating, and we can leave it as a name.

But we're not gonna be making use of tags here within the Notion database. So in this case, I'm gonna come down here and choose a Number. In this case, I'm going to use the criteria Impact, alright. Let's add a few more here for our example.

The second one here again, is not text, I wanna change that to a Number, and we're gonna call this one Effort. Let's add one more to our example here. Once again, we want to choose Number, and in this case, let's call this one Vision, similar to what we saw in the first example.

Now we can go ahead and start filling out our projects or our ideas and giving them some type of quantitative value. You don't have to limit yourself to a score between one and five, you could choose one and ten or any other numeric value that you like.

The key thing here is that we need some type of quantitative data so that we can sum up or average that data at the very end of this table. So even if I start to add in an idea, let's just call this one Idea number one, I can come in here and start entering the values.

Effort of four, maybe it's an impact of two, but the vision is very much in line so it's a five. That's great, and I can keep filling out this data down below. But we want to get some type of final or cumulative score at the very end so that we can compare them head-to-head against each other.

So in this last column here, what we're going to do instead of choosing a Number we need to come down to Advanced and select a Formula. Now, if you're not familiar with creating or editing formulas here within Notion, no problem. I'm going to show you a very, very simple formula even if you've never used formulas here within Notion.

Under the column that we just selected here, we want to come down and select Edit Formula. Now, what Notion does is it gives us some of the most common properties, both the properties that we've created here within the table, but it also gives us a variety of other factors and criteria that we can use to make these calculations.

We're going to keep it super basic for our needs today. So all we need to do is come down here and select the properties that we want to add or subtract or average, in this case. So I'm going to select Impact, because that's the first one in my column, and then I'm going to add a Plus symbol.

Next, I'm going to add Effort, and then once again, I'm going to hit the Plus symbol. Last but not least, we have our third criteria, which is Vision. And so that's essentially all we want to do. In fact, as you can see here above it's actually doing this in real-time to make sure that we're getting the value that we're after.

All I need to do in this case is select Done. Now I've got my sum total of this particular row. That's exactly what I want here. The last thing that I may want to do is that I've left this as the title of the column, that's maybe not that helpful, so I can come here and change that to Score.

So now when I have my second idea, I'm going to select New here and I'm going to call this Idea number two. I can come down here to Effort and start filling in my different variables here. I can say the Vision is, ah, it's only about a two as well.

If the Score is not listed in the place where you want it to be, remember you can always drag and move these around as well. Now when I come back to my Decision Table I instantly have that score. I can see this is almost half of my first idea. So I should probably consider doing my first idea.

The last thing that I'd like to show you here is that it may be helpful to you to add a default sort order. So when we select Sort here, what we can do is add a Sort. In this case, what I want it to do, is I want to actually sort it by its score, and I want to sort it by descending in this case.

So now what I'll have is always the idea with the highest score sorted to the very top. So no matter how many things that I list here within this table, I can see the one with the highest score at the very top. Now, I'd love to know what other tools you are using to help you make better decisions. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

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

Introduction

This video is brought to you by SaneBox.

Stay tuned to learn more about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox.

Are you wanting to save time when using Microsoft Outlook?

Well then, this video is for you because I'm sharing with you seven of my best time-saving tips right here within Outlook.

Let's not waste any more time and jump into tip number one.

Turn off sounds and alerts in Outlook

And that has to do with turning off all of those alerts and visual notifications, so we're a lot less distracted when dealing with our email.

What we wanna do is come up here and select File and then come all the way down and select Options.

Now that's gonna open up our Outlook Options dialog, but second, we need to come over here to Mail and near the bottom of the screen, you may need to scroll down just a little bit.

We've got a subheader called Message Arrival.

Now by default, Outlook is gonna have all of these things checked and turned on, which only makes our life that much more distracting as we're trying to get on with other things, especially if we have Outlook open while we have other applications or maybe even other monitors open as we go about our workday.

So we can uncheck Play a Sound, very, very distracting.

We can uncheck Briefly Change the Mouse Pointer.

So even if you're doing something in an Excel spreadsheet, for example, you're not distracted by your mouse changing midway through editing a cell or writing a report notifying you of a new message.

We can uncheck Show an Envelope Icon in the Task Bar, but maybe the most distracting one in this list of them all is the last one, Display a Desktop Alert.

And you know exactly what I mean.

In the lower right-hand corner, you get a little preview of both the subject, the sender, and maybe the first two sentences of that message for every single email.

I strongly encourage you to uncheck this one as well so that you can regain your focus.

Send an email at a later time in Outlook

The second tip I have for you today has to do with delaying the delivery of an email message.

So let me come up here and just open up a new email.

I'm just gonna type in a default or a test email address here, and let's just call this a Test Delay here as our subject line.

So maybe you don't want someone knowing that you were actually writing that email at three in the morning.

However, you wanna use this feature is up to you, but let me show you how to execute on it.

So let's say I finished crafting and writing this email.

Next up, I want to tell Outlook when to send it.

What we need to do is come up here to Options, and then over to the right under the More Options area, we have an option called Delay Delivery.

Now, if we select this, we're gonna actually have a number of other properties show up.

But all we wanna focus on here is down here, these Delivery Options.

So when we select the Delayed Delivery option from the ribbon, this is already going be checked here, the Do Not Deliver Before, and then we can choose the date and time options.

Now, I've noticed by default, it's gonna choose today at 5:00 PM as the default delayed delivery time.

But of course, we can choose any date and time that we want.

Here, I can come to my mini calendar, and I can say, you know what, I'd rather have this go out on Wednesday morning.

That's when I hope this person, I want them to see it or open up this message.

I'm gonna say 9:00 AM on Wednesday morning.

We can say Close at this stage, and you're not gonna see anything different on the message itself.

We can still go ahead and edit and change the subject or the message itself.

But at this point, I'm gonna hit Send, but it didn't actually send.

In fact, all it did was send it to my Outbox.

Let's see what that looks like.

Here on the left-hand side of my menu, I can come down here and click on my Outbox.

I can see that there's one message in there.

This is the one we just created called Test Delay.

And over here, it's gonna say that it was sent at Monday at 10:40, which happens to be just now or just a moment ago.

Now it wasn't actually sent, that's actually telling us when I hit the send button, but the reason why it's in the Outbox area here, is because it's waiting for that delay time.

It's waiting for that Wednesday time.

If I want to, I can open this up and remove the delay and send it right away or change the delay settings.

But you can always go back to your Outbox if there's something that has not been sent yet.

A very handy feature if you want a message to arrive at a particular time.

Let's go back to our inbox and I want to show you another feature which I think is very underutilized.

Save clicks with Quick Steps in Outlook

Even though it may have been staring at you in your face for many, many years.

Here in the middle of the ribbon, we have a section called Quick Steps.

Now, Quick Steps is nothing new.

It's been around in Outlook for many, many years, but in my experience, very few people actually use it.

And number two, actually don't even know what its purpose is or how to use it.

So by default, Microsoft is going give us a few different preloaded Quick Steps for us to try and make our lives that much easier.

The best way to think about Quick Steps is it allows you to customize some automated steps or multiple steps, even though you're only going to click one particular action.

So to create your own, all you need to do is come down here to select, Create New, and we're gonna get this dialogue here.

So I'm gonna say a New Quick Step.

In this case, you can give it a name, anything that you want.

You can even choose your own icon here to make it stand out from other such things.

I'm just gonna choose this one for fun, so it stands out from everything else.

And next, what we get to do is choose all of the actions we want to apply.

So by selecting this dropdown, we can file things away, change the status, add or remove categories, different responses that we have here.

We can even do things related to our calendar.

So for example, maybe I want to move it to a particular folder, and here I can choose which folder I want to move it to.

But I don't wanna stop there.

I also wanna come down here and flag that particular message, and I can choose which flag it is.

I'm gonna say tomorrow, perhaps in this case.

I can come down here and add yet another action as well.

I can say let's also mark it as unread.

So I come back to it at that time and it stands out from everything else.

So again, you can stack and layer all of these actions, but only select one button to execute them.

Now, next up on our list, I wanna talk about creating and modifying rules here within Outlook.

Create Outlook rules to save time

The rule section is right over from the Quick Step ribbon by default.

So here we can select Rules, and we can either apply a rule to the message that we are currently selected on at the moment.

Or we can select Create a Rule.

Now you can create some very, very sophisticated rules here within Outlook.

By default, it's going to include some of the information on the message, if you happen to have a message selected at the moment.

But you can see that all of these boxes are unchecked.

