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No matter if you're a new user to Trello or perhaps you're an expert when it comes to boards, lists, and cards, today I wanna share with you some of the very best keyboard shortcuts so that you can do things quicker when dealing with Trello. Hello, everyone.

Scott Friesen

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

If you're not familiar with Trello keyboard shortcuts, well, you are not only missing out,

but you're probably wasting a lot of time when you're dealing with your Trello boards.

Now just before we get into eight of my favorite Trello keyboard shortcuts, I wanna start off with the shortcut question mark. If you hit the question mark key,

Shortcuts Menu

Which is usually Shift + Question Mark on your keyboard,

what you're going to get is the complete list of keyboard shortcuts,

this is the official Trello list,

so that whenever you are within Trello,

you can get everything that I'm talking about here along with some additional ones as well.

So, just hit the Question Mark on your keyboard.

With that being said, let's start off with one that I use all the time.

That has to do with assigning myself to a card or perhaps removing myself from a card.

Now it can sometimes be tedious to hit this little edit icon and then go down to change members and then uncheck myself here and then I gotta hit save.

I mean, that's one way of doing it.

I could open up the card and do something similar by selecting this members version over here.

Well, why don't I do it just from here?

Why don't I do it in just single click?

Well, if you select the Space Bar, you can assign yourself.

Add/Remove You

To any card.

Look at that.

In just a single click, I'm assigning myself to these cards.

If I wanna remove myself, well, that's just a Space Bar click away as well.

I mean, how often have you had several cards assigned to you?

And you say to yourself, I no longer need to be assigned to that anymore.

Boom, boom, boom.

It's as simple as just the Space Bar on your keyboard.

Let's stick with assigning members and assigning things to maybe other people on our team.

For that, we wanna use the keyboard shortcut key A,

A as in assign.

Assign Members

So, if I hover over a card here and select A on my keyboard,

it's gonna automatically pop up the assignment dialog.

So, I'm gonna select someone else.

I can go over to this card here.

I'm gonna select A, and I'm gonna select someone else as well.

Now I've assigned people to this card.

Now there's one other thing I wanna show you here.

I'm gonna actually open up this card as an example.

This goes for almost all of the shortcuts in today's video

is that you don't always have to be at the board level view.

But when you're opening up this card,

even if you're looking at other things such as the activity down below,

if I hit A on my keyboard, it will still bring up the member assignment here.

If I hit Space Bar for example,

it's still gonna remove me.

And if I hit it again, it's going to add me.

So, you don't have to use these members and labels buttons here if you don't want to.

Almost all of these shortcut keys can be used within the card but also here at the board level view.

One last shortcut key I wanna share with you when it comes to assigning people or unassigning people

and that has to do with you want to filter out the cards that are only assigned to you.

You may be familiar by going to the menu, going to the search cards feature,

and then selecting yourself to see which of these cards are assigned to you.

But there's a much, much simpler way.

If you select Q on your keyboard,

Filter Cards Assigned to You

Q is going to quickly filter all of the cards on your board.

Here we can see there are four cards that are assigned to me.

I can toggle that back and forth as much as I like.

Here, when I select Q, I can just focus on these cards.

I can maybe work on these for the next 20 or 30 minutes or however long I'd like to work on these tasks.

If I hit Q again, now I go back to seeing every other card on the board,

so a very valuable one, the Q to filter cards assigned to you.

Well, let's move away from assignment of cards and let's take a look at labels.

I got a few different label shortcuts I wanna show you here.

Now I often get the question about Scott, how do you see the label names here.

Scott, I've seen some of your videos.

How do you actually show the label names?

You may know that, by default, we just get to see the colors on the front of the card.

If I open up this card, I can see the full name.

New project is green, and orange is client request.

But sometimes it can be very helpful to see the name right here on the board level view.

Well, if you select the Semicolon key on your keyboard, all of your labels will be expanded.

Now I can see that, new project, client request.

Yellow is medium.

Blue means HR.

If I hit Semicolon again, it will collapse everything there for me as well.

Now one thing to note is that this view does not change how other people see this board.

So, if you have other members of your team, just because you're viewing it with these expanded labels, it doesn't mean that everyone else is going to be seeing that.

So, you might wanna pass this tip along to the people that you're collaborating with or the people that you're working with within Trello.

All right.

I'm gonna hit that one more time just to collapse that label.

Let's get to label assignment.

Well, label starts with the letter L.

So, I'm gonna guess something's gonna happen when I hit L on my keyboard.

I'm gonna hover over this card, hit L, and boom,

Assign Label Menu

I've got the label assignment right here.

I'm gonna put client request on this one.

I'm gonna maybe go over here to Idea One.

I'm gonna hit L again.

I'm gonna say that this one is urgent.

Quick and easy.

Well, let's take it one step further.

You'll notice if I hit L and we bring up this menu here,

this is the default colors that when you start a new board in Trello,

you're gonna see this default order of colors,

green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and blue.

Well, I want you to remember that order because these colors correspond to the number keys on your keyboard.

One is green, two is yellow, and so on.

So, if I wanna attach the green label here, all I have to do is hit the number one.

If I wanna attach the yellow label, it's number two, and so forth.

Let's go to a blank card.

Let's go to this one over here.

Let's just go one through six.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

I'm only hitting the number keys on my keyboard.

Six, five, four, three, two, one.

You may not need to or not want to memorize all of the labels that you're using,

but particularly for those that you use frequently or that you use quite often,

that might come in handy if you are needing to change those labels on a regular basis.

All right.

The next one on our list has to do with due dates.

Due dates are so important within Trello to help us stay on task.

Due dates, that's two D words.

So, I'm gonna guess the letter D is gonna bring up my calendar.

Change Due Date Menu

Here I can change my due date or remove the due date if so necessary.

Once again, if I'm here within the card, no matter where I am looking in the card, if I hit D, I can still get that menu.

You don't have to use these buttons here on the right.

And the very last keyboard shortcut I wanna share with you today has to do with adding new cards within Trello.

A lot of you may not be familiar with this one.

You're obviously familiar with the add another card, which is at the bottom of each and every list,

but you don't even have to click that.

No matter where your cursor is, let's say I wanna add something here within progress,

as long as my cursor is below in progress,

all I need to do is select N on my keyboard.

Add New Card

And boom,

I'm gonna have a new card waiting for me to enter.

I wanna add a new card over here.

My cursor is below it.

I'm gonna hit N.

I'm gonna add a new card.

But let's go one final step further.

Maybe I don't want to add that new card at the bottom of the list.

Maybe I want it as the second from the top.

Well, if I hover over this card here and select N,

I'm gonna get that new card directly below.

Maybe I need to add something in-between these two July 12 due dates.

I'm gonna hover over this one.

I'm gonna select N.

Now my new card is ready to be entered directly below that card there,

so another tip for adding new cards here within Trello.

Well, I would love to hear from you.

Of all of the keyboard shortcuts that I showed you,

which one is your favorite, or which one are you going to start using right away?

