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Here on the Simpletivity channel, I talk an awful lot about productivity tools, things such as Trello, maybe note apps such as Google Keep, and of course, email. It's something that we still can't get rid of here in 2018—ways in which we can be more productive and efficient with our communication.

But you might be surprised that one of the most frequently used tools in my arsenal isn't a web app at all. In fact, it's not even a project management tool.

It's something here that lives in my taskbar, and it's called Gadwin PrintScreen. Now today, we're talking about print screens in general, but I'm going to show you the one that I use, why I use it so frequently, and if you're not using some type of print screen resource or some type of print screen utility, why you should think about it—why you should consider it.

And no joke, I probably use this utility up to 10, 20, maybe 30 times in a given day. So how often are you on a particular website, or you might even be in a document on your computer, and you want to grab something?

Well, we know if we hit print screen on our computer, we can get a screen print of everything that we see. But in most cases, I just want a certain section—maybe I just want a quick print screen of this particular list.

Print Screen

Well, I use Gadwin PrintScreen. It allows me to hit the Print Screen button on my keyboard, just like you normally would, but then select the specific area that you're after.

And once I'm happy with what I have selected here, all I need to do is hit this check mark here, and it is copied—it's copied to the clipboard. I'm just going to open up Paint to use a simple example, and now I can paste it.

I can paste it there, I can paste it into an email, I can paste it into a document, wherever I like. I use this tool so frequently when I'm either grabbing something I need to share with someone else, or I want to import it or bring it into some other document.

I really use this a lot for my graphics. A lot of the thumbnails here on the Simpletivity YouTube channel start with a screen grab, with something as a print screen.

So let me show you some of the print screen options that you can use. Obviously, it's pretty simple to set up, right?

Print Screen Options

You hit print screen to grab that particular area. I can just click and drag right where the cursor is.

I can just click and drag over it, and if I want to redo it or if I want to scrap it, I can do so as well. If I don't want to hit the check mark, actually, I can just hit enter on my keyboard, which is sort of a nice alternative that I use quite frequently as well.

But let's see what other options we have with this print screen utility, some of the things that you may want to consider or think about. So, there are a few different things here.

You can see we can capture full screen, the window that you're in, or a rectangular area. It's this last one that I find so helpful and what I use most often because I can quickly just get a small portion of the screen.

But let's go look at some of the other options that it gives us because I may not be using all of these options, but you may find them helpful. So yes, I've got things to run at startup here.

A lot of these are more just sort of preferences here—a countdown. I've never thought this to be terribly helpful; I want to capture it immediately when I do so.

But I have a lot of these things turned off because I want it to be as less intrusive as possible. So, I don't want to see a widget anywhere on the screen.

I don't want that countdown timer, as I said. I don't want a notification message, and I certainly don't want a camera shutter sound, or I don't want anything audible to go along with it.

Now, our second option here has to do with hotkeys, and really the only one that I care about is the capture rectangular area. You can actually assign this to other hotkeys or shortcuts if you like.

I like it to be assigned to the typical or the standard print screen button on my keyboard, so that's what I use here. But I could reprogram that if I wanted to; I could choose another key or another combination of keys like you see above.

Now, when it comes to the image itself, this is probably most helpful if you want to capture the mouse cursor or not. Sometimes, if I need to show someone how to change a setting, maybe like this particular example, I want to show them which checkbox to click.

Maybe I would want to tick this off so that my cursor could be placed in that particular place on the screen and show them exactly where I want them to click. But in many cases, I don't want the cursor in the way.

I don't want to remember to have to, you know, move the cursor somewhere else, so I usually have this unchecked. We can resize the captured image, so by default, you can make it larger or smaller.

You could add a watermark if necessary. I believe in this case you can change what that watermark looks like, but I don't want a watermark.

I don't want a shadow, and no, I'm typically not printing this on a black-and-white printer or some other need to convert it into grayscale. But it might be helpful for you to know the number of different options that you have here.

And then lastly, we have post-capture options. So, a couple of things that can be helpful, but again, you'll see I have most of these things turned off.

Preview the captured image—I just want to be able to hit print screen, grab it, and then paste it immediately into the document or wherever I am placing that screen grab. Copy capture to the clipboard—this is pretty much a no-brainer because you need to get it somewhere else, right?

You want to be able to paste it or place it somewhere else. You can capture it to a designated folder, right?

You can send that via email, you can send that capture directly to the printer, and it looks like it does give you the opportunity to add some other custom actions as well. But for my needs, in most cases, all I want to do is hit print screen on my computer and say, you know what, I just want a screen grab of this.

I'm gonna hit checkmark, and then I can bring it somewhere else and just paste it immediately into that other file format, that other document. Like I said, many times it's an email that I'm pasting these images into.

Now, this video is not about recommending necessarily Gadwin PrintScreen. There are a lot of screen grab or screen capture tools available to you, both for PC users and for Mac users.

And recently, on my Samsung S9 phone, I've realized that they have a nice handy widget that I can use to do screen grabs on my mobile device as well. So I don't have to capture the entire screen; I can just do portions of it.

So I would recommend that you check out a screen grab tool. You might want to start with Gadwin, but there are other such tools, such as Snagit, and a number of other tools available to you.

So, if you're not already using one, I would recommend that you do so.

Hello everyone, thank you very much to Scott for having me here on Simpletivity. It is so good to be back.

I'm going to talk in today's video all about Things 3 and how we can use the project management functions to coordinate your own personal projects, which is quite exciting. For those who don't know, my name is Francesco.

I run a YouTube channel called Keep Productive here on YouTube, and I do reviews on productivity apps and resources. It's very much a complementary channel to Simpletivity, and vice versa.

