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Hello everybody.

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

And today I'm talking to you from the road.

I just finished an all day workshop that I delivered yesterday right here in Spokane, Washington.

And I'm about to pack up my hotel room and head to the airport to head back home.

And you know this month, I'm spending an awful lot of time on the road.

So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to pass along some productivity tips to help you stay productive while you're traveling.

Whether that's for business or maybe even if that's for pleasure such as a vacation.

So today I wanna talk about two things that I do as I am preparing to head out.

Whether I'm departing or whether I'm heading back home.

And that has to do with my boarding passes and making sure I'm at the right gate number.

Digital Boarding Pass

So number one, my number one tip has to do with your digital boarding pass.

We're pretty fortunate that most airlines have an online app or they can text message you a link to your online boarding pass, right?

You just have that QR code that you can use at the gate.

But you've probably seen that experience.

Either you've experienced this yourself or you've seen someone else fumble with their phone.

They can't find the email, they can't load that boarding pass correctly, they forget where that app is or it's not loading or refreshing properly.

Take a Screenshot

Well, to avoid that hassle, to always make sure that you have your boarding pass available, my first tip for you is to take a screenshot of the online boarding pass.

So you only have to reference it in your photos.

Your photos do not need to connect to the internet, your photos are gonna be stored directly on your mobile device.

So whenever you first get your boarding pass, I recommend that you take a screenshot.

Now, preferably, you can do this on your mobile device so it's got the same dimensions as you would.

You could do it on your desktop computer if you want to and then just save it to your phone.

Just have it on your phone.

But I tend to do a screenshot on my mobile device so it looks exactly like how it would or how it's supposed to be on the phone.

Google

Now, depending if you're an Android user, an Apple user, you may need to find out how to take a screenshot on your device but I would encourage you to learn how to do so.

If you don't know how to do so just yet, I'll see if I can post some links down below for some helpful resources.

The second thing is that when you get your boarding pass, when you first check in, perhaps 24 hours in advance, you often will not have a gate number.

Either they don't know what the gate number is yet or it may change.

Well, I like to rely on Google to always make sure that I know where I need to be in the airport.

All you need to do is find your flight number.

It usually starts with a two-letter code for the airline followed by four digits.

That's pretty standard, or at least here in North America.

And all you need to do is go to your Google Search bar and just type in flight and then follow it with that flight number.

Sometimes the flight number is all you need as well but if you include the word flight either before or after you, you are certainly gonna get the latest information directly from Google.

And sometimes it even provides you more information than the airline will provide you directly such as both, not only the departure time but boarding time, gate changes, if it's on time, if it's delayed.

I find that Google is sometimes, it's just a more convenient way and I can rely on it.

I don't need to go to a special website, I don't need to go to the airport website or the airline website.

I let Google do the work for me.

Conclusion

So those are my two tips for this week.

Look forward to more travel tips later this month right here on the Simpletivity channel.

And if you've got something that you'd like to share to help you stay productive or help you just stay on top of things when you're traveling, be sure to share it with me here in the comments.

Until next time, remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Google Tasks has come an awful long way over the last few years and in particular over the last few months as they have added new features to help you and I be more productive.

So in today's video, I wanna share with you my five favorite tips so you can get so much more out of Google Tasks.

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

And let's jump right in to tip number one.

Now, this is something that is more recent so you may not be familiar with these first two tips.

The first thing that Google Tasks has added recently is the ability to have repeating tasks.

So I can add a task here and let's just do something.

Repeating Tasks

Really basic like take out the garbage, something that I certainly need to do on a regular basis.

But before you hit enter I'm gonna edit this particular task and you will see that I have the ability to add a date and a time.

I wanna start with that and I wanna do this every Sunday.

Sunday evening is when I wanna take out the trash but you can see at the bottom that there is now a repeat function.

So I can choose to have this task happen each and every Sunday.

I'm gonna select that and I've got multiple choices, if I wanna do it by day, week, month or year.

In this case, I wanna do it every week and I want it to appear on the Sunday.

Yeah, I wanna start it on May 26th, I could change that there if I want to.

I'm gonna leave the time alone so it's just gonna appear at the beginning of May 26th, the beginning of Sunday and I'm gonna select OK.

And so now we have it there.

If I go back to my task with this, yes it's going to appear for this coming Sunday, May 26th but the great thing is I can see the little icon.

It's telling me that it's a recurring task.

This time if I go and mark it as complete, it is now gone from my task list but yes, it will reappear here in the coming Sunday.

So it's always going to come and show up when I have that repeating task.

Of course we always have the Completed area down below here.

So I can always go back in here, and if I want to remove that repeater, that's where I would wanna go into this Completed area and then I can remove future completed tasks.

But let me minimize that for now and let's get to tip number two which is also something which is rather recent, something that was recently added and that's the ability to add a specific due time.

Adding Due Date Time

Not just a due date but a due time.

So let's say I wanna email Susan later in the day.

First of all if I'm gonna update my time here.

This is something way in the past.

So let me bring it up to something a little more current.

Let's say I'm gonna email her tomorrow morning but I don't wanna just set it for the 22nd, I wanna make sure I do this before noon.

So I'm actually gonna come down here and select 'Set time'.

I could either enter it from a text based perspective or I can just punch it.

I'm gonna say 9:30 a.m. and I'm going to say OK.

Now the great thing with this is that I will have, there you can see it, it's just popped up here to the left on my calendar.

It will appear on my calendar as well.

As long as I have my tasks calendar enabled down here within Google Calendar, anything with a specific time will also show up here within that calendar.

So not only will I receive a reminder but I'll see it there on my calendar as well.

So another helpful addition, something that Google has added recently.

Tip number three has to do with using subtasks.

In many cases you may be managing a project.

Create Subtasks

Or even just a mini project here within Google Tasks.

So I'm gonna say, let's just call this one 'Mini-Project' for our example, shall we?

What I'm gonna do this time around, I'm gonna hit the edit button and we can see below Add date/time there is the ability to add subtasks.

So I'm gonna say this is Mini Task.

Mini Task one, really original Scott, Mini Task two and Mini Task three.

So I can have these other additional tasks, these things all work their way up are all a part of this mini project, I can add them here within my task list.

So something very very powerful.

Now, when you see the front of the task what you'll notice is that they do appear as individual tasks.

This is actually quite helpful because I can now go into Mini Task 1, for example, and I can give it a distinct due date, I can give more details, specific details for this particular task as well.

But it will keep them together.

So for example if I want to…

Let's give this a due date, let's give the Mini-Project a due date, for example, of let's say like maybe the end of next week.

I'm gonna come back out here as well.

So here you can see that Mini-Project there.

They're still attached.

Even though these ones have no due date, these are the subtasks, they're still joined.

If I open up this Mini Task here, I can still deal with it the way I want to but it's still attached to this Mini-Project up above.

There you see all of our tasks here below.

And I can start checking them off.

I probably would have done task one first but let's say I did task two first, I can see them all here within that Mini Project.

All right, tip number three.

It has to do with something that I'm sometimes surprised that I have to remind so many people about but it's very very helpful is don't forget that you can use more than just one list within Google Tasks.

By default, Google's gonna create this My Tasks list but you can see here, I have a new project list and I can create something else as well.

Let's call this one the Brand New List, for example.

And I can hit Done.

So I can separate my personal from my business.

Here's my Brand New List.

I've got nothing in here just yet.

So maybe I wanna start out and I'm gonna say New Task for Monday.

So I've got my brand new task in here but let's say that I created it here and then I forgot.

Oh no, brand new task list, I don't want it here, I actually wanted it in my tasks list.

Well, it's actually pretty simple.

If you go over to the edit function here, you can see you can change the list down below, right below the details, you can always move your tasks in between different lists.

So in this case, maybe I put it here by mistake, I'm gonna say, let's put it back into my tasks.

I come back out, this is empty once again and now I can go back here and find that one under My Tasks.

I didn't give it a due date, right?

There's my new task for Monday.

So I can find it down below as well.

