Tech Tidbits for Turbocharged Productivity

Okay, so welcome everybody to today's learning objectives webinar series from the Center for Practice Management. And I like to do a tips program in January so we can start off with some new ideas and some things to remember to do. Some of this stuff may not be new to you, um, Hopefully it's a reminder of tools and things that you can use. Um, some may be new to you, and, uh, so we'll go ahead and get started. If you have questions, you're welcome to open your mic and ask the question, or you can just chat them to me in the chat. So the first thing we're going to cover is email management, and email management is obviously something that everybody struggles with, um, because For one thing, I think we get a whole lot of email that really isn't two-way correspondence. And one of the things, if you're an Outlook user or a Gmail user, I have found incredibly helpful— and I've tried SaneBox, and I've tried Unroll.me, and I've tried all these little add-ons and different things. And other than just completely abandoning the usual interfaces like Outlook and Gmail and using something entirely different, which I've experimented with as well, One of the things that I find is that if you use those automated tabs in Outlook, it's, it's going to be the two tabs where you have one for focused and other. Those actually work. And then Gmail, you've got 4 or 5 different tabs, and you can customize them, all that stuff. So it tends to put newsletters and things in a place where it's not part of your correspondence. And as much as I can, I unsubscribe from newsletters in my work email, um, just so I'm not distracted by everything. It gets a little overwhelming. Uh, so anyway, there's a couple of things, and I'm going to focus on Outlook because that's the tool that I use. Um, there are similar tools in Gmail. If you're using AOL or Yahoo or GoDaddy or something like that, you're I would suggest looking at a more business-focused email application because they're not going to have quite as many bells and whistles. But something that I really, really love in Outlook is Outlook templates. And in the past, the way I've dealt with templates in Outlook was to type up an email, save it as a template, go insert it, do all that stuff, and that was a pain. And then there's, um Quick Parts, which still works, which you can also use for templates. But the current version of Outlook— and I'm going to share my screen with you so you can see what I'm talking about— has these little templates. Um, and so if you get an email and you need to respond, um, or you're sending a new email, then I can just go and open up a new email and put my cursor here in the body, um, and then go to View Templates, which is in the Microsoft 365 Outlook. And if you click on View Templates, I have templates, and you'll see that I have a number. This is so they order in the ones that I use the most frequently. So Schedule Consultation, Find Time to Meet with Me, um, I get— I speak a lot, so I get asked for my bio. So I've just created, you know, basically if I've sent the message 3 or 4 times, rather than going into my sent mail and copying and pasting, I just create a template. And the way that you do this to create a new one is you just go down all the way to the bottom of the screen and click on Templates, give it a title, put in the text, and then you've got a template that you can drop in. So One that I get a lot is, um, whoops, you know, I need a lawyer. So I have, um, you know, different, different responses for different things. So I can respond to it, um, or I can just start a new email with a different template. You can add different template language. The other thing that I use for quick, um, things is I use auto text. And auto text, so if I am too lazy to even go and find my— I use Calendly to let people schedule appointments with me. So if I'm, if I'm just in a big hurry and I'm responding to somebody, I just hit slash Calendly and type in Calendly and hit enter. And it plops in all the text for me, including the hyperlink. And the way that you do that is you go into your File, Options, and then in Mail, go to, uh, let's see, I think it's Spelling and Autocorrect. And then AutoCorrect Options. And then you can actually— so you can see that /calendly puts in this text, /csr puts in my full name. And so you can— and the reason I use the slash is because that way it doesn't have any effect on things that are already in the dictionary, um, and it just keeps me from accidentally dropping in text when I'm typing something else. So that was a trick that Baron Henley teaches, and it's a good one. So you can basically— there is a limit to the number of characters you can put in there, but this is just— and there are plenty of text expander tools on the market that you can purchase, but just for, you know, quick and dirty, easy to use stuff, you can put in quite a bit of text into here. And just when you type in, say, um CPM, and I want it to say Center for Practice Management, and I click Add, OK, OK, OK, and then if I type in CPM, it fills it in. So those are two ways to keep yourself from copying and pasting, typing, doing all that stuff, is to use the templates and to use the autocorrect dictionary. Another thing that I use in Outlook all the time is reply with a meeting instead of replying to, um, an email if it's going to be a meeting. And so what happens is someone, you know, will email and we'll talk about availability and when we want to meet, and then you have to go set up a meeting. So an easier way to do this