Make sure to tell me and share with others in the comments down below.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

When you're starting a brand new project,

one of the best things you can do is brainstorm,

whether that's just by yourself or maybe with other members of your team.

And one of the best tools to use is a mind mapping tool.

Now, there's an awful lot of mind mapping apps and software available to you.

In today's video, I'm gonna share with you three simple tools that you can start using immediately.

Coggle

Hello everyone,

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

And let's get this list started off with a tool called Coggle.

Coggle, that's C-O-G-G-L-E.

Now, one of the things that you're gonna notice immediately is that Coggle is pretty bare-bones.

But sometimes that's a great advantage when you're brainstorming and thinking up new ideas.

I mean, really, a mind mapping tool should really represent like a whiteboard or a blank piece of paper.

So, Coggle is very minimal in that respect.

The other thing that I really enjoy about Coggle which you don't always get with a number of mind mapping tools is that it's actually quite nice to look at.

I actually haven't even chosen these colors that you see here.

This is something that Coggle has chosen as I've started to branch out my ideas.

And aesthetically, I think that looks really, really great, which can be important if you're gonna be working with this tool on a regular basis.

If I add something else here, it's added a nice, attractive sort of a reddish-pink hue here as well.

But another feature that I like about Coggle is that not only can you collaborate with others,

you can share this so that other people can join and start to brainstorm as well,

but you can have a full conversation.

So it does have a discussion window here.

Here you can see I'm already asking some questions.

You know, what do other people think about the t-shirt ideas, and so forth.

This, I think, is a great feature for any mind mapping tool.

Mind Meister

Now, moving on,

the second tool I wanna share with you is called MindMeister.

Now, MindMeister is also, you know, relatively simple to drag and drop and add things around.

If I wanna add some more ideas here to "Book,"

all I need to do is hit tab on my keyboard.

And maybe I'm going to consider writing a self-help book.

Maybe I'm going to consider writing a cookbook.

Who knows, and if I wanna highlight some of these things,

MindMeister gives me a lot of options here as well.

If I want to add little icons,

if I want to change the color,

or the appearance,

or the size of some of my branches,

very easy to do.

In fact, one thing that I found very, very simple with MindMeister is that if I've grouped something in a different branch,

but then I want to either merge it or bring it somewhere else,

so here, for example, I've got "Poster,"

I've got something labeled "Bumper."

Well, I think I meant that for the "Stickers" branch over here.

All I have to do is click on "Bumper,"

and I'm going to touch it to "Stickers,"

and now it's brought "Bumper,"

along with the things that have proceeded it here with "Small" and "Large" over on this side of the mind map.

So, you know, very intuitive,

very easy to use,

things that are very, very important when you're selecting a mind mapping tool for yourself.

Drawio

Now, the third and final one on our list today is called draw.io.

And one of the things about draw.io is you don't even need an account to start using it. All you need is to go to the website, and you can immediately start creating a flowchart.

And you can save it either to your cloud storage, or you can save it to the computer that you're currently working on.

Now, I know draw.io may look a little more intimidating compared to the previous two tools that I just showed you, but don't let this screen look too intimidating. It's actually a lot easier than you think.

You know, here, if I want to add something new to this branch, all I need to do is click on that arrow, and now I can start adding a new idea over here.

Very much the same or similar functionality that we saw in the previous two tools.

Now, The nice thing about draw.io is that it's really optimized if you're wanting to create a flowchart, for example.

So, we've got some of the more common shapes here that you may be familiar with if you're in need of using flowcharts.

It does have a few more advanced features.

And another nice thing is that draw.io is really optimized if you decide to print out your mind map.

Or at the very least you may want to save it as a PDF.

So, that can be very helpful if you choose a particular paper size here, and if you want to share your mind map in that fashion.

So there you have it, three recommendations for some very simple yet powerful mind mapping tools.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next. What are some mind mapping tools that you have used or that you would recommend to others?

Be sure to share your thoughts 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.

Time blocking can be a very effective way to manage all of the things that you have to do in a given week and it can also give you the added benefit to make sure that you have a balanced week between your work life, your personal life, and other things that you're responsible for.

So in today's video, I'm gonna show you exactly how to effectively time block within Google Calendar.

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

And let's get started off with just a quick definition of what is time blocking.

Well, essentially, time blocking is all about putting things that are not appointments or meetings onto your calendar.

Your calendar probably already looks a little bit like what I've got here in my example.

I've got a variety of meetings. I've got interviews. I've got things that I actually physically have to be a part of or maybe a phone call that I need to participate in, but sometimes it can be very effective to put in tasks as a part of our calendar as well.

Let's say that there is a report that I've just been deferring all week long. I've just never found time to write this particular report.

Well, if I need to get it done before the weekend, a very effective thing to do would be for me to come in here, create an event and just say write the report.

I wanna block it out. I wanna make sure that I don't have any other meeting, anything else that conflicts with this time so I can get this task done.

However, you can see that this task looks very much the same as to all of my other appointments, all of my other meetings on this calendar.

Now I could go in here, I could edit it, and I could change the color if I wanted to.

I can make it green for example so it's gonna stand out a little bit here.

But we are using Google Calendar so there is a much more effective way to do time blocking within Google Calendar.

So let me delete this example here and the very first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over here to my calendars and I'm gonna create a few different calendars for the different types of tasks, the different aspects of my life.

Now you'll see here the very first one is my default calendar. It's called Scott's calendar.

This is the one where people are using my primary email address.

They're inviting me to meetings and appointments and I'm doing the same.

All of these things here are part of my default calendar.

And the next two below I've unchecked, these are reminders and tasks which are built right into Google Calendar, but I'm not gonna make use of them as a part of today's example.

What I wanna do is I wanna create a few additional calendars.

So I'm gonna go down to other calendars and I'm gonna hit the plus button and I'm gonna say create new calendar.

Now the first one I'm gonna select or create is gonna be called work.

This is where I'm gonna be putting work tasks. Not work meetings, but work tasks.

I'm gonna hit create calendar and the nice thing is it is actually gonna keep us in this menu.

I'm gonna add a few additional calendars here all at the same time.

I'm gonna add a personal calendar for some personal activities.

I'm also going to add a, sometimes it takes a second, I'm gonna add an exercise calendar, making sure that I fit in enough exercise as a part of my week.

I'm gonna add one more in my example. This one I'm gonna call travel and you'll see I'm not gonna use it for things like my commute, but I'm gonna use it for things that maybe I don't usually travel at a certain time of day or a certain distance and I'm gonna put that in.

So now under my calendars, you can see that I have them listed here.

Now Google Calendar has chosen a bunch of very similar colors here so I'm gonna go in and change this.

I'm gonna change travel to maybe more of a blue color, work I'm gonna change to let's use like a green color.

It's nice to have some different shades in here. There we go.

It's gonna be a bit easier to see the differences between my calendars here.

So let's go back to that first example where I need to write a report.

Again, I'm gonna do it here between 9:00 and 11:00 so I'm just gonna click and I'm gonna drag and when I release, the first thing I'm gonna do even before I add the title, I guess it doesn't matter which order you do this in, I have the tendency to come down here.

