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hi Scott friesen here at simple tivity and today I wanted to do something just a little bit different because today is a very special one why is it special

Why is it special

well it's special because I'm wearing a simple tivity t-shirt but no I'm not about to start selling merchandise today is special because it marks the one-year anniversary of the simple tivity calm website yes it's been exactly one year

Thank you

Since we started offering training and other consulting services to help you and organizations be more productive, help you to get more things done, and enjoy less stress at the same time.

So thank you for subscribing.

Thank you for joining the email newsletter.

Thank you for all of your comments and questions as we continue to produce new content to help you be more productive.

Now, if this is your first time visiting Simpletivity.com, I encourage you to stick around.

Browse some of our other content.

We have workshops.

We have webinars.

We have some upcoming online courses to offer in just a few weeks’ time.

If you are looking for a quick and simple way to get more things done right now, I encourage you to download the To-Do List Guide.

It's a free guide, and I'll provide a link for it right here in the video so you can access it and get started right away.

It has been an amazing year and I want to thank you for being a big part of it.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it’s very simple.

There have been a total of seven US presidents over the course of my lifetime.

That should probably give you a pretty good guess as to how old I am.

And to get to this level of leadership, or even just to be considered the US president, you need to know a thing or two about how to get things done.

Whether that's from a personal productivity standpoint or just from the ability to motivate others to get things done.

Now, arguably, my favorite US president of all time was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And that may sound surprising because he was the leader of the United States long before I was even born.

But this quote has really stuck with me since the first time I heard it.

He said, "What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important."

And from this brief quote, we get our important-urgent matrix, something that was made quite popular by Stephen R. Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Now, the important matrix gives us four different quadrants where we can group together our tasks and our projects and give us a bit of a better idea of where we should be focusing our attention and what types of tasks or what types of things we should maybe try to avoid on a daily basis.

We first have our important and urgent quadrant.

Now, this tends to be our reactive tasks, things that have a sharp deadline, something that's due right away, a crisis, some type of fire that we need to fight.

Next, we have our important and not urgent quadrant.

This tends to be more of our proactive activities, things that don't need to be accomplished today, this week, or maybe actually never need to be accomplished, but provide a lot of value if we work on them and if we bring them to fruition.

Down below, we have our tasks which are not important yet urgent.

And these tend to be made up of a lot of interruptions.

Think of phone calls that you receive or people who drop by your desk.

And perhaps what they have in front of you is not that important, but it may seem urgent, or people are making it sound more urgent than it actually needs to be.

And then our last quadrant are our activities which are neither important nor urgent.

And these tend to be our time wasters.

Now, we all need some downtime, we all need to get away, maybe spend some time binge-watching Netflix.

But hopefully, during our working hours, when we're trying to get things done, we're spending little to no time in that last quadrant.

And what President Eisenhower was trying to get us to focus on was that we should be spending most of our time in the important and not urgent quadrant.

This is where we can be proactive, and as a result, we have an opportunity to minimize the number of things that fall into that reactive quadrant, that important and urgent quadrant.

Now, another president which I think had a lot of valuable productivity advice for you and me was our most recent sitting president, President Barack Obama.

And you're probably wondering why I'm showing so many pictures of President Obama on the screen here.

Well, do you notice anything different between these images, or maybe I should say do you notice anything similar?

Yes, Barack Obama was known to wear only two different suits: one grey suit, as you see here on the left, and then one navy blue suit here on the right.

He had the exact same cut, the exact same style for both suits, but just two different colors to choose from.

No, no, I'm not suggesting that he only had physically two different suits.

He had multiple copies of each suit, but only two colors: one grey and one blue.

So why was this helpful to him?

How did this help him improve his productivity and his ability to get things done?

Well, when he was asked the question, he responded with this: he said, "I'm trying to pare down my decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm wearing because I have too many other decisions to make."

You see, the concept that President Obama was tapping into here was decision fatigue, specifically avoiding decision fatigue.

Now, decision fatigue states that people tend to make worse decisions after having made a lot of decisions.

This is precisely why many judges will give out harsher penalties, harsher rulings later in the day, later in the afternoon than they do earlier in the morning.

And President Obama was trying to minimize the number of decisions, unnecessary decisions, that he needed to make first thing in the morning when he got dressed, when he decided what to wear for the day.

Because he had much more important things to focus on.

So I think a valuable lesson for all of us.

Now yes, we are not the leader of a nation, or at least most of us watching are not leaders of a nation or a country.

But I think we can use this advice to our advantage.

So my question to you is this: how can you reduce the number of unnecessary decisions in your day?

We all have decisions to make, but how can we reduce the number of decisions, the number of unnecessary decisions that we need to make so we can be sharp, so we can be clear on our most important decisions?

I would love to hear your answer in the comments below.

Thank you so much for watching.

If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like, give it a thumbs up below.

And if you've not yet subscribed to Simpletivity, please do so.

It's absolutely free, and you'll get updates of new videos here on this channel.

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

In fact, it's very simple.

Are you tired of feeling busy all the time? Are you sick of feeling stressed as a part of your day? Is there an ideal way to manage a to-do list? Is there an optimal way to manage your schedule or your calendar?