So I don't have to apply the from Wayfair option to this particular message.

But here's where you get to set the conditions or the criteria for this rule.

So do you want to either flag or send certain messages from a particular sender somewhere else?

Maybe you want to seek out messages that have a particular keyword in the subject line or who it was sent to.

And then we can tell it what to do.

Now, this is the one I wanted to highlight to display in the new item, alert window.

This is where you can turn off your desktop alerts.

Remember that distracting window in the bottom right-hand corner, and you can create your own custom ones for those that are coming from a particular sender or that meet your particular conditions.

Now we can always come back up to Rules here and select Manage Rules and Alerts.

If we wanna review all of the rules that we've created or maybe need to modify them or just delete them altogether.

So make sure you know how to get to this screen so you can make changes in the future.

Now, if you don't wanna spend your time creating all of these complicated rules, for different folders and different places to send your messages, then you may benefit from SaneBox.

SaneBox is the artificial intelligence to help you sift through a large quantity of messages in a matter of seconds.

And the great thing is because SaneBox uses artificial intelligence, it actually learns from your behavior.

So as you drag more of your promotional material or emails from a certain sender into a particular folder, it starts to learn from you and will apply that automatically without having to apply all of these complicated rules.

If you would like to try SaneBox for yourself and receive a special discount for Simpletivity viewers, be sure to click the link in the

description below.

Now, next on our list we wanna look at sharing some information with people when it comes to our Outlook calendar.

Share your Outlook calendar in an email

How many times have you wanted to set up a meeting with someone outside of your organization?

Someone who doesn't have access to your shared calendar but you still want to tell them when you're busy or free in the next couple of days.

Well, Outlook actually makes it quite easy for us to do so.

Let's start a new email here again.

And I don't even have to fill in any information to get things rolling with this feature.

In this case, what I wanna do is I wanna give a summary of the times that I'm available for the coming week.

So all I need to do here is come down to the body of my message, and I'll probably start off by saying something like, please take a look at the following dates or times.

But next I wanna come up here to Insert, and under Insert, I'm gonna say Calendar.

This is gonna pop up a short dialogue which only gives us a few important but critical choices.

First, we need to select which is our calendar.

Which calendar we actually want to share.

And by default, it's probably your main calendar here within Microsoft.

Next up, how far out do you want to share this calendar?

You can start with only today, or you can select tomorrow, a few other defaults, or you can specify a few particular dates.

In this case, I'm gonna select the next seven days.

And it's even gonna give me a summary down below as to which dates are going to appear.

Next up, we get to choose the level of detail that we want to share with the person we're sending this to.

Now by default, it's gonna be availability only, and I would assume that nine times out of ten, this is exactly what you want to share because it's gonna limit it to just free, busy, tentative types of information.

No names of events or appointments are going to be shown.

No attendees or invitees are going to be shown either.

But it does give us a few other options, including limited details, which will include the subject of those calendar events, but also full details which will include the invitees as well.

So like I said, in most cases, you're probably only going to want to show the availability only.

Now, if you have set your working hours here within Outlook, I would also encourage you to select this checkbox, Show Time Within My Working Hours Only because you don't want someone to assume that you're available late in the evening, if those don't include your working hours.

At this stage, I'm gonna select Okay, and what's gonna happen is it's gonna embed this sort of miniature calendar into the body of the email.

So what they can do is scroll down through this mini calendar.

And as you can see, it's only showing free and busy information, no specific details.

So they can come down and say, oh, I wanted to meet on the 25th, but it looks like you're busy all day.

Let's meet on the 26th at about 10:00 am.

It looks like you're free, let's set up a meeting for that time.

So for very quick and easy way to include your calendar information, even for those who are outside of your organization.

Let's stick with our calendar for just a moment and see how we can easily convert any email message into a calendar event.

Convert any email into an Outlook calendar event

Now, first and foremost, why might you want to do this?

Well, I think there's two important reasons.

Maybe you've already been going back and forth with someone and now you need to set up a meeting and you wanna keep all that information that you had in that email.

So you want to quickly convert it into an actual meeting appointment.

The second reason would be if you're using a concept like time-blocking and you wanna just reserve some time to maybe address or go deeper or respond to a particularly messy or important email.

So in order to do so, all you need to do is select that email.

We want to click and hold.

We're gonna click and drag.

And what we want to do is come down to our calendar icon and then release.

By releasing it there, it's gonna open up our appointment dialogue.

No, we are not replying at this stage, we are now creating a calendar appointment.

Now Outlook is automatically gonna convert the subject of the email into the title of the appointment.

And down below, you can see the entire email is now included within this appointment as well.

So the first thing that you might wanna do is change the subject, right?

To something a little more meaningful for yourself or for whoever else is going to be included on this.

And you can still add further details above the email contents itself.

So whether you're actually inviting others or not, a very quick and easy way to do so.

Add multiple time zones to the Outlook calendar

Next, let's go into our calendar itself and show you how you can add additional time zones to your calendar.

For most of us, we are not limited to a very specific geographic area or only one time zone.

You are most likely working with others and also have clients in a variety of different time zones.

So wouldn't it be helpful if you may be highlighted one or even two additional time zones, so you don't always have to be doing that mental math.

For example, I am here on the Pacific West Coast.

So I have the Pacific time zone here listed on my calendar, but many of my clients are on the East Coast.

So I would like to see exactly what their time is rather than always having to add three hours every time I'm trying to plan a meeting.

So in this case, we can get to this area in one of two ways.

Let me show you the long way and we'll shorten it up a little bit.

Once again, we can go up to File, then down to Options, and then this time we wanna come down to Calendar and we're still gonna have to scroll a little bit to get to this time zone area.

But that was an awful lot of clicks.

Let's see if we can speed that up a little bit.

Here within our calendar view, we can select the View option here, and then under Arrangement, we wanna select Calendar Options, and that's gonna take us directly to Calendar Options within this dialogue.

We're still gonna have to scroll down just a little bit before we get to this time zone area.

So for your default time zone, you can choose the default label to whatever you like, but we can add both a second and a third time zone.

By selecting this checkbox, I have now added the Eastern time zone and I can either call it East or Eastern or EST, whatever I want, whatever makes sense to me.

At the very end, don't forget to select Okay, and now you will see I've got the Eastern time zone selected here, right beside my default Pacific time zone.

So quick and easy can help you as you're setting up meetings with others.

Why text expansion is so valuable (bright upbeat music) If you'd like to save an awful lot of time while you're typing at your computer, then this video is for you.

I wanna show you two of my favorite text expansion tools and share why you should be using something like this every single day.

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

And if you're not using a text expansion tool, you're wasting an awful lot of time.

Now I don't usually like to point blame at anyone, but wouldn't it be easier to just hit one or two keystrokes on your keyboard and have an entire email reply ready to go, or maybe half of that article or that agreement or whatever it is you're writing all ready there.

Well, that's where text expansion tools come into play.

Let's get started off with a tool which is called Text Blaze.

Text Blaze overview and how to start

Now Text Blaze is actually a Chrome extension.

So it is somewhat limited to only filling in things and adding text within your browser, but for many of us, we spend the majority of our time dealing with email, dealing with documents, filling in forms, for example, online, and I really liked the way that Text Blaze lays everything out.

It's quite simple to navigate.

So let me give you a quick tour and show you what you need to know.

Here on the left-hand side, I'm in my folder called My Snippets.

Now both of the tools that we're looking at today will allow you to group these snippets into different folders, and that's very important because over time you may accumulate a large number, and it's very valuable to group them into different categories that make sense to you.

So let's start off with something rather simple, something that I am sharing on a regular basis, and that is my Zoom meeting link.

Well, number one, I don't want to have to remember it and actually type in this link every time, and I don't wanna go and copy and paste it from somewhere else either.

I would rather hit just two keystrokes on my computer and input it directly wherever I want it to be.

So here, I've got the label for the snippet, which I'm calling Zoom link, and that's just for my reference, just so I know which one I'm looking at and talking about here.

To the right, we have the shortcut.

Now this can be anything that you want.

You can see that I'm using a /Z in this case.

So that's quick and easy for me to input this information.

The shorter, the better, but keep in mind you don't wanna be using common combinations or actual words that are going to be confused because whenever you enter this in this snippet, what you enter into this box down below is going to appear.

So having something like a forward slash or an asterisk, something else with a special character, is not a bad idea because you're probably not using that elsewhere as well.

So here we go.

I've got the link down below.

I've got the meeting password.

This is where I want to input anywhere I go.