is you take an email that you've received and you open it up, say, I'm gonna respond to this and say, let's meet. In the response group here, there's a little button that says reply with meeting. And when I do that, It takes the entire email— whoops, my computer is possessed right now, evidently— and it formats that email as a meeting. So I can put in the time, the date, And it also keeps the entire thread of the email in the body. So I have a kind of running reminder of what this meeting was about, what the conversation was prior to setting up the meeting. And the next tip is kind of similar to that in that, and again, this is I have a lot of meetings, and I'm sure you do too, is meeting insights. So once we've set up a meeting, there's probably been an email discussion. There may be an attachment. And so when I get ready to get on a Zoom call or have a meeting, then I like to go back and review any important information that we had discussions about prior to the meeting. So you can actually go into Outlook, look in your calendar, see what meetings you've had. We'll see if I have any upcoming meetings I can show you. If there was an email conversation— that's a recurring meeting. See if I can find something that I can show you. Okay, so there's the upcoming board meeting, and if I click on this meeting insights, it shows me the emails and the discussion around this particular— it's basically from the organizer to me and everybody else to see what's going on. So, and if there were attachments, and I can click into each of the emails, see the attachments, all that kind of stuff. So this meeting insights just is a quick way to refresh yourself on what the conversation is going to be about during the meeting without having to search through your email. And that's even if those emails have been put into folders. So another one, and this is to be used sparingly, of course, but there is a button that says ignore conversations in Outlook. And this is for when you get CC'd on a thread and it's really not— you don't need to be part of this conversation anymore. It doesn't require your response, so you just go up into the upper left-hand corner and click on this little icon in the delete section, and then it'll say ignore the conversation, and it basically will delete the conversation itself and all future messages. It'll be put into your delete folder. You know, if somebody sends a blast out to the entire firm and says, hey, who wants to go out to lunch? And then there's all these responses, and you're going to be working through lunch today, stuff like that. The other thing that I see people do is there's all sorts of cool little tools that allow you to create requests for multiple people to agree on a meeting time. And the one that was kind of pervasive and very popular is called Doodle. The problem with Doodle is that Doodle is— if you're using the free product, there were a lot of ads. And there were so many ads in it that it was almost impossible to tell what was an ad and what was actually pertinent to setting up the meeting. For that reason, I'm not a huge fan of Doodle if you're using the free version. If you're in Gmail, I would suggest FreeBusy. And if you're in Outlook, I would suggest FindTime. But these are very helpful if you've got multiple people who need to meet and agree on a day. Rather than negotiate availability with many, many emails, you just set up a little poll right from your email and check FreeBusyTime. I've written articles about it. I'll, I'll send you all these slides with annotations so you can kind of get a sense of, um, how to use these things, but that is the best way I know to get multiple people to agree on a time without having just a ton of emails. Okay, the next bit we're gonna talk about is something that has been the topic of conversation for quite some time, which is generative artificial intelligence. And we have an ethics opinion from the State Bar now on using generative artificial intelligence in your practice. You know, there's a lot of concern, and rightly so, about whether it is really ready for things like legal research, drafting, contract review, all this kind of stuff. There's a lot of hype. There's a lot of discussion about what it can do. What my experience has been is that it doesn't quite deliver on all the promises yet. I think it's fledgling technology. That said, there are some low-hanging low-hanging fruit things that aren't going to be particularly dangerous in terms of, you know, is this information being shared with, with the, the foundational model so that what I'm putting in has a confidentiality breach or anything like that, you know, some of the stuff, you can just use it to help your day-to-day life. And so just to get a sense of what And there's a lot of discussion about prompt engineering and how to prompt the generative AI tools to give you the best response. So this is just a very simple example of me coming up with a program title and description. And one of the things that when we prompt a GAI, and this feels a little weird to me to do, but you have to tell it, you give it a persona and you have to think of this as being the director. So you're directing this actor. Being the generative artificial intelligence. What role are you playing here? And so you're an expert on legal technology and law practice management. Write a title and description for a CLE program, you know, that discusses how to budget for technology. And so this— make the title and description memorable and interesting. Also include elements. You could tell it, you know, word