It's so easy to make things more complex or more difficult than they need to be. It is so easy for us to put the blame on our technology. It's so easy to say it's my smartphone or it's the apps or there are all these people who are trying to get a hold of me.

If you want to have your most productive day yet, you have to stop being a slave to email. You are the one who's in control; you get to decide when you check email next and how you interact with your inbox.

I think focus is what we lack on a day-to-day basis, and when we lack focus, we start to hurt ourselves, hurt our organizations, and hurt our clients.

I want to show you three steps that you need to include as a part of your morning routine. Three things that you should do every single morning to set yourself up for a fantastic day.

If you want great results, you need to ask yourself great questions, and this one simple question is going to help you reveal what you should be working on next.

When we keep things basic, we drown out the rest of the noise around us and it allows us to work at our productive best.

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

hello Burnap simple tivity it's Francesco here

thank you to Scott for having me back on your channel it's really amazing to be here I love all of Scott's videos especially loved his Trello videos and his Google Calendar videos as I've said in the past they are some of the best resources so I'm actually gonna include in the description a few of my favorite ones that Scott has put out and I'll be great so you can dive into that one

Scott is also gonna be doing a video on my channel so jump over and join in the fun because there'll be a video of his back

as you can see by the title I'm gonna be talking about how you can use Evernote and Todoist together now this is a sort of topic that I'm gonna be diving into a bit more detail on the channel but I wanted to give you sort of like a basic overview of how you can use them together in sort of three contexts

so a short introduction on Todoist and Evernote to-do list

TODOIST

it's basically for to-do lists, so your tasks, and that's basically where you can store all of those activities

well if you haven't tried it out it's a really good task manager it brings together some really strong features with a really simplistic and flexible experience so that you can get things done across a day with a bit of ease

and Evernote is the same it's very flexible and you can use it and structure it in a way that you like I I am a big fan of Evernote and I use both of these in tandem

now Evernote is really for your notes and so you can use it for clipping meeting notes all the way over to your ideas and bringing together presentations and things like that

now when it comes to using both of these together in like a situation for example the first situation you can use them is

CREATING A PROJECT

Starting a new project now inside of Evernote, what I tend to do if I'm starting a new project is create a new note and start documenting a few ideas or a few things like a checklist or to-do list to help bring together this sort of outline of the things I need to do next.

I tend to just block out a bit at the top so that I can have a few like checklist items there, and it's a good way for me to get started.

But once, as you can imagine, you've got started, you need to be able to connect that to your task manager.

So I do not use Evernote as my task manager. What I do is with those checklist items I tend to just copy over, and I can either be selecting the whole copy of all of the items or just individual items and pasting them into an editor to do this project.

This way I can basically take all of my notes in like pre-actions and bring them into reality where I have a tick-off and I can add a due date and information like that.

So bringing them from Evernote to Todoist makes some more of a reality.

What I do then is, for example, if I have a task like "film this video" and I made some notes inside of Evernote, what I do is I copy some of those notes over and put them inside of the comment section of the Todoist task.

In this way, when it comes around to doing the task, I don't necessarily have to go back to Evernote. If I wanted to, I could, which is great if it was a lot of detail and I couldn't store all the comments.

What I do is I add a link to the Evernote note. That way I can click out and go straight into the full information without any need of actually, you know, making it too complicated.

So once you start a project inside Todoist, you could actually use the comment abilities as well to communicate with people.

USE COMMENTS TO COMMUNICATE

Great, so that's one of the ways that I use Evernote.

I introduce it together when starting new projects.

I tend to use my Evernote as my canvas for getting all of those ideas and tasks out, and Todoist is my action board for getting those things done.

The good thing is with Todoist, you can add other people, start actioning them, assigning them as well, and delegating to other people.

So the next sort of context area is clipping things across my day.

As you can imagine, when you're in a day, you end up clipping a lot of things.

A lot of people, what they do is, instead of clipping things, they just watch them.

For example, it could be you find a really good article or a YouTube video and you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna watch this now."

That can potentially be distracting to your routine or your workflow.

So grabbing that YouTube video or that article and saving it for later does help because it helps me come back to it later, clipping all the information but not actually getting distracted at that given time.

So I will do that using

2. CLIPPING THINGS

The Todoist inbox in my day, if I see a link that I like, I'll clip it into the Todoist inbox and get it there so that it's ready. The same with Evernote. If I find a bit of research or a bit of information on the web, I used to use Web Clipper to bring that in.

Now, let's say I'm working on a project, and I get an email with a bit of information about the project. I want to clip it to both Todoist and Evernote. Both Todoist and Evernote have a specific email address you can use.

You basically can clip the email address for Todoist for a specific project and also into your Evernote inbox as well.

You put them in the BCC of the email, and all of the information, including attachments, will be sent over into Todoist and Evernote.

In Evernote, it will appear in more of a full-bleed format, but in Todoist, it will appear as a task, and in the comment, you'll have all the information. You’ll find those inside projects.

That's a good handy way to start sending things into projects or sending conversations into projects and catching that within Evernote or Todoist.