Scott will be doing a video over on my channel all about Trello power-ups, which I'm really, really excited about posting. So without further ado, guys, let's dive over to the laptop and explore Things 3 for project management.

Things Overview

Now, in today's video, I wanted to dive into Things 3. This is an application available for macOS and iOS.

It's really for all others—a simple to-do list application. But what I wanted to talk about specifically is the project side of things.

Obviously, you can only share personal projects here; you can't share with other people. But I think it's a great visual application for planning out a new project.

I wanted to dive into what it exactly means, how you can get started with it, and a little bit more about the application. So guys, we have Things 3 in front of us.

I'm obviously viewing the macOS version—it's only available on that platform at the moment. Of course, if you're a Windows lover, it's a bit of a shame.

On this left-hand panel, we have a new list section. You can do typical things inside of the actual Things 3 list building.

You can create a new project, which is a time-based project, which is quite exciting. We'll be talking about that in a moment.

And there are areas, which are a group of projects or to-dos based on a responsibility. I've already created two: I've created Work and Personal.

Obviously, that tends to be a lot of people's situations, although there are tons of areas you can create. There are some great examples out there if you check social media like Twitter to see how people are using this—it's really extensive.

Create a Project

Let's go ahead and create a project. Let's say a kayaking event or tracking activity.

We're looking at kayaking next month, I think by the sound of it. If we scroll this one down and drag it under Personal, it now becomes a personal project under the area Personal.

You can do that with the same, so for example, you could create a project for work. So, for example, I could say Conference—I always go with conferences as my demo project.

I'm gonna drag it down to Work. If I just pop it in Work, it appears there.

You can add as many projects as you'd like to the different area sections, which is something a lot of people love inside of this application. So if I go to kayaking, you can see here it's a very simple project.

Pie Chart

It looks like a task, but it's actually not. Here is a pie chart—we'll be showing you this near the end.

It's a pie chart for the completion of a task. So once a task is completed, you can actually see it.

For example, if you've added all your project tasks to this project, you can see this partially filled. So, for example, if you're getting planned and organized, this can be a great way to visualize what you've got left and how much you have left.

Projects

Let's go into the project options. You have a host of different options.

You've got Complete Project, which will allow you to complete the project and now go into your logbook. Your logbook is accessible in this left-hand panel.

But the great thing is you can actually complete a project inside of Things 3. In some other applications, you've only got the ability to archive a project, which is a bit of a shame.

But again, it's something that serves as a bonus of Things 3. You can add a When date to it.

For example, let's say we were going on the 10th of November kayaking. As you can see, the actual project disappears from the actual personal section—it turns into Upcoming.

So if you don't want it to actually appear in Upcoming, you can add a deadline to it instead. For example, let's say we want to add the 10th of November to it and actually remove the When of the tasks.

It should appear back in this personal area, and that's because once you've assigned it there, you've given it a fixed date. Whereas this is a deadline, and actually, you can still use it as a project.

It becomes less accessible through the personal area section. Let's just explore a few more of the benefits you can advocate.

Benefits

You can add a When deadline, you can add tags to this project. For example, you could say Fitness and add a tag to it.

When you are searching stuff, you can actually find it. For example, if you had multiple fitness ones, you could click in this area and actually filter down, which is very helpful.

We also have Move, so you can move it to work, for example, or another area. You can repeat, so you can actually repeat an entire project.

So this is like if this was a monthly event and you planned for it. I don't know what it could be—it could be a newsletter for your website.

Then you could have a week or sort of monthly tabling, a monthly plan, and obviously, all of the tasks in here. You can duplicate a project, which is quite easy to do.

You can actually delete it and share it, but again, the sharing abilities aren't great. Now, as you can see here, you've got notes, and down here you can sort of go crazy.

Personal Projects

What I recommend for a lot of people when they're starting personal projects is to use this button down here, which is the heading area. This is something that ToDoist doesn't have.

It has it, but in this really strict format, which I don't necessarily like. So, for example, I'm going to put Planning here.

I'm going to add another one called The Day, so I'm gonna drag that one down there. You can see here that these are movable, archivable, removable—all from there.

Once I create a to-do, it opens up into this lovely, beautiful panel in which I can add notes to, I can add a date, tags, checklists, and the like. So, for example, in the planning process, maybe when we're planning for kayaking, I can call the sports center.

In my notes, I'm gonna put Ask for two kayaks to rent, and I'm gonna put this one on the task list for Wednesday. As you can see, you can add checklists if you want and even a deadline.

Now, if I drag this and put it under Planning, it is neatly organized under there, which is lovely. And of course, I haven't completed anything yet, so you can see that this is my chance to open.

We'll be demonstrating how it works in a minute. So, we're gonna put an Invite List to send the invite list out, and I'm gonna add a tag to it.

For example, I'm gonna put Easy because that's gonna be quite easy, apparently, to do, and I'm gonna give it a due date of Friday. So I'm gonna drag that one down there—this is all part of the planning process.

Then I'm going to put, for example, in The Day, I'm going to put Pick up all team members, and I'm gonna drag that one down there. As you can see, it's actually added the Friday to it.

But I'm gonna give it another day, and I'm actually gonna put that on the day of completion. So you can see here you can start building a lovely outline of a personal project here, or it can be work—whatever you want.

As you can see, it's a great way to do it. If you wanted to, you can add in a few details about the event up here, which makes it really accessible.

Now, let's say today I got the call center thing done. I called the sports center, and as you can see up here, what's been updated quite nicely is the pie chart for the completion of the projects.

You can see a nice outline of exactly when it's been completed, and that task disappears. You can even see the logged item below and when you did it, which is quite exciting.

