Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’ve come to stark realization and I recognized that for the past several months we have been
concentrating on all sorts of individual apps here on DottoTech.
We’ve been talking about Asana.
We’ve been talking about Todoist.
We’ve been talking about Trello.
We’ve been talking about Gmail.
We’ve been talking about Evernote, of course.
We’ve been talking about all of these apps as kind of silos.
But you know, no app is an island.
They work together really well and we need them to work together in order to really do
our job.
So today, I thought we would take a lesson from the apps, a lesson that our society can
learn a lot from, how to work together.
Yes, no app is an island today on DottoTech.
I can’t believe this, that I’m actually saying this, but in some ways I pine for the
old days of just having Outlook as my only contact, task and calendar manager.
Life was simpler back in the Outlook days.
It was probably even simpler in the paper days but I always had terrible writing so
Outlook for me is probably the epitome of me being in control of everything in my life.
But of course, it’s tremendously limited and it frankly sucks in so many ways.
So today, we are so much further ahead with the apps that we have access to and how they
all work.
But really for us to make them work for us, they each have to talk to each other because
our task manager has to know what’s going on as far as our calendar is concerned, our
calendar has to know what’s going on as far as our Evernote is concerned, and our
email is our busy body that has to know what’s happening in everybody’s life.
So we need all of these different apps to connect and to work together.
We’ve been talking a lot in the last couple of months about individual apps and celebrating
individual apps so today I thought today we would celebrate the connections between those
apps, a little bit of a narrative taking us on a journey of how one apps connects with
another app connects with another app to give you an idea of how you might layer in your
apps.
Now I don’t care which email you use and which apps you use.
If you look for the capabilities that I’m going to be talking about today in this demo,
you will be able to build your own system where one is going to talk to the other and
make you that much more efficient.
So let’s dive in.
Most of our responsibilities begin and end with email, don’t they?
That’s where things kind of start so I’m just going to take you on a bit of a tour
of one of the ways that I set things up in my life.
So here I’ve got a bill.
I’ve got a bill from my buddies at Rogers and in Canada.
They are our mobility carrier and that bill has to be paid.
Basically, I could pay it right now.
I’m going to do all my banking stuff a little bit later.
So I actually want to save this bill in several different places.
I don’t want it to just live it in email.
I want to file it away so I want to send it to Evernote so that I’ve got it there when
I need it, when I need to look it up and I also want to make it a task because it’s
something that I want to do kind of as an appointment a little bit later in the day.
I want to do that as a task on my task lists to do.
So here’s what I typically do or one way that you can do this, tying in a couple of
my different tools.
I am using increasingly a task manager called Todoist.
We’ve got some demos on it.
It’s an awesome product.
I like how simple it is but I also love its integration, how it integrates with so many
other tools.
One of the tools that it integrates brilliantly with through a Chrome add-in here or a browser
add-in is Gmail.
As you see, I’ve got my bill up here.
I can just add whatever is in this email to Todoist.
I click on this button and it takes the title, I can change the name of it but your Rogers
Bill is available seems to be a pretty good name and then I can send it directly into
Todoist.
I can actually select which of my projects I’m going to send it into but I’m just
going to have it go into my inbox right now and I’m just going to save it as a task
for me to do.
I could have added a few extra details to it at that point there but it’s good enough
now.
It’s sent in.
Now I can go on to the next part of my day.
I know that later on today, I will take care of paying that bill when I do all of my banking.
Next, I want to save this bill.
Where I want to save this bill is to Evernote where I save all of these bills.
What I’m going to do now is I’m going to take the same bill and I’m going to forward
it to my Evernote account because Evernote has an email address attached to it.
I’m not even going to bother changing the name because I’ll recognize the name again
once it’s in Evernote.
I’m sending it in to the Evernote inbox.
Think about what I’ve just done with this email in a few seconds.
I’ve put it into my system.
Now could it be far more elaborate, the sorts of things that I wanted to do with it but
I’ve migrated it out of email where it’s not the best place to do with it and I’ve
put it into my archiving system into Evernote and I’ve put it into my process by putting
it into Todoist.
Very simple but because of the integration, because Evernote allows us to email directly
into it and Todoist allows us to connect directly out of Gmail.
Actually, if I didn’t want to connect out of Gmail, I could actually send it to Todoist
as an email as well.
Almost all of these apps have email attached.
But I’ve now moved it out of email into the place that it should be worked on.
Pretty cool, aye?
Let’s take a look and see if it worked.
We’ll first of all jump over into Todoist.
There’s Todoist.
If I take a look at my tasks for today, your Rogers Bill is now available.
Woohoo!
Ready to pay.
So if I click on this task, I can bring it up and it will actually load the offending
email for me.
Brilliant!
It works just perfectly.
Let’s head over into Evernote just for a second and make sure that it all worked there,
too.
I’m going to sync Evernote, make sure that everything is done properly here because it
hasn’t synced in a few seconds.
I don’t know how often it syncs, probably every three or four minutes but I force sync
here.
Yes, there it is indeed.
My Rogers bill is now available.
So what I do now is I would take this bill and I would file it into my accounting section
so that it’s filed, so that I have it and I can retrieve when I need it.
I won’t do much more with it here in Evernote.
There we see one app talking to two other apps.