In terms of planning, planning is an important part of your day. What I'll do is use Evernote as my big vision planning tool. I tend to plan inside of Evernote, that's anything like a month onwards. Literally, I will go there to plan and action stuff.

PLANNING THINGS IN BOTH

Things ready as a big picture, but I'll use Todoist for literally my next seven days all the way up to the end of the month. I've never really stored too many tasks past a month in Todoist, so I need Todoist because I want to keep things short-term in Todoist and things long-term in Evernote.

Mainly because I feel like Todoist is more about actions and Evernote is more about vision planning and getting things ready for the future.

Actually having Todoist for actionable items helps to make it faster. It helps me to not store necessarily because I used to store my main ten goals in Todoist, and it just got messy.

So having Todoist for short-term action items really does help. Now, of course, you may have seen a couple of experiences that you can set up with Todoist and Evernote in applications like Zapier or IFTTT, which are great. I'll probably be exploring them in a future video, probably in more detail.

There are other apps as well on iPhone, like Workflow, that will help you bring those together. For me, at the moment, just using them like this, using the sort of ability to use the context and planning and visioning, is pretty much my scope of it.

But there are lots of different ways that you can do that. I'll include a few ways other people are using Todoist and Evernote to sort of go a bit further.

Anyway, guys, I hope that you enjoyed today's video. Thanks to Scott for having me here on the Simpletivity Channel. It's great to be here. I'll probably be back, and Scott, I'll be over on my channel, so feel free to subscribe to both of us in the description below.

It's free; we put out regular videos, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Just before we go, if you want to join the new Facebook group for the Keep Productive community, which is the name of my channel, feel free to add it and join in the description below. There are lots of other like-minded people that will be sharing apps and resources like this, so feel free to jump in and become part of the community.

Thank you so much to Scott at Kudos on all of these videos as normal. He is a great guy, definitely check them out. But thanks everyone for watching. Feel free to use the comments below, and I'll be there to answer any questions or queries or just check with you guys.

So guys, thanks very much. Make sure to have a great week, keep productive, and I'll see you guys very, very soon. Cheers.

hello everyone

Scot Friesen here at Simpletivity

and today I want to share with you seven websites to help you stay more productive

now in today's video I'm gonna be focusing on websites where you can get some instant gratification

where you can start to get some instant results to help you stay on task

or to help you in some other productivity area

I'm not gonna be looking at applications

so we're not gonna be looking at things where you need to be managing a project

or referring to your calendar

but things that you can use

things that I use on a regular basis

to get more out of my day

Time Date Comm

and to be more efficient so let's start off with the first one and that is time and date comm

time and date comm is where you need to go for anything related to time related to calendars time zones if you want to know when the sunsets or sunrises in a particular part of the world and I want to show with you two things that I use time and date calm most frequently with

the first one is the world clock meeting planner and I am often meeting with people around the globe and I want to try and find the ideal time to schedule that meeting so when I come to the world clock meeting planner I can pick the date where I'm planning to have that meeting or wanting to have that meeting

my first location is usually yourself so I'm gonna put in Vancouver here and then the second location perhaps I'm meeting with someone in well let's say Chicago for one of them and then let's pick someone maybe on the other on the other side of that were let's say Hong Kong

okay so we've got our three locations here this is where the three people are going to be resigning my next gonna select show timetable and then what it does is it gives me this nice sort of color coded form letting me know green as standard working hours yellow would be either early morning or late in the evening but still waking hours and then red would be typically when people are sleeping

so as I scan here obviously Vancouver and Chicago I mean we're on the same continent there's gonna be a lunging though with our friends in Hong Kong so I might say well look at this here we go maybe five o'clock my time that is a little bit later in Chicago but it's 8 a.m. in Hong Kong maybe I would propose you know one of these two times here 4:00 p.m. my time 4 or 5 p.m. my time to see if that might work with my colleagues in the other area you can even add more than three cities if you need as a part of this planning tool

now another one that I use often is their calendars here in time and date comm and the first one is the date to date calendar a duration and so here you can input any two dates and instantly find out what is the distance between those two days so let's say I pick something in the in the future here November 15th maybe that's when the project is scheduled to to end I'm going to say calculate duration and here I know instantly that's 51 days or if I want to convert that into minutes hours number of weeks and so forth I get all of those time units here as well

so if you're managing a project or if you get a date on your agenda and you want to see how many days or how many weeks in advance is that actually I often use this calculator there's a number of other calculators you can use here as well so let's continue with time and