I'm going to open up this Google Doc just to use as my example here, I'm going to enter in /Z, and immediately there we go.

I've got my information.

So if I'm replying to someone via email, if I need to share this quickly and easily, all I need to do is hit two keystrokes on my computer to do so.

To add your own snippet, all you need to do is hit this plus icon here.

You'll get a fresh workspace, a fresh snippet to create here, to give it a label, a shortcut, and then enter your text down below.

But remember, you can go much further than just a simple phrase or a simple piece of text.

How to use text expansion for email replies

I've got one down here below which I am calling my Trello reply because I do offer Trello consulting services.

And often people are inquiring about my services.

Now this is a great example.

You think of how many times in your workday are you responding with the same reply, or at least 95% of that reply is identical to the other 100 that came before it.

So in this case, I may want to customize something.

I may want to change maybe one of these questions, but most of the time, this is my default response.

So I have it all written out here.

I've got a link back to my webpage here.

I can add other customized pieces of information here as well.

So when I'm replying to that, and I'm just going to go back to my Google document for an example here, my shortcut key this time is /tr.

There I've got that information.

Boom, immediately I can hit send and go on with the rest of my day.

Now Text Blaze does allow some further customization, such as adding the current date, or doing some date math.

You can add in custom fields and custom names, but why don't we jump into our next tool, TextExpander, and I'll show you some of this capability there as well.

TextExpander overview and how to start

So the difference between TextExpander and Text Blaze is that TextExpander applies to your entire system.

It's not just limited to your web browser.

So this is great if you want to be able to use text expansion in other parts of your software, when you're working offline or maybe you just prefer to work on a desktop version of Microsoft Word, for example, you can use all this information here as well.

Now for today's example, since I'm using two different text expansion tools, I've decided to use a different prefix.

As we saw here in Text Blaze, I'm using a forward slash so I know that it's a Text Blaze expander or a Text Blaze snippet.

Here in TextExpander, I'm using the letter Z.

So everything is starting with the letter Z.

Now where I might need to be careful is if I have a combination of words, maybe like Z E.

I've got one here that's Z E M.

Remember, it's not Z E O or Z E R.

If I'm typing the word zero, but you want to make sure that no component of those combination of words doesn't exist in another word.

You're going to find that out pretty quickly, and then you'll need to come in here and change it.

So as we saw in Text Blaze, we also have the ability to group things together in different folders.

TextExpander is a little more full-featured.

Advanced libraries in TextExpander

In my opinion If we come down here to brand names, for example, they have a feature where they have this long list of common brand names and the way that they will auto-correct for you.

So it's more than just inputting text that you want.

Let's say that you keep forgetting is Mailchimp with a capital C or is it with a lowercase C?

Well, Mailchimp's proper name happens to be with a lowercase C, but it doesn't matter.

So if I come back here to my example and I'm going to purposely type in Mailchimp with a capital C, it's automatically going to change it to the proper lowercase C.

So it's more than just inputting the text.

It can actually be an auto-corrector and choosing the correct format.

And you can customize that as well.

Let's open up our TextExpander dialogue here for a second and go back to my own snippets.

Adding date math to TextExpander

I want to pull up one here which is called form submission response.

So for example, let's say that I get someone to fill in a form and then I want to send them back a response, but you'll notice I've added a little bit of customization to this particular one.

Here I've said in my final line, "Let me review the form you submitted, and I will get back to you by," and I've got some math going on here.

So I've said add two days to the day, month, day format.

So what this is going to do is it's going to add two days to the current day right now.

So whenever I input this into my email or if it's somewhere else, either online or offline, it's going to do that math for me.

Let's go back and check this one in real time.

So I'm going to come here Z form.

So there it is.

There's my snippet.

And remember, it can be much lengthier than this if I want to.

But at the end, it says, "I will get back to you by Thursday, March 11th."

That's correct.

Because as I'm recording this video, it is Tuesday, March 9th.

So you can adjust this.

You can add more complicated calculations here just to customize your responses rather than "I'll get back to you soon."

Or maybe there's an expected shipping date, something along those lines.

Including name fields to TextExpander

Do this to make it a lot more personal as well. Let me bring back this snippet here.

And at the very beginning, I'm going to say, "Hi," I'm going to leave a space, but in here, I'm going to choose this option, which is called fill-ins.

And I'm going to choose a single line field.

And in this case, the name I'm going to give it is just that—it's going to be a name because I wanna personalize this response a little bit more.

I don't wanna just leave it in the format it's in right now.

I want to input someone's name.

So by doing so, I'm going to hit okay here.

The last thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a comma just for formatting, just so it looks more natural.

So it's going to actually prompt me to input the name I want before it inserts into my text.

Let's minimize this and see this again in action.

So I'm gonna type in my keywords, and just before it goes into the document where my cursor was, I'm going to get this little pop-up down below and you can see the cursor is waiting for me to input a name.

So I'm going to say, "Hi, Steve," in this case.

And all I need to do is hit enter.

And now, boom, Steve is right there.

I can address Steve in this email reply.

Now you can also add that same name field that we just saw in multiple parts of your snippet.

So think of something a little lengthier, like an agreement, maybe it's a longer email and you want to address them again later on in that message.

You only have to enter it in once, but it's going to appear in all of those places.

And the nice thing is that TextExpander is going to give you that preview as well.

Well, I would love to hear from you next—are you already using a text expansion tool?

If so, what are some of your best tips and tricks to getting the most out of these services?

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

In fact, it's very simple.

How NetHunt CRM works with Gmail

(upbeat music) If you're a Gmail user and you need a CRM system, then this video is for you, why?

Because NetHunt CRM has gotten so much better because now it includes complex automation.

So you can sit back and do a whole lot less and let your CRM system do a whole lot more.

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

And the reason why I love NetHunt CRM is that you can do it all right here from within Gmail.

You don't need to open up another tab.

You don't need to go into another application.

Here, I can expand my Scott's business example here, and I can view all of my deals on a single screen.

I can view my pipeline and start to move things across.

As soon as I've won this deal, I can move it over here to the won column and manage those contracts, manage my clients.

I can not only view all of my contacts right here from within Gmail.

I don't have to jump to Google Contacts, but I can see the full history.

If I click on their link, I can see all of the emails and set my customized fields and everything that you would want from a CRM system.

But what I want to show you today is how to use Workflow Automation.

So you can have people fill in a contact form.

You can have people reply to an email and then automatically change their status or send a follow-up email campaign.

Whatever you want to do, you can build it right here within NetHunt CRM.

First, let me quickly show you

Example of a NetHunt CRM Workflow

what I'm talking about here with a sample I already created.

So in this case, I've got a nice overview of someone who is filling out a contact us form and how they're automatically being included in my CRM records.

But beyond that, I've got things branching out into a few different things.

Because once they've signed up or filled in that contact form, I want to send them a special email message.

And then I want to wait to see if they reply.

And if they don't, I want to send them another email, but once they do reply, I want to change their status to a lead.

And here on the right-hand side, I can follow those workflows each and every time.

So I can see in this case, I have three individuals that have already gone through the process.

And that gives me a lot of great statistics and data as well.

So I can see how many people are laying eyes on it.

If there's a bounce or how many emails are being bounced at what stages, where are people getting caught up in that workflow?

So let me show you how you can build out a workflow and a variety

How to create a workflow in NetHunt CRM

of different automations right here from within NetHunt. So all we need to do is click on the workflows tab on the left-hand side of our menu.

And then up in the right, we're going to select new.

And in this case, I'm going to call this a contact us form, okay?

So this is something, when someone fills out my contact us form, this is the automation and the email drip campaign I want to send them into.

So we start off with a blank grid and we can do so many different things here when it comes to automation.

I'm going to start by selecting, add a starting trigger.

And here's, you can see that trigger could be a variety of things, including when a new record is added, whether I do it manually, or maybe it comes in by some other form, when a field value changes.

So perhaps when I adjust the lead type or the customer type, maybe one of my customized fields that I already have set up in my contact list, that could be a trigger.

We can choose web hook events, but in this case, I want to use a web form

Setting up a web form in NetHunt CRM

when someone is filling out a web form. Now, the nice thing here within NetHunt CRM is that yes, you can connect it to other web forms that you're already using, but you can also create your own right here from within NetHunt.

So for example, I'm going to say that this is just a basic contact us form.

I could give it a description if I want, but I'm going to keep it simple for this example.

I'm going to keep it basic first name, last name, email address, and maybe I'm going to add a text field here as well.

