How to use AMAZING MARVIN for Getting Things Done (GTD)

hello lucas here and welcome to this amazing marvin video review and tutorial amazing marvin so the review is also amazing of course but the tool is actually named amazing marvin a highly requested video for me on this channel and i'm happy to walk you through my setup which i created it's a setup that i've built for getting things done and you can download it yourself using the link in the description for just 4.99 you can download and import it into your amazing marvin setup so you don't have to do all the work of recreating it if that is what you want to do that's totally fine you can stick around until the end of the video and follow my guides how to build this yourself instead let's first get started with a walkthrough of how you can actually use it and then we'll proceed with building it alright allow me to first show you what i've built here in amazing marvin it's a setup that is like i said built for gtd so you may see some familiar terms if you've already been following this method for a while but if you haven't yet that's okay i'll walk you through how you can use it step by step on the left hand side we have the sidebar which allows us to access different views here we have another sidebar which allows us to see various lists here's the main view which is the most important one because we can access several of those lists and more from the top here with buttons that i've custom created and we are first looking at the inbox here which is a great place to start because first we want to cover how do we fill up our system with new inputs on the go on our laptop or anywhere else wherever you are whenever you need to be able to do that quickly and easily the first way to do it is by using this button which i created add to inbox all you have to do is press it and add a task or anything that comes up in your mind press enter and there you go it's part of the inbox the same goes for this button here at the right bottom and same story you can add either a task or a project directly from there to the inbox as well a bit more manual way to do it it's hidden but once you scroll to the list you can add a task or project from here you can also use emailing to email directly into the amazing marvin system you get a unique email address that you can use and once you save that in your email contacts for example anything you email there will end up in the inbox as well so let's get to work and actually process an item see how we can clarify whatever we've captured here we have an item that we just created my task let's make that a bit less ambiguous shall we what we can do is navigate to the item here and change the text so we can give it a actionable name for example let's pretend that we are gary the goat farmer and we want to think of a name for a new goat that we will soon adopt so what we can do is find inspiration online list of goats names maybe find list of goat names we can use google for that which is a context that we have here through a label and the last thing we need to do is move it into a specific list out of the inbox of course the way we can do that is by editing it and then selecting a new list let's say this is a standalone item so we don't have to create a separate project for it just for example sake so what we can actually do is just select the main project list from there we can also schedule it by giving it a due time an end time and these are two different things according to amazing marvin one is more soft than the other a start time even a review time so if you want to kind of check in on the progress you can also estimate a duration so let's say we need 10 minutes well we can just select it from here or we can enter an alternative time from here we already added a label by typing it but if we hadn't we could have added it here as well so you can add any label here to define a context that you have dependencies is something we will cover in just a moment as well as priority levels which are accessible from here and frog levels now i think this is a bit much this is based on the concept of eat that frog a book by brian tracy good book good concept basically it says do your most dreaded task first thing in the morning because then the rest comes easy just as eating a live frog would make anything else appear easy i think it's enough to just classify it as either yes this is one of those eat a frog type of tasks or not amazing marvin decided to have four levels of gradation there i guess if you want to use it you can but you can also just select one so a lot of options for clarifying but for now let's just say this is the way we want to do it and from here we can either access the list of items projects as well as tasks from the left hand side under the project list but more interestingly we can navigate to the context which i've named research here it's a bit confusing maybe because the label is google but you can name these anything you want and this pulls up a list of items a list of tasks that have this associated label so here we have a list of code names as well as tractor options why because we have a project open for buying a new tractor that's a multi-step outcome and gary wants to add a new tractor for his farm so he has this item as the first actionable item and if we go to the master list we can actually look at this in a bit more detail here because from this project we have research tractor options but also a dependency named make short list and basically what this is trying to say is we cannot start doing this until this item here is complete and it makes sense because you cannot make a short list if you haven't created a longer list first through online research right so the way to do that is by selecting a dependency from here and this can be an project or a specific task within a project so you can get really narrow here and this helps to pre-define sequential projects now let's say what if you have an item that isn't actionable directly but instead it could be an agenda item so gary the goat farmer actually has a goat named gary as well i guess he really likes his name and he believes in communication with his goats he wants to take good care of them so one of his agenda items is asking gary the goat how is day was what we did here is create a specific project within the agendas list and then adding a task for any individual question or talking point that you may have so if you have a specific meeting for example this is also a great place to put that you can also add items you're waiting for from a third party in here in fact there is a specific button here to see only those regardless of who they belong to here for example we have a goat jacket that we've ordered from a company named goatsupplies.com so you can add those as well as separate lists within the agendas main list basically to organize items that you either need to talk about or that you're waiting for now let's say you don't want to do something right now you can't or you don't want to whatever it is then you can actually use someday maybe a familiar concept like a back burner basically here how you add this is a bit counter-intuitive though instead of adding this item to the specific list what you actually do is basically push an existing item into this someday maybe dimension and i know that sounds a bit strange so let's