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we live in a world where there is new content and new articles being published by the thousands each and every minute

and that can make it very difficult

as a consumer

as someone who is wanting to stay on top of a particular topic

or to browse even one of their favorite websites

to find the articles

to find the postings that are most either relevant to them

or worth their time

I mean think about it

the average blog post is somewhere in the range of 500 to a thousand words

it's going to take you a couple of minutes for you to sit through and read it

and you're hoping

you're hoping when you start that particular article that it is worth your time

well today I want to share with you a website that I find myself using more and more frequently to help me do just that

help me to find articles

help me to find content that is worth my time

and to see what other people are sharing

to see what other people are viewing as well

now the website is called BuzzSumo

and you can find it at buzzsumo.com

and let me just walk you through what BuzzSumo does

and how I use it to find content that is most relevant to me

and at the very least help me find content that other people are sharing

so all you need to do to use BuzzSumo is to use this search bar here

and you can search either by topic

you can search by keyword

now keywords are a little limited

they only limit you to about two keywords

if you start entering in more than two keywords you'll find that your results are not nearly as good

or you can decide to search by a particular domain

so let's type in productivity shall we

and let's see what it brings back

I'm going to search for productivity

and I haven't changed any of my filters here on the left-hand side

so by default it's going to bring me back all of the articles

all the content from the past year

but you

it's going to sort it by the number of total shares

so what BuzzSumo is doing

it is looking at all of the shares on the five major social media platforms

we've got Facebook

we've got LinkedIn

we've got Twitter

Pinterest

and Google+

and by default it is going to display these results by the total number of shares

right

because that might vary by the type of content that you're looking at

some may have many more Facebook shares while others may have many more LinkedIn shares

you can see here in these first two results

this first article from ENCOM

many many more Facebook engagements

however this second article from the same domain is almost equal between Facebook shares and LinkedIn shares

so it's taking a look at this topic that I've put in here

productivity

and it's bringing back all of the articles which have been published within the past year

and sorting them by total number of shares

now maybe I want something a little more up-to-date or a little more current than just the past year

well I can use any of these preset filters here

maybe I just want to look at the past month

I hit that radio button

and now it has adjusted my filter here

now I can see articles that are just specific to the past month

now I am NOT a pro user of BuzzSumo

so they will limit you to about 10 articles when you are searching by domain

but I find that is just enough for me to look through the content which it is listed here

and find at least a handful of articles that are worth my time

my theory being this

that if thousands upon thousands of people are sharing this content

chances are it's worth my time

or at least worth browsing the headline

or at least the opening paragraph

I mean if a piece of content is not being shared in any way shape or form

chances are it's probably not worth your time either

so let's see how it works if we choose to enter in a domain name

I like to visit Lifehacker once in a while

and lifehacker.com produces an awful lot of content in a single day

I certainly don't have enough time to browse through all of their content

so often I will come to BuzzSumo

I'll type in lifehacker.com

and maybe I'll select the past week radio button

and now I can see what are the most popular articles

what are the most popular pieces of content from lifehacker.com during that past week

now I don't have to browse through literally hundreds of different posts

hundreds of different articles that Lifehacker produces on a regular basis

I can just see a short summary

sort of a best-of

now they may not in fact be the very best articles

but they are certainly being shared a lot

and that's a hint that at least other people are finding it interesting

or other people are wanting to share it with others

so chances are I might find a few things in here that I'll want to read

that I'll want to consume as well

now of course you can filter in a few other ways beyond just a time frame

beyond just the filter by date

down below we have a few other options

we have an in-depth articles only

not exactly sure if this is restricting things to

journals

things that are recognized

like actual published journals

but you can choose an option there

you can filter by language

you can filter by country

you can also filter out certain domains

you can include only certain domains or exclude certain domains

and then at the very end you can even go granular in terms of the type of content that the results will bring back

articles

infographics

you can include videos

or you could exclude videos if you like as well

and of course you can always change the default order

if you don't want to look by total shares

you can always look by the number of Facebook shares for example

and change which way that the results are listed

but I find BuzzSumo can be a very very helpful tool to see what is trending

see what you may have missed in the past

I'll give you one other example which I find is very very helpful

sometimes I'll go out a bit further

let's let's change this filter to the past six months

the reason I choose this is that once in a while

and perhaps more frequently than we think

there may be an article or there may be a piece of content from your favorite website

or at least a favorite topic or subject of yours

that was not very popular in the first 24 hours

or in the first week that it was published

but if it was a quality piece of writing

if it was a very helpful piece of content

chances are that gained more and more shares over time

so once in a while I will go back to 6 months or even the past year

on a favorite topic or maybe a favorite website

a favorite domain of mine

so I can review and look back at that content

so I would encourage you to check out BuzzSumo

the free version will allow you to retrieve the top 5 pieces of content from any particular domain

and the top 10 pieces of content from any keyword or subject

and that includes all of the filtering that you can include here on the left-hand side

check out buzzsumo.com and see what is interesting to you

see what other people are sharing when it comes to topics that you are most interested in

I'd love to hear your feedback

and if you have used BuzzSumo yourself

especially if you're a content creator

BuzzSumo can be an excellent tool to see what else is trending amongst your competitors

against other people who are talking about the same things that you are

I'd love to hear your comments in the section below

and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up

and be sure to subscribe to the Simpletivity channel

remember being productive does not need to be difficult

in fact it's very simple

I have been a longtime user of Trello and I recommend Trello to both individuals and teams to help them get more done. It's a fantastic tool for managing projects and really organizing almost anything.

And it's very interesting to see how Trello has affected many other applications, particularly in the productivity space. Microsoft, about a year and a half ago, introduced something called Boards, which allows you to manage your Microsoft files and other Microsoft documents within a sort of Trello-like space.

Then roughly a year ago, Asana, which has been around for a while as a very excellent task and project management tool, introduced a Boards version of their application as well.

So today, I wanted to take a look at the Asana software. I want to look at the Asana application both from the vantage point of a Trello user and also for those who are just looking for an alternative or maybe looking for a new tool to manage either your personal tasks and your personal to-dos or if you're wanting to collaborate with others.