count, all sorts of different things. Be specific but not too long. There's a fine line between giving it too much prompting because if you write 3 paragraphs of a prompt, it only remembers the first bit and possibly the last bit, but it gets kind of lost in it. So keep, keep it tight, keep it specific, give it a persona, tell it, you know, what are you an expert in? And then once you get the initial response, you can then prompt it to be more specific. So you look at what it gives you, and in this case I said, okay, reorder with an emphasis on budget, then tools, then assessing ROI. Make it shorter, no bullets. And it— because I put continuing legal education and regulators, it put in this thing about accreditation, which I didn't need. So you go back and refine. And then what you come up with is it gave it a, you know, title and description, learning outcomes. And, you know, I'm not going to probably accept this as the final version, but it is helpful in giving me some, you know, it's, it's kind of to deal with the blank page syndrome. I kind of know what I want to talk about, but I need just some help with language and getting it out, especially when you're stuck for ideas. People use it for all sorts of different things. This is one of my use cases. You will find use cases for yourself. Another thing that people use generative AI for a lot is basically writing refinement, and there's a tool called Grammarly that is a really good writing aid. The problem with Grammarly is that it— there has been some discussion about whether or not it is sharing your information that it's reviewing for training purposes, and so going into being fed into the large language model, which without some pretty high-level assurances of how that information is going to be used, it makes people nervous. So there was this controversy about Grammarly. Well, interestingly enough, if you have Windows 11, you have a really good AI writing tool built into the system. And so it's in Notepad. So one of the things about Windows 11 is they have gotten rid of WordPad. You probably don't use Notepad all that frequently, but for things like my newsletter, I find it's very helpful. I just write it in Word, run the Word editor through it, and then paste it into Notepad. Sometimes you can start in Notepad just because if you need to just get words on a page and focus on the text and not formatting, sometimes just having a text editor like Notepad is actually quite helpful. But now what they've done is they've added How did this, um, AI writing help? So you can select a sentence. It's not the entire document, and then you click on it and ask it to, um, rephrase or suggest other phrases. And then you can change the length, the tone, the format, and it suggests several different replacements. So you can kind of scroll through. And so if you read a sentence that you've written and you think, This just doesn't read well. I'd like a little editorial help in making this read more effective, you know, better. I find that this AI in Notepad is actually quite effective. Another thing that you're probably aware that generative AI does is create images. And so, and we've gotten to the point where we've seen lots and lots of these images, and they all start looking very similar to the point where you go, that is generated from AI. It's because a lot of people use the same models for generating the, the images and they all start looking the same. That is really a situation where you're not doing a good job prompting. But again, if you don't want to go and use another tool outside of what you already have, Microsoft Paint now has the ability to generate images, and it's using DALL-E, which is available through ChatGPT. So if I open up Paint and I wanna create an image, then I just go over into this area, the image creator. I describe the image that I want. I can choose the style, which is, is neat because I don't have to tell it, you know, oil painting or line drawing or whatever. And then it gives me a couple of different options. And then you can go back in and you can actually edit it and paint if you want to, or copy and paste it and put it in a document or a blog post or a PowerPoint or whatever you need. And so that, you know, again, using tools that are already available to you. You don't have to go sign up for another product or something like that. Now, this is where we branch out into using third-party tools. I do have a subscription to Claude. Claude is the generative AI from Anthropic. It was— it's one of the big foundational models. And one of the interesting things with Claude is is that you can actually upload your own writing examples. And so again, because I write a lot of content, I'm able to share, you know, non-confidential information with it to give a sample of my writing. And then you can actually have it give you responses in different styles, one of which is your own personal style, how you write. Now, it it does a pretty good job. It still doesn't sound exactly like me, but it sounds more like me and gives me responses that are a little bit more in tune with how I write than what it would if I hadn't customized it to my own writing style. So this is an example of another way that you can use generative AI. For instance, this is an actual disclaimer on the bottom of an email. Um, you know, many, many attorneys have disclaimers at the bottom of their email to remind the recipients that there's, you know, confidentiality and blah, blah. A lot of times there's a lot of language that is either unnecessary because this isn't actually legally