Rescue Time

that brings us to rescue time calm

now rescue time is all about analyzing where you spend your time on your computer

rescue time you install it on your desktop computer you can actually install it on multiple devices and then what it does is it just silently tracks what applications are you using what is the active window on your system and then you get a very detailed report showing you you know what websites you visited what applications are open how long you spent in email again a very detailed report which you can dig down to

here's just an example from their homepage blue is indicating work-related activities and red is maybe fun or maybe time wasters so in this case software development that's great this person seems to be spending a lot of time on that but 15% of their day in news and opinion websites may be spending too much time there

so you can even block distracting websites by using rescue time as well so a very simple application you really don't have to do anything else other than install it let it do its thing and then you can review the results and see how you might want to change your workday change on where you focus

now speaking of blocking distracting websites and obtaining that focus we desire let's take a look at forest app dot CC

now forest first and foremost is an application for either your iOS or Android device but there is a Chrome extension so you can install this on your desktop computer as well

and forest app is all about focus so what Forest does is that when you start the application it plants a little seed just this little bud in this little pot of soil here and the goal is for you to ignore your phone or if you're using the desktop version to ignore certain websites that you determine for 30 minutes 30 straight minutes

and if you can do so during that time your little sprout here will start to grow it will start to grow into a tree and be a full-fledged tree at the end of those 30 minutes however if you pick up your phone if you do something with your phone or if you go to one of those websites that you've identified as distracting you're gonna kill your tree

so yes there's a bit of gamification going on here with the forest app your goal is to to build a forest all together right build multiple trees by obtaining your focus over multiple sessions

so again this can be a great way for work right if you have to write that article if you need to review an important document start it on your phone started on your application or identify websites such as Facebook or other websites that may tempt you and distract you and see if you can focus for 30 minutes and grow that tree next

Buzzsumo

up is buzzsumo calm and you may have heard me talk about buzzsumo before

buzzsumo calm is all about finding content that is shared the most online so you can type in a topic I'm going to type in productivity and here on the I've selected in the past month I want to take a look at you know what articles what pieces of content have been shared the most on social media

so here it gives me a nice list here I can see that this article here from inc.com has been shared the most when it comes to the topic of productivity I can even break it down by you know which social media platform so you can see an awful lot on LinkedIn quite a few on Facebook not so much on Twitter

whereas if I go down a bit further here let's take a look at this article from HBR you can see still the most on LinkedIn but it's almost even between Facebook and Twitter

so if you are looking for great content or maybe you just need some content ideas for your business perhaps you write a blog or you create content yourself buzz sumo can be a great resource to see what else is trending what are other people sharing it might give you some great ideas for your own content

next up is interacting

Survey Monkey

with our customers or really just getting anonymous feedback from anyone and that's surveymonkey.com

now chances are you've probably already heard of Survey Monkey maybe you've used it already but something that constantly surprises me is how few businesses or how few team leads make use of anonymous surveys

it's so great to be able to get that information to get feedback in real time and of course people like being honest they tend to be a lot more honest when they know that their email address or their name will not be associated with that feedback

so survey monkey makes it so easy for you to create a new survey it doesn't have to be too lengthy it can just be a few questions and then you get those responses immediately and maybe change your course of action

I've done some changes right here on simple tivity based on some of the wonderful feedback from viewers like yourself and and again try and use Survey Monkey as often as I can as long as it's appropriate

but don't forget to reach out and quiz your customers your subscribers even it's even if it's within your own company or within your own business even if it's a small team I've sent out surveys to a team five or seven individuals to get their feedback on certain questions

so Survey Monkey can help you do it all very quickly very efficiently

next up we have

Most Dangerous Writing App

the most dangerous app the most dangerous website on this list and yeah it's titled the most dangerous writing app and you'll find it at the most dangerous writing app calm

so what makes this website so dangerous well sometimes I suffer from writer's block right I I'm often a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my writing so I'll write a couple of sentences and then I'll just stare at that flashing cursor what should come next what should I write next

well any professional writer will tell you you should edit later just write just get into flow just write the content and that's where the most dangerous writing app comes in

so what you do is you select either the length of time in this case the number of minutes the number of consecutive minutes you would like to write or the number of words the number of total words that you would like to write

so when I'm writing a blog article I will often select 500 words then I select start writing and I've been given a blank canvas here where I can start writing so let's start writing something and then if I get stuck and I wait maybe I should maybe I should go in this direction if I don't input I failed it's gone everything that I've just written and remember it might have as many words as maybe 400 words on that previous screen is absolutely gone

yes the most dangerous writing app is so dangerous because you need to keep writing for that specified length of time or number of words or you will lose it all

I have used this more frequently more often than you may think many of my articles on the simple tivity comm blog actually started right here it's more important just to get those ideas out and then you can always go back and cut and paste and edit it later

so go ahead and try out even if it's just for fun the most dangerous writing app comm

and last but not least let's talk a little

Sleepy Time

bit about sleep and that brings us to sleepy time or more specifically sleepy ti.me and there's a dot or a period between the TI and the ME in time and this is all about getting the ideal length of sleep

so first we say I have to wake up at or maybe I want to wake up at let's say let's say 7:00 a.m. I'm gonna select 7:00 a.m. here and then I'm gonna select calculate and it says I should try to fall asleep at one of the following times 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. or 1 a.m. or 2:30 a.m.

well which one is it what when should I try to fall asleep well sleepy time is all about sleep cycles and you may be familiar with sleep cycles that we typically have a sleep cycle which lasts about 90 minutes so what sleepy time is doing is calculating those sleep cycles based on the information that you give it and saying these would be sort of the ideal times for you to fall asleep

now again we all have different different rhythms when it comes to our sleep and some of us need more sleep some of us need less sleep but sleepy time can be a great resource to find out when should you go to bed so you can get your optimal number of sleep cycles

you can also use this last one here at the bottom find out when to get up if you go to bed right now so if I hit that right now now remember it's in the morning when I'm recording this video it's telling me I should consider waking up at these times or at these intervals throughout the rest of the day

so those are the seven websites I'd encourage you to check out I hope you found it useful and encourage you to test out some of the websites that you've seen here

I'll also include a list and link to all of these websites in the description below if you like this video I would encourage you to give it a thumbs up and if you have not yet subscribed to simple tivity please do so we have many more videos coming up releasing new videos each and every week

thanks again for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult in fact it's very simple

Hello everyone, it’s Francesco here. Thank you very much to Scott for having me on the Symphony channel here on YouTube, and I really do appreciate him having me on here.