I'm gonna select the activity first.

This is a work activity so I'm gonna say work and I'm gonna say write the report just like we did before and I'm gonna hit save.

Now not only do I have the different color, but it's actually a different calendar.

Let's have a few more examples just for fun here.

Maybe let's say the first thing I need team meetings may be the first thing on Monday, but I got a lot of email that's gonna be coming at me on Monday morning so I'm gonna say process email.

I wanna get through all of that email first thing Monday morning.

So that's another work activity. I'm gonna hit save there and maybe let's add one more thing.

Maybe I'm gonna review. I'm interviewing a candidate on Wednesday so I'm gonna say over here on Tuesday afternoon I'm gonna say review job applicant, their application there.

And again, that's gonna be a work activity and I'm gonna hit save.

So right away I can tell just at a glance that these three items are different.

I don't have to physically be somewhere.

I don't have to call in to a conference call.

These are work-related tasks and they show up very differently than my other appointments here.

Let's try and fit in a few other things as a part of our day.

Exercise is very important and I like to go for a run on a regular basis so let's put in some exercise here for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I'm gonna come up here. I'm gonna start again. I'm gonna say go for a run.

This time of course I'm gonna change it to exercise and I'm gonna make this one recurring.

Actually, it's not a full hour. It's just a half-hour run.

I'm gonna go into more options and I'm gonna go down to my repeat option here.

Instead of does not repeat, I'm gonna say, it's none of these so I'm gonna say custom.

I'm gonna say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and I'm gonna say done.

I'm gonna hit save and now you can see, this is gonna go on beyond just this week Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

And let's say on Thursdays I get together with some friends and in the late afternoon we play some pickup basketball so I'm gonna put that one in here on Thursday afternoon.

I'm gonna pick exercise so I can see that it stands out.

Again, the nice thing is that I can get this overview of not only when these things are happening, but am I fitting in enough exercise as a part of my weekly routine.

All right, obviously, there's gonna be some personal activities and maybe I've got a lunch scheduled with a friend on Tuesday.

So I'm gonna come in here, I'm gonna say lunch with Jane and we're gonna change that to personal.

It's not work related or at least not directly related to my work so I'm gonna put that as a personal activity here.

And then maybe on Wednesday night I've got dinner with friends.

So I'm gonna put that one in here, again choose the correct calendar and hit save.

So I've got a few personal things that stand out as a part of it as well.

And the only other calendar that we haven't used in our example is travel.

In this case, I'll usually use something like this not for my everyday commute.

Not for the things that I'm doing on a regular basis.

But let's say I've got this community breakfast.

This is an early breakfast and I need to travel downtown to attend.

So this is different than my other days.

So what I'm gonna do here is at 6:00 a.m., I'm gonna say leave for downtown and I'm gonna put that to my travel calendar.

So I want it to stand out a little bit more here.

I wanna make sure that I fit that in, that oh yeah I gotta get there by a certain time.

Sometimes another way that I'll use a travel calendar is that if I'm leaving for like the airport for example.

I know when I need to be at the airport. I know when my flight is leaving, but sometimes we don't calculate how much time we need to give ourself to actually get to the airport.

So maybe I'm leaving for the airport on Friday afternoon.

I need to be at the airport at 4:00 so that means I need to leave my house at about 3:00.

So here I'm gonna say leave for airport and again we're gonna choose that travel calendar.

So again, I've got that built in. I know when I should be jumping into my car and leaving for the airport.

So it does look like a bit of a kaleidoscope, a bit of a rainbow I guess you could say here of different activities here, but the other nice thing about Google Calendar in separating out your activities by different areas in your life is that you can of course hide and minimize and just focus in on certain activities.

So let's say I just want to hide my work activity.

I'm gonna hide my work calendar and my work tasks.

I can take a look and say okay, I'm gonna get my exercise in this week.

Here's when I need to pay special attention of leaving.

I've got lunch with Jane and dinner with friends.

That's nice. Maybe there's something else I should fit in there just for me or maybe there's something else I should reach out to a friend.

This is where sort of that balance comes into play as you can zero in on different activities.

Let me enable some of these other calendars again and I wanna show you one more tip which you may think is just for fun but I actually think it can be very effective.

Of course, the colors help things to stand out from other calendars and other events in your time blocking calendar, but there's one other way that I sometimes add, an additional way to make things stand out and that is by adding emojis.

And no, I'm not kidding.

I use a website called Emojipedia on a regular basis.

And you can just search for emojis as you want.

So in this example, I'm gonna go grab this man running emoji.

I'm gonna select copy which just copies it to my clipboard and I'm gonna go back up to this recurring run event and I'm gonna hit edit and at the very beginning of it, you can do it at the end as well, but I'm gonna paste it in there.

I'm gonna hit save. I want it to be applied to all of my events.

And so now, it may be a little hard to see with that purple background.

I can always change that color of course.

I've got this little sort of running man out in front which again sometimes just makes it stand out that much more than everything else on this screen.

So I hope you found this video helpful as you consider time blocking within Google Calendar.

I would love to hear from you next.

Do you have additional suggestions as to how to time block within your calendar?

Or do you have further questions about how to effectively time block within Google Calendar?

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

And remember being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Here on the Simpletivity channel, I talk an awful lot about to-do lists and it's very true that a to-do list is a type of checklist.

As you're going through your day, you're checking things off or striking things through.

But today I wanna talk about recurring checklists.

These are checklists that you can use on a recurring basis and are gonna help you so you don't have to remember certain things as a part of your day.

Welcome

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

And I wanna give an extra big thanks to Rob Joseph for today's video.

Rob gave me the suggestion for focusing in on checklists opposed to just to-do lists.

Checklists we can use on a recurring basis.

Travel Packing List

So let me start off with an example of a checklist that I use on a regular basis, and that is my travel packing list.

Here you can see I've got a variety of things, a lot of them are clothes, but it also includes some things like my passport, my earbuds, and maybe both my dress shoes and my sneakers.

Now here's the thing, I actually travel quite frequently and, as a result, you know, I pretty much know this list very, very well. Most of the time I probably don't even need to refer to this list.

And you probably have other activities in your life in which you've done them so often you think to yourself, "I don't even need this checklist."

Well, I might argue that's precisely the time when you need the checklist because when we start to feel a little confident, that's exactly when we forget the tie and oh no there's gonna be a formal function at this destination.

Or oh no, I forgot my sneakers and I do want to go for a run.

That is the great power in using checklists. You don't have to store this information in your head at all. You can just refer to the checklist when you're doing certain activities.

End of Work Day Checklist

So let's take a look at a few other examples that I have here.

The checklist that I have here is called an end of work day checklist and this can be great if you want to end your day on a positive note and maybe make sure that you don't forget anything or that you've crossed off a few things on a regular basis.