Let's start out. This is sort of the traditional or default view here in Asana. I'm looking at one of my projects that I've titled Personal To-Do List, and here you can see all of my tasks listed below.

Now, Asana really was developed from a task management point of view, and you can see that these check marks here are built right into the application. It's really meant to complete things, not just manage things or not just organize things, which many of us might do within a Trello board.

You can also separate your tasks by adding these sections. So here you see I've very originally titled them New Section, Section Two, and Section Three. So you can sort of break up your tasks. However, it should be noted that if you go to move your sections, it does not bring the tasks below them with them. I found this kind of surprising that the sections weren't grouping together the tasks that are below them.

So there might be some other interesting ways in how you can break up your sections and how people are using sections within Asana, but I found that a little puzzling at first when I went to go and move around my sections.

In terms of the tasks themselves, you know, very similar to a drag-and-drop system. So you can reorder them or group them any way you like. One other thing I'll note is that it's very easy to add tasks to Asana just simply hitting Enter here.

If I want to add a new task, New Task For, and hit Enter, it gets me all set up for a new task. However, I soon realize that as soon as you hit Enter, not only does it get you ready for the new task, it actually creates that new task.

So here you see I haven't entered in any text or any title for this task, but it has actually gone ahead and created it. In fact, if I just hit Enter a few times, I'm going to have multiple tasks appear at the bottom of my list.

I found myself coming back and deleting a bunch of these tasks because of the way it's set up, because of the way that it adds an additional task with the Enter key, so I wasn't a big fan of that.

Let's move over here to the right-hand side of the screen, and you can see by selecting any of your tasks, it will give you a split-screen view. So you can still see all of your tasks on the left-hand side, but now we get to see the guts or the details of a particular task.

And for Trello users, a lot of this looks very familiar. We can assign a task to either ourselves or someone else, we can give it a due date, we can give it a like—you can almost think of this as a thumbs-up or maybe a voting button.

You can favorite tasks within Asana. You can have the ability to have subtasks, which is a really nice feature here within the Asana application. You can attach documents and other files and some other functionality such as copying and merging tasks, that type of thing.

Now, another thing to note is that you also have the ability to have a task appear in multiple projects. Right? You may have a single task which will benefit or is applicable to multiple projects. So you can see here this particular task exists in both my Personal To-Do List project but also in my New Website Development project.

So they can exist in multiple places. And then down below we've got some of the regular stuff—the title, the description. Here you can see I have an attachment as a part of this task, and you can see the image here as well. And at the very bottom, you have a comment section where you can have a discussion with other members who may have access to this project.

Now, I will admit this detailed view of the task did leave me feeling a little cramped. You don't have the option of just seeing the detailed view without your list. It's always going to show it in this split-screen view, and so I found that this did get me feeling just a little cramped with everything sort of bunched in here.

Again, coming from Trello, I'm used to having a larger card or a larger detailed area for me to work in.

Now, a few other things I want to show you here within your project: you have a few different views you can look at. You can view your conversation so you can see a nice summary of all the conversations that are going on within this project. It's a very nice touch.

We have a calendar, which is pretty basic. You can see where tasks are due on the calendar view. You also have a progress view where you can give this project a status update using sort of the traffic light system, but you can also see a graphical representation of the number of tasks you have remaining to do here in blue and the number of tasks which you have completed.

So that's sort of just a nice visual indicator of where you're going with your tasks. And then lastly, you can view all of the files which are attached to this project.

So again, nice to have some of these summary views such as the conversations and the files—really easy to get to, really easy to access so you can view these other areas of the project.

Another nice thing with Asana is that you can access your other projects quite quickly and with ease. You can minimize or hide this left-hand menu if you like, but it's really quite quick, you know, transferring between different projects that you have here.

Another nice thing that I really like about Asana is that this My Tasks area will give you a summary of all the tasks that you are assigned to. So regardless of the project where that task lives, you can see all of those tasks here and do the same type of functionality. You can make changes to the tasks here.

But I like how it gives you a nice summary of everything that has been assigned to you regardless of how many projects you're involved with.

So I started off by talking about Boards and how Asana introduced Boards. So let's take a look at what Boards look like in Asana.

Now, probably the most important thing to note is that if you are desiring a board view in Asana, you have to make that decision from the get-go. You have to make that decision when you first create the project.

So here, I've created a project. I've titled it Content Planning and I've even put in parentheses Board Style to remind myself that this was the board project because the first two I showed you are using the traditional Asana list view. You cannot view these projects in a board style, just like I cannot view this board-style project in a list view.

And again, I found that a little bit surprising. I assume that the column headers, or what we refer to as lists in Trello, would be the equivalent of sections in our list view, but that is not the case. You do have to make that choice; you have to make that distinction when you first create the board.

So here is the board view, or the board style in Asana. Again, if you've used Trello in the past, you'll find this looks very familiar. We have what Asana calls columns here—the vertical columns—you can have as many as you like, and then we have our cards or probably more appropriately called tasks within those columns.

Because if you click on any of these tasks, we have all the same functionality, identical functionality as you would find in the list view version of Asana. Again, it looks a little more comfortable to me here that we have a larger display, a larger view of the details of that task, but everything here is exactly the same as we would find in the list view.

So, some other thoughts about Asana. I'm going to go back to the list view here just for a second. Something that I found a little, I guess a little uncomfortable—not just how cramped some of the space was here in the list view, but just how much white and gray text on top of white is displayed.

I found that there wasn't quite enough distinction as I would prefer when working with an application. We got an awful lot of white space and then most of the text is in this gray color. You know, I find that Trello does a very good job of making a distinction between some buttons and bolded text and highlighted areas, and that was something that made me a little, not uncomfortable, but just made it maybe look that much harder as to where do I need to go to make this change or find this piece of information.

So maybe too much white and not enough distinction for my own personal taste.

One other thing that really stood out to me is that here we see the activity log for what has been done or what has been changed on this Asana task, and it gives you the ability to delete the log.

