Be More Productive in 2018: Screen Capture and Project Management Tips

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, January 17th, 2018 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at Powered by WSI.com. The sniffly, coughing, somewhat congested sounding person that you are about to hear is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins with CBCI. Did I say that correctly?

You did.

Look at that, the old memory's not failing me. So say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world, Mr. Jeff Simpkins.

Greetings, everybody. This is Jeff Simpkins with the newly named company, CBCI Consulting, based in Columbia, South Carolina, where I told Eric before we went on the air that this is something you'll never hear me say, but today is an exception. It is actually snowing here. I am just in the process of rebranding from Community Bank Consulting, Inc. So I'm still using the old URL, Community Bank Consulting, Inc., but got a big project ahead of me doing all this rebranding.

All sorts of fun stuff. So yeah. Yeah, I, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit on that one and not jinx myself. So, but hopefully you feel better and, uh, it goes away very quickly. So I heard the drug fairy arrived earlier today with some tasty little treats for you. So hopefully that'll take care of things and get you all back in tip-top shape.

Thanks. Yeah.

Cool. Well, before we jump in, I think I actually forgot housekeeping items last week. We just kinda dove right in headfirst and got all excited about stuff. But those of you that are attending today's session live, we appreciate you joining us and encourage you to post questions or comments in the chat area if you wanna talk about anything specific or if we touch on something that you'd like to learn a little bit more information on. One of the joys of doing a live show is we get that visitor attendee interaction that you just don't get from a recorded show. So please feel free to let us know that you're there and if there's anything that's on your mind. And to do that, you just go ahead and use the chat function there in the right-hand side of your screen in the control panel for GoToWebinar. And we'll keep an eyeball on that as the show progresses and look forward to hearing from you. And today's show and all shows are recorded and made available out at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So I've got that up on the screen here and you can see show from last week. We talked a little bit about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, some marketing automation, and then Jeff caused me to chase a squirrel. I haven't bought one yet, but you shared one of the newer note-taking thought documentation notebook little nuggets that you, uh, that you got. For the audience that maybe didn't join last week, you want to just give a quick little recap of what that Amazon notebook screenshot is, is for?

Yeah, that is, um, my shiny new Rocketbook Everlast, which is a, uh, sort of brings together the traditional old paper and pen into the, the modern age of computer technology with any of the Rocketbook products. They have 3 products. You write on it using a Fusion Pen. I think it's a Pilot Fusion Pen. And the version I have has a plastic page that feels very much like paper. You write it, you snap a picture of the page with the camera on your phone and the Rocketbook software for Apple or Android, and it uploads it to the cloud destination that you choose magically.

Great. Yeah, that was the one question I forgot to ask you. I purchased one of the Evernote books, which is not reusable paper, but it does have Evernote synchronization capabilities. But when I— and I haven't Gone back to check, but the app only worked with iOS, and I have an Android phone, so I was kind of screwed. It's a nice little notebook that is nice to use, but I didn't have the luxury of kind of optical character recognition and other sorts of automated indexing because I don't have the iOS app. So you're saying that this works regardless of what operating system you're using on your mobile device?

Let me just double check. Yes, sir. iOS app and Android app.

There you go. Cool.

Alright.