Well, the last task I wanted to share with you today is maybe one of my favorites and something that you'll find very very powerful has to do with using Google Tasks with Gmail.

So if I go right here to Gmail,

Create Tasks from Gmail

Often we want to convert a particular email into a task and we can do that quite easily.

Up near the top of any of your emails, you'll find the little three dots that give us some more options and here we have a choice to add it to tasks.

So you can see it's automatically gonna up my tasks bar here and it's gonna add this particular task.

Now it's going to use the label here.

Here we go, under no date, it's gonna use the subject line of the email, it's gonna give that the title of the task.

So Winter is gone.

Something that I wanna here with this Sheetgo notification.

Maybe there are some things that I wanna look at here.

Now of course I can come in here and I can relabel this, right and I can say, let's just call this SheetGo tasks to complete, something like that, then I can add further details if I want to but the real bonus, the real plus here is that it gives me a direct link to this email.

So if I go back out here, you can also see that from the front and in fact I can access it from the front as well.

So I'm gonna just click on my inbox, I'm gonna get out of this particular email here just to show you an example.

So let's say as I'm going through my to-do list, I come across this one and say, oh yeah, I wanna review.

What were those tasks in that email?

I'm just gonna click on this link and immediately that email will appear here on the left-hand side of the screen.

So really powerful if you want to automatically attach an email to a particular task, you can convert it by just using the more options and selecting Add to Tasks.

Well, I would love to hear from you next.

Of these five, which one was your favorite?

Which one do you find is going to be most useful for you and do you have some additional tips that you'd like to share with others?

Please be sure to add them in the comments down below.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

How many times have you sent an email asking someone a question and waiting for a reply, yet you hear absolutely nothing?

Maybe a few days go by and then suddenly it dawns on you.

Oh, that's right, I should follow up with so-and-so.

And maybe even when you sent out that very first email you tried to set a reminder.

Maybe you added something to your calendar or something else just so that you could remember in the future, but then that person replied back immediately so that reminder was worthless.

Well, today, I wanna share with you a super cool Gmail extension which is gonna help you increase your chances of getting replies to your emails.

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

And today, I wanna share with you something that I've discovered recently called Rebump for Gmail.

Rebump is all about sending automatic replies to people who have not yet responded to your emails.

So, let me show you how Rebump works.

So, here, I've got an example email.

I'm wanting to set up a meeting with someone and I'm saying, hi, Ken, let's continue our discussion so we can iron out the details of this contract.

When would be a good time to get together?

Now, in a normal course of action, I would just hit send and hope that Ken would reply to me in a short amount of time, but I'm gonna use Rebump.

There's a little icon down here.

This is the Rebump icon and I'm gonna check this off.

But you probably wanna understand what on Earth is Rebump going to do after I hit send now.

Well, let me take you into the Rebump interface and explain to you what a bump actually is.

So, here we have what is called a bump sequence, and the way that this is designed is that if that individual does not reply to my email, there will be a series of follow-up emails coming from my email address, not Rebump but from my own email address, just giving them a gentle reminder.

So, here I have a default sequence in order, but keep in mind, all of this is editable.

You can change the frequency, the days out from each bump, you can change the messages themselves, and I'll show you how to do that in just a second.

But in this default example, after I send my original email, if that person does not reply to me within three days, Rebump will send this automatic email.

I don't have to do anything.

It's gonna do it on its own.

Hi, just wanted to make sure you got the email below.

Thanks!

Something pretty simple and straightforward.

Now, if we continue on with this bump sequence, if I do not receive a reply four days after bump one or, over here, seven days in total, right, this is seven days after the initial email, well, then a second bump will be sent, a second email.

Just checking in.

Wanted to make sure you got my email.

And there's actually four bumps in this complete sequence, day 14 and even day 21.

They're all worded a little bit differently.

And, remember, you don't have to have a four-bump sequence.

You don't have to use this text here.

It is all editable.

But the great thing is is that if this individual does reply to me before day three, none of these bumps go out.

Nothing additional will be sent.

Maybe it needs bump one and bump two, but let's say in between bump two and bump three, that's when the individual replies to me.

Once again, everything here is canceled.

So, it's not as if they're gonna be receiving reminders after they have followed up with you or after they've replied to you.

So, let me show you just how easy this is.

You can create multiple bumps, different bumps for different purposes.

I've created one here called Proposal.

So, if I go into my proposal bump, the one that I just edited not too long ago, you can see that I've changed the time frame, right?

When you're sending out a contract, you wanna follow-up in a shorter amount of time, so I'm saying after two days if I don't hear a reply I want them to send out this email.

And the other nice thing about Rebump is that you can actually add personalization.

So, here I've added the auto first name, right?

This is gonna be the first name from your email contacts.

So, hi, first name, I just wanted to check in and see if you've had time to review my proposal.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

And if we continue on to this proposal bump sequence, you can see that it's specific, right?

I've used… Let's just hit edit here for a second here just to show you that, again, you can add formatting to these emails very much like you would in Gmail itself.

Here I can change the days, right?

How many days from the previous bump that I want to add.

And over here, even to the right, here's some of that personalization, right?

The auto first name or auto last name if I wanna add that as well.

So, in this case, I've got a bump sequence which is very specific to a contract or for sending a proposal.

So, let's go back to Gmail for just a moment here, and I wanna show you exactly what's happening.

Now, let me uncheck Rebump for a second here, and I'm gonna check it again.

So, I'm gonna check it here, and I wanna show you up here in the Bcc line.

Whenever this box is checked, it's actually adding this unique email address, this special bump email address to the Bcc line.

Now, what makes this so important is not only is this is how Rebump works, but it allows you to use it on mobile.

I know a lot of times we install an extension for Gmail and we love it, we use it, but then we're disappointed that we can't use it on our smartphones.

Well, that's not a problem with Rebump.

All you need to do is use this email address in the Bcc line when you're composing an email on mobile, and the same functionality exists.

Now, I'm gonna uncheck it for just a second because you'll notice that there's a little drop-down here, bump sequence.

So, here you can see.

Here's the default and here's the proposal.

So, I can choose between the two which one I want to use.

In this case, I do wanna stick with the default 'cause I'm not sending a contract along.

I just wanna talk about the contract.

So, I've checked it and now I can send it and I can see what's going on.

Now, if I go back into my Rebump account, you're probably wondering, "Well, how do I manage all of these Rebumps?"

Well, here we go.

Under the emails tab within Rebump, here you can see a list of all of my active bump sequences, so these are the emails that I have sent out.

It shows me the date, recipient, subject, all the important information I need to find out which email is which, and then it's also telling me where it is in the sequence.

So, the last bump is actually the original email.

None of these have actually been bumped, but it's telling me when that person can expect to receive the next bump.

It even has a nice visual indicator here that as it goes through the bump sequence, these little circles will light up and change color so you know exactly where they are in that sequence.

And, of course, I can just select cancel here if I don't want these bumps to happen at all.

If I just wanna cancel it, I can select that.

I can do it in bulk as well here on the left-hand side of the screen.

Now, I also wanted to make sure that you can customize when your bumps are sent out.

Because I know some of you are probably asking, "Scott, I deal with business people.

They're typically dealing with me during business hours.

"I don't wanna send this out at three in the morning.

"I don't wanna send it out on the weekend."

No problem, Rebump has you covered.

So, here you can adjust a number of your bump settings, including bump days and times.

So, I'm gonna uncheck Sunday and Saturday and then I'm also gonna check this one.

So, I only wanna send bumps between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Of course, I can change these if I want, but now I can ensure that my bumps will be sent out during typical business hours and a typical business week.

They're not gonna be receiving something at Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m., and of course the client's gonna be thinking, "Why on Earth is someone sending me a reminder at this time of the day?"

So, I encourage you to check out Rebump for Gmail.

Rebump comes with a 30-day free trial.

You can try out all of the features within Rebump, including the ones I've shown you in today's video.

If you do like the extension, if you do like the service, Rebump is only $5 a month afterwards.

I hope you enjoyed this video.

I look forward to your questions and your comments below, and remember to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Do you wish that you could read more in a shorter amount of time?