I’ve been up here before, and I love talking to you guys about productivity apps and resources. If you haven’t checked out Scott's content, if you're brand new to this video, go over and check all his stuff out. There’s everything from inbox to calendar features; it’s really amazing, so definitely worth checking out.

But in today’s video, what I wanted to do is cover Todoist. I run a very simple YouTube channel to Scott, covering productivity apps and going a bit deeper with them. So in today’s feature, we’re going to look at five Todoist hacks that you can use that will help benefit you for any day.

So let’s get stuck in.

Start Page

Over here, the first one I wanted to talk about is in the settings: it is Start Page.

Now, many people don't know about this tip, and it's actually one of the best ways to really optimize your experience.

So once you're in settings, whether you're using the web, mobile versions, go over to Preferences and you'll see Start Page.

Now Today is obviously set by default—that’s what I use personally—but you can actually create a specific thing.

So you can actually have Next Seven Days appear, so whenever you open up the app on Mac, Windows, etc., you’ll get this page.

So this is a Start Page that you land on.

Now you can see everything from Overdue, Today, or you can actually delve into a project.

Now, I previously used Todoist for my project, which had all of my sort of main targets there, but it got a bit too weird sometimes, so I just kept it with Today.

And that’s one of the best ways to start, but if you want to modify that, that’s available in Preferences and can easily be changed.

Labels

Moving down to labels as well, this is one of the things I'd recommend to everyone because, as you can see on my actual timeline of tasks for today, you can see their association to time.

So replying to all YouTube comments will take ten minutes. I have these labels set up.

So if you're in Premium, you can actually see these labels appear, and once you sign up, once you create the color, it will actually appear for five minutes when you create a task.

So, like "Eat cheesecake," for example, you can assign it with the label “Complete in five minutes.” Once that appears, you can actually click in and see all of the other tasks that you can complete in five minutes.

Now, this is actually a really effective way to keep productive and a great way if you've got five minutes to be able to spend it wisely and actually help plan in advance.

So that's one of my top tips for people who want to optimize their Todoist account.

So the other thing as well...

Project Comments

Here is the paragraph with sentences separated:

Is the idea of this project comments.

So for those who don't know, you can collect projects down the left-hand side. I have mine for all of my different activities.

But the one thing that people don't know is and do, like for example in the project.

So it can be home.

If I click project comments, you can actually add any comments here, any attachments as well, audio files, and emoji if you like.

So it's a good way actually having project comments there to add to me, maybe if you want to add targets to a specific project, or an attachment, or a voice recording telling you what that project's about for example.

So virtually a very handy way to have that, especially when you're working in teams and you want to add some more information, members, and guidelines, and information about how to use to do.

You can just pin it there, so it's actually a very useful resource.

So the other thing that I want to recommend is being able to segment to do.

So if you go over to your settings page, you'll be able to see that you obviously got your account and login information there.

But you also have this thing in projects called email in.

So you can actually email tasks into the project using a specific URL, sorry not URL, email address.

So if you copy this email address to the clipboard, all you have to do is whenever you go into email.

So if I'm on my email here and I want to send it to that.

So if I open it up, you can see that it's specific to this account.

And I say, get groceries, groceries.

Howdy's for groceries, this is a learning point for me today.

And there we go, I send that into the Todoist account.

It takes a few moments to appear, but obviously the sync works really well on Todoist.

But once that appears, I, so here we are, the email appeared and actually links back to all the other information inside the email.

So it's a great way for you to actually just quickly email in tasks, or if you want to add a thread.

Very helpful as well, so there are some of the useful.

Conclusion

Here are the sentences separated:

Tips I have inside of Todoist.

The only other recommendation in the final hack is actually on your iPhone.

To make sure that you've got Todoist saved in an extension.

I'll include the link to that in the description so you can go away and install that.

But every time you see an article, save it into Todoist.

Because it's actually a great way over here in my section.

I save any articles that I need to read and have actually been very helpful of them to clip them for later.

And it was.

I hope you enjoyed this feature.

If you haven't subscribed to Scott yet, do subscribe.

Again, subscribe to myself.

Do subscribe as well because I put out regular content which I'm sure you enjoy if you enjoy Scott's channel.

And we do regular columns as well.

So Scott will come on my channel.

He's just done a feature on Trello hacks.

So there's even more benefit to subscribing to a space.

Anyway, guys, thank you very much and thanks very much to Scott for having me.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all very soon.