Now, you do it one by one. The first one you can't change when it was created, but I can go here and say, you know what? Yeah, I added it to that project, but you know, I don't want to. Let's just get rid of that. And so it's gone. And you can see here just a few moments ago, not too long ago, I added this to this particular project. I can say, well, get rid of that.

I don't know the advantage of allowing the user or users to do that. It'd be nice if maybe you could minimize this if you think this is taking up too much space, but it really surprised me that you can go and actually delete your activity log or the timestamp. I think you always want the ability to go back and see when something was changed.

So there you have it. Asana somewhat through the eyes of a Trello user or a Trello expert. Which one is better? It's going to come down to personal preference and what you are trying to accomplish, what you are trying to do.

I would love to hear your thoughts about Asana and also Trello. What do you use these applications for and which do you think shines brighter depending on the circumstance? What do you use these particular pieces of software for? If you like this video, I would encourage you to give me a thumbs up down below and be sure to leave a comment as well. I would love to hear your input and also hear what are some of the other pieces of software or other types of videos you would like to see here on the Simpletivity channel. And if you haven't already done so, please be sure to subscribe. We would love to have you as a part of the Simpletivity community. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult—in fact, it's very simple.

It is so important that we are clear and concise with our communication.

And today, I'm not actually going to focus on our verbal communication but our written communication.

And no, I'm not talking about short pieces of text like email or text messaging.

Today, I want to look at some longer forms of communication.

Things like a blog article, or maybe a report that you need to write, or perhaps it's even just some content that you post on your website.

It is so important that we are clear and concise with our communication.

There's a vast audience out there, right?

There's millions of unknown readers who may stumble across your article or stumble across your website.

You want to make sure that whatever it is that you're writing, it is easy for your viewers, for your audience, to digest.

Today, I want to share with you.

The Hemingway App

A free app called the Hemingway app—you can find it at Hemingwayapp.com—and that's precisely its purpose: to take whatever you have written and to help you make it bold and clear.

Here's how the Hemingway app works.

When you first visit Hemingwayapp.com, it's actually going to pre-populate the editor with some text, some default text, and it's gonna actually help you explain what the Hemingway editor does.

I'm gonna start with some of the metrics and some of the data that it's showing us here on the right-hand side of the screen.

First, it gives us a readability grade, and in this case, it's saying that the text over here on the left is a grade 6 readability, and it's saying that that is good.

Now, it's my experience that as this grade level goes down a bit closer to, I think, grade 3 or grade 4, this good actually turns to great.

And, you know, you want to think about that for a second.

Think of the variety of people who may be consuming your content.

These are people from various different back—whether it's socioeconomic backgrounds or just language—where something like English may be their second or third language.

You want to make sure that you're communicating at a level that the most amount of people can digest it and consume it with ease.

Metrics

Now, it's also going to give us some other metrics here, such as word count and character count.

You're going to find that almost anywhere, including a basic word document.

But it also has an estimated reading time, which might be helpful.

How long would you expect someone to take to read this content?

But the really good stuff, I think, is the colorful stuff that you will find down here.

And this acts as both a guide and a bit of a key as to what is happening here on the screen in front of us.

You can see that many of these sentences and several of the words are highlighted in different colors.

What exactly does that mean?

So let's go through them one by one.

The first one, highlighted blue, is highlighting adverbs.

And depending on how much you have written, it's going to tell you what your goal is or sort of what the minimum is.

And here it says that it's found two adverbs, meeting the goal of two or fewer.

Again, this is based on how many total words are in the article or in the document.

If you write more words, well, you're going to be permitted more adverbs.

But you can use this information and decide if you want to omit these adverbs or change them, or are you fine with them.

The green one is similar, but this time it's looking at the passive voice.

And again, it says that you should aim for two or fewer based on the number of words here.

And they are highlighted in green.

Simpler Words

Shade has to do with using simpler words, and they will provide a simpler alternative.

So here in the second paragraph, you can see that in their default text, they've used the word "utilize."

You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one.

Well, there is a simpler alternative to "utilize."

When you hover over that text, it's going to give you a suggestion.

We can either replace it or maybe just try to omit it altogether.

If I like the suggestion, I can click on it, and it just replaces it.

And there you can see that now that purplish shade is gone.

I can move on to something else and decide if I want to make changes there as well.

The last two shades—the first one is yellow, and then the last one, sort of a reddish-pinkish—has to do with the complexity of a sentence.

Yellow identifies sentences that are hard to read.

Here, you see we have an opening sentence, and then the pinkish color identifies sentences that are very hard to read now the great.

Editing

thing about the Hemingway app is that you can edit this and it can make the changes dynamically so in this first sentence a simple fix would be just to split this one up I'm going to delete and put a period there and let's put a capital there on the on the if and now you can see that that yellow is gone it's a much easier sentence to read for the audience to come along and consume this and hopefully continue to read the rest of this article or this this report now you of course don't need to make all

of these changes to make your writing as clear and concise as possible but what I do like about the Hemingway app is that it highlights these facts and then you can make the decision if you want to make changes if you want to make these edits based on the recommendations here now one thing is I don't recommend that

Writing

You actually do your writing within the Hemingway app.

If I select everything here and delete it, I can easily get a back blank screen, and I can start to type out my article or maybe my website content.

But this is a web app, and so nothing is actually being saved as I go along.

The second reason why I don't recommend that you write within the Hemingway editor is that with all of these shades that are coming up as you write, sometimes that can be a little tricky in terms of identifying.

You know, you can get stuck on a certain passage and say, "Oh, well, maybe I should say it this way or say it that way," when what you're looking for is more of a flow, right?

Where you're looking to just get things down on screen and not really think about editing should always really be the second part of the writing process.

Now, it does give you the option here in the top right-hand corner.

You can select "Write," and then it's gonna hide all of this information here, and it will not highlight things as you go.

But again, I prefer to write in a place where things are going to be saved, and I can always paste it in here later.

So that's typically what I'll do.