And of course, the actual header that it was under. So if you're looking for a great way to coordinate a project in personal situations, this could be your best bet.

As you can imagine, Things 3 is a bit of an investment—it's $49.99, which seems simple but provides enough access. This could be your bet again—it's worth the investment.

Anyway, guys, hopefully, that gave you a nice outline of everything. As you can imagine, once you click Upcoming, you can actually see the tasks and the project linked to it.

Anyway, guys, hope this gave you a nice outline of Things 3. I will hopefully be doing more videos on this very soon over on my channel.

I've done a Skillshare course on it recently, so you can definitely check that out. Anyway, guys, a big thank you to Scott for having me here on the channel.

Please do join me on the Keep Productive YouTube channel and feel free to subscribe to Simpletivity, the awesome channel over on YouTube. Anyway, guys, big thanks for stopping by today—make sure to have a great week.

Keep productive, and I'll see you guys very, very soon. Cheers.

reminders and tasks in Google Calendar. what's the difference and what should you be using them for?

Find out in today's video. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And, up until recently, you had to make a hard choice between reminders and tasks. Yes, for the longest time you had to choose, do you want to use reminders on your Google Calendar or do you want to use tasks, but unfortunately Google Calendar didn't allow you to use both.

Well now you can. You can have both reminders and tasks on your calendar and I'm gonna show you the difference between the two.

Calendar Event

But let's actually add Events into the mix here just so we are clear on the differences between these three.

So in my example calendar here I've got one event, it's shaded here in blue, "lunch with Ted. " So I'm gonna receive a reminder if I have that enabled,

here you can see it's set for thirty minutes before. Of course, if I select the edit button I can add a location.

Here I got actually an add on added to my calendar where I can make it a zoom meeting or if you are using some other type of video conferencing tool. A fair amount of option within a calendar event, you can add guests of course to a calendar event.

But let's not spend too much time here, right an event is something where in most cases you have to be at a physical location or maybe it's a phone call, it's a meeting, it's some actual event of activity that you're engaged with. Now you'll notice on the previous day I actually have a reminder here, a reminder to, if I click on it to expand it "Pick up Todd from school".

Maybe there's an early dismissal and I need to pick up this child at 1 pm. So what's the difference from a reminder than an event?

Well, this might not necessarily have to do with a physical location, maybe I just want to remind myself to call someone or I wanna remind myself to send an email somewhere else.

Now it's going to remind me at a specific time, this one is assigned to 1 pm and I can check it off, so when I complete this task, I can say "Mark as done" and what's interesting here it's actually put it up here in the Monday you're probably wondering why has it done that? Well today happens to be Monday so although this was scheduled for Wednesday and I said I had completed it, that's where it's put it, here in that Monday just to track it if I want to.

Now I can go back and say "Mark as not done" but you see what has happened there and I want to show this in particular you can see that it adds it here back to the Monday where it was last, right we know that it was originally scheduled for the Wednesday so something to keep in mind is if you do check it off, it's going to go and keep track of it in the particular date that you checked it off when you checked it off. But if you undo it, it's not going to bring it back here or if it was an all day reminder, it's going to bring it back where it was last.

Grouping Reminders

So another thing that you're going to notice here and let's look at Monday again as an example, is that I have three all day reminders and then I have two specific reminders at 8 a.

m. One of the things that I don't appreciate about reminders and Google Keep is that they group them all together.

If I want to see what these three reminders are, I need to click on it and now I can see a breakout of those three reminders, I can tick them off one at a time, or delete or edit them but I don't actually have a way to auto expand them at least not in this view. Now if I do change it to, I believe it's the Daily view, no it's still gonna be there, it's still going to be all of those grouped together in that fashion.

So that's one of the things I don't like about reminders, that it continues to group them. Here at 8 am I've got to do what, I've got to go click on it and now I can find out what is exactly associated with that time.

Tasks

But you will notice that tasks behave differently.

Here I havea couple of tasks on the 16th on the Tuesday and although I have multiple tasks, it will not group them together, it'll actually treat them as separate items. Now tasks cannot be placed at a specific time so that's one of the biggest difference between reminders.

reminders can be either all day or at a specific time, but tasks will not have a time associated with that. It'll have a date associated with it, but not a specific time, if I wanna change that to the 17th I can add a description, I can add a little more detail

to this but it's always gonna appear at the top of the calendar, now for those of you who may have watched some of my previous videos, here on Simpletivity you will know that I recommend to a number of my clients to keep their to do list within their calendar because

View Tasks

they're spending so much time in their calendar anyhow, this also keeps your tasks in the forefront. They never go hidden no matter where I go or scroll as a part of my day, I'm always going to see those tasks upfront and of course it's pretty easy to just drag them to a different date or to drag them back as well.

Now you will also notice that you can view your tasks in a few additional ways. On the right hand side, in the recently redesigned Google Calendar, we have a tasks widget and if I open that up, you can see I have these tasks, along with some other tasks that I have here assigned.

The ones down below, here's a blank one lets get rid of that one. We don't need the blank test one there.

The ones down below you'll see don't have a date assigned. So you can have a number of tasks which are not assigned to a particular date but the ones above you can see, are the ones we see in the calendar to the left.

They are assigned to a particular date. If I go over here, let's check this "email Steve"

and I say Mark complete, it is going to cross it off up here so I can see it on the date, but you will also know if I expand the completed section it was also crossed it off down below as well. Sorry this wasn't the Steve one this was the Susan one, just for clarification, this was the Susan email so it's crossed off that task below there as well.