just look at how that works let's say for example this specific task about finding a list of goat names isn't as urgent or crucial as we first thought and we want to put it on the someday maybe list instead of actually moving it to that list which we can't even see here what we actually need to do is press this button here this basically puts it on the back burner so let's press it and we can see it's now blocked as well and now if we go back to the main view and we press someday maybe we will see that this item is now part of that the way to remove it from there put it back into view is by also activating it from here so instead of moving it to a different list you just use back burner and activate next up let's look at reference material non-actionable information basically here i've added an article that explains how to take care of a goat you can add notes here and you can even add attachments now i can't show this because i'm on a trial account here and they don't allow that for those types of accounts but if you do commit to this tool you will be able to upload attachments like pdfs for example the way to organize that is up to you you can create sub lists within the reference main list or you can also use labels and then use filters to filter for a specific label within the reference list that is really up to you it's super customizable and that's a recurring trend that we'll see as we explore this tool some more last up we have the higher horizons button here in this menu which allows us to define those areas of focus that we have for example gary the goats caretaker gary the business owner gary the father whatever your areas of focus are you can define them here i use sub tasks here to actually define them and they can actually change from time to time but if you change jobs for example you maybe want to check it off and maybe add a replacement my vision and purpose you can also add those in here and define them as you see fit a cool way to further elaborate on it if you wish is by using the toggle note option here which allows us to add clarification right you want to define your vision you want to define your purpose well this is how to do it next up let's look at a different view which is the goals view and in here we can define our goals in any way we see fit i like the smart methodology i actually did that here by saying gary wants to adopt 20 goats within well 74 days whatever that date is and it currently has an active status you can get super granular in here add specific phases tasks projects and trackers and habits to this school if you wish for now though i will just go to the settings and show you how this works from the editing menu you can add a title for example the type of goal a deadline or no deadline you can mark progress in any way you see fit by using tasks to aid you in the progress calculation it goes very deep as you can see using a habit great i think this goes a bit too far personally so i'm not going to spend too much time on it checking tasks deep links mark done and deleting the goal is all possible from here so you have to use this separate view for that and the same is true for the calendar which you can access from here see any due items start dates appointments whatever so it's great to have that all within the same app the same is true for habits so for gary the goat farmer perhaps he has a routine to buy goat foods twice a month this is an example of a habit that we can add into the system and by editing it i can show you it in a bit more detail you can actually also say trying to quit so maybe you're trying to quit smoking and you have a specific way of trying to get there again super detailed and granular in how you can set this up in terms of the intervals the settings of how you want to see it when and where and everything yeah it goes very far some could argue too far and i would understand that so that's why i'm not going into all the details here but if you wish you can open up the app for yourself and of course set it up in the way you see fit i think the simple version is good enough which is why i'm going to stick with that in this showcase so that's it in terms of showing you around how this actually works how you can use this in the day by day and organize your life if you want to get to work on this and adjust it make it your own then you can use the link in the description and for just 4.99 you can download this as a file that you can then import into your amazing marvin tool and i'll show you exactly what you need to do to do so go to the menu here and press workflow templates then go to import and press load workflow and that's where you'll select the file that you can download using the link in the description now if you want to build it yourself then you can follow along stick with the video and i'll show you how i did that and you can recreate it and customize it as you build it to get started with building this first we'll need to look at the exact features that i've activated in order to create this setup and this is needed as there are and i counted them 94 specific features that you can toggle on or off it's pretty ridiculous if you think about it what you can do is go to the menu and press features strategies and instead of going through all the details i'll just quickly walk through the ones that i turned on in order to achieve this category context task notes subtasks labels priority levels task reminders quick add quick jump skinny sidebar sidebar calendar duration estimates agenda smart lists fast add buttons smart list day alerts top mini list project shortcuts time blocking snooze eat that frog saved items templates super focus mode the wall procrastination count line marker background color marker text color marker icon marker most important projects back burner sequential projects dependencies rollover schedule tasks truncated lists email to marvin habits goals and objectives these two are on by default the api and the zapier integration i'm not using them deep links custom sections time tracking stillness warning missing next steps warning custom squares custom text links custom screens end dates review date right click menu hover button actions time block sections procrastination wizard start dates mobile sidebar and global filter well there we go i think that was about 50 of them at least but you can see there are even more but those i personally think don't contribute to uh productivity as much but if you feel like any of these could be useful then you can access them from the features menu and activate or deactivate them and that is how i built this screen for example here this is the custom text link setting that is something we activated and from here you can add and configure whatever buttons you want to see in this top menu for example i created an add to inbox button the way i did that is by adding a new item choosing the type as fast add button and then creating and selecting add to inbox so if you want to create a new one you can do so here click to edit and then click setup fast add buttons and from there i created the action to be assigned to category slash project being inbox and the title being add to inbox so from here you can also add to any specific filter if you want to or create any other type of button of this nature let's go ahead and delete that again and look at an example