Let me go and grab some text that I've written previously, and I'm just gonna paste it here into the editor just to show you what it looks like.

So, you know, immediately you don't have to write it in the app to get the benefits of the app.

Here you can see it's highlighting some of my sentences, some of my words, and what I like to change these.

And it's giving me the data on the right-hand side, and you can see how things like my adverbs and passive voice, the minimum number has increased because this is a much longer article than the first one we used in this example.

So from a workflow perspective, I'll often write in a different document, whether that's a Word document, or sometimes I'll use The Most Dangerous App, which is another online tool, but I find a really effective tool for getting into flow and to continue writing.

You can find more about that app in a previous video.

But in most cases, what I will do is I will write first, and then when I'm sort of ready to publish or almost close to posting that article or posting that piece of content, I will paste it in the Hemingway app.

And then I'll make some final touches, right?

I'll see the suggestions here, I'll see the words or the sentences that are highlighted, and make those changes there.

I have even used the Hemingway editor once in a while for very important emails.

You know, I want to be clear, I want to be concise, and we know when it comes to email communication, if you're not clear, chances are your email may be ignored, or you know someone will never come back to it later.

You want to be as clear and concise as possible.

So even in a few important emails, I've used the Hemingway editor, and for my website, even if it's just two or three paragraphs in a certain section of my website, I find the Hemingway editor can give me a little bit of reassurance that what I've written is concise and can be consumed by a broader audience.

If you have had experience with the Hemingway app or a similar app, I would love to hear about it.

Please include your feedback or your comments and questions in the comments section below.

And if you like this video, please go ahead and give it a thumbs up and subscribe.

We would love to have you as a part of the Simpletivity community.

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

Your calendar is probably the most basic productivity tool that you use.

In many ways, it's the lowest common denominator when it comes to getting things done.

I mean, we all use email to some extent, but some of us use it a lot more frequently than others.

Some use it a lot less.

Some use it a lot more.

A lot of us use a to-do list or a task manager app.

Some of us don't use that at all either.

If you have watched some of my previous videos, you will know that I often use Google Calendar.

I use my calendar to manage my tasks as all-day events.

It's a great way to keep them front of mind.

They're at the top of my list, and I can't ignore them because I'm in my calendar so often, looking at other appointments and other events, places that I need to be.

I really like having those tasks in front of me at the top of my calendar.

Well, today, I want to show you how to adjust some of your notifications in Google Calendar.

Make them optimal for you, make them optimal for your specific workflow, and in particular, I'm going to show you one little checkbox that you may not have used before in the past that's going to help you set yourself up for a great day.

To adjust your notifications in Google Calendar, we want to select the little gear icon in the top right-hand corner and find settings.

Now, the very first tab that you're going to see here in settings is going to be a general one.

We want to click on the calendars tab here, and here you're going to find the list of all of the calendars that you have associated with your Google calendar.

Now, in this particular example, I really don't have that many other calendars, but if you have more, you're going to see them under this other calendar setting.

But if we go all the way to the right, we're going to see the notifications column, and we want to be able to select the edit notifications link.

This is going to give us a variety of options of how we receive and when we receive these notifications.

Now, at the very top, we've got two different types of notification settings.

The first one is event notifications.

The second one is all-day event notifications.

Now, the second one probably has cleared up what the first one means, right?

The second one is things like the tasks I just showed you on my calendar.

These are things that are all-day events.

They don't necessarily have a start and an end time, but they're attached to an entire day, or they may be stretched over multiple days.

The one up above, event notifications, are specific meetings or activities, places that you need to be.

These have a distinct start time and finish time, right?

It can be a meeting with Greg at 1 p.m., or a dentist appointment, which starts at 10:30 in the morning.

Now, we've got a few different options as to how and when we will receive those notifications.

So here you see I have set up for my event notifications.

I'm going to receive a notification 10 minutes before each event.

Now, when it says notification, it means that I'm going to receive a desktop notification.

Right when I'm here in my browser, that's where that notification will appear.

And this notification will also apply to your smartphone, phone, or your tablet device, if you'll be notified by those notifications as well.

The only other option that we have here is email.

If you'd rather have an email notification, you can make that selection.

And then you might want to adjust the time difference as to when you will receive that notification.

Ten minutes just before an event might not be long enough.

You might want an hour before.

You may want a few hours before to remind you for those events.

But for the way that I use Google Calendar, just the desktop, just the in-browser notifications suffice my needs, and 10 minutes is about right for me.

Now, the one thing to note is that you can have multiple notifications set up.

So if you do want email notifications as well, you can do that.

You can do that too.

You can continue to add notifications, maybe at different time lengths, or maybe just at different times, you know, different types, email and regular notifications.

You can also change these settings within your individual events.

So, for example, I like the default here of 10-minute notifications for all of my events.

And if there's something particular, I might adjust the length, or I might adjust the type in that individual event.

A good example would be something significant like a birthday in my family.

I will often have multiple notifications for someone's birthday coming up.

I might have an email that comes out maybe two weeks before someone's birthday, my mother's birthday, for example.

And then maybe I'll set up a second email three or four days before her birthday in case I've forgotten.

Because in case I ignored that first email, just another reminder, hey, this special event is coming up.

You don't want to miss it.

You want to make sure you've got your presents or your cards or whatever else you need to get together for that event.

Now, for my all-day events, you can add further notifications if you like, but I prefer not to.

You know, these are my to-dos.

I'm very engaged and involved in my calendar, so, you know, for me, I would rather not have a notification shown.

But of course, just like our time-based event notifications, you can add multiple ones as well.

Now, the only thing left on this notification settings page is the last section, which is entitled "Choose how you would like to be kept up-to-date."

And here you have two options, either email or SMS.

These would be text messages.

Now, you will need to set up your mobile phone in order to receive those text messages.

And here you can see I have not linked up my phone with this account.

That's because I really have no interest at this time in receiving text messages for these updates.

Email will suffice.

And you know, these first few choices have a lot to do with events where you have been invited to or you've invited others to.