And just something like, "tell us more about what you are looking for," something along those lines.

And you can add a variety of customized fields in your contact us form here as well.

Now I'm going to hit save.

In this case, we can do some customization here.

I kind of liked the way things were so far.

If you don't like the color scheme, you can change from a few different templates here as well.

But this is just a preview of what this form is going to look like.

And at the top of the screen, you can see, we can add this in a few different ways.

We can link directly to it.

So you can add this link, or if you want, you can embed this directly into any website.

So if you want to put this on a particular page or maybe in multiple pages on your website, you can do so as well, but we've got the contact form the way that I like it, it hit close at this stage. Let's decide next,

Adding actions to a NetHunt CRM workflow

what is going to happen once someone has filled out that form.

So I'm going to select add an action here.

And in my case, I think the most logical next step would be to create a new record, right?

When they fill out a form, I don't care, I may not even know their level of interest is, I want to add them to my CRM so I can decide and hopefully bring them in as a part of my sales pipeline.

So I'm going to say, create a new record, and I want to put it into contact.

Next up, we just need to match our fields, because remember you can customize that contact us form and have it mapped to different things within your CRM system.

So in this case, I just want to make sure that yes, first name is going to match up to first name.

We want the last name to match up to our last name.

We want the email address to match up to, yes, you guessed it, the email address.

Now this may seem like a lot of additional work at this step, but remember, all of those fields can be customized on your form.

So maybe you want to map them to something particular or very different than what the user is seeing depending on how you create your form.

So I'm going to hit save at this case.

So that's, what's going to happen next.

We're going to create that contact.

Splitting paths within NetHunt CRM workflow

But my next step here as a part of our web flow builder, or workflow builder is we want to create a split path.

We want to branch things off here into two different streams, because on the one side, I want to send them a welcome email and hopefully get them to respond.

But on the second side of things, this is going to be sort of the next step is when I graduate them to be an official lead, because I'm not going to really count them as a lead until they actually reply.

I'm not going to count them as a qualified lead until they actually reply to one of my emails.

So that's where this split path comes into play.

So we've got branch A and we've got branch B, let me show you how this is going to work.

Let's start with branch A and what we're going to do is we're going to send a welcome email.

Now you can see there's a variety of other things we could do as well, including sending Slack messages or a Google Chat message.

We could just simply update the record.

You don't always have to be sending email as a part of it, but I know for many of us, when it comes to nurturing our leads and people who are contacting us via our contact form, we want to send them an email.

So I'm going to select, send an email.

We're going to send it to the email address on file.

And here you can craft any message that you want.

In our case, I'm going to keep it very, very simple.

In fact, I'm only going to be using subject headers in this case, but of course you can customize this text any way you want.

You can even add macros.

So if you want to make it personal and address them by their first name, you can do all of that right here within NetHunt.

But let's say this is our welcome email and I'm going to hit save.

So that's the first email that they're going to receive.

Next up, I want to check and select another action.

Adding time breaks and rules within the workflow

And in this case, I want to wait for a little bit of time.

I want to wait maybe about two days before, I send my follow-up email.

I don't want to feel like a pest, but I don't want them to forget about me either.

So I'm going to wait a maximum of two days before I send that follow-up email.

I'm going to hit it save here and here you can see it's built right into my workflow.

So I can easily see what's going on and I can adjust these things, add more or remove or edit these actions whenever I like.

My next action here is going to be my second email.

So here, I'm going to come back into, add a new action, I'm going to say, send another email, and in this case, I can choose to send it as a reply to the previous email if I want, but in this case, I'm going to actually check that box.

I'm going to say, "I think you may like what we have," all right.

So this is my follow-up email, right?

'Cause they haven't responded to the first one yet.

So the messaging is probably going to be a little bit different.

Maybe I'll add a bit more detail and as to why they should reach out and find for more information.

I'm going to hit save on this one.

And here you can see I've got my second email here.

Now, remember you can make this drip campaign as complex or as simple as you like.

In this particular example, I'm going to stop it at this point because I want to show you how we can convert them or when we will convert them to a qualified lead.

But maybe you have five or seven or even 10 emails that you want to be sending along before you either change them or have something else happen as a part of your workflow.

So what I'm going to do at this stage here is I'm actually going to end this workflow.

Setting triggers for next path in workflow

You can see the last option here is to end this branch of the workflow.

However, as we move to branch B, let me show you how the relationships work here.

The very first action I'm going to select here is to wait for email.

And what that means is that I am going to wait until they've replied to do what is happening here in branch B.

So branch B is not going to start.

Nothing is going to happen in this second set of actions, the second set of automations until I receive that email back.

Now, in this case, I want to uncheck this box, which says, ignore previous emails.

I don't want to ignore those previous emails.

I want to be listening to and making sure that whenever they reply to any of those emails in branch A, then branch B will begin.

So I'm going to hit save in this case.

I'm going to wait for that email to receive, and as soon as they've replied to me, what I want to do is change their status from new contact to a lead as in a quality lead.

Because, just because someone filled out a contact form, I really can't gauge their full level of interest, but once they've emailed back or replied back to one of my emails that I've sent to them, well, that gives me a hint that maybe they are interested in my services.

Using the update record workflow action

So what I'm going to do in this case is I'm going to update the record.

Once they've replied to me, I'm going to select update a record.

We're in our contacts field already.

And what I need to do is come down here to one of my customized field values.

Now I can change any of these field values that you see listed here.

But in my case, I'm going to come down to type.

And what I'm going to do is going to select the value and choose the type that I want to change it to.

So by default, in my CRM, the way it is set up, everyone is a new contact when they first fill out that form.

But I want to change them to a lead as soon as they reply to one of my emails.

So I'm going to select lead in this case and hit save.

Now, the other thing that you want to keep in mind when setting up your workflows here within NetHunt CRM is you can rename these as well.

Here on the left-hand side, maybe the subject line of these emails are good enough to tell me what is happening here.

But in this case, it says, update a record.

It says, update one field.

Well, if I come over here, I can select rename.

And I think what's going to make a lot more sense if I say, update type to leads.

So I know what is happening at this stage.

I'm going to hit save here.

So now I know this is when they are converting from a new contact to a qualified lead.

You know, the next thing that I want to do once they've replied is obviously send an email back to them.

Either thanking them or giving them more detailed information.

So once again, I'm going to select send an email to their email address, and this is going to be, "take a look at these great, these great deals."

All right, perfect.

So here I've maybe got a long list of things that they may be interested in purchasing, or maybe I want to set up a meeting, whatever makes the most sense for you and your CRM automation system.

I'm going to hit save at this point.

So there is when that email is sent out.

And my last step here is just going to be to end that workflow, because now I've started a conversation, maybe I want to be a little more personal and I'm going to jump on board and maybe set up a phone call or a meeting or something of the like.

So here we go.

Now, I've got my automation all set up.

All I need to do at this stage is come up here and select activate.

So now we are ready to take it for a test run and see how this actually works.

Testing out the workflow and seeing it in action

So first off, what we need to do here is to get that form.

In order to get that link, all we need to do is click on that, contact us form.

I'm going to copy that link here and put it in a new tab.

So this is what your contact may see, or in my case, this is what my participants would see.

And again, you can embed this into your website if you want to.

So let's give this a very test, test, Testerson, yeah, that's a good name there, test Testerson.

And we'll give him a real address in this case, just so we can see how the reply automation works with the workflow that we've set up.

And I'm just going to leave this last one blank here.

So here's this test user who is submitting my contact us form.

Form is submitted, fantastic.

Let's jump back to NetHunt, which is within our Gmail account to see what happens.

So I'm going to come back here, let me close this page.

And already you can see on the right-hand side, we have someone waiting within this workflow.

I'm going to show you the contact in just a second, but here you can see we've got one person who's filled out the Contact Us form.

They've now updated the contact records and we've sent them that welcome email.

Now everything else shows as a zero for good reason because we're waiting, right?

We've decided to wait for two days, at least two days before we send out this following email below, right?

And again, you can have as many as you like.

The idea is that we hope to send them for them to reply an email back to us so we can change their status from a new contact to a lead.

Viewing the updates within NetHunt CRM

But let me jump over to my contacts for just a second here.

Here we see we've got test, Testerson.

Right at the top of our, right at the top of our list here.

If I click on that, you can see that we've got his information here.

Here's his welcome email that we sent him and the type is a new contact.

It's working just the way that we have designed it.

It's been added to our CRM system.