Cheers you.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You're about to set up a meeting with someone, so you sent off an email, and you asked the following question: "Hey, can you meet with me this coming Tuesday?" And they reply back, saying, "Sorry, I've got another commitment. How about later on the same day? How about Tuesday afternoon?" And you received their email and say, "Mmm, sorry, I'm leaving work early that day. How about Wednesday? Wednesday afternoon?" To which they reply, "Nope, no can do. I've got another meeting at that time," and they suggest another time, and you suggest another time, and there's an awful lot of back and forth, back and forth as you try to find the ideal meeting time.

Well, today, I want to share with you a tool that is going to eliminate all of this back and forth, and it's called Assistant.to. You can find it at assistant.to, not .com, but assistant.to.

And what this Gmail add-on does is it helps you to not only invite someone to find the ideal time, but it actually creates that meeting for the both of you, all with just a single email.

Now, Assistant.to is only for Gmail users at this point if you want to create the invitation, but you can send this invitation to any user. It doesn't matter what the receiver is using. As long as you're using Gmail, you can use Assistant.to.

First steps, you'll need to install it, and Assistant.to comes as a Chrome extension, so it will be installed here in your browser. But let's go into our email. Let's see how it works here.

So I'm going to open up a new message. I'm going to find my test account here, and let's say I'm doing a new meeting. "Can we meet this week?" And I say, "Hi, Scott, looking forward to talking with you soon."

So at this point, I'd like to propose a few different times. You know, in the past, I may have suggested one time or two times, you know, just here in the description or just here in the subject of the email. But Assistant.to makes it so much easier.

At this point, I'm going to come down to the lower right-hand corner of my screen, and once you have Assistant.to installed as your extension, you're going to see this icon in the lower right-hand corner of the message that you're writing.

So I'm going to click on it, and what's going to happen is I'm going to see a new dialog box, which looks very, very similar to any calendar event or any other meeting that you may be setting up. We've got a title up here. It comes with sort of a stock title here. I'm going to change that. I'm going to say this is "Scott and Scott Chat."

Location: it is going to be phone-based, so I'm going to leave that there. Here, you can add one or more invitees, so I'm going to add the email address of the person that I'm sending it to. I could add additional ones if I wanted to as well. This is going to be helpful, so it adds it to their calendar as well.

And then, of course, we've got a description area where you can add phone numbers, maybe a link to your video conference, whatever else you'd like to include in the description.

Now, down below, we've got a snapshot of our calendar, and we can change the meeting length if we want. But the great thing about seeing your calendar is you can see the other commitments that are already on your calendar at that time.

So I'm going to push this out a few days. I'm going to look ahead at the following week, and I'm going to make a few suggestions. So all I need to do, with my 30-minute meeting length selected, is I'm going to select a few possible times.

I'm going to say 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday. I'm going to say 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday. And also, let's drag that one down, 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday. And then I'm also going to suggest 10:00 a.m. on Thursday. So I've got four different times that I'm available, and I'm hoping that that's going to be enough variety for the person that I'm sending it to.

So at this point, with all the information filled in and a few different choices, I'm going to select "Insert Times into Email," and what happens is you can see I've got a little bit of additional text here. It automatically adds this line in: "I'd like to set up a 30-minute meeting. Click on the meeting start time that works for you."

This is text-based, so if you'd like to alter this or change this, you certainly can. But down below, now we've got some clickable options for the person receiving this email, and the great thing is that they can take a look at this, make their selection, and immediately you will be notified, and it will also be added to your calendar.

So I'm happy with this here. All I have to do next is select "Send."

And now, let's go back into my test account here. It might take just a few seconds for me to receive that email. This is who I sent it to.

There we go. "Can we meet this week?" I'm going to open up this email, and this is what it looks like to the person receiving it, just like what we saw when we created it. So I can take a browse down here and say, "Well, I'm busy Tuesday. I'm away for a conference on Wednesday. Hey, Thursday at 10 a.m., that works for me."

So the receiver clicks on the link, clicks on their selected time, and look at that—it gives me a confirmation. "You're all set. You've successfully scheduled a meeting. Here are the details."

I can always select a different time—maybe I made a mistake, or maybe I'd like to change it. I can always select a different time, but I've confirmed, I've selected that meeting time.

Let's go back now to our original email, right? This is the person who has sent it, and this is what we receive. Assistant.to gives us a confirmation email telling us that that person has selected a meeting time, and here's the bonus: it's been added to your calendar.

So now if I go to November 16th, look at that—here is that invitation. It has been added directly to my calendar, all with a single email. So I've got all of the details: if I added a description, phone, the title of my meeting—it's all here. Here's the person that I've invited.

And Assistant.to will also add an additional link here, so if I want to reschedule, if I need to make some changes, I can always select this link, and the receiver will also have this link, so if they want to make a change, they can do so as well.

Speaking of which, let's go back to the receiver. Let's see what happens on their end. Let's go back to their inbox, and they receive an invitation from me, almost as if I had gone and created this meeting invite, right? This looks just like a regular meeting invitation. Do I accept? Am I tentative? Am I going to decline? But I really haven't done any of this; Assistant.to has done all of the work for me, all from that single email. I gave it some options, I gave the meeting details, and all the receiver had to do was select one time, and now we are all set.