Or maybe you just want to find a way to commit to finishing that next book that you pick up.

Well, today I want to show you a very simple trick to help you do just that.

I'm currently in the middle of reading this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear and I'm really enjoying it, however, because I borrowed this book from my local library, I need to complete it within the next two weeks.

Well, I'm going to do that with the help of this little bookmark, which I create for almost all of my books.

I'm gonna show you what it is, and how you can create it for yourself in just a few minutes.

So, let's dive in.

To make sure that I can finish a book within a specific timeframe, I take just a couple of minutes to create a reading chart, or a reading guide, to make sure I can hit that specific deadline.

Now, you can do this in any type of spreadsheet tool.

Here, I'm within Google Sheets, but you can use this in Microsoft Excel, or almost any other spreadsheet tool.

Now, the very first column, we're gonna create a date column here.

So, I'm just gonna call this date.

Let me just type that in here, date.

The next column we're gonna call day, because I do find it helpful to see the day of the week.

And then, this last one, I'm gonna call page min, as in page minimum.

This is gonna be the minimum page number I need to read to in order to reach my goal.

So, over here in the date field, I'm gonna type in today's date, which happens to be 2019.

It is May the 14th and I'm gonna put it in this date format.

This is usually what spreadsheets like the best.

It's easiest to work with.

And then, if I select this cell, you'll notice in the lower right-hand corner there's a small square or a small dot.

If you click and hold and then drag this down, I'm gonna drag it down 14 cells, because I wanna finish this in two weeks, and let go, you can see that it will automatically increment each date.

And even if I was to go over the month of May, it would successfully know the date and keep going onward.

So, this is gonna be helpful to keep me on track, but I find it's also helpful sometimes to know the day of the week.

So, today is Tuesday, I'm gonna put in Tue, just an abbreviation of Tuesday.

And then I'm gonna do the exact same thing.

I'm gonna click and hold on this little dot here and I'm gonna drag it all the way down and release, and again, now I've got my days of the week.

Now, I'm gonna clean this up just a little bit.

I'm gonna select this cell and I'm actually going to center it, just so it's not right up against the date.

And how about, actually, I take our headers here and I'm gonna bold that, just so they stand out a little bit more.

Now, the last one is crucial.

This is the minimum page number I need to be on in order to reach my goal.

But, in order to do this, we just need to do a little bit of simple math.

I'm gonna go over about two cells and just so you can see what I'm doing, I don't usually put in the title or the name here, but I have 256 pages in the current book that I'm reading.

And, so the next one I'm gonna put down below is the pages per day.

Again, I don't usually do this, but I just wanna type this in so you know exactly what these numbers represent.

So, here's the total number of pages here.

In the cell down below, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select the equals sign, because I'm gonna put in a very simple formula.

I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select the cell above, which is my total number of pages, and I'm gonna say divided by 14, right?

'Cause that's exactly two weeks.

I'm gonna hit enter and it's gonna give me this number.

18.2857 so on and so on.

Now, that's a bit of a messy number, but don't worry.

We're not gonna have decimals over here in our page minimum.

So, we're gonna go back to this page minimum column and we're gonna use this cell.

We're gonna use this number.

So, in the very first cell, on day one, I'm gonna put in another formula, a very simple one.

I'm gonna put equals and I'm just gonna reference that cell, okay?

I'm just gonna reference that cell over here and I'm gonna hit enter, so now we've got that number over here.

But, you know what?

I hate how this is gonna look, right?

We don't want all of these decimal places.

I'm not gonna read like, you know, one-third of a page, of page 19 in this case.

Let's keep it nice and clean.

So, if I select this particular column here I can go up here and you can decrease the decimal places.

So, I'm gonna do this, it's not only gonna do it for the number that I have in there, but any future number, it's gonna remove the decimals as well.

So, on day one I just need to make sure that I've read about 18 pages.

Now, the only thing I have to do next, well, there's two quick steps.

I'm gonna go down to the second cell and we're gonna type in another formula.

We're gonna say equals, and we wanna start with the 18, right?

So, I'm gonna say equals this.

I could really either reference the one above or, actually, sorry, I have to reference this one because it's gonna follow it all the way down, so I'm gonna say equals, I'm gonna select this cell and then you need to select F4 on your computer and what you wanna do, is you wanna hit it two times so you get that dollar sign in front of the cell.

That means it's gonna follow that cell all the way down, because we're gonna start adding pages on top of one another.

I'm gonna select plus because we're gonna add something to it.

And what we're gonna add is this number over here, right?

We're gonna add our 18 number over here.

I'm gonna select this, but we also wanna hit F4 again.

This time we're gonna hit it just once, where we get that double dollar sign amongst the, in front of the cell and in between the cell so that we are always adding this number, all right?

So, we've got our dollar sign C2, plus dollar F dollar three and I'm gonna hit enter.

So, it looks pretty simple, and you know, you might be saying why did you put in that complicated formula, or for those who are more advanced in Excel, it's not a very complicated formula.

This is basically just doubling that, right?

And because there's decimal places that's why it's not exactly doubled.

It's 37 instead of 36, well, this is the reason why.

Now, just like we did with the day and the date field, I wanna come here, I wanna select this little dot and I'm gonna drag it all the way down to my last day.

And look at that!

It happens to add up precisely to 256 pages.

So, now, I can print off this little guide.

I could have a digital copy as well, but I like it as a bookmark, especially when I'm reading a physical book.

Now, as I go through, and let's say I get to this coming Sunday.

I can glance at my bookmark and say, I need to read to at least page 110 in order to stay on pace, in order to stay on track to reaching my goal.

If I'm behind, maybe I'll need to read a few extra chapters or a few extra pages.

If I'm ahead, well, who cares, right?

If I finish the book early that's great.

But I find this has been a very, very useful tool to make sure that I finish a book within a particular timeframe and, in many cases, just read a book faster.

Even if there's not a due date, even if I don't have to return it to my library.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope that you're getting in as much reading as you would like.

I credit a lot of my expertise and really a lot of the joy in this life to reading a variety of books.

I'd love to hear your input and your feedback on today's video and any other tips that you may have in enjoying reading more frequently.

Thank you so much for watching.

I hope you give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity Channel.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

You spend an awful lot of time on your phone.

Don't lie.

You probably don't go much more than 15 minutes before doing something with your mobile device.

So, doesn't it make sense that we should spend just a few minutes to optimize the arrangement of all of our apps on our home screen?

Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do just that.

I want to show you an easy, three-step method so that you can quickly and easily find the information and find the tools that you use the most.

So, let's dive in.

‍Step 1 Anchor Apps

All right.

So, here we are on the home screen of my phone.

The very first step that we want to take a look at is the bottom of our screen.

This is where you have the opportunity to anchor four, maybe five apps that will always remain visible at the bottom of your screen so that even if you swipe to another screen, to the left, to the right, those four or five apps will remain the same.

Now, when you first got your phone, they probably had a few defaults there.

Remember, you can always change those defaults.

You want to think of not only the most used apps but the ones that you want to conveniently access because most of us are accessing our apps with the thumb of the hand that we are holding the phone, and that makes it extra convenient with those apps at the bottom.

So, in my case, I've got both my phone app and my text messaging app. I've got email, maps, and a timer—a timer, which I use quite frequently. That's why I actually have it in the right corner. I'm right-handed. It's very easy for me to get to.

So, focus on what you want in that anchored area.

Step number two, let's take a look at rearranging the rest of the apps on our home screen.

Now, at first glance, you may notice that I don't have a single folder listed here at all.

Folders

The reason being is that I find that folders tend to be a very inefficient way of organizing your apps on your mobile device. It forces you to go in and out of a variety of different folders. And although it may seem to make sense to group all of your social media apps in the same folder, chances are, you use one or two of those social media apps much more frequently, much more often than everything else.

So, I think you'll be better off putting your most used apps on your home screen.

So, how have I organized my apps and how do I encourage you to do the same?

Well, starting from the bottom and working our way up, you can see that I've grouped things together in rows—or at least for the most part, they're either in rows or maybe in a squared group.