He is correctly labeled as a new contact and we can follow the conversation here, but nothing else is going to happen in this workflow until they reply back to us either they need to reply to us, or we're going to wait two days and we're going to send them an automated email.

Well, let's accelerate the process here.

I'm actually going to jump into my test Hotmail account and here you can see here's the welcome email we created just a few minutes ago.

So let's say that I am interested, right?

I'm someone who is interested.

So I'm going to reply and say, "please send me more details."

All right, so I'm going to hit send on this case.

I'm replying to that email.

So let's jump back into NetHunt and see what is happening with our automation.

So at this stage, you can see that we still have zeros on branch A because we haven't waited two days.

In fact, there's actually no need for us to continue on with sending this future email.

But if we look over at branch B, yes,

Reviewing the live details within the NetHunt CRM workflow

the email was received. So we've now updated that individual's type from new contact to lead and we've sent them the follow-up email.

And if we look over here on the right-hand side, it's even telling us that it's fully completed.

I'm going to jump back to my Hotmail account for just an example here.

Here you can see there's that new email that was automatically sent.

We had no hands-on in this operation at all.

It was all automated on our behalf, but on this side, we can also follow a full time staff history of the entire workflow and where this customer has been.

Everything from when they first filled out the contact us form all the way to when we sent that last email and when their type was changed.

And if you don't believe me, let's go back into contact here.

Let's click on that test Testerson and here his type, yes, is now changed to lead so we can treat him a little bit differently, send him other information, maybe reach out to set up a meeting.

Now, if you'd like to watch my full review of NetHunt CRM for Gmail, be sure to watch this video right here on the screen in front of you.

Thank you so much for watching today's video.

I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel and remember being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

What is Time Blocking?

(logo whooshing) Are you struggling to find the time for your most important tasks?

Well, then time blocking may be the solution for you.

So in today's video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know along with some of my best tips and tricks for using time blocking right here within Google Calendar.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and time blocking can be one of the most effective ways to ensure that you have enough time for your most important tasks to-do's and projects.

So let's dive in.

Here I've got a pretty typical looking calendar.

I've got a week in front of me here, where I've got several different meetings, events, and appointments.

And by default, most of our calendars are built upon these things, things that involve at least one other person.

I've got things like a sales presentation where I'm gonna be presenting to another team.

I've got a monthly coaching call, where perhaps I've got a regular conversation, whether that's via Zoom or telephone, or maybe sometime in the future in person.

I've got a lunch date here on Friday.

All of these things have in common that I'm doing something with someone else.

And even if it's something like a dentist appointment, it involves not just me, but the dental office, right?

But too often, we ignore our own tasks, our own to-do list and where we can fit in the time to do those things.

And that's where time blocking comes into place. If I need to reserve some time to prepare

Using Time Blocking within Google Calendar

for this sales presentation, maybe what I should do, a smart move would be to create an event over here.

And I'm just gonna call it prepare for presentation, all right.

So now I've got an hour of time, maybe I need a little bit more than an hour.

I'm gonna block out 90 minutes to prepare for that sales presentation in time.

The great thing about time blocking is not only is it going to appear on your calendar, it's gonna send you a reminder, whether it's on your phone, if you have desktop notifications enabled.

But the bonus is that it will block out time from other people who may be trying to book an event with you.

So if you have a calendar that is linked to other people within your organization, it's going to show as busy.

If you have your Google Calendar linked to a scheduling tool such as Calendly, it's gonna block this out as well.

So that's one of the effective uses of using time blocking.

And you can use it for a variety of activities, for example, maybe you're having trouble finding the time to eat a healthy lunch during the day.

Well, a smart move would be to block out that time in advance.

You can select lunch on just one of these days, and then of course we can use the repeat functionality right here within Google Calendar.

If we open up this event, I can go over here and say, yeah, we want to repeat this daily at that particular time.

And now we can, on our calendar, we've got lunch scheduled throughout the week.

So it's blocked off, not only from other people, but we can reserve that time to hopefully eat a healthy lunch or go out for a short walk

Common problems with time blocking in Google Calendar

or whatever you want to do with that time. However, here's some caveats that I want you to think of when we think of time blocking within Google Calendar.

Many of us think of the flexibility of having multiple calendars.

As we see here in the lower left-hand side of my screen here, we'll create multiple calendars for things like things in our personal lives, things that are related to hobbies or social gatherings or maybe for just different aspects of our work life.

So for example, here I've got one called work in parentheses time block.

Now this can be effective.

Let's say if I want to block out some time here to catch up on email.

I'm gonna select email or call it email, should say, and then I'm gonna come down here and actually choose that time block calendar.

So not only is it gonna give me a different color, but I can also hide and minimize my time blocking activity by using multiple calendars here within Google Calendar.

However, watch out because this will not block out your time from external forces.

If someone is wanting to book time with me on Thursday at 9:00 am, it's gonna show this as available 'cause it's only referencing my primary Google Calendar.

If I have this linked to something like Calendly, as an example, again, it is not going to block out this time because it's a separate calendar.

It's only gonna be looking at that default calendar here. So how can we have the flexibility of seeing certain things

How to highlight your personal tasks on Google Calendar

on our calendar, make them stand out as something that we've blocked off without using this functionality?

Well, let me give you two options here.

Number one, on any of your calendar events, remember you don't have to change the calendar in order to change the color.

So if I wanna use that same type of green shade here, I could use that for all of my time blocking activity.

Lemme open up this first lunch one here, and maybe I want lunch to stand out in a different way.

Maybe I want it to be more of a red color, sort of like a stop for now, let's stop and go have our lunch.

I'm gonna hit save, and I can choose to add that to my following events as well.

So now lunch really stands out to me as I'm looking at my calendar here within Google Calendar.

However, there's an additional tip and a trick that I like to use to make certain things stand out.

Not only will it keep those things blocked off on my calendar, but they sort of jump out a little bit more as I'm creating them, and that's the use of emojis.

Now, not too long ago, I introduced some of you to one of my favorite sites, which is called Emojipedia.

Now here on Emojipedia, you can search for different things.

So let's say, I'm wanting to do some work, some focused work on my laptop, such as a writing laptop.

I can just type in a few keywords or search words and find the emojis that I'm looking for.

However, you should also be made aware of some of the quick keys or shortcut keys on your computer.

And if you are using Windows, for example, all you need to do is select the Windows key plus the period key, and you'll bring up your emoji menu.

So now I can actually start typing in some of the same things here.

I just started typing in lap.

Hey, there's a picture of a laptop, I can select that and then go on by labeling this, and maybe I'll just call this focused, focused work, right?

So I'm gonna label that focused work.

Now I've got this nice little icon beside it here, which just makes it pop, just makes it jump out a little bit.

Remember I'm not using a separate calendar, but maybe I'm gonna use these emojis as a signal as to the things that are, things that I've put on my calendar.

Things that are time blocked for me and don't involve someone else.

Using Text Expanders with Google Calendar

But let's go one step further.

I wanna show you another tip that I just stumbled upon, and I think it's gonna make your life a lot easier as well.

How about if you created maybe four or five different categories that are specific to your time blocking needs?

Things such as lunch, exercise, email, focused work, written work, maybe presentation preparation or something along those lines, whatever makes the most sense for you.

Maybe a social media time where you can review your social media platforms or set up your social media campaigns for the future.

Well, to incorporate the use of these emojis along with these labels, you can use a text expander.

And something that I've been using a lot is a tool called Text Blaze.

So let me show you how I can use that here with my time blocking strategy.

Let's say that I wanna go for some exercise here at maybe 4:00 pm in the afternoon, I wanna hit the gym, or I just want to go out for a run or something along those lines.

What I can do is I can create a quick key, something that's customizable to me.

I can actually use it in other places on the web as well.

But in this particular example,

Using Text Blaze snippets to save time in Google Calendar

I'm gonna use it right here within Google Calendar. So Text Blaze is a Chrome extension, which you can, which is free for you to use and you can create your own custom quick keys.

So if you're here, for example, here on the left-hand side, I've already created one for email and lunch, but you can go much beyond this as well.

This third one here is actually an email reply that I use quite often when I'm replying to a common question or the first time that someone inquires about my consulting services.

So all you need to do is give it a title, choose the quick key that you want to use to trigger this, and then you can edit all of this text down below.

So here, for example, is this email reply, let me just go back to the test screen here.

So if I enter in my quick key, in this case which is forward/ tr, I've got the entire email response right in front of me, it just appears.

So wherever I want to put this, I can do so.

Let's try this with the one of the existing ones that I have here, an email label, and I've chosen the quick key E, L.