So you might like to view or to use this little task window because it can be very helpful to see all of your tasks in the same place and of course we don't always have tasks which are assigned to a particular date or time. So I'd love to hear from you next, How are you using reminders and/or tasks within Google Calendar?

Do you have a preference and what are some of the rules that you use when selecting the differences between these three? Be sure to let me know and share with others

in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video.

I hope you subscribe right here to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up and I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

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

Hi everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And you're probably wondering, why am I whispering?

Well, I'll tell you in a bit, but today I want to talk about ASMR. And if you have no idea what that acronym stands for, I want to tell you about it.

First off, you may be thinking it's weird that I'm talking about ASMR on a productivity channel such as Simpletivity. But because my goal is to help you to get more done and enjoy less stress, I wanted to focus on something that helps me to feel less stress on a regular basis, and that is ASMR.

So first off, what exactly does that mean? ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

Yeah, it's a mouthful. You can see why it's more commonly referred to as ASMR.

In summary, individuals who are affected or triggered by ASMR may feel a tingling feeling or other pleasurable sensations from soft sounds such as whispering, but other soft sounds as well. Now, by this point in the video, you may already know if you are affected by ASMR or not.

There are many, many people like myself who are, but there are just as many people who are not affected by ASMR. Now, my intent for producing today's video was not to have a trending video or a higher performing video here on YouTube.

Over the last two to three years, ASMR has really taken off within the YouTube platform. But for me, roughly once a week, I will enjoy an ASMR video to help me relax.

In my specific circumstance, once a week, perhaps I'll have difficulty sleeping. And I find by listening to an ASMR video for several minutes, while it won't put me to sleep, it will certainly help me to relax both my mind and my body.

And so, if you are affected by soft sounds, you may want to look at this as a way of stress relief after you've had a very hectic workday or a challenging or difficult day. You may want to look to ASMR videos to help you relax so you can unwind and finish your day and set yourself up for a great night's sleep.

Of course, ASMR can be used in a variety of different ways to relieve stress. So, if you're new to ASMR, some of the things that you may encounter…

Number one, often ASMR artists will use a stereo microphone like I'm using right now. And if you happen to be listening to this with a good pair of stereo headphones or stereo earbuds, you can see and you can feel the differences as I'm going around the microphone from the left ear to the right ear.

Of course, there's a lot more to ASMR than just whispering. Some ASMR artists may use their fingers such as this.

Some do a form of tapping or scratching. I'm not so triggered by those, but they'll often also use a variety of objects to trigger certain sensations.

It's just a piece of paper I had lying around beside my computer. And if you do decide to explore or do a search for ASMR videos, you will find an endless supply of objects and sounds and different ways that these types of triggers can be produced.

So, I realize today's video was very different than what you've come to expect here on the Simpletivity channel. But because this is something that I have found helpful, I wanted to share it with you.

And I'd love to hear from you. Are you affected by ASMR?

Do you happen to watch ASMR videos from time to time? I'd love to hear your experience in the comments.

And if you're still watching this video and you're not affected by ASMR, I'd still love to hear from you as well. What is your opinion or what is your feeling?

You know, as someone who loves cilantro in my meals and my dishes—I love Mexican food, I love Indian food, and I love cilantro in both of those dishes and many others—I find it amazing that there are some people to whom cilantro tastes like soap. And maybe you're one of those individuals.

To me, because I don't have that same type of sense with my taste buds, that just seems amazing to me, almost absurd. And I imagine if you are not affected by soft sounds such as whispering, you may think that ASMR is pretty absurd too.

I want to 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.

Let's find our focus with Workflowy. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, and today I'm doing something a little differently.

Yes, today I'm gonna be taking a look at Workflowy. It says it's going to help us to break big ideas into manageable pieces, then focus on one piece at a time.

But what makes this different is that I'm going to be reviewing Workflowy in real time. Actually, I've never spent a single second with this application.

So why am I doing this? Well, number one, several of you have actually recommended Workflowy and asked me to review this application.

And number two, I've never actually done this before—actually gone through a product and reviewed a piece of technology in real time. So let's do this.

Everything from the sign-up process to creating our first… I don't know if it's called a note. I don't know what's gonna happen behind this screen.

So I'm going to start out by putting in some email addresses in here. Let's create a password and hit sign up, and let's see what happens with Workflowy.

Let's see how long it takes and if it gives us some introductory information here. I'm gonna say never—let's get our LastPass stuff out of there for now.

Welcome to Workflowy, where you'll just have a blank page. I'm gonna show you what I do here.

It's only turned that way, but you know what, like I like to do with most of my pieces of technology, I just want to dive in and see what happens here. You can see it is a very, very blank screen.

I've got a bullet point here, I've got a little star here on the right, and we've got a little toggle here—Show Completed and Search Home. I guess I can maybe filter by stars, and I've got settings here as well.

This is somewhat what I expected because I believe Workflowy is a brainstorming or mind mapping tool—a great place to get down those quick notes. So here's bullet point number one.

Brainstorm

Here's bullet point number two, and yes, I realize I added some additional fun in that first bullet point. If I hit tab, okay, I can tab and add more notes, additional notes down below.

But I think the real power of Workflowy, if I am not mistaken, is that you can click on these tabs, and look at that—you can go back in and out. So here you can see I'm a few sections deeper into this note.

So here's some additional text, maybe one more bullet point here. One more bullet point—you'll see why I need spellcheck so often here.

But then I think I can go back somehow. So this is notes; what are these arrows doing in here?

There's some way I can get back out of this. I think I can complete it; I can add a note or duplicate it over here.

Additional Notes

What happens if I click on it itself? Hmm… If I hit Home—okay, there we go.