Rows

So, the first row we see here, I've got a variety of Google things, Google apps that I use frequently, Photos, Google Podcasts, and Chrome as my web browser, something that I use most frequently.

It's actually very easy to get to. It's central down low with my right thumb. So, I can easily access it.

The next row above it is sort of my notes, projects, my project management, and task list items. I've got a habit tracker, I've got Keep notes, and I've got Trello. So, I've got those three things grouped together as well.

Now when we go up to the next level, I sort of mixed a few different things together. Let's start on the right-hand side. Here you see I've got my three most frequently accessed social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Yes, I could have put them in a folder, but I want direct access to these tools. So, by grouping them together, it's very easy for me to find them on this list.

Left Hand Corner

Now on the left-hand side, I've created more of a square grouping, a two-by-two grouping.

Here you can see I've got a stretching app, I've got a timer app that I use when I am presenting, I've got Stocard, which is where I can place loyalty cards and that type of thing, and then I've got Guitar-Tuna.

Yes, I'm a musician, I'm a guitar player. So, every once in a while, I need to tune my guitar or maybe one of my children's guitars. So, I want to have access to that as well.

These four, I grouped together as functional tools. They have a purpose to them, but they're more functional. They're not related in that I would use them together or one after another, but I know exactly where to find them in that group of four.

Upper Right Hand Corner

Now continuing on to the upper right-hand corner, these are apps that I use less frequently than the ones down below. Remember that's by design because if you're using or touching your apps with your thumb most often, you want to put the most frequently used, the ones that you click on the most in the lower half.

Top Right Hand Corner

But up in the top right-hand corner, I've got both a banking app Tangerine, I've got a calculator side by side, and then I've got a few things related to weather, not just the Weather Network, but I've got my Nest thermostat, I've also got my Ring doorbell,

so some of my smart home technology. And then on the upper left-hand corner,

I've got the Play Store app.

Widgets

As you can see, I actually have space for two more apps here if I want, but I don't feel the need for that right now. The last thing that you'll see here on my home screen is that I've got a widget. That brings us to step number three. Don't forget to use widgets. If you have the capability of adding some additional functionality here, do so. You can see that I've got a calendar widget here in the bottom right-hand corner.

That's why I don't have a calendar app visible.

Using Widgets

I can click on this and go directly into my calendar app. I'm gonna jump back out here. I can scroll through my items, I can click on something in particular. For example, right now, yes, right now (laughs) I'm recording new videos. So, I can actually click on those items as well. Very, very convenient.

But I want to show you another great way to use widgets. If I scroll to my secondary screen, this is my primary home screen, this is secondary screen, I've got a few other apps, and yeah, I actually do have a couple of folders, but they are on my secondary screen. These are less frequently used apps.

You'll also notice that I have an email widget here. This is actually the Gmail widget for Android. What I love about this is that although I have my Gmail app available to me, it's anchored down below in that middle position, I find a much quicker way to browse my inbox is just a swipe.

Just a swipe over and I can glance, and then I can swipe it out of the way. I don't have to wait for the app to load. I don't have to click on anything. I find that swiping is much more efficient. I can quickly see things here.

And I can click either directly on one of those messages. I can also click on the little pencil icon and start composing a new message immediately from that screen.

Investigating Widgets

So, you might want to investigate widgets. In order to do so, at least on an Android device, you just need to click and hold on an empty space in most cases.

And then down below, you're gonna see an area called widgets. And if you click on that, depending on what types of apps you have installed, you'll have a variety of different widgets available to you.

You might want to experiment with them. You'll see here that they'll show you how many squares or how many spaces it will take up. Some of them will have a variety of widgets for you to choose from.

Summary

So, those are my three tips for optimizing your home screen.

Start with the anchored area, most likely at the bottom of your screen. Number two, when it comes to individual apps, I would encourage you to think beyond just folders but to group like-minded apps together, whether it's in rows or maybe in quadrants as in groups of fours.

And last but not least, don't forget widgets, whether it's this calendar widget as you see in this example or having a particular widget on another screen that you can quickly just swipe over and glance and then you can get back to whatever it is that you're doing.

I hope you enjoyed today's video and I'd love to hear your input on how you organize your apps on your mobile device. Be sure to leave me a comment down below. Thanks again for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

In a recent video, I asked you what would you like to see next here on the Simpletivity channel and I got an amazing response. One of those questions, one of those requests came from Zelphia, who says that they want to learn how to create a calendar task/event from info in an email. And many of you seem to agree because this received an awful lot of up votes.

So in today's video, that's exactly what we are going to tackle.

Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Dealing with email and your calendar, often, we are switching back and forth between a number of different tabs. And we often start out by receiving an email and we'd like to convert this into a calendar event. Perhaps we want to send a meeting request or just convert some of the information here into a task. Well in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do just that.

So let's start off with one of these emails, and these are fictitious of course, but hey, Scott, how does 3:00 pm on May 9th sound to you? I'm receiving an email from someone. They're suggesting a date or maybe I want to suggest a date, whatever the case may be. How can I quickly and easily create an event in my calendar?

Well the feature wish has been around for quite some time, but it seems to get hidden, is right up here. These three little dots. You may be more familiar with things like archive, and delete sending things to the trash, even the new snooze button, or the more recent snooze button, but all the way over here these three dots, we have some more options available to us. And one of them is to create an event.

So right from within the email, if I select create an event, what it's going to do is actually open up another tab. I'm gonna show you an alternative method, but this one is gonna open up another tab, and it's gonna do some great things for me.

As you can see, it's going to put the subject of that email here as the title of the event or the event name. And if I scroll down below, you'll see in the description, I have the email itself. Right here's the question, here's the person who sent it to me. So I have all that information at the ready.

Now this can be very helpful in some cases if the subject line or that information in the email is relevant, or in many cases, maybe you just want to scrap it and retitle it yourself, but many times I've received an email and the subject line made sense or was close enough that I could use it right here. I wouldn't have to do much editing.

But I'm gonna say, I'm just gonna call this something really simple. I'm gonna say meeting with Scott. I'm gonna change the title here.

But when it comes to the description, this can be quite helpful because at least it's a reference point for the person that you're inviting. It can be a reference point for yourself as well, in terms of why did you set up this meeting, and if there's an email thread, for example. If there's other pieces of information here.

Now by default, Gmail or Google Calendar will typically just pick the next available slot, like what's coming up in the next 30 minutes. So you will need to decide you know to change the more appropriate date, in this case, we're meeting on May ninth and we're gonna meet at three p.m. If it's an hour or if it's a half hour, you can change that here.

The other thing that you want to remember is that by default, by selecting create an event, it's going to automatically include the person or persons who sent the email. So this includes other people who may have been on the two line or in the CC line. You may have multiple people here.

So make sure to keep that in mind. If you are wanting to create a meeting with that individual, maybe it's just one of the three individuals on that email, or as I'll show you later, if you're creating a task, you'll want to take them off immediately. But it is going to come over here automatically. So that's great. That's one less thing for me to do.

I can hit save. It will prompt me do you want to send invitations? And this is I think a great prompt. I know it may be a little frustrating that you get this so frequently, but I think it's important, especially if you forgot, especially if you forgot that it added other people to this invitation, oh that's right, there's other people on that line there as yes so yes I am gonna say send.

That event is now created. Here it is on my calendar. And they will be sent an invitation as well.

But let's look at an alternative method.

So let's go back to our email here. I'm gonna go back to a different email this time. And here we've got big project with an early deadline. And this person says, let's set up a call so we can discuss this situation in more detail. Can you please send me an invite?

So we've already talked about creating an event here. We don't want to forget about the little sidebar menu here, on the right-hand side of your screen. And of course, calendar is one of those options.

So if you don't want to leave the comfort of Gmail. If you want to create an event directly without opening up a new tab, all we need to do here is click the calendar icon, and we're gonna expand this little mini menu here. And you can view this in a few different ways. You can view this in either the day view, as we're viewing now, or the scheduled view.