So if I wanna create some time here for email here, maybe later in the day, I'm gonna open this up and I'm just gonna type in E, L, boom, I've got the emoji, I've got the all caps email for a reason because maybe I want it to stand out that much more.

That's when I'm gonna do my email at the end of that day, maybe I need to do some more catch up on Friday.

I'm gonna come over here, I'm gonna type in E, L, there it is again, hit enter on my keyboard.

Now I'm quickly and easily adding things right here on my calendar.

How to create Text Blaze snippets to use anywhere online

Let's go back to that exercise example and show you how you can create your own here within Text Blaze, or there are other text expanders that you may be using already.

So I'm gonna hit the plus key here to create something new, and I'm gonna call this one exercise in this case.

Now, when it comes to the shortcut key, you don't have to use a forward slash or a special key.

In fact, often what I like to do is use a combination of keys that are already in the word that I don't use very often.

But in this case, I think E, X is maybe a good choice in this case.

I'll use that as my shortcut, and then down below here, I'm gonna pick my emoji.

I'm gonna use that windows period to pull up this quick menu here.

And I'm gonna choose one of these runners here, I'm gonna put that in here and then I'm gonna give it a space, and I'm gonna say X or oh, let's use all caps like I showed before, exercise, okay.

So this is going to jump up big in all caps along with the emoji.

I don't even have to hit save here within Text Blaze, it's gonna work automatically for me.

If I wanna test it out right here within Text Blaze, they give you a handy way to do so, let's try that E,X boom.

There it is.

So let's go back to our calendar and let's say

Adding recurring time blocks to Google Calendar

I wanna add exercise all throughout the week at 4:00 pm.

I'm gonna come up here, I'm going to enter in my quick key, there it is.

If I want to repeat it, I can come in here and I can choose to, let's, yeah, let's repeat this daily and hit save.

Now I've got my exercise listed throughout the week, it's nice in all caps.

So it stands out from my other appointments and I've got that emoji there as well.

The other big benefit of using this type of time blocking strategy is that again I'm gonna get these notifications as well.

So if I have notifications turned on, on my phone, if I have desktop notifications turned on here within Google Calendar, I'll get that gentle reminder, hey, you're planning to go for a run or you're planning to hit the gym at this time.

It can help me keep on track with my goals.

Use a shortcut key to quickly add events in Google Calendar

The last tip I wanna share with you here today when it comes to time blocking within Google Calendar is another way to quickly add your events.

And it does involve a shortcut key but not an auto expander.

In this case, I want you to remember the letter C on your keyboard.

Whenever you have Google Calendar open and you hit C on your keyboard, it's going to immediately open up to create a new event.

So now I can add that title, I can set a repeat period if necessary and then hit save and immediately jump back to my calendar.

Now, one of the drawbacks is that it is going to open up in a full screen.

So you can't actually see the other things in front of you, but if you're on a different part of your calendar, maybe a few weeks in advance, or you've been reviewing something in the past, using C on your keyboard can be a great way of doing so.

Now if you'd like to learn even more tips and tricks and how to get the most out of Google Calendar, be sure to click on the video here on the screen in front of you.

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

In fact, it's very simple.

Why spending less time with email is important Would you like to spend a lot less time in your email?

Well, then this video is for you, because I'm sharing with you my top five time-saving tips for getting the most out of Gmail.

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

And if we can shave off some time while dealing in our inbox while replying or reviewing or searching through our emails, well, then we can get onto more important things and the things that we want to get done

Changing Inbox Views in Gmail

as a part of our day. So let's start off our list with number five and we're actually looking at our views.

Sometimes when we come in here into Gmail, it can be really confusing as to see where we last left off, what we haven't read, what we have read, and where we should be putting our focus.

But Gmail has recently made it a lot easier for us to view this the way that we want.

If we come up here to the gear icon and open this up, and if we scroll about halfway down, you will see a section called inbox type.

And here you can see, we can go beyond just the default view of showing things in a chronological order.

Now we can customize this default view in a few different ways, but I wanna make sure that you save time by finding the ideal way for you.

So the first option that we have here is called important first.

And if I select this, you can see that it has filtered my most important emails, the ones that it thinks I should be dealing with first up front.

Here you can see, and I can collapse that if I want to.

And then down below, I have everything else.

Now, I only have this many messages in my inbox right now.

I know some of you may have many, many more, but I'm in the habit of archiving my messages.

So now I can deal with my important messages first, and then get to everything else as I go about my day.

The other options that we have here include unread first, and this can be really helpful after you've replied to something or once you've opened up a message and you only wanna be seeing new messages first.

Now, you may not want to stay in this view at all times, but as you can see here, it really splits things up nice and easily.

I've got everything that I haven't opened that I haven't touched upfront.

And then I've got the other messages, which may still be important for me to review down below.

Another option that we have here is starred first.

So if you're used to using this star feature amongst your emails, let me go ahead and star something down below here.

You can see if I refresh my screen here, it's now going to add it to my starred viewed.

So if you are picking and choosing certain messages that you wanna see first, that star viewed may be for you.

Now, the next two are the priority inbox, which is going to put a few different things here when it comes to important, and unread, starred.

There's a few different ways that we can segment this out.

In fact, if we click on customize, you'll have a lot further options here, but I wanna get to the last one here, which is perhaps the most customizable of them all.

That's multiple inboxes.

Now, by default, you may have a few different categories such as starred or perhaps things that are drafts as you can see down here below.

But if you click on the customize option, we've got a lot more detail that we can add here.

So here are the search queries that are being used to including those messages in those different headings.

What I would recommend is that you click on learn more, which is gonna open up this little dialog box on the right-hand side of your screen.

Now, at first, it's just gonna give you a bit of a description as to how these multiple inbox sections work.

But I want you to go one step further and actually click on search criteria.

Here, you will see the full list of search operators including an example, so you can include the things that you want to see here.

Maybe you want to include things with a certain name or a certain keyword in the title.

Maybe you want to filter out things from a certain individual, such as an important client or maybe your manager or something along those lines.

You can really think about this like applying the filtering option or the advanced search option within Gmail.

But now you can put it in your customized view.

So make sure you click on learn more and then view the search operator, so you can see the full list for yourself.

All right, let's go back to our inbox.

Schedule Gmail Messages to Send Later

I'm gonna rearrange my view back to the default, and let's get to my fourth best time-saving tip.

And that has to do with scheduling a send.

So let's open up and compose an email here.

How often have you thought to yourself, oh, I need to send that email or I need to let everyone know about something, but actually I don't need to let them know right now.

What do you do?

Well, perhaps you go to your calendar and add it as a task or you set yourself a reminder as to when it's an ideal time to send that message.

Well, that's a waste of time, because now you've got to add that to a to-do list or to a calendar.

And then you've got to come back and do it.

If it's on your mind right now, and you're thinking about it, why not write the email and then you can schedule that send later?

So let me just add an address here very quickly.

I'm not gonna add any content for this example, but if we come down here to the bottom, you will notice that there is a dropdown arrow to the right of the send button.

When we click that we are going to get this schedule send option.

Now, maybe I should put in just a fake, how about a fake subject line here?

Just so we can keep track of this as a part of our example.

So I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna select schedule send, and that's gonna open up this dialog box, and it's gonna give us a few preset times.

Now, as I've shown you in a previous video, if you want to change these preset times, you actually need to go into your Google Keep account.

You need to open up Google Keep and change your default reminders.

That's where these times are coming from.

So if you want to change these times, if you don't want them to be a 1:00 PM or 8:00 AM, as it says here when it comes to afternoon and morning, you can go into Google Keep and change your default reminder times which are associated with your Gmail account.

Now, if none of these work for you, if none of these defaults fit for this particular message, all we need to do is come down here and select pick date and time.

And I can say I want to send this out tomorrow.

I'd like to send it at about 1:30 in the afternoon.

So let's make that PM and perfect.

Tomorrow, 1:30 PM.

I'm gonna select schedule send.

Now that dialogue box is gonna close, or I should say the email message is gonna close.

We're gonna get the notification down below that it's going to send tomorrow, but what if you made a mistake?

What if you actually want to send it sooner or later?

You just want to reword it?

Well, here on the left hand side of our Gmail menu, you can see that there's an area called scheduled.

So if we click on that, it's gonna bring up all of the messages that we have scheduled for the future.

And here's that fake subject that we just created.

Now, from this view, it's only gonna show us the date.

It's not gonna actually show us the specific time.