binding, um,, and so just, you know, simplifying this language, making it say the same thing but without sounding so stilted and making it a little bit shorter, a little bit easier to read. So I ran it through Claude and I said, rewrite this using plain language. Now you've got this, you know, nice— this email and attachments serve the name, you know, says the same thing but without the hereto's and thereby's and wherefore's and all these other extraneous words. And it makes it cleaner and neater. One of the things that has kind of come to pass with all this generative AI technology that's out there is that we are kind of bombarded with it. It's— there are generative AI search tools. ChatGPT has web search now. Perplexity is, is a GAI search. There's a lot of these tools out there, but what we're also seeing is that GAI is coming into Google results. So when we type in a Google search, the first thing is we get this Search Labs AI overview, and it's been somewhat hilariously inaccurate. It's suggested that you eat a rock a day. I, it's, uh, I think one of the summaries, um, suggested that you glue toppings on the pizza to get them to hold on, you know, stuff like that. So they know that it's not perfect and they have little disclaimers and warnings. But if you just want to bypass, um, the generative AI overview before your, um, the search results start in, do your Google search. And then there's a new button you can click, and it's called Web. And so once you do your search and then you click Web, it strips out that GenAI summary, and you just get to the results. The other way that you can do this is if you do a search in Google and you use, um, any kind of parameters, file type, um, the minus sign, um, quotes, anything where you use any of the, the Boolean search parameters, it actually won't give you those. Um, so it kind of teaches you, if you don't want those AI results, then just do a little bit more specific search and you won't get that. The other tools up here, if you've never explored them, under this More button, if you click on that, you can actually tell it Search and give me results from just today, just last week, um, within the last year. Depending on the search that you're doing, if you really want super current information, you have to tell Google, I want really current information. Otherwise, it's gonna give you the most popular and relevant to your keywords, which means that the content may be old. The other thing is, if you're looking for breaking news, don't do a search for all. Do a search and then limit it just to news. So This whole toolbar across the top here in a Google search will refine your results for you, and you'll get better results as a result of using them. The other thing is, again, I've mentioned that there's some nervousness about where the data is going, how it's being used. If you're uploading documents, if you're chatting with it, and, you know, is it saving all of those chats? And is there a way to anonymize this completely so that you don't even have to have a login, and the answer is yes, thanks to DuckDuckGo. And DuckDuckGo is a browser that is focused on privacy that I actually have switched over now to use as my exclusive browser and search because it doesn't track me, it doesn't, it doesn't know where I am, and I can, you know, easily remove all cookies. It just, it just is a lot more privacy-focused than the the big, big browsers and big search engines. And similarly, they've basically scanned, um, the chat. So let me go and I'll show you what this looks like. So you can just do a search for doc.go AI chat, and you can see that now you could go in and do a new chat and pick which model you want. So if I want to, um, pick a different model, I can go up here and say I want to chat GPT-4o. These are all the free ones, so, um, We've got ChatGPT, and then I can ask it something like, can a PL file in S-Corp? And it gives you the answer. Now, because I do have a ChatGPT account, I am logged in, so it does, it does remember my searches. But if I want it to forget them. I— you don't have to have a login. And I can also click on this little button that says Clear All Chats, and it says, you want to clear all your chats? And it clears all cookies, chats, and memory of anything you've asked it. So that's something you can use if you want to remain anonymous when using these tools. This is a tool that I use a good bit. You've probably all seen participating in a Zoom call or Teams video conference that on occasion an unexpected guest will arrive and it'll be, you know, Catherine's otter or, you know, Zoom companion or some other thing. I find it a little disturbing to have an uninvited guest, which is basically a third-party tool coming in, listening to, and transcribing the conversation. So I like Tactiq because you don't have to actually invite it. So everybody's on notice that if I'm doing a conference call, if I'm recording it, you know, it announces it's being recorded. We make sure everybody knows it's being recorded. So the recording is not done in secret, but once you do that and you've got the recording, you can actually use Tactic to create a transcript and summary notes. And so I'm going to show you kind of what this looks like. So when you log in and you can have this participate in calls, but again, that's not my use case because I think that's weird. So I do this with my HOA board a lot and stuff like that. And so you can go in and upload a transcript or recording. Um, and someone is asking if I recommend the password manager that comes with DuckDuckGo. Um, I