I don't have a whole lot here, but here's that meeting that we just created. I actually prefer the day view myself, but you can choose the default that's best for you.

So let's say I'm gonna set up another meeting on the ninth. In this case, all I have to do is select when I would like this meeting to take place. I'm gonna click right around the 11 o'clock mark. And now what it's going to do is that it's already brought in that subject line again.

We see similar behavior here. It's brought it automatically. I'm gonna leave that this time because that is maybe a little more relevant than the question that we saw in the previous example. The time is already what I want.

Remember I selected that on a previous screen. Now in this case, it doesn't bring over anything further in the description. So I'll have to add that myself. And under guests, it doesn't bring anyone else over either.

Now, again, this might actually be preferable to you depending on how you like to work. This is a little bit quicker in that it doesn't have to open up another tab, in some cases, but you can see we don't have all the same information that is brought over either.

So if I need to add another guest, then I would just need to click on that icon or click on this area and add this guest in this case. So let's do that. We've got the person there. And so now we can see that we've got both myself and that other individual.

I can do further editing if I want to open up another tab. But in this case, everything looks pretty good. I'm gonna hit save. And I'm gonna get the exact same prompt that we saw before.

And I'm gonna say yeah, let's save it, just send it over. This expanded calendar, this little mini calendar on the side will continue to stay visible, unless I hit the X, right. Unless I minimize this myself, which again you might like as you're dealing with your email and as you're adding other projects along the way.

It's a great tool to see just a quick snapshot of your day, again without having to go back and forth between tabs.

Now the two methods that I just showed you remember can also be used for tasks, because long-time subscribers of the Simpletivity channel probably know that I recommend using your calendar as a very, very effective to-do list.

So what we just did there can be replicated for tasks.

So let's take this first example again. This case, I'm gonna close the tab that we created later. If I say create an event, typically what I will do in this case, it's gonna bring over that information, and it's really this stuff down here, the description, right the body of the email that is what I want, but I'll convert it as an all-day event, is what I'll do. I'll convert it as an all-day event, and then I'll select which day I'd like to complete that task.

The one really important thing that you need to watch out for here if you are creating tasks in this way, is that remember it's gonna automatically bring those individuals over.

So I'm gonna have to remove that individual if I just want this to show up on my task list. But yes we're gonna leave that tab there. But there's another way that you can do this as well. It might be fairly obvious that I could go over here to my tasks pane, or my tasks view, and I could open it up, and I could just say add task, but let me minimize that for just a second.

Because if we go back to the little three dots, the little more options here, we also have add to tasks. So if you happen to be a Google Tasks user, you can select that option, and then what it's gonna do, it's gonna open this up once again, but let's see if I scroll down.

Here we go, here's the can we meet Thursday. So it's added it under my no dates.

Right, these are the things that are due or have been due in the past. But it's gonna bring it in here as a new task. The subject comes over, but I think the really valuable thing is that it creates a link, a direct link, to that email itself.

Right so if I go about my day, and I'm working away and I see whatever this task is and I've probably will rename it in something that's more actionable, I can always go back and click on this, and immediately here to my left, it's gonna bring up that original email.

So if I need to go back and retrieve an attachment, or find a link or something along those lines, then I can access it there as well. And remember you can always access your tasks and view your tasks within Google Calendar as well.

Thank you so much for watching today's video, and don't forget, if you'd like to see one of your questions answered, just let me know in the comments down below.

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

One of the most common questions I receive is, "Scott, what are the very best power-ups that I should be using with Trello?"

Well, one of the first questions that I ask in response is, "What exactly are you trying to do?"

And for many of you, you want to have some advanced reporting. For many of you, you want to be able to sync cards between different boards. And for many of you, you want to create sub-tasks or dependencies.

Well, often in the past, I've had to recommend several different power-ups to use, but today, I'm sharing with you one of the power-ups that I am recommending on almost a daily basis, and that is Placker, or more specifically, Projects by Placker.

In fact, Placker, I think, is perhaps the best all-in-one power-up.

So, let's dive in, and let me show you the features of Placker.

So, in today's example, I've got three different boards, creatively named TEST Board 1, TEST Board 2, and TEST Board 3.

And as you may notice, I have the exact same list across all three of these boards. You can envision these as maybe different teams or different departments or maybe just different people, right? They're all working on their own separate To-Do list.

But one of the things that we are often asked for, or wanting to do within Trello, is to be able to see things at a higher level. You know, you manage more than just one board. I'm almost assured of that.

How can you see multiple boards at a higher level?

Walkthrough

Well, by installing the Placker power-up, you can do just that. You can see here in the top right-hand corner, I've got three links to go directly to Placker Board, Placker Gantt, or the Placker Track view.

Let me just open up this Placker tab here, and I want to show you what things look like. Now, at first glance, you may say that this looks pretty much identical to TEST Board 1. It's the same cards, we have the labels, you can even see my face, which cards I'm assigned to here, but just wait for it because it gets so much better than this.

Yes, you could start managing your projects here within Placker. If I click on any one of these cards and I go over here to this preview pane on the right, I can change dates, I can add a checklist, I can do almost everything that I would regularly do within the Trello interface. But here's where things get really, really neat.

In the top left-hand corner, you see something that says Select Boards. Right now, I'm just viewing TEST Board 1, but what if I'd like to see how all of these boards are performing in a more concise view? Well, I'm gonna select this option, and I'm going to add TEST Board 2 and TEST Board 3. I'm gonna say Load Selected Boards, and now, what you will see is that I've got all three boards right here on the same page, right? So, I don't have to switch between tabs. I've got all three of my boards viewed in front of me.

But I think it gets better even yet, because you will notice that there is a combined boards setting. Remember, each of these boards has the exact same lists, To-Do, In Progress, and Complete. I'm gonna select Combine Boards, and look at this. Now, I've got everything in a concise, user-friendly single board. I've got all three of these boards condensed into one.

So, I can manage and move my cards around, I can change things here across three boards, but just in a single view. I love this, and many of my clients love it as well. That's why more and more of them are starting to use Placker.

Now, it gets better. On the right-hand side, you can see we can actually view this information in a few different layouts. So if I go over here and I just want to, you know, list it by member, I can select this option here, and I can quickly see just all of the things that are assigned to me right here, and the left-hand list is just all the things that are unassigned.

I can go down to, well, let's list it by label. Let's just filter everything else out by label. Of course, you can search and filter and do something similar within Trello, but not in this manner, right? Not by separate lists, not in the way that things are laid out here within Placker.

So, this feature alone, this ability to combine boards—let's go back to that default view for just a moment—I think is worth the subscription price to Placker alone, and I have more and more of my clients that are using it just for that reason.

Gantt View

But, let's keep moving on. Here, let's go to the Gantt view. And I know a lot of you prefer, or at least enjoy, having a Gantt view of your projects.

Now, this is just a sample project, so it may not make sense, all of the different tasks that I have laid out here, but you can see each one of these icons here or durations represent a task within Trello.

The great thing is, whatever you do here, it syncs automatically back to your original Trello board. Now, just for simplicity's sake, I'm actually going to remove two of these boards, just so I can go back and make sure that I'm interacting with the right tasks over here. So, I'm gonna remove those other two boards. We've just got TEST Board 1 here working, and let's look at Task 4.

Here, it's about to start, it's about to be finished around February 14th. Let's say there's a delay or something like that. So, Task 4, let's go back and make sure that it's synced up here. Task 4, February 14th, there you see it. But let's say I prefer this view, and I say, I really need to push that out. There's other things going on. I'm just gonna drag this out about a week from now. It's gonna be due right over here along the 22nd.

If I go back, Task 4, look at that. It's changed it automatically. February 22nd. An instant sync between the Gantt chart and my view here. Let's go one step further and say, you know, it's actually gonna take longer. It's gonna take more than a day. Let's set a duration, because that's what a Gantt chart is all about, right? Start time and end time.

Now, you're probably saying, well, you haven't changed the end time, Scott, so isn't it gonna just look the same within Trello? Well, you're right, it's gonna still show February 22nd as the due date here, but if I click on the card, you're gonna see something special under the covers, and that is the start date is February 15th, and we still have our due date of the 22nd. It even tells me the duration, one week and one day.