So I have things here like new events.

Receive an update when someone sends you an invitation, when someone changes an event, when someone cancels an event, or here, receive an update when guests respond to an event for which you can see the guest list.

So again, most of these things are involving other people, either people that I've invited to a calendar event or I've been invited to.

But the last one on this list is where I really want to focus our attention.

The daily agenda sort of gets hidden here at the bottom of the page, so I'm sure there's many of you who have maybe not been aware of this option.

So by selecting this box, "Daily Agenda," you will receive an email with your calendar's agenda every day at 5:00 a.m. in your current time zone.

So depending on your personal workflow, depending on how you receive information, depending on how you would like to get a summary of your day, this may be an excellent way to receive it.

Google is going to send you a very short, a very concise email showing both your time-based events but also your all-day events in one single email.

And the great thing is that if you do manage multiple calendars within Google Calendar, you might have seven, you might have 12, you might have many, many more calendars.

For each one that you check this box, you will need to go into each calendar to select this box.

But no matter how many you've selected, you're only going to receive one email.

A single email.

So don't worry about checking this box for four or five or six different Google Calendars thinking that you're going to receive four, five, or six different emails at 5:00 a.m.

No, it's going to combine it all into one single email.

One single email for you to review.

So it can be an excellent way to start your day or review your day to get that email in your inbox and see all of your events there.

Now, be sure whatever changes that you make on this page, be sure to select "Save" so that those changes can be applied and you can start to receive your daily agenda.

Now yes, that time, as you can see, it is hardwired.

You cannot adjust that time for 5:00 a.m., and it is going to be based in your current time zone.

But I think for most people, that's probably a good time.

I can't see many people wanting it much earlier than that.

And if you're wanting it for sort of a planning purpose or what's coming up today, that's typically a good time to receive that daily agenda.

So try out and investigate some of the notification settings that you have for your Google Calendar.

You can experiment with different time lengths and different times and see if you like the daily agenda.

Thank you so much for watching.

If you liked this video, I would encourage you to show it.

Give me a thumbs up down below.

Add a comment.

What do you think about the notification settings within Google Calendar?

And we have many other videos here at Simpletivity, so we would love to have you subscribe.

Tell us what you think.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

I'm going to assume that in your role you probably have to do some type of writing

perhaps you write a regular blog article for your own personal website

or perhaps you write blog content for your company or organization

perhaps you are starting to write a book and you have a goal to write a new chapter each and every week

or perhaps you just need to get that marketing report done or some other piece of written work done this week

well today I want to introduce you to the most dangerous writing app and I love that title

you can find it at the most dangerous writing app.com and the entire purpose of this application this web-based tool is to keep you in flow

I don't know if you're like me but when I go to write something I'm often a bit of a perfectionist

and I overanalyze what I'm writing while I'm writing

too often I have started to write an article or started to write a report and after the first two sentences I start to overanalyze those sentences saying well that's not exactly what I wanted to say

or maybe I'd like it to sound a bit more like this

and I waste a lot of time because as any established or professional author will tell you

you want to get into to some type of flow

you want to get into some type of rhythm

you can always edit it later and in most cases you should edit it later

and that's what the most dangerous writing app can help you with

here you can see their tagline don't stop typing or all progress will be lost and that is very and 100% true when it comes to the most dangerous writing app

here's how it works you get a choice of either the length of time that you would like to write or the number of words that you would like to write

so it has several different defaults

no you cannot select your own specific length or your own specific word count

but they give enough variety here I think for any writer to use or benefit from

so here's the number of minutes that you can select from

and I usually prefer this one is the number of words

when I sit down to write a new blog article I'm usually targeting somewhere around 500 Words so that's the length that I will select

I'm not really sure about this one 1667 words I don't know if that's an inside joke for writers or authors

if you know what this number is referring to please leave your answer or leave your comments in the section below

now I'm going to get back to hardcore mode a little bit later but let's don't worry about that just yet

so let's say you want to sit down and you want to write for five minutes so we've got minute selected and then we've got five

the next step is we select the big start writing button and then we get a blank page

we get a blank canvas to start typing

now just before I begin start typing I just want to highlight few of the other things that we see on this screen

number one I love that most of it is blank

this is not a place to do any editing bold italicize bullet points this is pure for writing

if you have a preference of a dark contrast or a light contrast it allows you to do that

you can expand the entire screen if you want to hide even your web browser

and then at the very bottom you can see we have our word count and it doesn't matter if you've selected a time limit or a word count limit it's always going to show you the number of words down below

and then lastly you will see right here creeping out from the top left corner there will a progress bar that will start to branch out

now this will either represent the amount of time that I've selected

and so in this case we've selected 5 minutes so you know it's going to slowly creep out across here until we get to 5 minutes on the right hand side of the screen

or it will represent the number of words that you have typed if that was your goal

so how does it work

so I haven't started yet as soon as I start typing it is keeping track of how often my key are on the screen and if I pause it's going to start fade

oh did you see that it started fading there a little bit now I have a tough time talking and typing at the same time so yeah this is a little gobbly go

but I'm going to stop again and watch it's going to start to fade

and I'm going to stop it once more now this next time I'm going to let it fade out and it's about a 5-second interval and if you stop typing for 5 seconds it's gone

I failed even gives me a big red screen and yeah you can see how many words you wrote

and no I don't feel like tweeting this out to anyone but the entire concept is this if you stop typing within that interval whether it's a time-based or a word-based you are going to lose everything

the goal here is just to keep writing

keep it coming keep writing

you can always edit it later and if you achieve that milestone if you achieve that limit that you have set out to do well then can keep the work

right nothing's going to happen you're not going to get this red screen in the future so if we say try again it's just going to bring us back and keep us at that time limit

let me show you that fail once again

so again I'm a poor typer and speaker at the same time so I'm just sort of putting some garbage down here in front of me

and here you can see this progress bar right which is a timer in this case

but if I wait right it's going to give a slight fade

oh oh I better yeah let's keep writing let's keep writing

so it is going to give us a bit of a visual indicator and then if I wait too long and it is gone