don't really know that much about the password manager that comes with DuckDuckGo. Uh, I've used Dashlane forever. I think I would stick with— if I were going to switch to anything, I'd probably switch to NordPass, but I wouldn't switch to DuckDuckGo immediately. I do use it for my primary browser and search at this point. Anyway, so with Tactiq, you can upload the transcript or recording. Once you do that, and I've already done it with this one, I've uploaded the recording., and then you can tell it create a detailed summary. If I click on detailed summary with citation, um, it'll sit there and, you know, depending on the length of the, uh, recording, this may take a while. But so this detailed summary with citation, what that is, is here's the summary and then it links me to the audio. In the file, so I can actually go listen to that audio. So other things that you can do is write an agenda for the next meeting. So if I'm putting the recording in to generate minutes, I can say create a summary of action items and then create an agenda for next month based on those action items. So for your team meetings, for client meetings where you've agreed to you know, follow up with them. This stuff is hugely valuable, and it's not like you've lost the original recording. The transcript isn't perfect. No, no automated transcript tool is perfect, but you, you still have the recording and can listen to it if you need. But it's just, there's a whole lot of different things, and they've added workflows and all sorts of other stuff. But there's the free version actually if you don't use it a ton, is— has been good enough for me. It is used by really big companies all over the globe. It has good privacy in it. You can't share it without someone having to get an account. Not that they have to have a paid account, but they do have to create an account. So again, this is not the conversation about a merger agreement that you're having or something like that. I barely trust anything with those kinds of conversations. But for stuff that is confidential but not highly, highly sensitive, I think this is the kind of thing that can be extremely useful. Okay, the next thing that we're going to talk about is documents. Another thing that I you all live and breathe documents, and so there's a lot, lot to be aware of. The first thing I want to show you is just there's an inclusive language checker in Microsoft Word. So you're familiar with the fact that it checks for grammar and punctuation and things like that, but it— and it— this inclusivity checker doesn't check for highly charged terminology because it assumes that you're not using them. It's really more about things like if you say postman, it'll say postal carrier. You know, if you— depending on what you put, it may suggest, and it doesn't change it, it just, just like everything else in the, um, the checker, it suggests alternatives. It is not turned on by default, so in order to get this to come on, you go into your Word options. You go up to the File menu and go down to Options, then you go into Proofing, and then you go into Settings for Grammar. You scroll down through the list. I'll give you the instructions, and you'll, um, you can turn those on., and again, it's just, it becomes part of that, that check. For those of you who use Dropbox, Dropbox has some new automations that are built in that I think are interesting. And so when you create a new folder in Dropbox, you can choose different automations. So you can actually categorize files automatically. You can rename files automatically. You can have it convert files that you upload into a, a specific folder to PDF automatically. If you're doing a kind of eDiscovery, you can choose an image format to convert files to. So if you want a TIFF or something like that, so there's a lot of little— I mean, none of them are too terribly sophisticated, and they may not do as much as you need it to do. But just as a start, if you're a Dropbox user and you think what would be convenient that if I— that I wouldn't have to name all these files with these long naming conventions. You can actually let Dropbox do some of the work for you, um, based on where you put the document, um, with automations on that folder. This is something— so recently, if you are a, a FastCase user, you probably noticed that the bar has switched over to the new FastCase which is now merged with a company called VLEX. VLEX is an international legal research company, and FastCase is now part of that company. And so they have rolled out a new interface. There are some decided benefits to the VLEX FastCase in terms of things like annotations, summaries of case law, things like that. There are some things that you're going to miss that, you know, just tell us if you go in there. And I know one of them that someone's told me about is, uh, printing to dual column. So if that's something that you go, you know, where's the dual column? I can, A, show you how to kind of get around that, and B, they absolutely have that on their roadmap. So you tell me where you get frustrated and I'll tell them, and, uh, and, you know, we'll, we'll get this product, uh, where you want it to be. But right now, something I think is really neat is this Fastcase Word plugin. So if you go into Fastcase, um, and you look in the toolbox, there is a Word plugin. And if you install that, um, then what you get is this little toolbar. And I'm going to find you a document that has some case law in it. And once you get it installed, it just shows up in your toolbar up here. I'm going to click on