In this short instructional video, Randall F. Dean (the "Email Sanity Expert") demonstrates how to turn Gmail messages into actionable items within the Google Workspace suite. He first walks viewers through the side‑panel icons for Google Tasks, Keep, and Calendar, explaining how they can be resized and used across multiple monitors. He then shows three primary ways to convert an email: (1) dragging the email onto the Tasks pane to instantly create a task, edit its details, set dates, make it repeat, add subtasks, and retain a clickable link back to the original message; (2) using the three‑dot "More" menu on an open email and selecting "Add to Tasks" for the same result; and (3) selecting "Create Event" from the same menu, which opens a new Calendar tab with the email subject auto‑filled as the event title and allows the user to edit the time, location, and description. Throughout, Dean offers productivity tips such as using dual monitors and keeping the task list visible in both inbox and calendar views. The video serves as a practical guide for Gmail users to streamline email‑driven workflows by leveraging native Google tools.
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Alright, hi everybody, this is Randall F. Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and this is the first of just a couple new quick tip videos I'm going to be doing this month related to a big new project I'm working on, which is a post-program self-study guide for the people that attend my live programs. This first one is basically just a quick and short video going into Gmail to show you how easy it is to take your emails and turn them into task, calendar, or contact items inside the Google Suite. So let's go ahead and do that right now. I'm going to jump out and go into my Gmail here, and let's go into the inbox. And I want to show you something that most of you probably know if you're a regular Gmail user, but just want to make sure that everybody's on the same page with this. Take a look over here to the left, and actually you'll see they have these new buttons here. Right there is the button for Tasks, and you can open and close these buttons as you wish. So I'm going to actually re-shrink the size a little bit so that it's not interfering with my video manager. But as you can see, you can open a button right here to open up the Google Tasks feature. You can also open up this button right here, which is Google Keep, which is the notepad. It's Google's version of basically Microsoft OneNote or Evernote. And also right here is the Google Calendar. And what's interesting about the Google Calendar is if you come up and hit this little widget right here, notice this, it'll pop up into a full-screen view of the calendar. And one of the nice things about this is notice that you can still get to your notes and/or your task list in your calendar view. So if you take a look at the top of the screen, that means I can have inbox on one tab, I can have calendar on another tab, and if you're a dual monitor person, you could even drag this second calendar over to your second screen so that way you could have your inbox with your task list on one screen and your calendar with your task list on another. This is not the tip, but it's just some good information about how to utilize the Google tool. But what I want to show you is one of the interesting things about Google that makes this nice. Notice that if we go back to the task function, I can take any email. Notice I have a test email here to show you how to do conversions. I can pick up this email, drag it over, and look at this, you can actually do drag and drop inside of Google now to create a brand new task. And this is the task it just created right here. Now of course I can come down here right now and edit this. Show people how to make a task in Gmail. And if I want to get even more specific, I can hit the little edit icon right here and come in and, you know, say which task list I want to put it in. I can add some additional details or notes. I could add a date and time.
So let's say I want to get this done by tomorrow. I can even make it a repeating item.
Then hit OK.
And then what's sort of nice is now that you've got this, notice that you can even add additional subtasks.
But I want to show you this, which is super cool.
This is a link back to the original email.
So what that means is once you make a task out of the email, you don't need to go searching for the email. Google will give you a link right back to the email. So you can basically just click the link from the task and you're in the email again, uh, which is very nice if the task is respond to this email or forward this email.
You don't have to go looking for the email. All right. Also nice, of course, that the email has an attachment that you need to reference.
Now, so that's—
it's that simple. Now that's one option. Let me show you something else that's pretty cool though. Watch this.
I could take that same message, click it open, and now let me show you something that's interesting here. I'm going to collapse the tasks.
You have a second way to do this.
You can come up here to the top and click on these three dots. Now, Personally, I wish both Microsoft and Google and all other software manufacturers would replace these three dots here and here—
notice the three dots— with the word "more," because I think if they did, more people would click on these to see what's in there. But let's open this thing up and take a look. Look at this option, "Add to Tasks," and notice it just did the exact same thing. It's now brought me back to the task list to allow me to create a new task. Now I'm going to collapse that, and I want to come back here to show you what else you can do right here.
