Shortcuts to Maximize Productivity

Norm Farrar.m4a [ 00:00:00 ]Hey everyone, my name is Norm Farrar, and I'm here at the BDSS Market Masters Think Tank. Today I'm going to show you a few ways that I create shortcuts, where I get more time in my day. And that's through using a few apps. So the first thing I'm going to show you is Google Calendar, then Gmail, then an app called Boomerang, Briskin, Doodle, and a couple of extras. But first thing, is the very first thing I do to get time back in my day, is I take about 10 minutes the night before, and I plan out the next day. So every single day, no matter what day it is, I take 10 minutes to see whatever I have to do. Now within that time period, especially in the morning, most people go and check emails. [ 00:00:47 ] I don't. I take about anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes, and I work on my A priority, whatever that is, I don't look at anything. Nothing is turned on. So then I color code everything as well. Like for instance, I'll just give you a few things. I'm at an all-day event for 15th, 16th, and 17th. And then I'm at, I'm traveling. So I use a light blue and a dark blue. I have tasks that I do, which are in purple. I have a much bigger task list that I put together. This is just a sample. And then there's a podcast I might be doing and conference calls are in yellow. These are actually the colors that I use. So I just have to look at it and I know at a glance what I'm doing, but I coordinate that with Gmail. [ 00:01:35 ] Now there's so many things I do in Gmail, but I just want to give you some of the best time savers. The first thing I want to show you is that I use filters. So first of all, we just come up to the gear. You click on the filter or you click, click on the gear. Then you go to all settings once you're in all settings. Yeah. You go to filters and blocked addresses and you'll see, I have thousands upon thousands of filters that we've been able to create for, um, for my Gmail account. And it's working for me, whether it is, uh, in the middle of the night or it is during the day, I'm not swamped with all this crappy emails that I don't need to see. [ 00:02:18 ] We create filters simply by going back to the Gmail account and I'll show you a simple filter. Maybe I don't want this one. I just come over here. I click Filter tells, tells me exactly what I want. So now that I've showed you the thousands of filters that I've created, how about I show you exactly how to create them? So I select an email. I go over, I click on the three dots on the far right? It says Filter messages. So let's say I don't want any, uh, any more messages from this company, or I want to put them into a folder. All I have to do is click Filter, select the email address, click on, well, it could be anything. It could be a word in the email. [ 00:03:02 ] Let's say you're looking for newsletters, uh, but it's the next, uh, screen that does the work. So over in the next screen, you can skip your archive box. So you don't have to see it. You can go and look at it later on. You can, um, you can mark as read. You can star it. I typically go into the label section and I create that. So then when it's done, it'll pop up. It'll show you how many are in your inbox right now, or archive. Do you want to bring them along into the filter? Yes, you do. And then you click, click, uh, then you click create filter. And so that saves a ton of time, but the other area that, and I can tell you that this is an app that I love, and it saves me a ton of time. [ 00:03:45 ] This is called Boomerang and what Boomerang allows you to do is let's say you get those, um, those emails that you're not sure if. You want to send it, or if you were want a reminder, you didn't get feedback, maybe a couple of days later, you want to make sure that you follow up on that email. This is the, uh, app for you. So let's go back to my inbox and I want to, uh, respond to this person. I click reply. Then once you have that email, you can go down and you can either. Pick a date that you want it to come back in your inbox. That might be a day from now. It might be in the afternoon. It might be a month from now. So just clean up your inbox. [ 00:04:32 ] So you're not stressed out, but if you are replying to them, you can come down here. You can select a date. Let's say that you have your Google maps associated with this account. It'll fill in all the dates or all the available time slots so they can easily pick a time slot. Now you can also pick up a followup date and you can. You can put a tracker on it, so it saves a ton of time. So now I want to talk to you about an app called Briskin, and it's going to make your life so much easier. It's just a, uh, an app that uses macros so you can come back. So all you have to do is come over, select the email, and let's pretend this is Nick. [ 00:05:11 ] Nick sends me leads all the time. So I want to reply. And what I'm going to do is I just hit reply. And then. I'm going to just type in 'Nick' tab and it sends off the information. Now all I have to do is change whoever he introduced me to, which is my appointment. I also use this for my Canadian and American addresses. So let's go over here and I type in 'CDN a D D' tab and there's my address. So it saves you so much time. You don't even have to think about it. Now next to this is Doodle. How many times? How many of us have tried to get a group of people to settle on a time? [ 00:05:56 ] Well, there's an app called Doodle and it'll take five, 10 participants that you're trying to coordinate for that one time; all you need to do is you click on one of the, it's called Group Poll. All you need to do is put in your available time and then you add the emails. And as people receive the emails, they put in their available time. So if you're just a beginner, you can just click on your app and it will take five, 10 participants to meet up to five people at the same time until it matches the time and sends everybody that five or 10 participants the perfect time to meet. It takes no time at all and everybody gets to book it into their schedule. Okay. So I've got just a couple more. [ 00:06:37 ] Another app. I highly recommend. Our company, I don't know how we work without it, is called Loom. Now Loom is a screen capture. It's a video. And all I need to do if I have instructions and I want to push that over to a VA or if we're working in a meeting, I just create the video. Actually, Loom is very good with AI right now. It tells you exactly what it is. It gives it a description. It gives it tags. You can add the tags. It provides a transcript. But the thing about it, it puts it into a corporate library. So if you want to source or search it, all you have to put in is keywords. It'll find the videos and it'll give you the exact video or the three or four videos that have, let's say, keyword research in it. [ 00:07:24 ] So we use this for all our SOPs. We also use this for meetings. If anybody's missed it, they can go to Loom. One of the other ones, this is probably the biggest one. This is the biggest one. This is probably the biggest one. This is probably the time waster for me. And that is funneling all your bloody communications. So I've probably got 15 different channels from Telegram, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Skype. There's a ton of them. WhatsApp. I'm going back and I'm wasting time during the day going back and forth, back and forth. Rambox is a very inexpensive tool that takes all of your social media, takes all of your Slack, and then takes all of your communication channels. And puts it into one funnel. [ 00:08:07 ] So all you have to do is look at it, you know, every hour or every two hours. In fact, I have my assistant go in, take a look at it. If there's anything urgent, she gets a hold of me. If not, I wait. I wait until I assign myself that I can check my emails and check my Skype. So that saves so much time. So that's Rambox. Now the big one. This is the one that's gold. This is called Plod. It used to be I'd have to go into a meeting and I'd miss half of what everybody was saying because I was taking notes. Not anymore. We have this handy dandy little item that didn't come out of my pocket, but here it is. And it's called Plod. [ 00:08:51 ] You turn this on, put it on the desk, and it records the speaker incredibly accurately. Then it breaks it down into a transcription, different types of summary notes, and even mind mapping. Now I'm going to show you how detailed it gets. We went to a podcast event the other week, and this is just one of the notes. So pulled out all this information about the speakers. You can actually name the speakers if you have it in that mode. It pulls out everything that we need. And if we wanted to have it in a different mode, let's say it was for tasks. It could do that. So this helps me concentrate on what the person is saying and then go back to my room, review the notes. And take action. [ 00:09:36 ] So this is a summary of some of the apps that we use. We've got tons that we use, actually, probably 20 or 30, but that might happen later on. Again, I'm Norm Farrar. If you want to reach out, know more about me, just hit me up at normatamz.club. That's normatamz.club. And if you want to listen to my podcast, you can go to any podcast platform or YouTube, and it's Lunch with Norm. And I have a second podcast with Kevin King called Marketing Misfits. That's it for me. Thanks for watching. [ 00:10:46 ] Subtitles by the Amara.org community.