I've got that meeting in my calendar, they can select "Accept," they will now have the meeting in their calendar, and we are ready to go.

So I would suggest you take a look at Assistant.to. It reduces so much of the back and forth, back and forth, as you are trying to find the ideal meeting time with the person that you are wanting to meet with.

Again, Assistant.to is only for Gmail users if you want to be able to invite people, but anyone can receive Assistant.to invitations. As you saw in my example, I was using Outlook.com as the person who received it, so it doesn't matter who you're sending it to—they can take advantage of this functionality.

So try out Assistant.to and let me know how it goes. Maybe you're already using Assistant.to. I'd love to hear your experience in the comments below.

If you enjoyed today's video, I would encourage you to give it a like, leave me a comment, and be sure to subscribe right here to Simpletivity.

Remember, being productive doesn't need to be difficult; in fact, it's very simple.

Are you tired of feeling busy all the time? Are you feeling swamped with your workload right now? Or are you sick of your staff complaining about all the things they need to accomplish by the end of the week?

If you said yes to any of those questions, you may want to hear from a busyness killer.

Hi, my name is Scott Friesen, and I'm the founder of Simpletivity Training and Consulting, and yes, I am the busyness killer.

What on earth is a busyness killer? Well, I find...

What is a busyness killer

that we often use that word busy synonymously with being productive

yet nothing could be further from the truth

it is so easy for us to fill our days with pointless and unnecessary activities

so I help individuals and organizations to work at their productive best

I help them to get more done and enjoy it less stress at the same time

you know I spent the first

About Scott Friesen

part of my career in the IT industry for many years

I helped to develop solutions and software so that businesses could communicate more efficiently and effectively with their clients

now I work directly with business owners, entrepreneurs, and their staff so that they can be more efficient and effective with their workday

are you wanting to optimize your schedule

are you wanting to ensure that your team hits their project goals by the end of the quarter

or perhaps you're just looking for new ways to avoid distractions and interruptions

if so, let's start a conversation

my name is Scott Friesen and being productive does not need to be difficult

in fact, it's very simple

Hi everyone, Jamie Keith from Teachers Tek here. Today, I hope everyone's having a great day. I'd like to thank Scott for having me on his channel. I've been coming to Scott's channel for a while to get productivity tips, checking out his Trello content, and I'm glad to be able to work with him on this one.

Today, I'm going to be showcasing some of my favorite reasons to use Google Drive. If you can think of any other reasons, make sure to write them down in the comments below. But let's get started!

Sharing and CollaborationSharing and collaboration are two of the best things about Google Drive. I'm already in my Google Drive here, and I want to show you how powerful this can be.

For example, if I go up to a folder, I can share the entire folder or the contents inside it one at a time. I prefer sharing folders because the permissions apply to all files within the folder. If I right-click on a folder, I can go to "Share" (or use the share icon up top).

I can share this folder with someone, such as another account of mine, and decide whether they can organize, add, and edit, or just view. If you go to the "Advanced" tab, you get more options, like making the folder public on the web. This lets anyone with the link access the folder.

After sharing, I can copy a shareable link and send it to anyone. They can access the folder or document based on the permissions I set.

Document SharingWhen working on a document, such as Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides, you can quickly share it using the "Share" button. You can add people, set permissions (view, comment, or edit), and send notifications. Comments can be added right on the document, and you can assign tasks to collaborators, making it easy to manage group work.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)OCR is an often-overlooked feature in Google Drive that can save you time. For instance, if you have a PDF, you can right-click on it and open it with Google Docs. Google Docs will convert the text from the PDF into an editable document.

Similarly, for images or scanned documents, you can use OCR to extract text. Just right-click the image or scanned document, open it with Google Docs, and the text will be extracted below the image in the new document.

Sending Large FilesGoogle Drive is great for sending large files. In Gmail, you can attach files up to 25 MB directly, but for larger files, you can use Google Drive. Compose a message, click the Google Drive icon, and select the file. Google Drive will handle sharing and permissions, so your recipient can access the file.

Revision HistoryRevision history is a valuable feature in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. If you need to revert to an earlier version of a document, go to "File" > "Version History." You can view and restore previous versions of your document, which is handy for tracking changes and recovering lost information.

Voice TypingVoice typing in Google Docs is a fantastic tool for speed and convenience. Under "Tools," select "Voice Typing" and click the microphone icon to start speaking. Google Docs will transcribe your speech into text. It supports commands for formatting, making it a powerful feature for dictating documents.

Google FormsGoogle Forms is another great app connected to Google Drive. It's perfect for collecting information, whether for business, quizzes, or feedback. You can start from scratch or use templates to create forms. Customize questions, colors, and settings, then send the form via email, link, or embed it in a website.

So, those are some of the best reasons to use Google Drive. If you have more reasons or features you love about Google Drive, drop them in the comments below.

Thanks for watching! If you found this video helpful, be sure to subscribe to Scott's channel, give this video a thumbs up, and leave a comment. Remember, productivity doesn't need to be difficult—it's actually very simple!