VLEX Find Citations, and it goes through and it identifies the case law. Now, to be clear, it is not at this time identifying statutes Hopefully that will be coming, but right now it does identify cases. And again, not perfect. It's— it doesn't always catch every case, but it is a good start. And so you can click on this to add links. When you add links, the links that it adds, it basically turns these into hyperlinks, takes you into Fastcase. For free. So this is something that if you were sharing a document with a client who didn't have a legal research database, these links will take them into Fastcase, but they don't have to create an account or anything like that. Um, the other thing is, and this is really small, so it shows you treatment. So in addition to recognizing the links, now they have this thing called the CertCitations, and it will show you negative treatment, um, red flags, yellow flags, and all that code. So what I'm going to do is find one. All right, this is 36 negative treatments. Let's see that. So if I click on this, it's going to take me straight into FastCase to this opinion, and You can see that it's superseded by statute, how many times it's been cited, when it was last cited, and then I can go in there and look at citing authorities and all that kind of stuff. So I can do, um, do a little bit of, uh, recognizing when I might not want to cite to a case or what happened with this. As I mentioned, The interface is a bit different. We do have a training video on this. It gives you this case analysis. You can copy the citation here. It's got key paragraphs, all this kind of stuff. So there's a lot more sophisticated functionality here than there used to be. So definitely do check that out. Someone asked, is there a benefit of Fastcase over LexisNexis? Really depends on how sophisticated your research needs are. Fastcase is, because you get it free with your BAR membership, a great place to start. And you may be able to— so for instance, you may have, if you know, if you are doing a lot of litigation, you may have a Westlaw or LexisNexis account, but you don't want to pay for the 50-state database. You've got that with Fastcase, and then you've got your, um, you know, your, your state and federal through LexisNexis or Westlaw. Um, there are people in the law library world who have done extensive deep dives, um, and all of these tools, as you probably are aware, are adding generative AI into the mix, and Fastcase is no exception. Right now, Vincent AI, their research assistant, is not part of what you get for free, but you can do a 3-day trial just to see if it's something that you might be interested in. All right, this is, this is kind of a tip and a tip and a tip, and my, the big, the overarching picture here is Creating templates for frequently used documents. So instead of going back to the last document that you put together and copying and pasting, if you want to create a template, say, for, you know, in a particular format for a local— the local rules for a court or your engagement agreement or whatever, you can create templates. And in Word, just in case you didn't know, I'll show you. Um, you, when you save your document, you save, I'm gonna save a copy of this and you can save this as a Word template. And then when you open the document, it doesn't overwrite the document unless it's in there. And I've got some instructions on how to do this. You can edit the template or you can create a new document based on the template. Um, so I'm a big fan of templates, but if you are just trying to get formatting in play here, there's a way to do this. And so let me go down to the bottom of this or just start a new document so you can see how this works. All right, so I've got a new document and say I'm creating a template And so what you do is you can type in equals lorem and then open paren and a number, and this is the number of sentences, oops, and then the number of paragraphs, close it, and then hit enter. And it basically puts in, um, some, you know, holding text. And this is if you're creating a formatted template, um, for pleadings, motions, briefs, filings of that sort of nature where you want it to be very obvious this is not the final version, this is a template. Put your own language in here, um, and then save this as a template. So the other thing, of course, is that I just created that Remember when I showed you the autocorrect in Outlook? Works in Word too. So I do the slash lorem, hit enter, and do one more space behind it so I don't have to remember that whole thing. And you can do that as many times as you want, um, and then you can, you know, go in and format your text however you need to. Using styles, which we'll get to. So I get questions a lot about how do I get clients to securely send me files, and I have a whole video on different ways using tools you probably already have on how to get files. If you don't have a good way of doing this or you want to add more structure to it, I really like this tool called Pipefile. Um, Pipefile will integrate with your OneDrive, Dropbox, what have you. Um, but what it does is it lets you set up a workflow. So you create a template. So say you're in real estate and you're frequently asking for very specific documents. Um, So you create a template and you say, I'll need, you know, the plat survey, the deed, the tax documents, blah, blah, blah. And so you don't have to do it over and over. You can do it once and save it as a template. Another use case, though, that I recently ran into is I was working with an attorney who does immigration