If I hit Home, I go all the way back to the top level, but you notice here there's now a plus sign beside that note. So if I hit that and expand it, now I get some additional notes as well.

Those are those additional notes that I added. I can keep adding them here.

But I think one of the benefits, what a lot of people enjoy about Workflowy, is that you can minimize that. You can go into so much greater detail down below here and then go off on a tangent, right?

You can add additional things here, but if you don't want to see everything else, if I just click on the bullet point itself, now I zoom in. And if I do that again, I think, there we go.

So additional text, more text, even deeper down the trail. All right, so you can go in and out.

Expand Notes

Now you can see the breadcrumbs at the top. I can go back to the notes, okay, and then I can go back to Home.

So here we can see this one is now expanded, so there's even more things that you can expand here as well. Let's take a look.

You'll notice as I hover over these notes, there's a few other things here: Complete, Add Note, Duplicate. Complete—what does that look like?

Let's say if I have completed this one here, I can either hit Ctrl + Enter or Complete. Okay, a strikethrough makes sense, right?

I'm done with that; I can still go in here and edit it, I guess. Now can I change that? If I hit Complete again—there you go, just to undo it.

Okay, so that's what Complete does. What else do we have here? Share—okay.

Duplicate, I think, is pretty straightforward. Adding a note is just gonna add another space down below.

Oh, it didn't add a bullet point that time, so I guess it's adding some further text or further information below that note. But let's go to Share—let's see what that gives us here.

Share Notes

Okay, we can enter in or paste in an email address. We can get a shareable link, and here's a nice and simple toggle: Can we edit this or not?

Back or forth, and then add that person there. I'm not gonna go through with a specific—actually, you know what, let's paste in something here.

I'm gonna use my other Scott Test, or ScottFTest2, Gmail address, and sure, let's say you can edit. And I'm gonna say add—I just want to see what this looks like.

Really, how can I see this later on? I can add more people if I want.

I'm gonna hit X here, so I've added that one there. Can I—okay, there we go.

There's a little different icon there. I have to click on it to see who I have shared it with, but that's how you can share some of these individual notes.

And I'm assuming, the way bullet points and indentation work, that they're gonna be able to have access to everything here, right? If I select this, they're gonna have access to everything down this particular path, so to speak.

Export Delete

Not this bullet point, but of course this one here that says "more text even deeper down the trail." We can export and delete.

Delete looks pretty straightforward. We do have a timestamp at the bottom, so that's interesting—it does keep track of when that particular point was last made or edited.

If I say Export, what kind of options do we have here? Okay, formatted plain text, plain text, or OPML.

Okay, so we can even grab the code if we need to. Plain text removes the formatting, and then we've got some formatting here such as the rounded point.

I guess this is just a simple copy and paste, and then you can put it somewhere else, or there's a click to download button as well. All right, let's star a few things.

Stars look over here on the right, and look at that—when I hit that, something happened down below. Let's hit that again.

If I hit that, there's a home—hmm, interesting. I don't know what that does.

Quick Links

Let's do that with another one. If I've got my cursor over here—no, does that star only appear at the top?

Okay, maybe I need to create a new one, because that seems to be the same as what we saw earlier. If I go here, what if I star that one?

Okay, so now I've got some—it looks like I've got some—they're almost like Quick Links. Ah, I get it—they're sort of like Quick Links down here at the bottom.

So if I put that star—I'm gonna put—let's put another one down. I'm going to zoom into this one, I'm gonna hit the star.

So now you see that I've got some sort of Quick Links down here at the bottom. So if I want to go to some special places—and I guess I have to click that, do I?

If I hit Home—oh, and here's another way. So there's how those stars appear as well.

Now, if I hit the star in the top left-hand corner, I can go directly to those areas as well. I'm not sure how to recreate what we saw down here—do I have to click on this again?

It's almost like you have to double-click it there if I want to see this view, but I guess the intent is that once you've starred what you like, then you'd go up here and go directly to that.

Home, as I've shown before, is just gonna bring you to the highest level. Show Completed—let's mark one off again.

And so in this case, it's showing strikethrough. I'm assuming as soon as I hit this, oh, it's actually gonna hide it—okay, nice.

Okay, so now I can see what I've crossed through here. If I toggle that, it's actually gonna hide it in my bullet point as well.

Search—I'm sure it's pretty straightforward, so I'm not going to even toy with that. And under Settings—some basic undo, redo, and so forth.

So this was a super quick overview of Workflowy, but really interesting here. As you can see, it follows a bullet point path.

And for those of you who may be looking for some type of mind mapping, some way of diving in deeper into your notes, I do like this functionality of being able to hide higher levels.

Minimize Levels

Or, let's do this again—if I keep clicking on those dots—you know, this could be a full page of information, right? This could be a full page of notes, meeting notes, ideas, things that you're thinking about.

But then you can go back up and hide that, right? If we go back to the notes level here, if we want to minimize that, pretty simple—we can just cinch that out.

Let's go back to that home level here

, where we have a bit more of a breakout. And I can just minimize all of that, so I can keep going down with other ideas, other brainstorming options.

And if I need to go and check out what I've done before, I can do so. I can expand this, I can expand that.

So there you have it—a live, real-time review of Workflowy. I'm sure some of you who have used this app before know much more than what I have just seen in these first few minutes.

So if you have some special tips or some ways in which you like to use Workflowy, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for watching today's video.

Be sure to subscribe right here to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up and leave me a comment down below.

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

Having a great-looking email signature is absolutely essential. So in today's video, I'm going to show you three different ways on how you can create a signature in Gmail.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, and I am excited to share with you three different ways on how you can customize your signature within Gmail. So let's start off with the basics.

