3 Workspace Templates that TRIPLED My Productivity

I've been using Google tools at work for over 10 years now and although I've been enjoying the gemic eh see what I did there of all their apps I've realized that often times it's the basics that make the most impact on my productivity so in this video I'm sharing three Google workspace templates that I've created and refined over the years that have collectively saved me hundreds if not thousands of hours since I use all three every single day let's get started

first off my notes template in Google Docs that started off looking like this 8 years ago and now look something like this it's an extremely flexible template that can be adapted for most workplace situations note taking for project management oneoff coffee chats regular one-onone meeting notes with your manager diving into the structure we see three sections on the first page up top a one sentence summary of what this document is about pretty self-explanatory if you're working on a project you would have the objective up here the key material section houses all the relevant links and documents for this particular project or meeting for example in my one1 meeting notes with my manager I have links to all the projects I'm currently working on and other relevant information uh so we both have easy access the outstanding question section is a dynamic section that helps me keep track of urgent and open issues I need to deal with if I'm helping my manager with a presentation and the person I need to meet with is out of office I would include that here so it's top of mine and once it's resed resolved I remove it and that's why it's Dynamic the actual notes start on the second page nothing too crazy here just a few formatting tips for example I like to use heading 3 #h space at placeholder to use a placeholder chip choose date divider topics make this bold enter command control shift 7 topic one enter tab sub bullet point I use normal text for the action item header since it falls under the same date right I just bold it like so command and control 8 for bullet point first action item and basically this setup allows me to select all this command contrl C to copy and paste for the next meeting or iteration select the date okay and then right click here uh restart numbering and we're good to go pro tip number one when I'm taking notes during the meeting I would underline action items command control U that sounds weird so that I can easily spot the key takeaways after the meeting ends and I can simply copy command and control C and paste without formatting command and control V down here Pro tip number two very underrated tip we all know we can press tab to indent text to the right and then let's say another bullet point here we can actually also shift tab to in unindent that text to the left and this is super helpful when taking notes in bullet point format like this drop a like if you didn't know that post tip number three is only applicable for Google workspace business users and that's if you go to the Google Docs homepage template gallery and you submit a template the next time you create a new Google doc you can select a template and choose this template speaking of if you like to make a copy of all three templates from this video you can sign up for my workspace toolkit I literally send you my top seven workspace templates for free and all I ask in return is for you to passive aggressively share them with your unproductive colleagues and let me know what they say all right moving on although the Google Docs template is very flexible it's meant for you to take

notes for yourself on the other hand this Google Sheets template is built for collaboration meaning it's optimized for team meetings diving right into the structure we have the meeting date here the notetaker for that meeting the agenda items and their corresponding owners duration of their session link to pre-read documents and notes and action items taken during the meeting the first benefit of the setup is that it saves the meeting organizer a lot of time by letting individual session speakers input information themselves ahead of the meeting second every single person involved the meeting can see all the critical elements the pread notes taken during the meeting action items and third you can actually see previous discussions by just scrolling down instead of having to open up a new tab or a document some of you might have already noticed this but if you go to the mapping tab you can add remove team members here for example Tim cookie and if you go back here the people drop down menus will reflect this new change a few more tips and tricks before the next meeting highlight an empty row up top and press command option equal sign for Mac users to add empty rows select an existing section below command control C to copy and paste command control V with formatting to preserve the formatting delete everything change the date and you're good to go if you want to add more rows simply select the row with a drop down menu and holding down shift down down command D to paste with formatting so formatting is preserved command enter new line command enter another you get the idea the third template is not technically a template but still something you benefit from Forever After a onetime setup and it's related to

Google Drive docs sheets and slides so you know how in Gmail you can search for all comments you've been tagged in from Google Docs sheets and slides uh by inputting this into the search field like comments hyphen no reply at docs. google. com but you can't really tell which comments are still active and open what you can do instead is to create a new folder in your browser bookmarks name it assigned to me input this URL into the search bar don't worry you'll get all the URLs in the workspace toolkit hit enter and bookmark this as slides comments as you can see this URL filters for all Google Slides presentations with open comments that are actively assigned to me so I never lose track of an uncompleted comment only when I go into the presentation complete this task Market as done will this presentation disappear from the filtered View we can do the same thing for Google Docs and sheets obviously and I share the URLs to bookmark in my workspace toolkit along with some other pretty cool tips for Google Drive I'd

love to hear what your biggest struggle is with Google workspace and maybe I can make a template for that but in the meantime check out this video for more productivity tips for work and as usual have a great one