Well, that, that, that might make my acquisition of one of these little gizmos that much closer to a reality. So, yeah. Alright. Well, a couple things that we wanted to talk about today. We had a show a few weeks ago. Mark Sherman from our office joined us and we talked about cryptocurrency. And you may recall the CryptoKitties. And if you didn't get a chance to listen to that show— and yes, I did say CryptoKitties— so there's a virtual reality cat that you can buy with crypto. More, just do a Google search for CryptoKitties. It's kind of the next generation of Pokémon Go, I think, only they're actually being spent on devices. I keep— they're just Well, Cass, this cryptocurrency slash, you know, phenomenon. Listening to the news or maybe paying a little bit closer attention, the concept of the blockchain that is behind cryptocurrency is still very much, I think, a valid process and holds some business value in authenticating some sort of a transaction or an exchange of value or information between 2 parties. But the actual value of these speculative cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, I've just popped over to a website called Coinbase, and you can create an account here. I will admit, when we were on the show and Mark was talking, I, I went on to Coinbase and tried to set up an account afterwards and buy some Bitcoin just to test it out. And at that point, it was right around $16,000, so I was just going to buy a very fractional portion. of a Bitcoin just to test it out. And for whatever reason, the transaction never went through. So I still cannot say that I am a Bitcoin owner. But it's probably a good thing because I think karma protected me. Because as I go back and take a look, you've got access to some of the charts here. And we talked about the volatility as part of our discussion. And Jeff and I both being bankers and understanding the whole concept of the money system and federally insured deposits and the importance that banks play and the trust transactional. There's certainly a lot of question on whether a cyber or an electronic currency really stacks up and has value, or if it's something that's going to fuzz out and die and cause people— but you can kind of get an idea here that the last time we had our conversation, if we go back maybe a month ago or even a year ago, you can see how The currency went up, up, up, and this is when everybody was all hot to trot that it was going to be the greatest. And then it dropped back down, and now it's on its downward slope, and there's a lot of people that are kind of realizing that maybe this wasn't the best source of investment for retirement funds. And so Coinbase also tracks a variety of other cryptocurrencies, and just as kind of a a going trend in the industry. These speculative value coins that are based off of the market all seem to be on a decrease. And so those of you that are giving this any consideration, uh, um, just double-check and make sure you understand what you're getting into. On a year-over-year basis, you can see there's still some value, but depending on when you jump in the pool, um, that's going to determine whether there's There's water, or if you're gonna hit the ground and that's gonna be cold, hard concrete. So, um, my gut tells me Jeff did not, uh, jump into any sort of a Bitcoin world, and karma prevented me from doing it and saved me, I don't know, a little bit of money. Um, I think I was gonna do a couple hundred bucks at the most, so it wasn't like it was a tremendous amount, but, um, We're seeing a lot of this in the news and just thought it would be of interest to pop back over and take a peek at it. Jeff, any other thoughts or maybe a big fat I told you so to offer as it relates to cryptocurrency?

No. It's like we discussed on the show that Mark actually spoke on. If it's something you're comfortable with, go for it.