So I've got a few examples here including reviewing my inbox to make sure that there's nothing urgent that I can safely ignore my inbox or ignore email for several hours. Maybe I want to check to make sure that there's no remaining voicemail on my phone. Perhaps you've got an activity, something that you need to send to someone else or something that you need to update on a regular basis. So in my example I've got send new leads to Sales Manager. And then reviewing my schedule for tomorrow and reviewing my to-do list as well.

The other nice thing about using a checklist like this is that we don't skip over anything or we don't rush the process. If you know when you created the checklist or when I created this checklist that these are good things. These are things that I really should be doing in the last 10 minutes of my day. It's great to be able to run through them and just check them off as I go.

Now, in today's example I'm using Google Keep to show you these checklists but of course you can use a checklist in almost any other tool. Whether you use Keep or Trello or Evernote or Todoist, hopefully your project management tool or your to-do list app has the capability to have a checklist.

And the other nice thing in most of the apps and technology that we use, here you can see I've crossed everything off of my end of workday checklist, what I can do is I can actually go down here and just say uncheck all items so when I'm finished I can say uncheck uncheck all items and now I'm ready for tomorrow. Now I'm ready to use this checklist again in the future.

Let me show you two other quick ones here.

Weekly Review Checklist

I've got a weekly review checklist.

Especially if there's something that you don't do daily. Maybe this is something I only do once a week, maybe you've got a monthly review or a quarterly review.

You can put it all here within a checklist. Make sure that you don't forget any of those steps.

And keep in mind these are living, breathing documents or checklists. These are things where you know I might add a few things over time and I might remove, or revise, or adjust a few things over time as well.

Morning Routine Checklist

The last checklist I wanted to show you here is entitled "Morning Routine" and hopefully you've got some kind of routine, and well we all have some kind of routine but hopefully you've got a productive and a positive routine built into your day.

So how are you gonna start your day so you can set yourself up for success? And you know over time I might adjust things here. Maybe I want to review my schedule for the day after I come back from my run or after I have my breakfast, or something along those lines.

Maybe over time I realized you know what, I don't want to do this at that time, I don't want to do it at all. That's fine, I can remove it from this checklist.

I think this is especially important when you are starting a new routine or you're starting a weekly review or whatever it is to have some type of checklist so you can save your mental energy for more important tasks and for more important activities.

Conclusion

So I hope I've given you a few ideas of how you can use checklists in your day.

If you're already using a checklist, I'd love to hear from you and I would invite you to share it with us in the comments down below.

I know there's gonna be many others who are going to be excited to see some of your checklist ideas and how they help you to stay productive.

And if not, hopefully I've given you some new ideas on how you can include checklists in as a part of your day.

Thank you so much for watching. 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.

Oh my goodness. Have you ever sat down with your to-do list and felt overwhelmed with the large number of tasks that you have scheduled for today?

And, in many cases, it's a result of you deferring tasks from previous days. In the example that I have here, it's a Monday morning, and I've got way too many to-dos than I'm going to be able to accomplish today, especially when I look down at my calendar and see the number of meetings.

So what am I going to do to prioritize this list, and make sure that I don't have this problem, or at least reduce this problem, for the remainder of the week? Well, that's what I'm gonna show you in today's video.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today, I want to show you both a simple but a fun way to prioritize your list so you can focus on what's most important to you.

So, whether you manage your to-do list on a piece of paper, whether you use a calendar like I'm showing here, or maybe you use some other to-do list app, you've probably found yourself in this situation.

Now, I could go ahead and maybe defer half of these things to tomorrow, but I've probably already got a number of tasks waiting for me tomorrow. That's one of the reasons why I prefer a week-view of my tasks. So I'm just gonna change that here within my calendar so I can see the rest of the week.

And sure thing, I've got four other tasks already scheduled for tomorrow, so if I just go and defer half of these tasks, I'm only gonna have the same problem again tomorrow.

So today, we're gonna use a bit of gamification. Yeah, we're gonna have a little bit of fun as we prioritize this list. And step one is by picking a hard number. What do I mean by a hard number? Well, in this case, I'm gonna pick the number five, and I'm only going to commit to accomplishing five of the tasks that are already slated here for my Monday.

Now, the reason for doing so is that I want to force myself to ask some hard questions. What is most important? What is most valuable to me? What should I really be focusing on so I can defer the other things in my list?

I need to remind myself, and you may need to remind yourself, that there are no two things which are exactly equal on your to-do list. Something is always going to be more important than something else. So, in this case, we're gonna pick the number five.

Now, you might wanna pick the number three, or maybe pick the number seven. I would recommend not going any higher than perhaps seven tasks, 'cause the other part of this system is that you want to have the positive effects of saying, "You know what? It's only five," or, "It's only seven things that I need to focus on today."

You wanna have that positivity to give yourself the motivation to accomplish all the things in your tasks. So, I'm gonna commit to doing five, and I'm gonna defer the remaining four on this list somewhere else this week.

But here comes the second step of the process. Instead of just deferring them all to tomorrow, or just sort of blindly deferring them, I'm gonna add another step to this method, another step to this gamification, and in that, I'm only gonna commit to deferring something to one of the following days.

So that's right, I've got four tasks which I need to defer. If I defer something to, let's say the 7th, well then the 7th is taken. I can't defer anything else on this list. I'm gonna have to pick one of the other days this week. What that's gonna do, is that's gonna help me continue to ask the hard questions about priority. What should come before something else? Or what's more important than something else?

But it's also gonna disperse this out a little bit so I don't have this same problem of having 10 or 15 or 20 things show up on a particular day. So, let's get going. I'm gonna get started, and I'm gonna start looking at the things that are, perhaps, the least important, right? The things that I can defer.

So, updating my LinkedIn profile, not that important. I'd like to do it, but it's certainly not urgent. I'm gonna take that one, and I'm gonna put it on Friday the 9th. So remember, the 9th is now taken. I can't defer anything else to the 9th, 'cause I don't wanna heavy-load my Friday or heavy-load a particular day. I might wanna just jot it down on a piece of paper if I need to remember, but it's pretty simple as a part of today's example.

All right, let's look at what else we've got on this list that I don't really need to do today. Pick up my new phone case? Certainly not something that I need to do today. And you know what? Since I have my calendar open, I notice that I'm having lunch with Julie. That's right next door to the store, right next door to the store where I'm picking up my case. So I'm gonna move that one to Thursday, okay? I can pick that up when I'm out of the office.

So 8th and 9th are taken. Now I'm gonna focus on the 6th and the 7th. Well, creating the monthly email newsletter is something I need to do this week, but I certainly don't need to do it today. I'm gonna move that one out to the 6th.

And that means I've got one more spot here on the 7th. What don't I need to do today? Something that I could push off. You know what? Review all of my social media comments. Certainly don't need to do, that's not urgent. So I'm gonna push that one out to the 7th.

Now I've got five things. I've got five things that are much more important than the things that I've deferred. I've got the positivity, I've got the motivation, to knock off these five things even if I'm having a rough morning. You know, I've got all these meetings. I can say to myself, "You know, it's only five. It's only five, Scott, that I need to accomplish today."