Email Signature Basics

First, let's make sure you know where to go to change or edit your email signature. In order to do so, you're going to want to select the Settings icon here and then select Settings one more time.

On the very first tab that you see, the General tab, we want to scroll down near the bottom, and you will see a signature area. Now you've got two choices: either no signature, which means that there will be nothing appended to your messages, or you can choose to have a signature.

What you're seeing here is that you can actually have more than one email signature. In this particular example, I am using two different Gmail accounts—I'm using Gmail forwarding so I can send as either of these accounts—and I can have two different signatures or even more if need be.

But let's take a look at how we can change this very bland-looking signature down below. It can be so much more than simply your name and a tagline.

Number one, don't forget to include some links, such as an email address. I'm just gonna add a simple fake email address here.

Now, in order to add a link within your email address and to change formatting, you're gonna want to use this editor up above. First things first, you need to select what you want to make linkable—in this case, I'm selecting this email address.

Then I'm gonna select the link icon here. Now this is a clickable email address.

If I want to add a website or some other thing that is clickable, I can do so as well. Let's see how we can add a picture to maybe spruce up this email signature as well.

I'm going to place the cursor near the top of the box, and in this case, all you need to do is select Insert Image. This will allow you to insert an image of yourself or maybe a logo—whatever you would like to add to this signature as well.

You can continue on, adding social media icons, or you can add other clickable banners to this email signature. The one thing you want to keep in mind within Gmail, no matter what you do with your signature here, is to be sure to scroll down to the bottom and hit Save Changes.

If you don't hit Save Changes, all this work that you've done up above is going to go away. So make sure you hit Save Changes, and then you'll be able to use that email signature.

But would you like to spruce up your email signature a little more than just what you've seen there? Well, I'm gonna give you a second method.

Email Signature in Google Docs

If you'd like to add even more custom options and flexibility to your email signature, I recommend creating it in Google Docs. Yes, you can create your email signature in Google Docs and then copy and paste it back into Gmail, and it will be saved as your email signature in the very same place that we just saw.

The first thing I'm going to encourage you to do is actually to insert a table. You might be interested to know why I suggest that.

I'm going to insert a simple 2x2 table here, and the reason being is that many email signatures start with an image, perhaps an image of yourself, and maybe you'd like to add other factors as well. Something that you can't do very easily in the standard Gmail signature window is to create this type of layout.

And maybe you want something even more complex than what I'm gonna show you right here. So let's start out in this very first and the top left-hand corner of my table.

I'm gonna insert an image, so I'm gonna upload something from my computer. Since this is gonna be my own email signature, let's start with a picture of myself.

That's a little too big—no problem. I can just drag the corner here and adjust the size of it just like that.

Now I can click and drag my table—I'm gonna go over like this—because in this next area, this next portion of my table, I'm gonna add things like my name. Then I can add my phone number if I want.

I can add whatever other details I want in this area here. Now down below, I can customize further parts of my signature.

So let's say, for example, I want to add a banner, for example. Maybe I want another image here.

So in this case, once again, I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna upload an image from my computer.

Let me go find it—I think it's under Email Templates. There we go, here's a banner that I've created previously.

Again, that's a little too big for me, so I'm going to reduce the size of it just like that. Now because I want people to click on this, all I need to do is right-click on it, and I can insert a link.

Whatever I type in here, whatever I type in this link field here, whenever someone clicks on that, whenever they receive my email, and this is gonna be my signature, they'll be able to go directly to that particular link. Now at this point, you're probably saying, "Well, wait a minute, Scott, I don't want an email signature that has black lines around it."

Well, not a problem. If we go up to Formatting here—actually, let me make sure my cursor is within the table—if we go back into Formatting and I select Table, come all the way down to Table Properties.

I'm gonna say I want to make the table border white, and I'm gonna say OK. Now essentially, it's invisible.

Now all I need to do is copy everything that I see here and then paste it back into my email signature. So if I go back into Settings, all I need to do is go back and paste it in this box that we saw before.

But if this seems like a lot of work—aligning everything and adding links to images—I've got even one more better way of creating your signature.

Email Signature in New Old Stamp

If you want a professional-looking email signature and be able to create it in a matter of minutes, I recommend using a tool such as Newoldstamp. Here you can see an example which I've created in literally two minutes' time.

The great thing about a tool like Newoldstamp is it comes preloaded with a number of templates, so I can quickly change the layout with a simple click. The other great thing is that I can just fill in these areas—you see it already has placeholders for things like name, company, telephone.

So it's already making these things linkable, such as this email address and these social media icons, so that they go directly to my own personal social media accounts. Even other options—you see the image here of my face?

Maybe I want something more square-like, maybe I want some rounded corners—I can easily adjust the size of it if I want. It even comes with some of these preloaded banners and special buttons such as "Find me on Facebook."

Or if you want it to link to other areas of your website, you can do so as well. Now, how do you install or apply this type of email signature?

Well, once you're happy with what you've got here, simply select Save and Install. Newoldstamp gives you two convenient options.

You can either install directly with your Google account, or you can select this option—Copy and Proceed. Then all we need to do is paste this signature into the box which I showed you previously.

Now, if you'd like to learn more about Newoldstamp and try their free email signature generator, I encourage you to check the link in the description below. So there you have it—three different ways on how you can create a great-looking email signature within Gmail.

Which one is your favorite? And I'd love to know, what are some of the pieces of information that you think are essential in an email signature?

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

The number one power-up that I recommend all of my clients enable when they start out with Trello is the Custom Fields power-up. That's because our businesses, our organizations, our teams all require some type of custom field.