Yeah, so we are looking— there's a couple of new, I guess, cryptocurrency that are backed by the dollar. And so their claim to fame isn't necessarily the fact that it's going to go up and down in price and cost, but that it makes it easier for you to transmit information or monetary payments back and forth between individuals. But it's based off of a standard unit of measure that we're all familiar with. So there's no chance of buying it at one level and having an increase or decrease because it's still going to hold its value based off of the dollar. But very similar to person-to-person payments, if I wanted to send Jeff $50 because we went out for a nice dinner and that was my share, there's services out there like Venmo and PayPal and A lot of banks use a service called Pop Money, which is available through some of their core providers. This kind of next generation of currency that's backed by the dollar is looking to make that process even easier. So if monetary stuff is of interest to you, this is something maybe to keep an eye on. But our advice, even though we're not financial planners, and you can see Just watching the screen over the last couple of minutes, things have already dropped like two or three hundred bucks in Bitcoin price. So, so buyer beware. The other two things that I thought would be beneficial to talk about today is as we roll into the new year, and one of my goals is to try to work smarter, not harder. I think that's always an ongoing goal. But a couple of the productivity tools that I have jokingly said to other people that you can take these from me. What's the saying? Out of my cold, dead hands or something along those lines, because they're tools that I use just about every single day. One of them is a platform called Snagit for screen capture. There's a very small cost for this, and I think it's like $30 or $40, so it's not a huge investment. But when we're working with clients and we need to do a screen capture and to be able to make notations or do updates or do instructional videos, this software is super easy to use. It works regardless of whether or not you're on a Mac or a PC. It has a lot of really powerful elements. You can see the video here demonstrating annotation. You can drop steps. So like 1, 2, 3, 4 automatically provide numbers. You can go ahead and highlight particular areas and remove things from the page. So it's almost like a Photoshop. You can see he's relocating icons just from a screenshot. So they really ramped up their solution here, which is, which is really pretty cool. I have got a keyboard shortcut that I've actually created. So I can just simply press a couple of keystrokes, and that allows for the screenshot system to kick in. And so you can see I've done that, and now I've got some cursors and some lines actually showing up. So I could do— and you can see this reference. I'm trying to put my mouse over it, and it moves. In the bottom right-hand corner, you've got a little arrow. It'll do what's referred to as a rolling or scrolling screenshot. So if you wanted to catch the entire website, you could grab from top to bottom without having to do multiples, which is really helpful if you needed to grab that. For an example, this works on desktop as well. So if you want to take a screenshot of a PDF or a screenshot of a Word document or just your desktop configuration where your icons are located, the rolling screenshot works when you're using Chrome as your browser, but the screenshot capability works You can see I've got the option where it's automatically recognized the window size. I can go up and I can do a full screen, or I can just grab a particular area and do that with my cursor. And you can see when you pause your cursor, it gives you a very down to the pixel as to what areas you want to actually select. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click to grab that. And now I have the option To be able to just grab a screenshot. So I click on the camera, it takes a picture, or I click the little video camera, and then that enables my audio. It also enables the, the mouse, and I can grab information, and then I can walk through it, and then it saves it as a video tutorial as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead, click on capture an image. That's gonna pull things up into my Snagit window. So I'm gonna let that load. I've actually got that on a different monitor, so I'm gonna drag that over here in just a quick second. So now if I drag this guy over, you can see what this looks like. So I'm on a Mac, so there's my spinning little beach ball. But now you've got access to all these little annotation tools. So if I wanted to draw attention to something, this is pretty cool. And if I spelled pretty right, that would even be better. And then I can kinda move that around. I can increase or decrease the size. If I wanted to take something out, you can see I can make a little highlight area and I can delete things. So I can actually, without having to get into Photoshop, because we found a lot of our clients don't have Photoshop. It's a pretty expensive program. It's pretty complicated. So being able to take that information out and then let's say we wanted to remove that and add something different here. We can just go add a new title here, and then this just makes it really easy to kind of do your little mock-up. And then when you're done, you can copy this and paste it directly into a Word document. You can paste it into an email. You can use a PNG file. I also use a platform called Screencast, which is also from TechSmith, the providers of the Snagit program. And it gives me the ability to actually upload this directly to a Screencast account. There's another small fee associated with this, but it's essentially a cloud-based hosting. You could use a Google Drive or Dropbox just as easily. And that then gives you the ability to share just a hyperlink to someone so they could view your online video, or they could get access. If you can't send an attachment, you could create a hyperlink and send that directly to somebody. And it gives them the ability to pull that image up. So tons and tons of really cool things that you can do with this program. There's a free trial that you can use. So if, if doing mockups or any sort of instructional videos or anything like that is something that either you do or you feel might be beneficial to you as part of your organization or your workflow, I would strongly encourage you to give Snagit a try. Check them out and see. Kind of how it works. One of the examples I'm going to be sending a note to our friends over at GoToMeeting is when I launched the GoToMeeting for today's show, everything looked just fine in this attendees still on hold area. And they've recently— you can see, I can zoom in a little bit. So they've recently provided the ability within GoToMeeting To be able to start the broadcast and record automatically, but you can see for whatever reason it's overlapped. So I created a nice little screenshot that I can send to the folks at GoToMeeting and have them take a look at it, and hopefully they'll be able to figure out what's going on and get that fixed for me. So the other interesting thing, and I'm gonna kind of draw Jeff's attention to this, and we've had some feedback from the Free Webinar Wednesday subscribers when Jeff and I are not able to have a live show. We've gotten the question before, Hey, do you guys ever think about maybe recording a show and making it available to play? And with the GoToWebinar system that we use, they previously didn't have any sort of a solution for us to be able to do that where you could get on the webinar at 1 o'clock Eastern Wednesdays and have the webinar go live. So it looks like there's a live simulation option now that we're gonna spend some time taking a look at. And see whether or not this might be an option. So if Jeff and I are going to be on the road and unavailable, we can do a prerecorded session and make that available for everybody so that if you do decide that you want to join us, it's going to limit our ability obviously to take questions and answers because we won't be here. But at least the show will go on and the Free Webinar Wednesdays at 1 o'clock will continue to be able to be an option. So stay tuned. That may be something else that you guys will be seeing here within the first part of 2018. So, but give Snagit a try. I've been very, very happy with it. Everybody on our team uses it, and I can tell you our customers love it, and we oftentimes get questions, how'd you do that? Because people will do little mockups and they'll dump something into a PowerPoint file, or they'll put it into Microsoft Word and try to manage it that way. This just makes it so much easier to be able to just manage in one easy, simple spot. So, Jeff, I don't know if you've got any sort of a screen share or a screen capture, if that's anything that you've ever really needed to do. But if you've got another tool that's similar to this, certainly chime in.