And here's the additional benefit. If I get to, let's say the mid-afternoon, or even the later part of my day, and I have accomplished all five things on my list, there is something so gratifying to look ahead and start to knock off things that I didn't even plan to get done today, things that are now scheduled for tomorrow. There's something very gratifying, very satisfying, of taking things off of this list, can make you feel even more productive, and also leave work or leave your office with a smile on your face.

So, if you're confronted with an overly long to-do list on a particular day, try a method of picking a hard number such as five, focusing just on five, and then deferring the remainder of your tasks, and using the limit of only one day for the following days ahead so that you can disperse your tasks along here.

And already you can see that the rest of my week is a lot more manageable as a result. Of course, other things are gonna be added to this week, but it's a lot more manageable as I manage those tasks going forward.

Thank you so much for watching today's video, and I would love to hear your comments and your questions on this fun and productive method. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

How do you decide which project you should be working on next, especially when you've got so many great ideas bouncing around in your head?

Well, in today's video, I want to show you a very simple tool to help you make the best choice. But first, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, Hygger.

Hygger is the project management tool which allows you to manage all of your tasks in any way, and in any view that you like. But what really sets apart Hygger from other software tools is its ability to prioritize. Do you want to view all of your tasks on a value versus effort matrix? Or perhaps you prefer the Eisenhower matrix and view all of your tasks from an urgent versus an importance category?

If you'd like to try Hygger for yourself, be sure to click the link in the description below.

So let's get some help on deciding which project we should start next. A number of years ago I read a book called "The $100 Startup." And near the very back of the book it included a Decision Making Matrix.

I decided to create my own matrix in a digital format so I could repurpose it, and I could also have it sum up some of the math and some of the numbers automatically.

Decision Matrix

So, how does the Decision Making Matrix work? Well, here on the left-hand side we have a number of different ideas, and these represent projects that I'm seriously considering undertaking in the coming year.

Now, it's best when using such a matrix to have probably a minimum of three different projects to evaluate, and probably not a lot more than maybe five or six. You don't want a huge list here; hopefully, you've already narrowed it down to maybe roughly four or five.

So I've got things like updating my website, building a new product, hiring more staff, buying a new customer relationship management system, and also writing a book.

And then in the next four columns, we have the different criteria in which we are going to be evaluating these projects. So first, we have impact. So how much of an impact will this project make on my business or my customers? And I have a nice little key here down below which gives you a description of each of these four criteria.

By the way, if you would like to use the Decision Making Matrix and use this for yourself, be sure to click the link in the description below, where you can have access to this exact sheet.

Now the second one has to do with effort, in terms of how much work and time is it going to take me to complete this project? And of course, we want to look at it from a scale of one to five in terms of what's going to cause a ton of work; we're going to give that a score of one all the way to five, which is going to cause very little work, almost no work. And as you can see here in the key down below, everything is going to get a value between one and five.

So let's continue on with profitability. Of course, that's important for any business or organization. Relative to the other ideas, how much money will this project bring in? So I'm going to start inputting my values, but just before I do, I want to give you one other handy tip that I typically use when I'm engaged with the Decision Making Matrix.

Of course here you can see that I've got an active total, which is automatically summing up these numbers here in the row to the left. But I don't want to be skewed by these numbers; I don't want to be influenced, negatively or positively influenced, by these numbers. So often what I'll do is I'll come up to this column here, and if I select the down arrow, I'm going to say hide column. And this can be very effective to hide that total column while I'm inputting these numbers. And it also makes it a little special for a big reveal at the end.

All right, so with profitability, updating my website, I'm going to give that maybe a two, might bring in a little more money. Building a new product definitely has more potential, so I'm going to give that a four. Remember, the higher the number, it's going to have the potential for the more amount of money to bring in for my business. Hiring more staff, maybe a three. Somewhere in the middle of the road. Buying a new CRM system, I'm also going to give that one a three. And writing a book, it certainly has the potential for more profitability, so I'm going to give that one a four in this particular case.

Now the last criteria that we want to use here is called vision. And this is something that I think we sometimes forget. Do these projects align with your business's mission statement, or the values that you have for your business? Or if these are personal projects, do they align with your personal beliefs? Right? Or your personal ethics?

So let's start off here with updating my website. It's sort of middle of the road, I think I'm going to give that maybe a three. Building a new product certainly does align with my vision, I'm going to give that one a four. Hiring more staff, though I do value a better work-life harmony, I'm going to give that one about a three. Building a new CRM system, yeah, it's important, but I'm going to give it a fairly low ranking. It's not really in line, there's nothing terribly special about that with the vision. And then writing a new book, you know, I might give that one a much higher one here. So I'm going to give that one five. Because I want to get my message out there, that's definitely in line with my vision.

Results

So now that I've given everything a score amongst these four criteria, let's go and reveal the total.

So if I go up here and hit this arrow, it's going to expand, and now I've got, oh interesting. I've actually got a tie. A 15 between building a new product and hiring more staff. And then on the opposite end, you can see that updating my website got a score of only nine.

Now, as part of a next step, it doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to engage with both of these projects. But what's so helpful about the Decision Making Matrix is that this is going to help me make the best decision. Maybe I love updating my website, and I get excited about that, but the Decision Making Matrix has told me that that's perhaps not the best use of my time right now. Especially compared to building a new product, or hiring more staff.

Again, if you would like to use the Decision Making Matrix, be sure to click the link in the description below, and plug in your own projects and see what you should be working on next.

And of course, I'd love to hear your comments and any of your feedback as to how you decide on which project you should be working on next. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Today's video was sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is the easy and all-in-one tool to help you keep your email inbox clean.

Now, at its core, SaneBox is about filtering, and it uses powerful algorithms to help you filter out unimportant email, so you can focus on what matters most. But some of my favorite features of SaneBox are its smart folders, things like SaneLater, which automatically moves distracting emails into a folder I can review at a later time, or also SaneNoReplies, which helps me to track and notifies me when someone doesn't reply to one of my emails.

And of course, all of these folders are smart. And so, it learns from your behavior over time, but of course you can make changes along the way so you can tweak SaneBox to get the most out of your inbox. If you'd like to learn more and try SaneBox for free, be sure to click the link in the description below.

You have a lot of email to write today. And many of those emails include questions in which you are wanting a response. So, how can you increase your chances of getting a reply to your emails? Well, that's what I'm gonna show you how to do today.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today I wanna share with you four tips, four steps to help you increase your chances of getting an email reply.

And we're gonna get things kicked off with, of course, the subject line. Now, sometimes we are too brief with our subject line. And you wanna make sure to take just a few seconds to make sure that your subject line is optimized. Because if someone doesn't open up your email, well, you can guarantee you're not going to get your response.

So, two things to keep in mind with your subject line, number one, you wanna be specific so that the person receiving your message knows exactly what you're talking about or can guess what the contents are gonna be within that email.

But the other thing we wanna keep in mind is to keep our length in check. Studies would show that the optimal length of a subject line is somewhere between three to seven words.