I'm sure that there is a text box, a number box, or a drop-down menu that is specific to your team's needs—or even if it's a personal project—specific to your personal needs that you would like to add to your Trello cards. Well, in today's video, I want to share with you three Custom Fields features that you may not be aware of.

So let's get things kicked off with actually creating our custom fields. Now you can edit your custom fields in one of two ways.

Edit Custom Fields

You can go into the power-ups menu—you'll find that by clicking on the menu and then selecting Power-Ups. You can either search for Custom Fields to enable it if you haven't enabled it yet, or in this case, because I do have it enabled, I can just go find it here.

By selecting that option, I can hit the gear icon, hit Edit Power-Up Settings, and now I can go into this. I can relabel the text field here and name this as a checkbox field—I can relabel that here as well.

But there's another way you can do that. You can go into any of your cards, find the Custom Fields button, and once again, when you click on those items—this may be the faster or the quicker way—you can just go into a card, and you can edit those things.

Dropdown Menu

So, tip number one has to do with the drop-down menu. In this case, I have a priority drop-down, which is very handy.

Here, I've got a high-priority item; maybe I want to change it to medium or to low. The great thing with Custom Fields is that you have the choice of actually showing these fields on the front of the card.

So let's go back to the high-level view, and there you can see I have a priority label. I have my priority Custom Field visible on the front of the card.

But what if I want to make this stand out even a little bit more? Well, the nice thing is that within the last year, Trello introduced colored drop-down labels.

Here I have my medium and high for my priority drop-down, but let's give it some more punch, shall we? Let's make medium maybe yellow—let's use the classic traffic light system and red for high.

So now, not only will I see that color here within the card, right? That makes it nice and easy.

If I change that to medium, I get that yellow label. But even on the front of the card, now I can see there's my medium level.

Let's change this one down here—let's change this to a high-priority level. So now I've got even further Custom Field capability here.

Not only do I get to make those choices, but they stand out that much more for myself and my team. So make sure to color code your drop-down menus, if applicable, depending on how you are using that drop-down menu.

Reorder

Now the second tip I want to share with you is something that we often overlook. Once we've started dealing with our Custom Fields for a while, we may determine that we want to reorder them.

Sometimes we forget that we can do that within Trello. No, you can't just drag them here within the card, but if we go back to that Custom Fields option, the Custom Fields button, you can simply drag and drop and reorder your Custom Fields.

So in this case, maybe I want priority number one—maybe that's the most important thing. So I'm going to drag that to the top of my list there.

Then I want to have name, and then yes, my satisfied checkbox and the start date. So now it's a bit of a cleaner look.

You can see, depending on what combination of Custom Fields you have, you may want to reorder them in a particular manner. So don't forget that you can reorder your Custom Fields.

Sort by

The third and last tip I want to leave with you when it comes to Custom Fields within Trello is don't forget that you can sort by certain Custom Fields and also filter by those Custom Fields as well. So at the very top of your list, you will find these three little dots that give us some additional functionality.

Here we have the Sort by option. Now the first three are going to be found on all of our lists—date created, date created oldest or newest, and card name alphabetically.

But look at this—I actually have a Custom Field because, of course, we can sort by start date. So I'm gonna select this option—Sort by Start Date—and now it's going to... I think I already sorted this just a moment ago, so nothing has actually changed in this particular case.

Let me drop this one down and maybe this one down to the bottom. Let's do that one more time—I'm going to come up here, I'm going to say Sort by Start Date, and there it has reordered.

You'll notice I don't have the start date on the front of the card—remember, you can always do that as well. Let's go to our Start Date option, and I'm gonna tick this option—Show Field on Front of Card.

You can do that with any one of your Custom Fields. So now, with that selected, I see that start date on the front of my cards.

Filter by

Lastly, don't forget that you can use the Filter Cards option as well. For example, you may have noticed that one of my Custom Fields had to do with a name, and one of those names was Kelly.

Well, I can find that card immediately just by typing in Kelly here. No, it's not the name of the card—it's not the description—you can't see it on the front of the card, but Kelly is the name here within the Custom Fields.

So yes, you can even filter by that option as well. I hope you found this useful, and I would love to hear from you next—how do you make use of Custom Fields?

I'd love to hear your tips and tricks, and I'm sure there are others who would like to take advantage of the way that you are using Custom Fields within Trello as well. Thank you so much for watching.

I hope you give this video a thumbs up, that you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel, and don't forget to leave me a comment down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult—in fact, it's very simple.

Let's make Google Keep so much more colorful. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Today, we are taking a look at Category Tabs for Google Keep—the most popular and best-rated Google Keep extension beyond the official Google Keep extension. So, what is Category Tabs, and how might it help you within Google Keep?

Well, of course, you'll notice right here at the top of my Google Keep page, I've got something a little different. I've got the entire rainbow in front of me—all of the different colors that are available to us here.

What this allows us to do is to quickly get access to certain notes which have been attached to a particular color. Or, we can just look at all of our notes, or blank notes, for example, as a part of it as well.

But this gives us a little more flexibility in terms of how we access and also how we enter in new notes. Now, the ability to add colors or change colors to notes has always been available to us here.

But sometimes it's rather difficult to access those notes—you have to come up here to the search bar, and then you often have to scroll down to the color area and then select those colors here. But if I go back to my main notes screen, all I need to do if I want to see all of my red notes is just click red.

Not only will I see my active notes, but also have access to my archived notes down below if I want to as well. Maybe yellow means my personal notes or my personal tasks.

I can just click on this and access my grocery list, access that book that I should have finished ages ago, and I can quickly continue down depending on which colors are associated with which categories. I can access those particular notes.