law, and he wants to— basically, he needs his clients to send him documents, and he's created the template, but he gave instructions— and he was doing this via email— and he gave instructions on how to scan the documents to send back to him. And, you know, that involves get your phone and take a picture and do X, Y, and Z. So Pipefile just introduced this integrated document scanner. And so what happens is when you send that request to the client, if they open it on, on their email, on their phone, they take their phone, they open up the email, they see Azure Files here. So if they're on their computer, they can just drag and drop the files or scan document, and it actually builds a scanner into their phone and it scans it directly into Pipefile. Which I think is really neat because you don't have to instruct people on, you know, get Acrobat Reader, Acrobat Lens, or Word Lens, or take a picture and do this, blah blah blah. It just, you know, so if you have clients who are technically challenged and you want to be able to collect documents from them securely and give them the ability to scan documents without having to give them instructions on how to do it, this is pretty straightforward. The other thing about BytePile that I like is If you ask them for 5 documents and they only submitted 2, it will remind them you still have 2 documents outstanding, blah blah blah. So it's a really cool tool. I wrote an article about the benefits of styles in Word. Um, couple of different things I want to mention just in case you didn't know. So this is, um, kind of the fundamentals of how you control formatting in Word is called styles. And so This is a document I created. One of the benefits of using styles is it automatically creates a table of contents for you. So because I have used headers and subheaders in this document, when I want to go add the table of contents, I just go into References, Table of Contents, and because I've used styles, it automatically creates those for me, which is incredibly convenient. If I make a change to the document, I just right-click up here or just click in here, update table, and I can update. So the pagination changes can update the page numbers only. So that makes my life easier from— and then these are clickable so people can click through. If you convert this to a PDF, then all of those clickable links also convert in the PDF, and they also turn into bookmarks in the PDF. So there's a lot of real good reasons to use styles. Another is that styles styles are helpful from an accessibility perspective. So if you've got someone who's using a screen reader, if you use headings— Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, title, so on and so forth— it helps people with screen readers to be able to get through the document. But one of the big reasons that I'm a huge fan of styles is this thing called the Navigation Pane, and this is in the View tab. If you have a tool that you frequently use, in the ribbon and you wanna be able to get to it without remembering where it is. So I can click on it here, but I want to be able to, to get access to it through the Quick Access Toolbar. So anything you see in the ribbon, just right-click on it and click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Um, the Quick Access Toolbar by default shows above the ribbon. But there's a lot of stuff happening above the ribbon, so I have a hard time seeing it. So for that reason, I show it, um, below the ribbon, and I find that it's a lot more visible and not mushed up with all the other things that are happening up here. So you can just right-click and add anything to that. So I have added my Navigation Pane. Cool thing about the Navigation Pane is You can search your document here, and I can jump to different headings, but I can also say, okay, if I right-click on it, I can demote this, I can promote it, I can add a new heading before or after a new subheading, delete it, select that heading and its contents, and then I can also move this entire section around. Without copying and pasting. So navigation, the navigation toolbar is really helpful for controlling the document, for moving things around. I really, and that's all the benefit of using styles in Word, and there's a lot more benefits, but these are just some of them. And like I said, I have a whole whole paper on how to use styles. Okay, so I'm running out of time because I have a lot of tips and I thought it would be worth showing you some versus just talking about them. But Windows 11 is basically something that if you're in a Windows world, you're going to need to upgrade by October. There are some ways that you can extend your Windows 10, but my suggestion would be is just to bite the bullet and get Windows 11 because it's actually stable and has more features and functionality than Windows 10. And so that wasn't necessarily the case immediately, but Windows 11 is pretty mature at this point and there's no reason to avoid it. So one of the things that I think is really neat is this Focus Time. So if you've ever heard of the Pomodoro Technique or you do, um, time, uh, batching this is a really great way to do it. You can set this thing up and you just go into your search and type in FocusTime, and you can say, okay, I want to focus for 24 minutes and tell it turn off email, um, turn off all the distractions. You focus on it for, you know, however many minutes you say, then it'll tell you to take a break. Um, you can have your task list up in the Microsoft Tasks, uh, You can listen to music. There are studies that suggest that for