It's hard to be specific with just one or two words but because we are dealing with emails so often on our mobile devices, we wanna keep it to seven words maximum so that the person reading it can see the full subject line and not get things hidden and again decide to move on to something else.

In my example here, I'm gonna be replying or sending an email to someone that I've already had a previous conversation with. I'm gonna be sending them a pricing quote or actually I'm gonna be following up with them about a pricing quote. So, my subject line is going to read Pricing Quote for Productivity Workshop. Oh spell it right there. So, very detailed of course here. It's about the workshop, and it's about a pricing quote. So, when the person receives this, they're gonna know exactly what I'm talking about, and I'm within this three to seven-word limit.

Now moving on to the body of the message itself, now depending on who you're speaking with, the topic, and so forth, I could go through so many different examples here. You're gonna know how to write the optimal message, at least what words to include within your message. But just like we saw that there was an optimal length for a subject line, studies have also shown that there's an optimal length for the body of your email message. That's somewhere 50 and 125 words.

Now keeping your message below 125 words probably makes sense. You wanna get to the point so that that person doesn't have to sift through three or four paragraphs to find out what you're asking or what you're needing. But you also wanna make sure not to be too brief because when we send emails that are only one or perhaps two sentences in length, studies have also shown that people sort of scoff at them and they don't consider them very weighty or that they are very important.

If it's just one or two sentences, maybe this could have been included in a text or instant messaging. Often, we won't give them the weight that they deserve. So, you wanna shoot for about a 50 word minimum but also 125 word maximum.

Now I'm not gonna get into the details of the contents of my message because of course each and every email is unique. But tip number three has to do with the question itself.

Here you can see at the very end of my message, I said, "Can we set up a call for Thursday to discuss in more detail?" My tip for you here isn't so much to do with length but the placement of this question. Sometimes when you've added the question in the middle of a paragraph or even at the end of a short paragraph like this one here, it can get lost in the mix.

So, my tip for you here, whatever that key question is, is to put it on a separate line, a distinct line within your email. The reason being, is that it's so much easier to see. In fact, when this person first opens up this email, they may actually see this question mark in the corner of their eye even before they've started reading the entire email itself.

So, I have found it very, very effective to put your question on a separate line. You can catch them up to speed up here. You can give them some other content or backstory here. But when it comes to that key question that you're asking, try putting it on a separate line. It just makes it stand out that much more. Studies have also shown that we tend to reopen and touch an email multiple times.

And so, instead of getting caught up to speed as to what is the question or what do I need to do with this email, make it easier for the receiver that they can see that question on that separate line.

Now I could hit send at the point and hope that I get a reply to this email. But there's one final step, one final tip I wanna share with you, and that has to do with your sign-off. Now sometimes we sort of scoff and don't think that sign-offs means a great deal, but there's a lot of interesting research that would tell us otherwise. Some people might say things like cheers or take care or maybe even thanks. Thanks isn't too bad. It's polite. That can often increase your chances.

But let's go one step further. We're gonna put thanks in advance. Again, some pretty interesting research has shown that thanks in advance will greatly increase your chances of getting a reply. Of course, none of this is going to guarantee a reply, but there's something about thanking someone before they've actually done the request or before that they've answered your question.

It makes the person who's receiving this email almost feel obliged to send you an answer or to send you a request. So, you may want to experiment with including thanks in advance as a part of your sign-off.

So, in quick review, tip number one, in the subject line, let's be specific and keep the word count between three to seven words. Tip number two has to do with the body and keeping our message between 50 and 125 words. In fact, here in Outlook, I can go up here and click on the Word Count. Look at that, 63 words. I'm definitely within that particular range.

Tip number three has to do with the question and try putting it on a separate line. It makes it punch out and make it a little more distinct, easier for the reader. And last but not least, our sign-off, thanks in advance, helping that person to hit the reply button and give us an answer or give us a reply to the question that we've been asking here.

I hope you enjoyed today's video. I'd love to hear your questions and further comments about getting replies within an email. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Today's video is sponsored by Bridge24. Are you frustrated by the lack of reporting in tools such as Asana, Trello, and Basecamp? Well, with Bridge24, you can manipulate and view your data any way that you like.

Want an interactive chart of all of your cards and lists? How about having something that is print ready so you can share with others? Or perhaps you'd like to deal with your data in an Excel spreadsheet? Well, you can do it all with Bridge24. Be sure to check out the link in the description below for more details.

You already know that Trello is an excellent tool to manage your projects and all of your tasks, and there are many new features that you may not be aware of, so in today's video, I wanna share with you three new features. These are things that have just been released within the past six months, things that you probably are not even aware of.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and let's get things kicked off with a brand-new Power-Up called the Map Power-Up.

Map Power-Up

Now in order to enable the Map Power-Up, you need to go up to your menu here and select Power-Ups, and probably the easiest way is to just simply search for maps. I've already got it enabled here.

Here is the new Map Power-Up, and once you've enabled it, there's really nothing else you need to do. If I hit the gear icon here, my only other choice is to disable it.

So let's go back to my Trello board and see how the Map Power-Up works. So think about how often you need to be traveling somewhere or maybe you just want to reference the different places that are associated with a particular card.

If you can see here in my To Do list, I've got a few cards here, such as "Visit a new client to discuss training options," "Look at office space near Central Park," and "I want to check into my hotel." Perhaps I'm traveling on business, and so, I would like not only specific addresses but also a map so I can reference these places.

Now I've actually already added the map to these second and third cards. You can see that there's this little location icon listed here, but let's go up to the first card here and add one. So I need to visit a new client to discuss new training options.

I don't have an address. I'd rather just be able to click on a map instead. So on the right-hand side, under Power-Ups, we have this button called Location, and if I select it, it's just gonna bring up this search field, which is actually just searching Google Maps.

Now you can either type in the address directly, or if it's the name of a building or an organization, I'm just gonna type in Hulu for this example so I get a, you can see it's bringing up those results already, Hulu on 5th Avenue.

I'm gonna select it and boom! I've got a map right here within my card so I can reference it directly.

Now there's a few things you can do here. If I click on the map itself, it's going to expand, so now I've got a closer view of this map. I can dive in deeper into this map. That's great.

Now if I click on this link here, this little upward arrow, it's going to open up this map in Google Maps in a separate tab, and that could be helpful if I want directions. This is especially useful when you're using this feature on your Android or iOS device.

If you're using an Apple device or an Android device, this is gonna open up Google Maps, and you can have directions immediately to get to that location.

And if I choose to change the location, I can choose this last option to do so or just remove it here as well, but in this example, I wanna leave it. This is exactly the new client I want to go meet with, so I'm gonna leave it here within this card, but it gets better.

Now that I've got a couple of different locations here, you'll notice that there's this little Map link in the top right-hand corner. If I select it, now I've got all three of those locations here within the map, each of these little pins signifying those separate cards.

But if I click on them, I even get the cards themselves. So now I can see exactly, oh that's right, that's the office space there, and then, I gotta come down here, and I gotta visit this new client at this location. I even get things like the due date.

