Would you like a quick distraction-free way to capture your tasks and notes?
In this video, I'm going to show you how to turn Google Forms into your own custom tool for managing ideas, tasks, and so much more.
Hello everyone.
Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
The distracted way of capturing tasks & ideas.
And tell me if this sounds familiar, you're at your computer and you're focusing intently on your number one task, when that idea pops up into your head.
What do you do?
Well, maybe you jump into your notes app and create a new note or maybe you go into your favorite task manager and you create a new to-do.
But no matter what app you use, there is often a major problem even before you've created that new task or note.
You can't help but browse and glance at all of the other tasks that you need to accomplish today or this week.
This can not only be very depressing, but sometimes we are tempted to go and look for something else and actually start working on a different task.
Well, with the help of Google Forms, we can create a personal form just for our use so we can manage all of our tasks and ideas and never have to see all of the other things that are on our plate so that we can retain that focus and work distraction-free.
Here I've created a form just for me called Quick Tasks and Ideas.
I'm going to run you through how it works and then I'm going to show you how to build it yourself so that you can customize it for the way you like to work.
So here, down below my very first question, I've got two big buttons.
What am I thinking about?
Am I thinking about a new task or is it simply an idea?
I think far too often we mix up these two and we think that everything is a to-do when in some cases it is just a maybe or a someday or something I want to come back to.
Let's start with a task.
So I'm going to select task and then select next.
And now this is going to bring me to four other questions customized for my needs, the types of things that I want to be thinking about so that I can quickly add this task and then get back to my work.
So let's say in this case, I need to ‘Email a Soneka about next week's meeting’.
That's one of the tasks that I need to accomplish this week.
I've added a priority level.
Now you could do a variety of things here.
You could make it a dropdown, you could make it multiple choice.
I've chosen to use the ranking system here, so I'm going to say this isn't really incredibly important.
I'm going to give it a two out five.
Down below I've added an estimated time dropdown.
I'm going to say this is only going to take 15 minutes or less.
And then I can also add a due date so I can hit the calendar and say, well, I really do need to do this by the end of this week, so I better put the due date by tomorrow.
Now you'll notice the only thing that I've made required here is the task description, and I think that's important.
We want to make this as seamless and as quick as possible.
I don't have to add these other elements, but there's a good chance you work differently than me and maybe you always want to include a priority level or maybe you always want to include an estimated time.
And of course, all of this is customizable so you don't have to keep it at the values you see here.
I'm going to go ahead and hit submit and I can immediately submit another response.
So if I click this link, I'm brought back to the beginning and maybe I want to add another task or maybe I want to add an idea.
Let's go with an idea.
This time I'm going to select idea I'm going to hit next.
And you'll notice, although I have four questions as well on this screen, they are different.
So maybe my idea is to create a new course about Gmail.
That's my idea.
I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but it's just an idea.
Down below I've got a files or attachment because sometimes maybe we've seen something on a website or maybe we've downloaded A PDF.
So in this case I'm going to say add file.
I can browse and either grab something directly from my Google Drive account or I can grab something here from my computer.
I'm just going to grab an image in this particular example, but I can choose to add multiple files if I want to and include that as a part of my note collection.
Down below the attachments, I've got an area called idea category.
Is this work-related personal side project or future goal?
I'm going to say this is Work-related.
And then lastly, we have another date picker, but the question is a little different.
When would you like to revisit this idea?
We haven't committed to this idea.
It's not a task.
So I'm going to say at the latest, I'd like to revisit this by the end of January.
I'm going to hit submit, and once again, we can very easily submit another response.
Managing your tasks & ideas.
So now that you've seen how my task and idea form works, where does all that information go?
Well, the easiest place to see and filter and sort that information is within the attached sheet.
You may already know that every Google form you can create a linked sheet.
So here I've got all of that valuable information.
In this case, I've got my tasks and my ideas mixed in here, but of course I can easily sort that if I want to.
Let's say I only want to see my tasks.
I'm going to say, okay, and now all I see is my task.
Do I want to maybe sort this by priority?
Yeah, that's something that you would want to do with your task list.
Now I've got all of those tasks sorted by priority and we even have some other pieces of information that you don't always get in your favorite task manager, including this very first column, which is a timestamp.
So when did I capture that task?
Not only the date but the actual time of day as well.
And remember, all of these fields are customizable, so you can choose to change them.
You can choose to add more options.
I've even chosen to add some conditional formatting here.
If something is overdue like you see here, I want it to shade in the color of red.
You could do that for any one of these columns.
You could do multiple colors.
Maybe if something is approaching its due date or is really overdue like two weeks or more.
A lot of these things are hard coded in your favorite task manager or maybe don't even exist at all.
You can customize it here to your heart's content.
Setting up your own custom form.
So let's jump back into Google forums and I'm going to show you how to build a form just like this and show you the other ways in which you can customize your personal task manager or note taker.
We're going to start with a blank form here, and of course you're going to want to title it something like tasks and ideas or really anything that you want.
We're going to put a pause on changing the colors and adding the header like you saw earlier.
You can always watch one of my other Simpletivity tutorials if you're wanting to customize the look and feel.
Now, the very first question in my form was what are you thinking about?
Again, you can do anything that you like.
You can word this any way that you want, but the type of question that we want is a multiple choice question.
Now of course, you could just build a task taking tool or an idea taking tool and not have this separation or this option at the beginning, but I want to show you how to do it nonetheless.
So in this case, my first one was a task, and then my second one was an idea.
So those are the two options that I wanted, but you may remember that I had those two big images that made it even that much easier to select, especially if I'm using this on my mobile device.
So if we come over here, we can add an image.
I'm going to click on browse and I'm going to check that checkbox there.
So that is going to be my task image.
And then over here beside idea, I'm also going to select browse, and I'm going to grab that question image.
Now, when you're building out your form, it may look a little funny.
You'll notice that it looked a lot different when we went to actually use the form, but this is the basis of that form.
Now because we are going to use branching, meaning depending on which of these two we are going to send yourself somewhere differently.
What we need to do is come over to the right hand side and select add a section.
And in fact, we're going to add two different sections.
The first one here is I'm just going to title tasks, and then down below that we are going to add a third section, which I'm going to label as idea.
Now, keep in mind you could add multiple sections if you want.
If wanted something beyond just task and idea, you could do that as well.
But let's keep it simple with this example.
So here within task, we can start adding our questions and you probably want to start with some type of description.
What is this task all about?
I'm going to add that plus button again.
Now as my second question in my form, I choose the new rating system here.
So if I select this, it's going to give me a number of stars, but you can customize this, you can reduce it to maybe only three stars, and they don't even have to be stars.
They could be hearts or they could be thumbs up, whatever you like.
But again, you don't have to follow my lead.
You could always choose multiple choice boxes if you wanted to, you could choose a dropdown, whatever you think is easier here in the question field.
I'm just going to call this a priority because that is the ranking that I want to add here.
And let's go through one last example.
I'm going to add the plus button again.
So let's add a due date.
So now I've got three questions
Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