Google Chrome is nearly 10 years old and boy has it come a long way. So much so that Chrome is now the most popular web browser.

In fact, as of this recording, 2/3 of us are using Google Chrome to browse on the web each and every day. So today I want to share with you my 5 tips for getting the most out of Google Chrome, getting the most out of your browsing experience.

Separating your tabs

We're gonna start by separating our tabs and learning a few different things about how we can manipulate and do more with our tabs up top. The first one has to do with actually taking something outside of your tab.

Sometimes you may want to just focus on one particular website or perhaps one particular application. To do so, all you need to do is click and drag.

I'm gonna pick this tab here, I'm gonna start clicking and dragging it outside, and now when I release it, I am now focused exclusively on this particular tab, just the one tab. Now I haven't gotten rid of the rest of my files or the rest of my tabs over here.

Split view tabs

Now I have two browsers open as you can see down in the taskbar, but if I want to, I can just focus exclusively on this particular webpage. Often when I'm working on a large screen, I may drag it over to the right-hand side, and I can enjoy sort of a split view of two different browser windows open at the very same time.

If you want to bring this back into your original configuration, you can do so with the same technique. I'm going to click and hold, and this time I'm just gonna drag it back up here.

Here you can see it's brought it right back into my browser window. So now I'm in my original view, I've got my four different tabs listed at the top.

Pin tabs

Another great thing that you can do with tabs within Chrome is that you can pin certain tabs or keep them in the same place and don't be fearful of accidentally closing them. In this case, I usually want to keep something like my Google Keep open at all times or at least accessible at all times, and I don't want to accidentally close it.

To pin a tab to your browser, all you need to do is right-click on the desired tab, come down and select pin tab. You'll notice a few different things change.

Number one, it took that tab and brought it all the way over to the left, but it also condensed it. Now I can just see the logo here, I don't have an X anymore, so I can't accidentally close it.

It's always going to be accessible here in the left-hand corner. The added benefit of pinning important tabs that you use frequently is that even if I close the browser, even if I close everything here, the next time I go to open up Chrome, this Google Keep tab will appear right here.

Of course, you can pin more than just one tab. There might be three or four applications that you always want to be accessible when you're browsing.

The other great thing about pinning tabs is it keeps them nice and small, right? It keeps it nice and uncluttered, and if you want to unpin it, you can simply right-click and select the unpin option.

The next tip I want to share with you has to do with zoom and actually taking a closer look or maybe getting a further look depending on the type of website or webpage that you're dealing with. When I'm dealing with Trello, sometimes I want to get a higher-level view and maybe I want to see more cards at one time.

Zoom

If I want to change the zoom level, all I need to do is go over to the three dots here and come down to zoom. I can either zoom out a bit, maybe I'm going to zoom out to 80% so I can work with more cards.

Or depending on the website that I'm working with, maybe they have really small text. I can zoom into a higher resolution.

I can get a closer peek at the words and the images that I'm looking at. The great thing about zoom in Chrome is that it's actually going to remember this zoom level with the website that I'm on.

The next time I come to Trello, it's gonna remember that I was viewing it at 80 percent the last time. Maybe that's my preferred view.

You can have a variety of different websites at different zoom levels and customize them to the one that is most appropriate to you or the one that you like the most. For example, when I'm reviewing my online banking, and I've got lots of lines and different financial statements that I'm looking at, I will often take a smaller view such as eighty percent or maybe ninety percent so that I can see more of those items on a single screen.

Zoom allows us to do that and we'll actually save that zoom level depending on the website that we're on. Last but not least, my fifth tip for you today is about browsing in incognito mode or secret mode.

Most browsers allow you to do this. I just want to make sure that you know how to do this within Chrome.

Incognito mode

Let's say, for example, that you're wanting to buy a special gift for your wife, your son, your child, someone else, maybe even a roommate, someone that you might just share this computer with. Well, of course, you don't want them to find out accidentally that you've been shopping on Amazon and that they see the purchases or the things that you've been browsing.

So what you can do is browse in incognito mode. To do so, we're gonna go back to the settings area and select new incognito window.

You're gonna start off with this screen which may look a little scary, but Chrome gives us a little helpful description of what this means. Chrome won't save our browsing history, it won't save the cookies and site data, and it won't save information entered in forms.

This is a great way to give yourself a bit of a clean slate as you're browsing the internet. You'll also notice in the top left-hand corner that we have an incognito icon there just to let us know that we are in this mode.

Now when I go to amazon.com, you will notice that I am not signed in to my account. Usually, we would say here hello Scott, but it's never going to say that when I enter into incognito mode because it doesn't know me yet.

This is like a brand new browser window as if I've just logged into it freshly. None of these advertisements are specifically to me or based on my browsing history because it hasn't followed me here.

Of course, you can use the incognito window or the incognito mode for other purposes as well if you're wanting to hide your browsing history. But this can also be a great way to test certain sites, not only if you don't want to be followed but to see what the sites are showing you when you are not signed into your account or when you don't have cookies that are following you around the Internet.

Of course, when you're done, you can just close this browser and your existing browser remains open. It doesn't replace what you were doing before in the past.

I hope you enjoyed today's video and if you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up and also subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.