I can get the label. I can even expand that label here, if I wanna see what the label is, and then, last but not least, I gotta check into my hotel at this location.

Now if I click on any of these, I can actually click on this little bubble, it's gonna open up the card. I can add a description. I can check it off. I can do whatever I want with a regular card, and when I close it, it brings me right back to this map view.

I think this is really, really helpful, especially for those of you who may be making client visits or sales visits, even if you're using Trello for personal use, and maybe you're just doing some sightseeing, right? You're just touring around the city.

You can have your different locations here right on the Trello interface, and of course, this is best used on your mobile devices as well. So as long as you have the Map Power-Up enabled for that particular board, you'll be able to take advantage of this on your mobile device.

Well, let's get to tip number two, or should I say new feature number two, and this one has to do with due dates.

Custom Due Date Reminders

Now due dates are not new, right?

Due dates are a standard feature here within Trello, but it's what we can do with the due dates, especially when it comes to reminders.

So if I select the due date here, let's say for this particular task, I wanna do it before the weekend, I'm gonna select the 12th, but you'll notice something new down below, that there is a Set Reminder drop-down window.

In the past, the default reminder time would always be 24 hours in advance, and in some cases, this was a bit of a nuisance 'cause maybe you didn't want a reminder for everything that had a due date, and maybe you wanted a different reminder in terms of a different time period.

You want it a little closer to this due date, or maybe you want it a little further out. Well, Trello now gives us that option.

If I select this drop-down menu, the very first choice here is None, so I can choose to say I just don't want a reminder.

I'd like the due date, but I don't want the reminder, but all of the other options are within about a 48-hour period.

You can either set a due date for as early, or I should say as late as the exact time of the due date, so in this case, it's gonna alert me exactly at 12 noon on Friday the 12th, or I can stretch it out to a few minutes, a few hours, or even two days before.

That's longer than the previous default, so a lot more flexibility, and one of the nice things about this feature, of course, is that this does not roll over to every single card within your board.

Maybe I wanna be notified two days before for this particular card, but on a different card, I'd like to be notified 15 minutes in advance, right? Your cards represent different things, so now, you have the flexibility of choosing a different reminder time.

One other thing I want to point out here when we're talking about due dates is that, now in this case, in order for me to receive that reminder, we've got the due date there, I'm gonna need to add myself to this card, right? I need to assign myself as a member.

Otherwise, no one's gonna be getting this reminder.

However, there's another way that you can be notified of a card, even if you are not being assigned to that particular card.

Let me remove myself here for a second.

If we go down near the bottom of the card, you'll see that there is a Watch button, and this is one of those features that I think goes almost unnoticed amongst many Trello users.

If I select Watch, you'll notice that I get this little green checkmark beside it.

I have not been assigned to it, but if I close the card, there's this little eyeball icon. It means that I'm watching this card, and I will get those reminders.

Whatever that reminder duration is set to, whether it's the time of or two days out or 15 minutes, I will receive that reminder as well.

That reminder's gonna be applicable to anyone who is assigned or watching this card.

Another way to take advantage of the Watch feature is that you can watch an entire list.

So you can click up here on a particular list, and you can select Watch, and what that means, there you can see that icon again, this time in the list, is that whatever happens in this list, as things move in, as they move out, as things are updated, I'm gonna be notified.

I'm gonna be kept in the loop of what's going on here.

That can be really, really helpful if you're working on a board with a number of team members, but you're really only responsible or you just wanna keep a much closer eye on a particular step in your process or a particular phase in your funnel.

So this isn't something new. The Watch feature's been around for a while, but since we were talking about due dates, I thought I would mention it here.

Now the third new feature, and this is brand-new, that I wanna share with you today has to do with giving your users and giving people who interact with your board a little more detail about what's going on, and that's the About This Board section.

About This Board section

If we go back to the Show Menu here, you'll notice that there's something brand-new as our first option, and that's the About This Board.

Now it's front and center for a reason, because this is a place where you're probably gonna want new people to be clicking on, or at least they can go and reference this when they need a little extra help or maybe just a little bit of background information.

So if I select About This Board, there are three main sections to this area.

Number one is the Made By. You know, who created this board? Who is the administrator? Who do I go to talk to if I need some help or need some direction on this board? That wasn't always obvious prior to adding this feature. Now it's very, very clear.

The second section is the Description area, and this is, I think, really, really helpful. I've added a brief description here. If I select the Edit button, I can add a lot more detail here if I want, giving other people an overview of "Hey, this is what this board is about." This is how we're using this. "This is why we're using it this way," that type of thing. You can add it here in the description.

And then, last but not least, we have a section here which is sort of referred to as an Actions section. So it's telling people that members can comment on cards, and if you are the administrator, you can change some of those permissions, including changing the team, the default cover image, if it's enabled or not, Commenting and Add/Remove Permissions. They're gonna be found here as well.

So I'd love to hear from you next. Which features in Trello do not yet exist but are on your wishlist? What do you wish Trello would introduce in the coming year?

Make sure to let me know in the comments down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Do you wanna learn some new ways to get the most out of Google Sheets? Do you wanna learn some new functions so you can manipulate your data in an easier way?

Well then today's video is just for you. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Use Sparkline to insert small graph

And let's get things started with tip number one.

Sometimes when you're dealing with an awful lot of numbers, and you know when you're dealing within a spreadsheet you've got rows and rows and columns and columns of numbers.

Sometimes it could be hard to decipher what exactly is going on here.

Well of course, we could create a chart within Google Sheets.

But sometimes a chart is overkill and you don't wanna take up all this real estate somewhere else in your spreadsheet.

Sometimes you just want a quick view of the data that is going on here.

So I wanna introduce you to something called Spark Line.

Now you can put this in any cell within your spreadsheet.

In this example I'm just gonna use this cell just below these sales figures 'cause I'd like to see if there's a trend, if there's a spike, what's going on here, and remember, if this column was hundreds, maybe even thousands of cells, I wouldn't be able to see that.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press equals to bring up the functions here, and I'm gonna type in sparkline. That's right, sparkline.

I'm gonna select it and then all I have to do is highlight the area, the cells that I would like to include. I'm gonna hit enter, and look what's happened here.

Let me expand that cell just to make it a bit more square like. It's giving me a visual, just a snapshot, a visual line chart of what's going up here in the sales.

So I can see that there's been sort of three spikes including this last one, and maybe that's gonna help me zero in on what I should be looking at.

So again that is sparkline.

All you have to type in is equals sparkline, then select the cells that you'd like included in that data, and you're gonna get this nice little visual, which of course is dynamic.

If I change anything here then that visual's gonna change as well.

Share comments and notifications directly to others

Tip number two, this has to do with sharing, and in particular letting others know that you've added a comment.

You probably already recognize by using Google Drive or Google Sheets one of the benefits is that we can add a comment and share that with others.

So if I right-click on a cell I can select comment and maybe I want to ask someone, like what, what happened here. Like why did we get no support calls that day.