I fail oh nine words again they weren't really words it was really more a mashing of keys in this example

but I have actually used this quite regularly over the last few weeks

let's go back to the home screen just so I can show you that last setting which is hardcore mode

now this one really surprised me and I think this is only for experienced writers because I'll show you exactly what happens when you select hardcore mode

you can do it for minutes or words it's available in both both options

but if I say start writing you'll see that my screen looks a little bit fuzzier right

you can't even see that that says start typing and watch as I start entering in some keys it quickly puts the letter of the key that I'm hitting at that moment but you can see I can't actually read what I'm writing

now I guess for some very experienced writers or authors this is fine

you know just a stream of Consciousness just keep it coming without even being able to proofread it

and of course if you stop typing you're going to get the exact same fail screen

I have not used hardcore mode before I am not ready for that and I don't think I'll ever be ready for that

I do want to see what I have just written down and how that forms what comes next

but this may be a very big help to you especially if you're in a bit of a writing rut

I've used this for a variety of different content

most often for articles and blog content

recently I actually used it when I wanted to compose a letter to a relative of mine

it was around the holidays I really wanted to reach out to this person and I sort of kept putting it off

but I wanted to give something a bit more meaningful than just a five-sentence email or short paragraph in an email

and the most dangerous writing app helped me to do so

it allowed me to sit down write about 500 Words

just let it come out just whatever was on my mind whatever I wanted to say and express

and then of course I didn't send that letter as is

I went back

it's very easy you you'll get it in a in a Note file in a text file

sorry is how you can export it or you can just copy and paste what you see on the screen and then put it in a Word document

put it in a web page put it in your blog editor

wherever you'd like to edit it afterwards

and in my particular example it was great

I could edit the letter

I could edit some of the content

but the important thing was it allowed me to do it in a much shorter period of time

because I knew if I stopped writing I was going to lose it all

so check out the most dangerous writing app

you might want to start out just by doing it for fun

but you might be surprised how it can help you get more done and really get into that writer's Zone

achieve that type of flow with your writing

I'd love to hear your experience with the most dangerous writing app

so be sure to share your experience in the comments below

remember being productive does not need to be difficult

in fact it's very simple

Trello gives us so many different options on how we can add information to our cards.

You can add labels.

You can add colors.

You can add due dates and checkboxes.

There are so many different pieces of information to an individual Trello card.

But maybe you want to add something a little more specific.

Maybe you would like to add a custom field depending on how you work or perhaps what industry you work in.

That might be very beneficial for you to start using custom fields.

Today I'm going to show you how to use, how to add custom fields and edit those fields so that they can appear on your cards.

You can use them as frequently or as often as you need to.

To do so, we are first going to have to enable the custom field powerup.

To do so, click on your menu and then come down here to power-ups.

Now note if you are using the free version of Trello, the basic version of Trello, you are only allowed one powerup per board.

For example, I already have my custom fields powerup enabled in this case.

But if you're wanting to use more than one, let's say you're using the calendar powerup and you want to use the custom fields powerup.

You will need to upgrade your Trello plan.

But for today's example, I'm just going to use the free version as an example.

After hitting enable here on the right-hand side, you are going to see a gear icon here.

By selecting the gear icon, you actually have to make one more selection, and that's the edit the powerup settings.

This is where we can start adding custom fields that will appear on our card.

The first option they give us is to add a field.

If we select the add a field option, we need to give our new custom field a name.

Let's say this first one is going to be the name of a person, so I'm actually going to label it as name.

From the dropdown type, I'm going to select text.

This field is just going to be used for entering someone's name.

The final option I have here is, would I like this custom field information to show on the front of the card?

You're probably already familiar with things like checkboxes and due dates, and if a card does have notes, you have some little icons, some little indicators on the front of the card if that information is present.

Now by default, when you're adding a new custom field, this is going to be unchecked.

But if this is information you would like to see, you can simply check that box, and then it will show on the front.

I think I'm going to check this one just as an example so we can see it when we go and apply it to a card.

I'm going to hit save.

The great thing is that you're not limited by the number of custom fields that you can add to a card.

We've just added the name field here.

Now I'm going to go ahead and add some additional fields as well.

I can add another text type if I like, but there's actually five choices for us to choose from.

We can include a number.

We can include a checkbox.

We can include a date or a dropdown list.

Remember, these will behave differently than the existing checkbox functionality or due date, for example.

Maybe you just want to capture a date.

It's not a due date.

You just want to capture a date.

That's the type of custom field that you would select.

The checkbox is going to be an either/or checkbox, so this is not going to be a list of items.

This would simply be a yes-or-no checkbox for you to select from.

A dropdown list can probably be very, very helpful if there is a list of selections that you regularly need to choose from, or you want members of your team to choose from.

The dropdown list can be very helpful in that case.

Let's pick checkbox in this case here, and maybe the name of this checkbox is going to be, we recorded a name in the first one.

Let's say, were they satisfied?

Was the customer satisfied?

Or something to that effect.

I'm going to say satisfied.

I'm going to leave this one unchecked this time around to show the field information on the front of the card.

I'm going to hit save.

Again, you can continue to add additional fields here.

You can also add fields within the card, and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

The last thing I want to show you is the button name.

By default, the name is custom fields.

That's what we're going to see within the card, but we can even change that as well.

I'm going to change it for this example.

I'm just going to say more info, or maybe more details would make more sense.

I'm just going to say more details.

That's going to be the name of the button.

Now let's go take a look at how that looks on a new or an existing card.

I'm going to come over here.

This is a test card here.

I'm going to open it up.

Here under the heading power-ups, you see there's our new button titled more details, or we can label it whatever we want.

When I click on that button, it's going to give us the options that we specified.

Here's the name.

I can put in the name of the person who may be helped me in this example if that's what we're trying to capture.

Was I satisfied or not?

I can check that box or leave it unchecked, depending on, I guess, the level of my service.

I can hit save.

Now you can see just above the description and just below the title, you can see those two fields now appear.