certain types of tasks, music actually helps you focus more. So I listen to music while I'm doing certain things. And like last night when I was putting this PowerPoint together and my family was all kind of talking to me and asking me what I wanted for dinner and things like that, I just put my headphones on, listen to music, started my timer, and reduce the distractions just to get that deep work done. And then it, it also will track your daily progress, how well you've done. So if you find that your computer creates distractions for you, um, this is an interesting way to try to use the tools that are already built into Windows 11, um, and reduce that. This is something that, again, I'll give you the instructions, but we have a lot of websites that we go to. If you're a Clio user, you know, that's an app, but it's, it's through a browser or ChatGPT or whatever. So I don't wanna go and open the browser and, and migrate to a tab. So I've actually created these as little web apps so I can show you. See down here, um, I've got Loop. Loop is not an installed piece of software, it's, um, it's a web app. And ChatGPT and Claude and other things, um, I've just made them appear as if they're actual pieces of software that appear in my taskbar, but all you have to do is go into your browser And so if I wanted to ask— add Fastcase, I can go up here and then go to Apps and install this site as an app, and then it appears down here in your toolbar. And you can take it away just as easily as you put it in there. I think I just obliterated my slides. Another thing is I— you can search if you're using Microsoft 365 and Windows 11. You can search everything: files, emails, SharePoint, Teams, um, using Bing.. And while you can use your search tool, I actually like to use the browser. So I've just bookmarked this. You can go to Microsoft Bing and then you can tell it— you click on work and I'm logged in with my work account here. Go to work and then I just bookmark this so it's up here. And then I can do a search. And when I run the search, I can say I just want to see messages. So these are emails. And then I can also say I just want to say— I just want to see chats and Teams. Or I can say I just want files. And I just want, you know, PowerPoints last modified in the past month. And this just is a great way of searching everything on my computer, um, using a, a good search and getting to what I need where I need it. Um, so if again, you kind of, the more all in you are with the, the Windows and Microsoft stuff, the more you get this kind of functionality. I'm going to skip around a little bit again because I'm running out of time. Just to remember, when you leave your desk in your office and you walk away from it, you really should lock your computer. Our IT director runs around and checks to make sure that you've locked your computer. The easiest way I know how to tell you to do this is you hold down the Windows key and L. And if you do that, so real quick swift movement when you get up from your desk, and it'll lock your, your computer. So someone would have to have login access to get to it. Couple of different smartphone tools. So I'm going to This doesn't seem like it should be all that revolutionary, but it is. So this is my actual— this is my text from my phone. So say I start typing a long text message, and then I realize that I made an error somewhere. I do not have to backspace out of this. You just hold the cursor down on your phone and you can easily scroll around and go back and then type what you need to. And this works in Android and in iPhones. I have a couple of Google Maps tips. I also have some instructions on how to delete advertising IDs on Apples and on iPhones. If you think your phone is listening to you and serving up ads, you're right. Apple is being sued right now over Siri using more information than it's supposed to. So because of that, I went through and deleted the advertising ID on my phone. That doesn't mean that I'm getting rid of all advertising, but I do not let my phone listen to me, and I don't talk to my phone, and I also try to reduce the amount of tracking that's happening. The last tip, since we're running out of time, and I'll send you the whole slide deck, there's, there's more in here, but if you want to preserve your battery, there have been studies done, and this is why you have that option in here. You actually go into your battery settings and you tell it it only charge to 80%. So if you keep your phone between 20 and 80% charged, it will extend the life of your battery. If you choose not to do this, this adaptive thing is when your battery is charged to 100%, charging will stop because you do not want it charging at 100%. In perpetuity. So if you plug it in when you go to bed and it just keeps, keeps charging to keep it at 100%, it'll wear your battery down faster, which is why they have these battery protection settings in your phone. So that is all the time we have. Um, I will send you the slide deck with annotations. Um, sorry I didn't get through as many as I want, but, um, I hope that you all have a wonderful year. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me and ask me questions about any of these things. I literally use your questions to create blog posts. So 2 days ago somebody said, can you help me shop for a PC? And I said, sure, and I wrote a blog post. So a lot of times what I help you with, other people need help. So I am— it doesn't have to be a sophisticated question. Um, anything goes, please let me know. And thanks for your time and attention today.