Can select comment and there's a little icon here letting me know as I hover over there that there is a comment included. Whoever, if I'm collaborating with others, this isn't gonna notify anyone else that I've added a comment.

They're gonna have to come in here and maybe the next time they're within this sheet they'll just hover over and happen to stumble upon this comment.

Well, there is a better way.

I'm gonna say delete so we can start off from scratch. I'm gonna go back to that cell and once again I'm gonna insert comment.

And you know what, I am gonna say what happened here. I'm puzzled.

But this time around I'm gonna use the plus symbol. I'm gonna use the plus sign, and that's gonna bring up my email directory here.

So now what I can do is I can start typing in a name or an email address. I'm gonna use this one here, my test account, and it's going to notify this individual of this comment.

Now it gets better. Down below you can see the plus mention. We'll add people to this discussion and send them an email directly.

But I can go one step further and I can actually check this box which will assign this comment to that individual, so they will be responsible for marking it as done.

Now this example, I'm gonna actually uncheck that, but I'm gonna select comment.

And what's happening right now is that Google is automatically sending an email notification with this comment and a link to this sheet so I can ask this person this particular question.

I don't have to email them secondarily with a follow-up email or, "Hey can you please review my comments?" Or something like that. It's actually built right in.

So don't forget the plus symbol if you want to call out someone directly within your Google Sheet.

Validate email addresses in Google Sheets

Now tip number three, we're gonna stick with emails.

But in this case what we wanna do is we want to clean up our emails and see if we actually have valid email addresses.

There's a good chance that you're dealing with information that is being submitted and maybe you wanna use that in a bulk email.

Maybe you have a mail client such as Mailchimp that you want to import this information, or maybe you just want to copy and paste a large number of emails into your own email client, such as Gmail or Outlook.

Well if you take a quick glance here you can see that some of these email addresses are not formatted correctly.

This one doesn't have anything in front of the at symbol.

This one down below does not have a domain name at the end of it.

And this is gonna make things really tricky when we go to import or when we go to actually email someone, if we want to copy and paste all of these emails.

So I wanna validate this particular column. You can see here I've added a title here. I call it Valid Email, and what we're gonna churn out here is just a list of true or false.

What Google Sheets is going to do with this function, it's gonna take a look at everything here on the left and tell us is there anything that is a false email address?

And then we can maybe follow up with the individual directly or see if our forms are formatted properly, maybe as we're collecting this information.

So the function this time around, we'll start with the very first cell. Again, we're gonna start with that equal sign, and it is isemail, -I-S-E-M-A-I-L.

So I'm gonna select isemail, and I'm just gonna start by selecting the one to the left here.

All right, so this one it says true. Yeah, that makes sense, right? It's got something in front of the at symbol. It's got a dot URL.

Now what I can do is I can just take this little icon here in the bottom right-hand corner and drag it all the way down and now it has analyzed everything here to the left.

And one, two, three, four, it looks like I've got four false email addresses. This is gonna spit back an error. It might not even let me send that bulk email if these are included in the to line.

So I can either get rid of them. I can go back and see if I've got the correct email address somewhere.

A nice and easy way to validate a long list of email addresses.

Create QR Codes within Google Sheets

Now, tip number four might just be my favorite in this tip five list.

And this time around it has to do with QR Codes.

Until recently I had no idea that you could do this within Google Sheets.

And you know, QR Codes are making a comeback. I think it was about 10 years ago when we first started seeing QR Codes and started using them.

And then they seemed to fade away. But recently I'm seeing them a lot more in posters, in marketing material.

It's so easy to scan a QR Code on your phone and then go directly to a website or a webpage.

So in this example here I've got about five website addresses. These are different pages on my own personal websites, simpletivity.com.

And maybe I would like to create QR Codes, a unique one for each and every page as a part of my marketing material.

Well, all I need is this special string here. We're gonna use the function which is called image, and then what we're gonna use is a special Google API to help us create a QR Code.

Now I don't expect you to jot this down or memorize what this full function is here. I'll be sure to include it in the description down below so you can copy and paste it yourself.

But first, let me show you how it works. So in this first cell, first what I need to do is copy, right? I need to copy this information here.

So I'm gonna copy this string of text, this function. And then I'm going to paste it into this cell below.

And to make sure that I can activate, I'm gonna eliminate that space at the beginning.

And the last thing that I'm gonna do is that it's actually referencing cell A1. In my case, the cell that I need to reference is A2. That's the first cell that I want to use.

So I'm gonna hit enter there. And boom, I've got a unique QR Code for my website address.

Just like we did before, when you drag a function or a formula, it's going to apply to everything below.

If you drag everything here in this column, it's gonna apply to everything on the left-hand side of the column that the first one was referencing.

So again, I'm just gonna take this, I'm gonna drag it to the bottom of my list.

And now I've got five unique QR Codes associated to all of these webpages.

Because these are images I can just right-click and say copy and now I can paste this anywhere.

I can paste it into a document. I can paste it into an email. If I'm creating a poster, if I need to send it to a designer who's gonna include it I can put it there as well.

So lots of great stuff. Let's just, just for fun let's just paste it over here in this cell. There's that image so I can put it anywhere.

Can you imagine having a long list of website addresses or something else here and you can instantly create new QR Codes for everything that you want in that initial column?

Clean up and trim name fields

All right, well last but not least let's move on to tip number five, something maybe you didn't know how to do here within Google Sheets.

Often we're dealing with a lot of information, and in this case we're looking at names.

And of course we wanna have as clean of information, clean data as much as possible.

And just by taking a quick glance of this short list, you can see I've got things like this first one's got some extra spaces.

I got a couple of things with extra spaces in front.

I've got someone like this one, Alvin Jimenez, has got too many spaces in between his name.

I think the same thing is happening here with Serena.

This is just hard to deal with. It's hard to look at as well, right? As I'm scanning through these names.

So what we're gonna do is we're going to clean up these names here.

And the function that we're gonna use is trim, T-R-I-M.

Once again, this first cell I'm gonna hit equals and type in the function trim, which removes spaces within the characters.

Now it's not gonna remove all the spaces because it's gonna recognize that these are names.

So it's not gonna move the moon, the surname, directly into the e of Elaine. It recognizes that there's a capital. They know that it's names.

So we're gonna say remove spaces so it can look proper.

So I'm gonna select this one, and let's start by selecting that first one again.

Of course, you could add the whole row here, but I like showing it as an example just how it's gonna deal with the first one and then how we can drag for the rest.

I'm gonna hit enter.

And look at that. The spaces are removed from the beginning of Elaine.

I'm gonna highlight that cell, and let's just apply it to everything else in this list, and now we've got a very proper, a very clean looking column here, where you see all of those extra spaces here in Serena and Alvin have been removed.

All the spaces have been removed as well.

I can go ahead and just get rid of this column altogether, if like, because I've got these cleaned names here.

Well, I hope you enjoyed those tips.

But I would love to learn from you, and I'm sure there are others watching today's video who would love to know what are some of your favorite functions or some of your favorite tips within Google Sheets.

Be sure to share them down below in the comments section.

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

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