I can edit that either here if I want to, or I can edit that here within the Placker interface. For those who are wanting start dates and end dates, Placker can do that for you as well.

Now, just before we go back to the normal Trello view, I wanna show you some other enhancements, some other features that Placker adds to the Trello interface. I don't want to miss out on the Track view. So, Track is the third view here within Placker, and here you have so many different ways of viewing and looking at your cards.

For example, here we've got sort of a summary of the end dates here, where they are in this workflow, when they are due, and which ones are overdue. If I click on this, I'm gonna see exactly which of those two cards are overdue. If I click on it again, just like we saw before, I can go in here and edit almost everything that I would normally see in Trello. In fact, more and more often, I find that clients are using Placker as a day-to-day tool.

They're going less and less within the Trello interface and more and more here within Placker, because there's just so much power. There are so many different views and graphs. This is just a sample of some of the graphs you can see here. Here, you see all of the different widgets, and there's even a Card burndown, for example, if you want to see where you should estimate and where you should track.

There are too many to cover in just today's video. But you can have a lot of fun just looking at the different graphs and the different ways that you can view your data here within Placker.

But I do want to jump back to Trello to show you some of the other things that get added here within the Trello interface. So, here, under Power-Ups, you will notice that Placker actually adds a few additional buttons, including mirroring and adding a dependency. So, in this case, mirroring, you can think of as syncing with another card.

I want to give this card sort of a unique name here. Let's just go Task 423 just so we can see this show up in a different board. So, Task 423 here, as we see within the Trello TEST 1 Board, does not appear in TEST Board 2 or TEST Board 3.

So, I want to open this up, select Mirror, because let's say I do want to sync this with my second board. I just need to select that board. I can select the list and where I want it to be, and I'm gonna say, Add Mirror. It may take just a few seconds, not very long, though, and you can see there's even a little link here, saying that I can show that card. I can click here and go directly to it. I can edit the mirror as well.

I'm not gonna click either of those. I just want to go directly over to board number two. Boom, there it is, Task 423. I've got a sync between those two. So, no matter what I do, either on this side on this board, or within my original Trello one board, I'm going to get a true sync between the two. You don't need to use another power-up just for syncing capability. You can do that here within Placker as well.

The other great thing is that you can also have it sync movements. So, if I move this from In Progress to Complete, another nice thing you'll see here is that it's gonna automatically check it off, because I've told Placker when anything moves to Complete, I want you to say that it's checked off.

Now, I haven't done anything. I haven't even visited Trello board number two. I'm gonna click on it, and guess what's in my Complete list. That's right, Task 423. If I move this all the way back to To-Do here in TEST Board number two, it's gonna uncheck it, right? We're not complete anymore, we're still in the To-Do phase.

Let's go back to TEST Board number one. Look what's waiting for me. A true sync with this card across multiple boards. The last one, which I'm not gonna get into in as great of detail, is the Add dependency. So, if you need to complete a particular card before something else, you can do so.

For example, here you see that this card actually has a dependency. Task number one needs to be finished before task number two. That seems to only make sense, right, one before two.

But let's see what that looks like on a different card. Task number six, I don't think has a dependency, so let's say I'm gonna click on Add a dependency. It can either be a predecessor or a successor. Let's say, well, let's add a predecessor in this case, and let's say task number five. Gotta do task number five before we accomplish task number six, so you can see that here. You can see that identified here within the Trello card. It's also identified within the Placker interface as well.

So, whether you want to create a true sync, create dependencies, or sub-tasks, or like I mentioned before, I think just combining boards, selecting multiple boards and seeing them in a single view, is one of the best features of Placker.

I would encourage you to check it out for yourself. They do have a free trial so you can test out all of the features I've shown you here to see if Placker is the right solution for you. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I look forward to your questions about Placker or about any other Trello power-ups.

Don't forget to leave me a comment down below and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

 Groups, labels, Google Contacts. What is it all about and why should you be using labels? Well in today's video I want to show how you can save time by creating groups within Google Contacts. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress

Why Use Groups

and when you create labels, formally known as groups within Google Contacts, you can save yourself so much time. If you have a team or particular group of people

that you contact on a regular basis, isn't it easy just to select one group here and then boom! All of their email addresses are input here on the to line. But this isn't the only place where you can use groups. You can use it in other Google applications as well.

Getting to Google Contacts

Now, let's get started by going back to Google Contacts. I want to show you two ways to get there because this is a question I get frequently.

Number one: If we go to the top right-hand corner, we have our Google Apps icon (the grid of dots). By clicking this, you should be able to find the Contacts icon. Now, if you don't see it up here, you may have to scroll down below. And let's not forget, you can drag these icons around. So, if you happen to find Contacts somewhere down below and want it in that top row, you can just drag it up and click it here.

But an even easier way to get into Google Contacts is to use a keyboard shortcut: simply type G C on your keyboard. This will immediately bring up Google Contacts—G for Google, C for Contacts.

Creating Labels

Alright, so let's talk about labels. You'll see labels over here on the left-hand side, and you can see that I've already created two labels: one from a Gmail example called "ABC Work Project," which includes four individuals, and another one called "Client Team," also with four individuals.

But let's start by creating a brand new label. You'll find this option at the bottom, indicated by a little plus sign. All you need to do is select a name for the label. I'm just going to keep it simple and name it "New Label," then click "Save."

Now, I've got my "New Label," but if I click on it, you'll notice that I don't have any contacts with this label yet. At this point, my only options are to either rename the label or delete it.

So, let's go back to my contacts. Let's say I want to select a few people to add to this new label. I'm just going to randomly select a few contacts—let's grab this one here and then select these three in a row as an example.

Applying Labels

So I've got these three selected and what I can do is I can come up here to the top

and when I click on manage labels, all I need to do is select the one that I want to apply it to so I'm gonna select New Label. Alright the check mark is there and I'm gonna select apply and now if we come over here you can see the New Label,

when I hover over it, I see these two icons but if I come over here you'll see there's a number three beside it. That's because, that's right, I've got those three people. They are now part of this group.

So when I use the New Label in Gmail and some other applications, all three of these individuals will be attached to it. Now it's very easy to remove people from a label as well. Very much similar as we did before.

If we check it, we can come up here and we can remove them from the label. I can uncheck such as that, apply, and now that person is no longer here.

Adding People to Labels

Now, Google actually gives you an additional way to add people to labels as well

and that would be if I grab someone like this, and I drag them into the label. You see that that is now gone from four to five because I've dragged that individual into this Client Team so you can drag people into labels as well.

And remember, you can change these and edit these at any time that you want.

If your Work Team changes over time, someone leaves the company, someone joins your team, you can change that on the fly. You don't have to change the name at all

and that's going to apply everywhere else.

Using Labels in Google Calendar

Now I've already shown you how you can use this in Gmail, right, you can just search.

You can just start typing just like you would any other name, any other contact name and that label should appear. But that's not the only place you need to go. There are other advantages of using such a label.

If we go into Google Calendar, we can also take advantage of Google Contacts. So let's say I want to invite the entire team to a new meeting. Let me just call this New Meeting 1. Give it a real simple name there.

I'm gonna select on more options and you're probably familiar with the add guests area. This is where you would typically start typing in the name or the email address of everyone that you want to attend. Well in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start typing in the name of, there's my Client Team that I want to add to this. So there it is. It appears in this quick search.

I'm gonna select it and immediately I have all the members of my client team. All five members are now added to this invitation. Another tip that I like to share is that even if you are not always needing the entire team but maybe you need just three out of the five or four out of the five, it's often quicker to add the team and then now, I can select remove for the particular individuals that I don't want to attend this particular meeting.

It's a lot faster then me trying to type in four separate email addresses, right, one at a time. Might as well just add the whole team and then quickly remove that particular person. So, now I've got those people here. I can send this meeting off and invite the whole group.

Using Labels in Google Drive

Another place where you can make use of labels and groups within Google Contacts is within Drive as well and probably the most typical example is when you're sharing information.