for context based buttons also important in my opinion for gcd the way to do that is by adding a new item and there are two ways to do it frankly you could either select the label directly here we have the google context for example and then it just spits out that name and the color and the icon you can actually rename it and change the color here if you wish as well as the icon to anything so maybe here we can do a search one then we wouldn't even need the emoji it's actually a bit more elegant the way i did it here was it maybe a bit of a workaround but you can also create and configure smart lists i created those here this is a way to also use more advanced filters when setting up these buttons for farm i said has farm label that simple as google has laptop but you could if you want to go more granular here and maybe combine specific time estimates all of that is possible i will show you by editing and here you can see all of these different items that you can filter for a title has time time estimate is something shorter than longer than extremely detailed of course be careful i would almost say because you may filter out items accidentally and not see as much as a result i like to keep things simple and that's what i did here but now you know how to build this yourself and perhaps go more granular if you wish after all this is just an example and you may have your specific quirks for the system for someday maybe i showed earlier how this works by using the back burner functionality and so that is also the filter back burner on back burner that is the condition in order to show up in this smart list and the same as for true for waiting for has the waiting label quite simple really and some of them are just a reflection of the list themselves that we've created here under the master list functionality so here you can add a main category as it's called and that will function as a list and from there back to the main view we could then edit this here add a new item and select category slash project and that's not even all right you can see external links are also supported you can also link to goals if you want personally i don't think that's necessary for this particular system but it's all there you can even go further with design pretty ridiculous how far you can go honestly but hey that's something you may like so you can't say that there's no freedom and that's really the main work you have in store for you when setting this up because by activating all these features we did previously most of them kind of show up naturally in specific settings that they apply to for example the procrastination wizard just shows up by default as an option for any task you can open it from there now whether you will use it i don't know but it is a pretty cool feature to see that it kind of prompts you to take a deep breath relax no one's going to make you do this task this is your life and you decide whether you wanna tackle this task or not why do you wanna do this task there are negative consequences if i don't brings me closer to a goal it's important to me and i'll gain positive feelings such as so you can see it's really ai based kind of almost personal psychology assistant to help you overcome procrastination and i think the idea of that is nice whether the execution of it is well done is up to you whether you would use this but i like that it's there i like that they really thought about the user experience here tracking time snoozing time estimates notes we saw a couple of these already deep link scheduling and by editing we can see even more options and those options we activated in the features and strategies menu so if you don't see something you do want to see always go back here to menu features and strategies and see whether you've toggled it on or off in the first place from here you can also toggle on or off attachments which i referred to earlier in the reference material list only available if you currently don't have a trial so you need a real paid account but then you can add these and i understand that they don't allow this for anybody after all it can take up a lot of this space and let's have a final look here at the settings look at the ones that i have activated i have activated undo or redo category and project full screen always show add buttons and empty lists i don't have copy task as markdown but you can see again it just goes so far with the settings you can turn on or off so feel free to pause this video if you want to do an exact copy but you can also just read through these in your own account and see what makes sense for you this includes the design of the app the theme of the app including colors a dark mode is there which is nice always nice to see even the text style the thickness the fonts it's just i mean i feel like i've said this i sound like a broken record now but it just goes so far with how far you can customize it it is insane it is insane and whether that's good or bad i'm gonna leave it up to you to decide i think for some people this is overwhelming frankly for me it is a bit overwhelming even though i like a bit of freedom to customize my own setup but i feel like i could spend hours upon hours here to tweak this and that may be a bit of a problem if you just want to get things done in a simple way lastly we have archive and stats and here we can see any tasks that we've completed or moved around in the past couple of days and weeks so that's nice to have although you should always take this with a grain of salt right task marks completed isn't necessarily work done after all all of this here is just a representation of your actual work you still need to do that in order to move forward well well how do we feel guys i think it's time to wipe the sweat of your forehead because this was quite an exercise in how much tweaking and customizing we did since i kept it minimal trust me we could have gone 10 hours long with this video if we really looked at every single feature that amazing marvin has to offer so that is my word of warning as well keep it simple tweaking your system is fun but none of that has to do with real productivity these apps should serve you to do the right things at the right time by letting you know what needs to be done in an accessible way but beyond that checking the check mark or pressing all these time estimates specific frog levels or whatever else that's just symbolic it's just symbolic overlay a representation of what actually needs to be done in the real world so that's my word of caution here use the app if you want to i recommend just downloading my template so you don't even have to think about setting it all up but don't get lost in the rabbit hole of tweaking this at infinitum because this is one of the most flexible customizable tools i've ever seen so it has that danger with it but if you want to use it feel free to give it a try use the link in the description and let me know how it goes in the comments [Music]

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 5,770

Keywords: amazing marvin, amazing marvin tutorial, amazing marvin review, amazing marvin 2022, amazing marvin getting things done, amazing marvin gtd, getting things done, gtd, getting things done tutorial, gtd tutorial, gtd david allen, getting things done planner

Id: eFvYeRJvsr4

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022