No app is an island.
Gmail spoke and took the bill and put it into Todoist and it also archived it into Evernote.
Pretty cool.
Let’s see about information going the other way, out of Evernote now into some of those
other things because often I’m composing information on Evernote.
Let’s start a new note in Evernote and I’m going to call it Something Impressive.
Now often when you’re making notes in Evernote you are in a meeting and you have a reason
that you need to.
You have tasks that you’re going to create.
You’re going to have action items that are going to come out of notes that you’re creating.
It doesn’t have to be in a meeting.
You can be sitting down typing away, working on a project and tasks will come up.
You might have to do Something Important 1 and More Important 2.
The way that we can now automatically migrate the information out of Evernote into our task
app is using some tagging, some internal tagging structure that’s built into Evernote.
Now I use a program called Task Clone which creates a conduit between Evernote and other
apps.
It will do it to Todoist but we’ve already shown you some stuff in Todoist so instead
I want to show you this going to Asana, which is another popular task and to-do list app.
How you do it is actually quite a bit of brilliance.
We have a video if you want to watch a total demo on how you can actually configure all
of these because I’m just going to show you the end-game, not the actual configuration
right now.
What you do is you attach one of the check boxes which creates an automatic kind of to-do
list within Evernote but it’s just a static to-do list on Evernote until we add a tag.
What I’m going to do is add a tag called “To Asana.”
That tells Evernote that this note is actually a to-do list which should be exported to our
to-do list manager, whichever one we happen to have chosen.
It will export to other things besides to-do lists.
It will actually export to Google Calendar as well should we choose but I’m getting
way ahead of myself.
Right now, this will export to Asana as a task.
I’ll sync that and we’ll see kind of a report coming back to us in just a moment
here.
Boom, it’s got to sync and once it’s synced, it will come back and it will give us a little
TC telling us that Task Clone has taken this note and successfully synced it through to
Asana.
Did you see that?
It just changed to say TC.
That tells me that it’s now synced it over to Asana.
So let’s jump over and here is my Asana up and operating.
Look, it’s already imported it.
It happened that fast.
This was in real-time.
There are no bells and whistles here folks.
I didn’t cut and edit this thing.
It just basically from the start of that Evernote segment to now has been real-time that you’ve
seen in my recording time.
There are the tasks in Evernote and here’s the beauty.
It tells me that they’ve come from Evernote.
So now I can take these tasks and I can discharge them and take care of them myself.
This is on Asana.
The exact same process can happen to Trello, to Todoist, to any task app that you have.
Again, no app is an island.
We see Evernote talking out to our other apps.
But Evernote will also talk to our calendar.
Now the calendar tool that I’m using right now—I’ll just show it to you quickly right
here—is called Sunrise calendar.
Now Sunrise, we’ve got another demo on—surprise, surprise—but the reason I like Sunrise is
when we look in Sunrise right here and we go into the Accounts, these are the things
that Sunrise will connect to.
So Sunrise connects to all of these different services.
You see I have mine connected to my Google account so my calendar, my Todoist account,
my Evernote account and my Asana account.
So again, no app being an island, the reason that I like Sunrise so much is besides the
fact that it works on every platform, on my Android phone, on my iOS phone, on my desktop
computer regardless of what operating system I am in, works on all of those and it gives
me a nice calendar function with a little bit of limitation.
It doesn’t do a really good job of handling invites but everything else does a pretty
good job of, but here because of the Evernote integration, and it’s not super detailed
and super deep, but let’s take the same note and let’s turn it into a reminder.
When I add a reminder to this note, I can set a date for the reminder to occur.
I’m just going to put it this coming Sunday and I’m going to ask it to save it for Sunday.
Now what happens when this syncs, the same sort of process should happen that just happened
with Asana.
Evernote should now talk to Sunrise calendar, which should say I’ve got an appointment,
I’m going to put that appointment in my calendar.
Let’s go over to Sunrise calendar, back to Sunrise and let’s see.
Let’s let it refresh and let’s hope that it’s done it properly.
Here it is.
This is Sunday coming up.
I’ll go next week because it’s this coming Sunday, not last Sunday and hopefully right
here, there it is, Something Impressive.
Do you see how it has a little Evernote note attached to it?
It’s green and it’s telling me it’s coming from Evernote.
It tells me it’s come from Evernote and if I want to go back and view this note in
Evernote, even if I’m not on my home computer, if I’m on a different computer, it will
launch Evernote in the web browser and there is the note in the web browser available to
me so I can gain context.
I can see all of the information.
This has just been a little cycle showing you how one app can talk to another app and
can help to save us time and energy.
I hope that you’ve kind of figured out from this demo just exactly what you can do with
these different class of apps, with our calendar app, with our email app, with our task and
to-do list app and with our Evernote and how we can start to build our own system by combining
them together and making sure that one talks to the other.
As you’re evaluating and choosing which tool is best for you, this process that I’ve
just gone through, looking at finding out exactly how they integrate is very high on
my list of things that I would always do.
There I’m done.
I hope you found this to be useful.
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I’ve just been talking about right now.
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At the $10 a month patronage level, you get access to those course as well as my Evernote
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So please if you’re interested, drop by Patreon.
I hope that you found today’s video to be useful.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.