I have the name.

I have the satisfied.

It's no or yes.

If I click on them, I can toggle them and change them as well.

I can change the name just by selecting on them.

Let me click this one back to yes.

Then I'm going to minimize the card.

Lastly, I want to show you, remember with the name field we said that we wanted it to display on the front of the card.

There it is.

Now we can see the name of that person on the front of the card.

If I go to any other card, let's add a name to this one over here.

I'm going to say Jane.

I'm going to say I was satisfied this time.

Hit save.

There we see the name now appears on the front of that card.

Again, it could be a date.

It could be a dropdown menu.

It could be a number that you are trying to attach.

You can give it any label that you like, and you can even edit it within the card.

So instead of going back to the menu, let's click on this card, and I'm going to click on the more details.

So that's the label we gave it.

You can see that the settings option is also located here.

If I select this, I can either edit the ones I've already created, my existing fields, I can edit the button name if I'd like, or I can keep adding fields.

Maybe I want to add a date here.

Maybe I want to add a start date.

We use a lot of due dates in Trello.

What if I want to add a start date?

When did this really get underway?

Just for fun, I'm going to say yes, show it on the front of the card.

I'm going to hit save.

I'm going to click over here, and now when I hit more details, hey, look at that.

I've got a date and a time field that I can select.

I can hit save.

It's going to be recorded here, and it's going to show on the front of the card.

Explore some of the uses of adding custom fields to your Trello board.

Again, it may be particular to your industry.

Maybe there are some certain words that you and your team use on a regular basis, and it would be helpful to include that within a Trello card.

Let me know how you find using custom fields.

I'd love to hear your experience if you have used custom fields in the past and how that has benefited your workflow, how that's benefited your productivity.

If you have not already subscribed to the Simpletivity YouTube channel, I would encourage you to do so.

We would love to hear from you.

We would love to hear what you think about Trello and custom fields.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Google Keep has gotten a lot of attention over the past year, partly because of some changes Evernote has made.

Evernote first ruffled some feathers by changing the number of devices you could use the Evernote application with if you were using their basic or free version.

Then, very late in 2016, Evernote changed its privacy policy. The way it was announced and some of the wording around it led to a lot of people looking for other note applications.

You can find articles and news about both of these changes if you'd like to learn more.

Today, we're not comparing Google Keep to Evernote, but rather focusing on managing different notes in Google Keep.

One of the most common questions I get is: "Scott, I’m used to dealing with notebooks and folders in Evernote. Google Keep doesn’t have that functionality. How do I manage all of my notes in Google Keep?"

I want to make one disclaimer at the beginning of today's video: I don't think it's fair to compare note applications head-to-head.

The way we use our note applications is quite personal and unique, unlike email, where you can compare Google Gmail to Microsoft Outlook on a basic level.

With notes, some of us take very brief notes, while others use note applications to craft articles, write short books, or bookmark blog articles.

So, it really comes down to how you use your notes and what you want from your note application to determine which is best for you.

I will admit that my notes have a lifespan of roughly two weeks. About 90% of my notes live for about two weeks before they’re gone.

I want a note application that is quick and easy. I can get in, type a quick note, and get back to the rest of my day. I usually review my notes daily or weekly, then convert them into a to-do list, add them to my calendar, or turn them into an email.

I’m not storing a lot of reference material in my note application.

You might be similar to me, or you might be different. That will determine which note application is best for you.

Managing and organizing notes in Google Keep without true notebooks or folders—how can we do it?

The first obvious option is to use labels. Google Keep makes it easy to create and add new labels. You can see a few samples on the left side of the application’s menu. You can quickly filter and see all notes associated with a particular label.

Google Keep also allows adding multiple labels at the same time. For example, a note might have both the "family" and "reference" labels attached.

Google Keep also lets you add a label using a hashtag. When starting a new note, you can hit the hashtag and see all your labels. You can select the label you want or type it in yourself.

Labels are likely your first choice for organizing notes in Google Keep, especially if you don't want to see everything on the home screen.

The second method is using color coding. Google Keep offers eight shades for color coding your notes. You might choose yellow for personal notes, blue for professional ones, and red for another category.

If you don’t need a long list of labels or folders, colors can be a solution. For visual learners, this can help filter notes by color.

To filter notes by color, click on the search bar at the top. You’ll see options to filter by labels and color. At the bottom of the search options, you can select different colors and see all notes colored that way, regardless of labels.

These are your two primary and easiest ways to categorize notes in Google Keep: using labels or color coding.

I’d love to hear from you about your experience with Google Keep. How do you organize your notes? Do you use one of the methods mentioned or something different that might benefit other Simpletivity users?

Share your experience in the comments below. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Simpletivity YouTube channel, please do. We have new videos each week and would love to have you in the Simpletivity community.

Remember, being productive doesn’t need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.

In order for you to work at your productive best, you need to be able to ignore certain things so you can focus on your most important work. And although email is a necessity as a part of our business world, we need to be able to ignore email from time to time.

However, that can be difficult when you have email desktop alerts turned on. So today I want to show you how to turn your desktop alerts off and also set up some custom rules so that you don't miss messages from particular senders or those that may be of high importance.

What are Outlook Alerts

Now, this video is particular to Microsoft Outlook users. If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, you're probably very familiar with email desktop alerts.

They usually appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, and they give you a brief summary of that new email which has just arrived. It will show you the sender, the subject line, the first few words or the first few sentences of that message, and the date and time that it arrived.

Now, I'm not exactly sure why it includes the date and time because these notifications arrive immediately as soon as that message arrives. And they can be so distracting, pulling you away from other work or other things that you were engaged in at that moment.

They don't just appear when you have Outlook open as the active window. As long as you have Outlook running, even if it's minimized in your taskbar, these messages will continue to pop up, distract you, and pull you away from your most important work.

So how do we go about turning these distracting notifications off? Well, let's jump into Outlook and see where we need to go.

How to Turn Off Outlook Alerts

In order for you to turn off your notifications that appear in the bottom right-hand corner, we want to start by selecting file. At the very bottom, just above exit, is options.