So we will need to click on that message to get the, here, send scheduled for tomorrow at 1:30 PM, just to confirm when it is going to be scheduled in the future.

So you can come in here and review any of those messages, but if we need to change it, all we need to do here is select cancel send.

And what it's gonna do, it's gonna bring us back to that original message.

Now I can change who I'm sending it to, the subject, the text, whatever I need to do, and I can reschedule it again if I want to, or I could send it out right now if something has changed along those lines.

This can save you an awful lot of time, because when you're thinking of that message, when you're crafting that message, why wait to press the send button yourself?

You can schedule it at the ideal time that you want.

Send and Archive Button in Gmail

All right, next up on my list, number three on my time saving Gmail tips has to do with sending and archiving at the exact same time.

Now, this is particular when you are replying to a message.

One of the great ways to get a handle on your email is to archive all the messages in your inbox, in your incoming inbox once you've replied to it, because you're most likely done with it, at that point.

You've sent the message.

You've downloaded the attachment.

You've acknowledged whatever the case may be.

So why not make it easier on yourself to, when you reply to that message, automatically have that email archived, so it leaves your inbox.

It allows for some decluttering to naturally happen.

So let me go in here into… I'll just use this as a sample email, and I'm gonna come down and I'm gonna say reply.

And I'm just gonna say, hey, thanks for the info. Okay?

So once I do, so you'll see down below I actually have two send buttons.

The first one is blue, and this is our send and archive button.

If I don't want to archive it right away, maybe I want to send the message, but then I want to come up here and grab some of this information, right?

Maybe I want to copy and paste some of this information or download the attachment, whatever the case may be, I will still have my traditional send option here on the right hand side.

But by default, I've enabled my send an archive.

So now when I click this button, it has sent the message, but it has automatically archived it.

It is gone from my inbox, which is great.

It's helping me keep my inbox nice and uncluttered.

So how do you make sure that you have that option?

Let's go up to our settings again, and this time we're gonna select see all settings, and under the very first tab under general, about six or seven down, we have this option send and archive.

So here you can see, we can either show the send an archive button or we can hide the send and archive button.

Now, remember even when this is shown, you're still gonna see that traditional or natural send button.

So you don't always have to archive everything when you're replying, but this can help you save an awful lot of time as well.

All right, let's get into our top two.

And just before I do, I wanna ask you what are some of your best Gmail time saving tips or tricks.

Be sure to share them with me and with others down below in the comments.

Smart Compose Messages in Gmail

Okay, number two. When it comes to time saving, for me, has to do with smart compose.

And what do I mean by this?

I mean, allowing email to help us finish some of our sentences, so that we can just hit the tab key and move on, and hopefully craft and write and reply to our emails that much faster.

So what exactly is smart compose here in Gmail?

Well, Gmail takes a look at what you are writing in the moment, and then we'll offer suggestions to help you complete a sentence or a phrase.

Now, in order to turn this on, what we need to do is come up to settings.

And again, we're gonna select see all settings, and we're gonna scroll about halfway down, and here you can see a few different smart features.

Now, the first one here is smart compose, and we want to turn that on if you want to allow Gmail to give you those suggestions.

Now, of course you don't have to have this on.

You can turn it off.

And in fact, it's probably off by default.

The second option that you may want to pay attention to is smart compose personalization.

And what this has to do is that Gmail starts to learn the way that you write.

There's certain phrases that you use most often, the way you address people, perhaps at the beginning of an email.

And it's going to start to personalize those suggestions as well.

You don't have to have these both on, you can turn personalization off while having smart compose on, and that's still gonna allow you to use that tab feature.

It's also gonna allow you to make it a lot quicker when you're using your mobile devices.

Well, of course you don't have a tab button when you're on your mobile.

All you need to do is swipe to the right when Gmail gives you those suggestions.

Okay, now that leaves us to tip number one,

How to use Gmail Templates

which I think is the number one way to save time with your email, especially when you're replying to common questions, and that has to do with templates.

So here we are.

I'm gonna open up my compose menu here once again.

And I'm just gonna say that, I'm gonna imply that someone is asking me a question that I get all of the time.

Maybe they're inquiring about my services.

Maybe it's the first time they're reaching out.

Maybe it's just a question I get a lot about my videos here on YouTube.

Rather than spending the time to write a personalized email with a lot of information and maybe going and grabbing certain links, all I need to do is create a template.

How do you do so?

Well, if we come down here to the very bottom, you can see our more options here, and you can see that there's an option called templates.

Now here I actually have a few templates that I've already set up.

So this saves me absolutely tons of time each and every week.

Perhaps I'm gonna select this one, which I've labeled learn more about Simpletivity.

And as you can see, everything such as links, such as images, such as bolding and text formatting, it all stays the same.

So you can have a very lengthy and a very specific email for different responses or different replies saved right here within Gmail.

Now, in terms of the name of the template, it's always going to look at the subject line.

So if you are creating a template from scratch, make sure you give it a subject that is descriptive to you.

Now, you don't have to keep it.

And in the event that you are replying to someone else, it will not replace it.

So if you're replying to someone using a template, it's always going to keep the same or the existing reply address.

It will not replace it there.

But this saves me so much time because I don't need to go finding certain links.

I don't need to go and find certain pieces of information.

And remember, I can still edit this.

For example, if I want to add at the very top, I wanna add someone's name and say hi.

"Hi, Dan," for example.

If I wanna personalize the message, maybe it's not a 900-word blog post.

Maybe it's just a 700-word blog post, for example.

I can come in here and customize certain elements.

Now here's a tip for you.

When you are creating your templates within Gmail, before you go and save it, which I'm gonna show you in just a moment, make sure you remove your email signature.

So for example, if I was to save this as a brand new template right now, it is also going to save this email signature, which means when I go to use it in an actual email, I'm gonna see a double signature, right?

It's gonna show this one in addition to the one that is automatically applied to my messages.

So that's just a very helpful tip when you're creating your templates, make sure that you delete the signature before saving.

How do you save it?

Well, once you've got your template, once you've got your message written the way that you want, we come back down here to our more option.

We select templates.

And we say save draft as a template.

Now we can either override one of the ones that we have here existing, or we can say save as a new template and give it a new name.

This is so handy when you are replying to things that you get asked time and time again.

Now, if you're looking for even more ways to get the most out of Gmail and save more time, you may be interested in my filters and labels tutorial.

I'll leave a link to it right down here below.

As always, thank you for watching.

And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

New views update and who can access

(whoosh) - Since the very beginning, Trello has been synonymous with a board view or a Kanban style of managing our projects, until now.

Trello now has introduced five new views, and I'm going to show you everything you need to know, on how to access and how to use these views, as a part of your Trello experience.

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

And this is a very exciting time to be a Trello user because there are some special features that have yet to come, but there are five brand new views that you can access right now.

Map view in Trello

So let's get started. Here in the top left-hand corner of any board, you're going to see a new dropdown.

Now it's going to show or list the view that you are currently looking at, and probably by default, it's going to be the traditional board view.

But if we click this, we can see that we have a number of other options available to us here.

So let's go through them one by one.

The first one here is a Map View.

So if I click on this map view, I have a couple of cards already, that have some location data.

So here you can see, we've got these little blue pushpins.

If I select them, it's going to show me the card, and I happen to have an image on these cards as well, that I can see, a little snapshot view of the data of that card.

If I come back down or if I zoom back out, I can click on this other one, I can see this card, and if I click on it itself, I can open up that card and start to work away at it.

If I close it, I'll be returned back to this Map View.

So, how do we access this Map View?

Now you may be familiar with this because until recently, this view used to be included in a Trello Power-Up.

However, that Power-Up is no more.

The only way that you can access the Map View is now by using this view here.

So let's go back to our traditional Trello board.

I'm going to open up one of these cards that already has location data, and you can see it's even going to give you a small mini map so you can actually view that inside the card.

But if we go and open up another card that does not have location data, you'll see here on the right-hand side just below attachment, there is now a location button.

So if we click on this button, and if we start to type in something here, let's just type in an address of some kind.

It's going to bring up the same type of results that you would expect from Google.

So I'm going to click on this address here.

Now you can see it's been added to this card.

Now you can only have one location per card.

You can't be adding multiple locations.

So this can be a great use in my example, for something like real estate, or suppliers, or client locations, whenever the card is going to represent something to a single location.

Now we can open up that Map View even by clicking on the miniature map here itself.

If I click on that, it's going to immediately bring open that map view.

So I can start to look at its surrounding areas as well.