So let's say I want to share this JPEG file here. I've got it selected. I'm gonna come up here and go to share. That will bring up the share with others dialog and here again, we are recommended to enter in a name or an email address, but when it comes to names, we can use our labels. Here I'm gonna type in ABC for my ABC Work Project. It even tells me how many contacts are in there. I can select it

and now all four are input here into this screen. I can hit send and share it with everyone immediately. Now, keep in mind, in my examples, I've only used a few small groups, right? Of only about four or five individuals.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no limit on the number of contacts you can put inside a label. So if you have a much larger group or a much larger team you can do so, but please no spam.

Don't put a hundred or a few thousand. I don't see the purpose or why you would need to manage that. There's probably much better tools such as MailChimp

for example if you are using it for a newsletter or email marketing. On that note, I do know that there is a limit of 25,000 contacts that you can keep within the contacts for a single Google account.

You probably could put all 25,000 into a label, but I do not see why you would ever want to do so. As always, I'd love to here from you next.

Which of the tips that I shared is most helpful to you and how do you plan to get more out of labels and creating groups here in Google Contacts? And as always, if you have other suggestions for future videos here on the Simpletivity channel, please let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to leave me a comment or a question down below.

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

Today's video is sponsored by Paymo. Paymo is the easy way to manage all of your projects and stay on top of your tasks.

Whether you work together as a team or perhaps you're a freelancer, Paymo has a task management solution for you. And they also have time tracking and time sheet reporting built right into the application, so you can always stay on top of all of your projects.

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When it comes to your work day, do you sometimes feel more like a firefighter putting out all of the fires and crises and emergencies that pop up during your day?

Well, in today's video we're gonna be talking about a weekly review, and how we can prevent these types of emergencies just by taking a little bit of time out of our week to not only plan ahead, but also look behind to make sure that we haven't forgotten anything.

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

And I honestly believe that the weekly review is the most important meeting that you will have all week.

Now you may have heard of a weekly review before. It was popularized in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, however, David Allen's weekly review included 11 things on a checklist, and I think 11 things sounds like overkill.

It's too many things. So today I wanna give you an easy four-part checklist so you can have a very effective weekly review.

And you know what? I wanna remind you that if you're not the only one participating in this, it's simply not a weekly review. I think you deserve as little as 30 minutes a week just for yourself so you can set yourself up for success.

Mind Dump

So let's take a look at the checklist.

First off, you're gonna want to reserve a minimum of 30 minutes each week for your weekly review.

Now you can reserve a little bit of extra time if you'd like, but I think you can have a very effective weekly review in as little as 30 minutes.

Now at the end of today's video I'm gonna answer some frequently asked questions including when you should hold your weekly review, but let's dive into the checklist itself.

The very first thing I suggest is that you start with a five minute mind dump.

Now if you're not familiar with that term mind dump, sometimes it's referred to as a mind sweep or just think of it as a brainstorming session.

But this is your opportunity to get all of those ideas, all of those concerns, and all of those thoughts out of your head.

So you can either take out a blank piece of paper. You can use a whiteboard or a chalkboard, or you can take out your favorite note taking app, such as Google Keep or perhaps Evernote, and just write down all the things that are on your mind right now.

Now I suggest that you use a timer as a part of this process, because you might end up spending a lot more time than five minutes, in fact you might spend the entire 30 minutes just dumping everything out, but set a timer for about five minutes, and in most cases, the most urgent or the most pressing items will be the first things that come to mind.

You wanna make sure that you capture those ideas so that you can have a clear head as you go through the rest of the process.

Calendar Review

Now the next step I recommend you engage with is reviewing your calendar for the past week.

Now, what I do as a part of my review is that I will open up my calendar and literally take my mouse cursor and hover over top of every single event or appointment that I've had in the past week, and this is just a very brief mental jog of all of the things that I've been engaged with.

I'll hover over something and say, okay, I met with Lucy and we talked about that project. I met with the team and we talked about this.

But you know what? The real value in this is that without fail, there's at least one thing that I come across and I'll say to myself, you know what? I've forgotten to follow up with so and so about this item.

Or, you know what, I promised so and so that I would give them a call back 48 hours after the meeting.

This allows me to not forget those things in the past, but now I can do something about them.

I can add them to my to do list or I can add them to my project management tool, and in some cases I can do them as a part of my weekly review if it's something very, very quick, otherwise I'll add it to the appropriate area and do it later in the day.

But this often takes as little as two minutes just to review my last seven days or perhaps my last five business days just to make sure I have not forgotten anything in the past.

Future Review

After we're done looking in the past we wanna look into the future, and I recommend that you review your calendar for the next coming two weeks.

Now you can review further than just the next 14 days, but I recommend two weeks at a bare minimum.

This gives you enough time so that you can prevent those surprises and prevent walking into the office or opening up your laptop and saying, oh my goodness, was that today or is that meeting happening this morning?

That's exactly what you don't want happening next week or even tomorrow.

So as a part of your weekly review, just like we did in step two, we wanna take that cursor or just take your finger and just do a mental jog of every single commitment or meeting or event that you have on your calendar, make sure that you can prepare in advance.

Do you need to send a reminder to others about an upcoming meeting?

Do you need to prepare some travel time for perhaps a meeting or location that you're not familiar with?

Do you need to rearrange a meeting because you've double-booked yourself sometime in the next two weeks?

This relieves me of so much stress as I take again just a few minutes to look ahead and make sure I can either clear my calendar or adjust my calendar appropriately.

Now the last and final step in the weekly review checklist is to open up your project management tool or maybe you have some other place where you keep track of all of your goals, and you want to review all of the deadlines and all of your key commitments.

This is an opportunity not to actually do things or to get the work done, but just to review the status of everything within those projects.

Do you need to negotiate a new deadline depending on where you're at with that project or how other projects are going to affect your work?

Do you need to give people a status update of where things are at?

Whatever you need to do, this is an ideal time to get that high level view of all of your projects and key commitments.

When

Alright, so now some of the common questions that come up with a weekly review, I would say one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is when is the best time to perform a weekly review?

Which is the best day of the week and what's the best time of day?

Now, I typically recommend starting out and doing your weekly review on a Friday morning.

Not just because that's when I do my weekly review but for most of us, Friday is the last day of the work week, it's our last day before the weekend, and on top of that, we wanna do it early enough so that if we come across something that is urgent or that is very, very important, we've still given ourselves enough time to do something about it before the weekend, or before others leave work for the weekend as well.

It also makes it nice and clean when you're reviewing your calendar for the last week, you're basically just looking from Monday through Friday.

You're doing a mental jog of something that's still fairly recent. You're not going so far back in time or over a hump like a weekend. You can go back and review and remember what was going on in those meetings and events.

Now when it comes to looking forward, another nice thing of having your weekly review on a Friday is it sets you up fresh for Monday morning, and I know a lot of us sort of struggle with Monday morning and what's going on. We're thrown back into the whirlwind.

Well, the nice thing about doing your weekly review on Friday, you can set yourself up for a great start, and no surprises, remember, you're gonna look ahead at both Monday and Tuesday, see if there's anything really significant or big and scary, and make adjustments or plan ahead accordingly.

Now of course you can pick any day or time of the week that works best for you.

In fact, I'd love to hear from you if you're already performing a weekly review, when do you perform it? When do you schedule it into your calendar? And do you actually add it as a real event?

That would be my last tip for you is make sure you actually include this on your calendar.

If you don't add it, if you don't give it the priority it deserves, it simply won't happen.

So I wish you all the best as you perform your weekly review.

I want you to be so much more productive within Gmail, and I'm gonna show you how to do that by introducing you to some new Gmail extensions. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity,

Scott Friesen

helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress.

And today I want to show you some extensions, some Gmail add-ons from CloudHQ. Now CloudHQ actually has nearly 40 different Gmail extensions to help you be more productive,

Vbut I want to share with you three of my favorites, and we're gonna get things started with Gmail Tabs.

Gmail Tabs

Here at the top of the screen you will see that I have a few different labels.