Now, the other nice thing is that when you are on a particular color, when you go to enter in a new note, by default it's going to assume that you want to make this new note the same color. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

If I'm back here in my yellow notes, for example—my personal—I think it only makes sense. If I'm taking things off here, or if I'm adjusting things on this screen, if I take a new note, I can change it if I want to—I don't have to keep it yellow, but I like that default functionality.

Now, there is one major drawback that you may want to consider when it comes to using Category Tabs. This is only available on your Chrome extension, so you will not be able to access this type of menu on your mobile device.

Of course, it still carries over—anything that you've applied here, anything that's red is going to be red on your mobile device, and so forth. But you won't have access to this type of tab.

The other minor drawback, I guess, depending on how you work and how you function, is that you cannot relabel these particular color tabs. So, I can't tell red that I want this to be business, or I want this to be something different—it's going to stay red.

I think that only makes sense because you can't go that far into the code in terms of changing how Google Keep functions. And remember, labels are still available to us here.

If you'd like to learn more about Category Tabs for Google Keep, I would encourage you to go to the Chrome Web Store. Just type in "Category Tabs Google Keep," and you will find it—you can try it out for yourself and see what you think about Category Tabs.

Now, as always, I'd love to hear from you next—do you have experience with Category Tabs? How are you planning to make use of this feature?

If you haven't tried it out for yourself, be sure to leave me a comment down below. Thank you so much for watching.

I hope you give this video a thumbs up, and be sure 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 need a better place for you and your team to store all that information? No, I'm not talking about tasks and projects, but I'm talking more about all the other information that may support your projects.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Today, we are taking a look at Nuclino.

Now, Nuclino can manage your projects if you want, but where Nuclino really shines is as a team knowledge base. Whether it's meeting notes or a meeting agenda like you see here, or maybe it's some brainstorming or things you are trying to work out with your team, Nuclino is a great place to organize and store all of those ideas.

Let me get you familiar with some of the terminology here within Nuclino. You'll see there's a little plus button here.

If I select this, I have two options: I can either create an item or I can create a cluster. An item is essentially a single file or a single workspace, like you see here in this example called "YouTube Ideas."

The nice thing about Nuclino is that you can embed those videos directly into your item space. Here, I can actually watch those videos and share them with others with whom I may be working.

My second option is to create a cluster, and you can see here I actually have a few different clusters. Here's my team brainstorming cluster, which branches down into a marketing cluster.

In another way, it's like saying that you have folders or subfolders, which can be a great way to organize your information. Let's take a closer look at what an item looks like and feels like within Nuclino.

Here, I've got an example called "September 10th Meeting Notes." At the beginning, you see I've got some pretty standard text here, some things that we perhaps talked about or need to talk about in a future meeting.

But I can do so much more within a single item. Here, I've got a link to a PDF document; I can create separation within my item, I can create a workable checklist, and I can even upload images as well.

Let's start a new item just to give you a better example. I'm going to call this one a "Text Item Sample," and I can start typing in text right away here if I want.

But you'll notice that there's a little plus button. If I hit that plus button, I've got so many more options available to me. Whether it's adjusting the heading and the font, changing the types of lists, uploading files or images, or even adding a code block, it's all here.

And of course, because Nuclino is a team knowledge base at its core, I can mention other people that I'm working with or link directly to them. I really like that flexibility.

In fact, if I go back to this example here, which has some further content, the look and some of the feel is almost very similar to Evernote in terms of a simple editor. But you can do an awful lot in it.

As I look at something like "YouTube Ideas," for example, yes, I can embed videos directly into an item. Here's another one I've entitled "YouTube Thumbnails," so I can get access directly to those images.

It can be a great place to brainstorm and store those pieces of information, but of course, Nuclino is so much more. One of the nice things about Nuclino is that you can view your information in a few different ways.

At the top, you can see we are looking at all of my items in this particular case, and of course, I can expand or collapse certain clusters. Let's go over to the board view.

For anyone who is familiar with Trello or the Kanban style of project management, yes, you can have a board view. Here, I have a few different clusters: content marketing, team brainstorming, in progress, and done.

I can move things along just like you would expect with any Kanban board if I want to move things from one area to the next. Of course, I can click on them, and this window will expand, and I can see more details about what's going on on that side of the screen.

But there are other views for us to take a look at as well. This one is called the graph view, and this can be really great for mind mapping or brainstorming.

Here, you see I've got content marketing, which would be the highest level project. You can see the title of it here at the top of the screen, and then I've got my different clusters.

You'll recognize some of these from our Kanban view, but if I click on this one, for example, team brainstorming, well, now I can branch out even further and take a look at what's going on in these areas. I can see, even if I hover over these little dots, it will actually give me the title of those particular items.

In this case, I've used a combination of clusters and items, but it's an interesting way for you to view and take a look at some of your content within Nuclino. Now, Nuclino has developed a mobile app for both iOS and Android, so I would encourage you to check it out.

Some of the things that I like the most here are just how clean the interface is. I like how the menu is clean on the left-hand side, the ability to add new items or create a new cluster is very simple and straightforward.

This simple editor, where you can add text immediately or change the type of input, or add different elements to your notes, is very quick and intuitive. If you are managing a team or if you are part of a team, you may want to check out Nuclino.

Even if you are an entrepreneur or just a small business owner, maybe you're just a team of one, I think you're still going to see the benefits of using a tool like Nuclino. Even if it's just for brainstorming or a mind dump, it's a very clean interface for you to check out.

Now, I would love to hear from you. What do you think of Nuclino, and what do you hope to use it for as part of your day or business? Be sure to tell me below in the comments.

I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you subscribe to the Simpletivity channel. We produce new content each week.

Be sure to give this video a like, and tell me what you think in the comments. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.