And I can even add a card from this view as well, but if we go back here, if I need to change it, all I need to do is either select the button again and I can start to type in a new address, or if I come down to this mini view I can select the more option and select change location or I can remove it if I want to as well.

So as mentioned, although this is not an entirely brand new view moving from a Power-Up to this dropdown, now you don't have to enable or waste a Power-Up or manage something additional.

You always have that location feature available to you.

Timeline view in Trello

Let's go to the next one, which is really exciting.

And that is our Timeline View.

This is sort of a simplified Gantt chart view right here within Trello, and I think this is maybe the most exciting view of everything that's been introduced here.

So here we can see I've got a view of some of my tasks on this board, and although some of them may have a singular due date in terms of they're only encompassed on a single day, you can see that I've got other cards, that surpass a few days or maybe even a few weeks.

Something that you may have noticed in the last few months is that Trello has now incorporated a start date into your cards.

We've moved away from just having a due date, we now have a start date as well.

So here we can see the two different drop-downs, here's the start date, and here's the due date.

And if I go and start to add a brand new card, or open up a card that doesn't have a due date, I'm going to click on that due date option.

Here you can see there is a start date checkbox, so you don't have to initiate this.

You don't have to have a separate start date.

You can stay with just the due date.

And if I check this box, now I can pick a start date and an end date.

So here you can see that this particular card is scheduled to start on the 9th, and then finish on the 25th.

I can hit save.

And now I have both of those dates listed here.

If we go back and select our Timeline View, now you can see that crazy idea is now included in this view.

Now, as you saw me do already, I can click on any one of these and open up that card, I can make edits and changes here, and then close that and come back to this view.

But with any type of helpful Gantt chart view, maybe the most important feature here, is that you can shrink or expand these dates by clicking and dragging.

So if I need to move this and say, I can't start this until Thursday, I'm going to drag it there.

Now it should be noted that that does not affect the end date.

It does not give us the capability to click and drag and move the entire project.

So let's say if you have something that spans seven days that you just shift those seven days over, you do have to at least from this view, move it manually both the start and the end date, to your desired location.

However, in one of the other additional views, I'm going to show you how you can do this in a workaround type of method.

So this can be really helpful seeing our cards in this project view, but we can also see it in a few different ways.

Over here we have a drop down that allows us to break it down by member.

So here you can see on the left-hand side now I'm viewing these different cards and these different tasks by the members assigned.

The default here is list.

So you have the list on the left-hand side, but we can choose to view that by member and see if there's any overlap here.

We can choose a label view, if we want to see the different labels on the left-hand side, or we can choose none, which will have nothing listed here on the far left-hand side.

Calendar view in Trello

All right, let's keep going and look at a new Calendar View.

So yes, this is actually a little bit different than the Calendar Power-Up.

First things first, you can see that we can witness both the start and the due date at the same time.

So no longer, is everything just listed on a single day.

If I go back to the traditional Calendar Power-Up, you can see that nothing spans across those dates.

It is only showing things on the due date.

So that's one of the nice things of this Calendar View.

It's showing us both the beginning, the start date, and when that task is due.

Now here's that workaround that I wanted to show you, coming from the Timeline View, which does not yet allow you to drag things across.

Let's say, I'm looking at this another sub task card here.

And I want to start it on Monday.

But I want to drag the entire project back.

All I need to do is click and drag it.

I can drag it to the 15th, and you will notice that the end date moves with it.

Let's do that again, just so you can see the difference.

We're starting on the 15th, and we're ending on the 24th.

But if I want to bump this up a week, I'm going to bump it up here, you can see now that that end date is now the 17th.

The entire project moved with it.

So you might want to use the Calendar View in conjunction with the Timeline View depending on how you're managing your cards.

Again, we can click on any one of these, go into the card, and then come back directly to the Calendar View.

Now, the one thing that you should note is that unlike the traditional Calendar Power-Up, you cannot scroll forever.

Here you can see I'm looking at the month of February, and I can't scroll beyond, before the month of February or beyond the first week of March in this particular case.

I do need to use this arrow to go to another area here.

And depending on where you're wanting to drag those new calendar events, that may be a limitation.

I would imagine that Trello is going to address that.

Dashboard view in Trello

in an upcoming releas. Let's continue on with our different views here.

And this is something that Trello users have been asking for for a very long time.

And that is a Dashboard View.

You've got so many cards, you've got so much data staring back at you, give us a valuable summary, so we can see what's going on.

What we've seen right here is the Default View, what you're first going to see when opening up the dashboard, but the good news is that we can edit all of this information.

So just a couple of examples here.

We've got cards per lists.

So we can see that we're sort of evenly broken down here in this particular case in terms of how many cards are in that list.

Here, we have cards per due date.

And I think this is quite interesting, right?

To narrow throw in and zero in what is overdue, what's complete, and what is coming up, or maybe when we want to address those things that have no due date at all.

Now, one of the disappointing things to note is that we can't actually click on any of these data sets.

So for example, if I just want to see a summary of all of those cards that don't have a due date, I can't actually click on it, it is only a visual.

A couple of other examples that they include by default are cards by members and cards per label.

But you'll notice in the top right-hand corner, of each of these charts, we have an edit or delete option.

So I can come in here and I can select edit, and I can say, I would rather look at this as a pie chart, and yes, I want to keep it as cards per member.

So I'm going to say edit tile.

Now I've got the same information, but I've got it displayed in a way which is maybe just a little more convenient for me.

If I don't want this to be shown on my dashboard, I can just choose delete.

Now down below, you'll see there's always going to be a plus option, so you can start from scratch.

Maybe I want a line chart, and this time I want to see the timeframe from the past two weeks.

So I'm going to say add tile, it's going to take just a moment here, and here you can see a bit of a breakdown of what has been going on on my board.

Now, another caveat is that you can not click and drag these data sets to a different area.

So if I want something like this, to appear in my top corner here, I would actually have to delete everything above it, and then recreate them down below.

Again, something that I imagine Trello will add in as a future feature set.

But this can be great if there's maybe two or three pieces of information, that you or your team wants to see immediately, you can create your own customized dashboard, and get that glance of what's going on in your Trello boards.

Team Table view in Trello

Now last but not least, we've maybe saved the most powerful view, of how we can not only see things on this particular Trello board, but on multiple Trello boards.

And that is the Team Table.

Now, when you choose Team Table, it's actually going to open up a new tab within your browser.

You can actually see here I'm within my business class account, and you can see the other tabs that you may be familiar with here.

Now, there is a note at the top here that this is still in a Beta version.

In fact, this is something that's been available to business class users for several months, even starting back in 2020.

But let me show you how you can get the most out of this Table View.

So in this case, because I launched it from this particular board, I'm only seeing the cards from that board.

But already this can be a very helpful step.

Here I can actually change what list a card is in if I want to do so from here.

And I can do that with the other columns as well.

Maybe I want to add or remove another label, I can do that here, I can change or add members right here from this screen.

So I've got a lot of great information, and I can make these updates.

I can even check things off if I need to complete a certain card as well.

It also makes it very helpful here in the top right-hand corner, we have a few quick filters.

So if I click on this option, I can just narrow down and look at the cards that are only assigned to me, for example, or maybe I only want to see things that are due in the next week.

So it's going to narrow things down and give us this great filtering capability.

However, its real strength is that we can add multiple boards.

So let me go back to all cards here for just a second.

And I'm going to add some additional boards to view here.

So if I select this add boards option, I'm going to choose this Best Trello Power-Ups board, and let me select just another board here as a demonstration.

So now you can see we've got a lot more cards, we've got a snapshot of some of the different colors of those boards here, but now I can use some of the same quick filters, or I can sort from the top if I want to here, I can sort that information.

And pull in that information from multiple places.

So if I say, you know what is assigned to me, for example, it's going to bring it in from multiple boards.

Now, once you've got the view that you like, let's say you filtered it a specific way and you've added the three or four boards that you want to see in this view, what you need to do is select this bookmark option.

So by selecting this, Trello is going to give you a unique link, which you can copy to your clipboard.

And now, you can either add it as a bookmark within your browser if you need to get back to this quickly, or you can share it with others, you can share it via email, for example, with other members of your team.

What's important to note, and they stress it right here in their language, is that people with this link will only see boards they have permissions for.

So you don't have to worry if you've added multiple boards that maybe some of the people that you're sharing this link with don't have access to.

Don't worry, they're not going to be able to see that information down here.

It's going to filter those ones out.

It's going to keep those things safe or keep them private.

So you can have your own customized view of information across multiple boards, and see them in a variety of different ways.