These are called Gmail Tabs, and once you have the extension installed, the first one you're gonna see is your default, your inbox, but you can now add additional tabs at the top of your inbox.

So a few weeks ago I showed you a very simple Gmail workflow using a couple of labels that I have here: Action Required and Waiting for Response.

But you'll probably recognize if you're a Gmail user that after you have about five or so labels, this can get really difficult to manage here. You're scrolling up and down, and you may even have some that are hidden down below. Where do you go to find those labels?

Well, why not have the ones that you use most frequently at your fingertips at the top of the screen?

If I select Action Required, it's just going to immediately go to all of those emails there. If I want to select Waiting for Response, it's immediately gonna show me any of the emails with that particular label.

So how do you use it?

Well, let's say I want this Completed label to be up top here as well. All I need to do is select these little three dots, which gives me some more options.

And once you have the extension installed, you'll see this little CloudHQ menu addition. In this case, I'm gonna select Add to Tabs, including Sublabels, and you can see immediately, I now have it at the top of my screen. I can click on it, and all of my emails that have that particular label will appear.

Now on the right-hand side, there's an Edit Tab function. If I want to clean things up, I can remove that asterisk. The only reason I added that asterisk is that I wanted this to sort at the top of my labels because I knew how difficult it was to manage labels over here.

So I'm gonna remove that asterisk. I'm gonna hit Save. Now it's a lot cleaner, and you can also rearrange these as well, right? I can rearrange the order of my tabs. So let's drag it.

I want to drag that all the way to the end. Let's move it over there. There we go.

So I can drag things around if I want to, hit Done, and now I've got my tabs here at the top.

But let me click over to the inbox for one more second. I want to show you an additional way to add a tab here because you don't have to have an existing label.

You don't have to use labels at all if you don't want to. I'm gonna type in BestBuy here in the search bar because I know I've got a bunch of emails here by BestBuy, and let's say this is something that I'd like to review or I'd like to take a look at on a regular basis.

Well, you'll notice I now have another option here called Add to Tabs. So I get to select that option, Add to Tabs, and immediately I've got this filter. So even if I get new BestBuy messages going forward, it's gonna show up underneath this tab.

And if I don't like the way that it looks there, let's go in here. I'm gonna hit Edit, and let's give it the proper capital B space, capital B, we'll hit Save, we're gonna hit Done.

So I've just immediately created this filter. It's not a particular label, but now I've added it to my tabs area.

So you might want to check out Gmail Tabs.

Alright, let's move on to extension number two. And this all has to do with saving time.

Gmail Snippets

when you are crafting a message within Gmail.

So here I am, I've opened up a brand new message, and I think perhaps the most common scenario for this particular add-on is gonna be when you're replying to someone, and think about some of the questions that you reply to very, very often, right? It's the same set of wording. It's the same sentences that you use time, and time again. Well, why not just save those phrases? Maybe you could even save an entire email, and then retrieve it with just a few clicks.

So at the bottom of the screen here, you'll see I have this little T-plus. That lets me know that I have Gmail Snippets installed, and all I have to do is select the backward slash on my keyboard, and it's gonna pop up this tiny menu here that is showing me all of these preloaded phrases, which either I've created, or the ones that we're looking at right now are some of the default ones. So I can either use my cursor, but probably what's easier is just to use the arrow keys, because I already typed something into my keyboard, and I can select this answer one, hit enter, boom, I've got that phrase right in there.

Let's hit backslash again, and I'm gonna say, thanks for using our app. Boom, there it is. Now those are two very, very short sentences. You can craft an entire email if you'd like to.

So let's go down to the settings here. I'm gonna click on this, and I'm gonna say you've got two options here. We can either create a new Snippet from this message. That's actually a really smart idea. If there's a particular email that you do quite frequently, or phrases that you use quite frequently, you can actually create it from the particular message. But let's select browse Snippets here, and here you can see all of the ones that we have installed so far, each has a shortcut itself, a name, and then the content itself. And of course you can always edit, and delete these ones as well.

I'm gonna select add just to show you how easy it is to add a new Snippet. Just gonna call this one Test. The name I'm gonna say Test as well, and I just gonna say this is a test Snippet from… Yup, CloudHQ. Alright, now remember again, you can add a lot more texts than just a single sentence. You can have paragraphs in here, you can have line spaces if you want, and at the bottom you can even add a few variables as well, including name, including email, or day of the week. I'll show you that in just a moment.

So I'm gonna save this one here. You can see that it's been added here to this list, and if you get a really long list, you can even search for all of your Snippets here as well. I'm gonna hit done, and I'm go back to my emails. I'm gonna go down a line, I get to hit backslash again, and I don't see test in this menu, right? It's only gonna show you about six here in this first preview, but if I start typing in T, well now I just get the thanks with T, and hey, Test. There's my test one. So I can input that one immediately.

Let me show you this other one that has this day of the week built right into it. I'm gonna go back slash, and this one. Oh, what is the day of the… And yeah, that's right. And have a fantastic, it's blank here, because it's gonna be built into this functionality. If I hit a return, and have a fantastic Tuesday, and that's right, it is Tuesday today. So no matter what day of the week it is, it's going to automatically input that into this particular phrase.

So you might want to check out Snippets, especially if you want to save time replying, and writing those very, very lengthy emails.

Alright, I'm gonna close up this message for just a second, but we're gonna get back into that for our third, and final Gmail extension. And that has to do with email tracking. And I want you to think of how many times have you sent

Email Tracker

an important email, or maybe you've reached out to a particular client, and you just, you wish you'd know when they opened up that email, because when can you follow up with a phone call? When can you follow up with another email? When would be the ideal time to check back in with them? You want to know when they have read the email. I don't mean reply, but when have they read the email.

So let me type in an email address to a test account that we're gonna use here. And I'm just gonna call this a test tracking in this case, and I'm not even include a message, I don't need a message for this, because we just want to track when this person has actually read this particular email.

So down below you can see there's a little, it almost looks like a wifi signal, but this is the icon for email tracking options. So if I click on this, I have a few different ways, a few different selections I can choose here, I can get it to automatically send me a reply, or send me an email if this person doesn't reply in a couple of days. But really what I'm after here is this, send me an email upon open. When they open it, I want to be notified of it. And then there's a few other options you can choose from here as well, including send me a text message, and get a text alert if you want. But I'm just gonna keep this one selected. Send me an email when this person opens this particular email.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go right ahead. I can get a select send. Alright, so just sends the email like a normal email. And then what we're gonna do is I'm gonna switch over to this, to that test account here. And of course, email is not always instantaneous, but let's see if I can… There it is. There's that email. This is this test tracking email. So of course it's unread at this state, right? I haven't clicked on it yet. So I'm going to click on this message. Of course now it has been read.

Let's see what happens if we go back to our original account. So let's go back to our Gmail account, and it may take a few seconds. I mean it may take up to a minute, or so. I might just, I'm gonna refresh my inbox here to see how quickly it's gonna actually come back, and notify me that that particular message has been read.

Alright, so there it is. Here at the top of my email, I've got an email from, it's given me a notification saying that this email address has just read, and here's the subject line. Now if I click on the message itself, it's gonna give me some more details. So and so has read your email less than a minute after it was sent. So it's gonna tell me how long it actually sat in their inbox before they read it. It's gonna give me details sent on read on location, if it can give it to me, and it's even gonna give me a small preview of the message down below. So if I'm curious like what? Like which email was that? What was that email about? It's gonna let me know here down below as well.

So regardless if this is a sales conversation, if you need to follow up with confirming a particular date, maybe now that you know that they've read it, you're gonna follow up with a different message. Are you gonna give them a phone call an hour from now?

So if you want a very useful, and free email tracking tool, you might want to check out the tracking tool from CloudHQ. I'll be sure to include a link to all of these tools so you can try them out yourself.

And I'd love to hear from you next. Which of these three are you most excited about? Which of these three are gonna be most helpful to your workday, or most helpful to your business? Be sure to let me know down in the comments below.

I want to thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Please give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment, or a question down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.