Look at this, "Create Event." Now if you hit Create Event, it's going to open up a whole new tab in Google, in the Google Calendar.
What it's going to do, which is interesting, it will auto-populate the name of this event with the subject line of the email.
But I could take this information and just change to this: Show People How to Convert Email into Calendar Item.
And time, let's say, let's move this out to Friday at noon. Okay, doesn't repeat.
Add location, home office, East Lansing, Michigan.
And no, that's not my home office right there. And also I could even invite guests. And if you take a look down here, look at this, look at this, the text of the message is inside this calendar item. So if you invite other people to attend your event, you can actually reference this in the bottom and you can even put a cover note right here. So in a few seconds flat, you can take an email that comes into you, convert it into a calendar item, and then turn that calendar item for your calendar into a meeting request that goes out to your entire team with the text of the message inside that calendar item. It's pretty cool. Wait, let's show you one more. Now I'm not going to save this because I just made it into a task list item. That would be redundant. But I got one more for you. Yes, I'm going to— uh, changes you made. Yes, I'm going to leave. Let's go back to that original email. And actually, I want to go to a different one because says here's one of the problems. Notice this, I'm going to put this over here. By doing this, what it's going to do is if that person's already in your contact database, it's going to bring up a little business card for that person where you can edit the contact. But I want to go to one that I'm pretty sure is not in my contact database. This is my online payroll service. Let's open this thing up and notice this, if I just put my item over that, add to contacts right there. So isn't that pretty cool? I have options to take these items and very quickly and easily convert them into task, calendar, and contact items. Now, what's interesting about that— let me share something that's neat about this. By doing this, if I can't handle that email right now, I can't handle that email right now, I don't have to star it, and I also don't have to click the checkbox and come up here and mark it unread. I don't need to do either of those things. I'm going to simply instead move it into my task list, move it into my calendar, or add this person to my contact database. And then I don't have to use the stars and the unreads anymore. And that's why my inbox is this clean. By the way, one final little thing before I finish this video. You're probably going, wait a minute, where are the contacts? See this little thing up here? I call it the Google Rubik, because it looks a bit like a Rubik's Cube. Click open this and look at this. One of the standard options inside of here is contacts, which allow you to open up a full contact database inside your Google Suite. So you can actually get in and find all of your items. And so think about the capabilities here. What this basically means is Google has made it remarkably easy to take these items, and if you can't handle that email right now, you can easily convert it into a task item, a calendar item, or a contact item. And that way you can keep your inbox clean because you don't need to leave everything in your inbox. Alright, so With that, I'll probably share a couple video links because if you happen to be a Microsoft Outlook user, I have a very comparable video which shows how you can do the exact same thing in Microsoft Outlook. So with that, I hope that you enjoyed this today. Let's go back and close this thing up. So I'd like to say Shift+Fn+F5. Okay, if you didn't hear what I just did, I did a Shift+Fn+F5 in my PowerPoint. That automatically takes you on whatever slide you're on into slideshow. Little bonus tip for you there. Thanks for your time. If you'd like to find out more about me and what I do, I strongly just recommend get out there, check out my website. I actually do have full-length streaming programs and webinar programs available if you click on the e-learning option or e-learning tab on randaldean.com. If you like this video, please subscribe. I've been having a nice growth in the subscribers to my channel and I'm planning to start posting a whole bunch more of these videos this year. And to give you a little incentive, uh, if you'd like to get a whole set of productivity PDF tip sheets— I have a whole series of little tip sheets, 2 to 4 pages in length, on time management, email management, Gmail usage and Google usage, smartphone/tablet usage, Microsoft Outlook usage, etc. If you'd like to get access to those really handy little tip sheets that you can use to better develop your skills and/or share with other people, just send me an email at randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll get those out to you in a day or two after your little inquiry. Um, and with that, I hope you had fun with today's program. Thank you.