Let's select options, and that's going to give us a whole lot of options. Right near the top is mail, so let's select mail.

About halfway down this screen, you shouldn't have to scroll. You will see the section heading called message arrival.

By default, Microsoft usually has all of these turned on: when new messages arrive, play a sound, briefly change the mouse pointer, show an envelope icon in the taskbar, and display a desktop alert. I don't think you need any of these notifications for new email, so I strongly encourage you to uncheck all of them.

Especially play a sound. You don't need an audible sound for every email that comes in, and of course, this last one, displaying a desktop alert, we do not want to see these interruptions for every single message.

Whether it's something important, a message from your boss, or something that is spam, remember it doesn't filter out anything. Every single message will pop up there in the lower right-hand corner, so we want to turn all of them off.

How to Create a Rule

Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, wait a minute, Scott. Once in a while, that notification has been helpful. Once in a while, I have received an important message, and I was able to act upon it because it showed up here.

Well, I'm going to show you how to create a rule for specific senders or for those which have been flagged as high important so that they can still appear and notify you, yet you won't receive notifications for every single message.

Let's start with a particular sender. For many people, they don't want to miss a message from their boss, perhaps a superior, maybe a very important client, or maybe it could be a spouse or a significant other.

The easiest way to create a rule for that individual is to find an email that they have sent to you. So I'm going to select this one as an example.

We can either select rules up here at the top in the ribbon, or we can right-click and select rules. They will both get us to the same place, and we are going to select create a rule.

This is someone that we want to be notified when their emails arrive. So I'm going to select create a rule, and it's going to show us this dialog here.

Nothing is checked so far. The way that this dialog works is that it gives us sort of an if this, then do that scenario.

So when I get an email with all the selected conditions, we're going to make that selection here, do the following. I'm going to tell it what to do here.

In this case, when I get an email with all the selected conditions, I'm going to select from this person. That's the only thing I'm going to check is from this individual.

What I want it to do is to display in the new item alert window, so I'm going to select that checkbox and select ok. Now it's gonna give us a brief warning saying that this rule is a client-only rule, and what that means is that this is only going to apply when Outlook is running.

Which is fine, the desktop notifications that we just turned off were the same thing. They were only going to show up when Outlook is running.

So we're gonna say ok, and now whenever I receive a message from this particular sender, I'm going to get a notification. It's gonna look a little bit different than the one we saw here, but it's gonna show up right in the middle of our screen in a new dialog box telling us that we've got a message from that individual.

So you can do this for as many senders as you like, but I would encourage you to keep it to a small number, probably no more than 4 or 5. Think of the four or five people that you really want to see their message every single time they send you something.

I'm hoping that's a relatively small number. The rest you can come and deal with their messages as you go through email throughout the day or throughout set times that you make time with email.

But these are just your extra important people that you want to receive that notification when they send you an email. Now there's a second circumstance in which you may wish to receive a notification immediately, and that's if someone sends you a message marked high importance.

Those are messages with those little red exclamation marks on them in Outlook. In this situation, we're gonna select rules up above, and instead of selecting create rule, we're gonna select manage rules and alerts.

This is an easier way to get to the new rule section. We're gonna start a rule from scratch down below.

We can see the one that we just created, right? These are the new item alert window alert for this particular sender, and as we add more people, they will show here as well.

So we can add or remove people if we like, but this time we want to select a new rule. Now this may look a little busy, it may look a little intimidating, but it's actually much easier than you may think.

The one we want to select is in the middle under stay up to date. We want to select display mail from someone in the new item alert window. That is what type of rule we are setting up.

In the next screen, if we click next at the bottom, we get to say, well, which conditions do you want to check? By default, they select from people or public group.

This is so you can choose a particular individual, kind of like what we did in that first rule. We're going to uncheck that because the condition that we want this time around is marked as importance.

That's the one we want to have checked. But before we move on, we have to make one more step in it and actually click on the importance link.

The reason is that there are three different levels of importance. There is normal, which is just your standard email. There is low importance that I find not a lot of people use, and then there's high importance.

This is the one with the red exclamation mark, so you want to make sure you select high importance level and then select ok. You can read the description of the rule down below as we go along.

Apply this rule after the message arrives marked as high importance. Let's select next once again.

It gives us the option as to, well, what do we want to do? Do we want to move it, do we want to redirect it, do we want to play a sound?

You can make additional options here. What I suggest is just having just the first one display a specific message in the new item alert window.

If we select that link, we can say, you know what we want to call this? I'm just gonna call it high importance.

You can put my own exclamation mark on it if I like. So that's just gonna show up in the dialog box when this message arrives.

I'm gonna select ok. We are gonna select the next button.

It's gonna ask us, are there any exceptions? In most cases, there is not going to be any exception, so we'll leave everything here unchecked.

On this screen, we're gonna select next. We can give it a specific name if we like.

I'm just going to leave it at high importance. Turn on this rule should be checked by default, and then we select finish.

Now once again, we are going to receive a warning saying that this rule will only run when you check your email in Outlook. That's fine.

We only want this rule to run when Outlook is open, either in the background or if we actually have it as the active window. So we'll select ok, and now you see we have that rule added here.

Going forward, every email from this particular sender, and if I add other people, that will show up as a new desktop alert. Every single email, regardless of who sends it, any email that comes in with a high importance label on it will show up in front of me as well.

Those are maybe the only two or three circumstances that I want. You can think of other rules or other situations in which you may want an email to show up.

But please, in order for you to reduce the amount of distractions in your

day-to-day, turn off your desktop notifications for every single email and instead create a few rules for just those important people or those important situations. I hope that has helped you out, and I wish you a very productive day.

If you would like to learn more about how you can stay productive, particularly when it comes to email, I would encourage you to like, subscribe, and comment below. What are some of your biggest distractions when it comes to working with your computer or working with your email application?

If you haven't visited Simpletivity.com, I would encourage you to do so. You will find many more tips and techniques to help you work at your productive best.

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