I think you and I used an early version Of Snagit about 10 years ago. I don't remember what it was called at that point.

Well, they, they used to have a totally free version called Jing, if you remember that.

Right.

That might have been the one.

That's it.

So, yep. So Jing was kind of a light version. I think they've just sunsetted that and moved everybody into Snagit. They do have a more advanced service called Camtasia, which is really more along the lines of kind of an interactive video screen share or screen capture, but it's more with animation. And it has the capability to track things like mouse movements. So for example, when I do the video overview, I can say, you know, at this point in the overview, zoom in on my mouse, and so it'll automatically zoom into wherever my mouse is located and zoom back out. So Camtasia is one of the premier ones, and it's not super expensive like some of the bigger companies. I think maybe $99 or maybe $199 for the full Camtasia. But Camtasia is another one from TechSmith that's got some pretty good horsepower to it. So give it a shot. And those of you that are attending the session live today, if you've got one that you use, I know there's a couple of browser plugins that I played around with in the past that did a pretty decent job. They're totally free. You can go into the Chrome Store and just do a search for, you know, screen capture in the Chrome extensions. and see what options you're going to get. But for the functionality that Snagit provides, I can say this is well worth the investment, particularly if this is something that you do on a regular basis.

What are the limitations on Snagit? Is it based on the length of the video or—

Really, the video can go as long as you want it to. I think it just depends on Whether or not you need some of the more comprehensive, um, you know, capabilities. If you're really going to be doing a lot of video editing, Camtasia is probably going to be the solution. You can see they've got actually a bundle option here where you can go in and get them both. Um, that I think is relatively new because I don't think we've got a bundle pricing. I think We've bought them separately over the years. So I've honestly not really found anything within Snagit that I can't do that if I really needed a video editor that Camtasia wouldn't take care of for me. But a vast majority of everything that we do is really in Snagit. I bet I get into Camtasia maybe once a month. I know Mark on our team uses Camtasia a little bit more. For training videos and other sorts of tutorials. But all of my customer communication is basically done with Snagit. Very, very simple and quick. Works super fast. So I know the, the Jing platform that you and I referred to earlier, that had a limitation of 5 minutes of video. So you couldn't really go any longer than 5 minutes on your screen capture if you wanted to do video. That's not a limitation with Snagit. You can do 10, 15 minutes if you want to.

Will you talk to us about the advantages and disadvantages of using screencast.com versus a Google Drive or one of the other services like that?

Sure. The Screencast account That we have, and I admittedly have not spent a lot of time trying to connect into Google Drive because we had a Screencast account when we started with Jing many, many years ago, and I just kept it. It— we've had instances with some banks based off of their firewall, they don't recognize screencast.com, and they will block screencast.com, particularly because they see a video file coming across a screencast.com link, and, and they'll block it. So our customers will have to especially request to their IT department that the screencast.com domain get whitelisted. So that it's available for people to have access to. But if you have a Dropbox or a Google Drive account, and a vast majority of those these days now provide a crazy amount of storage, and you're starting from scratch, my suggestion would be to give that a shot and, and make that kind of your go-to. And then you can organize things within each of those respective cloud-based services. Within Screencast, you do have the option to create folders. So if we were doing a project for CBCI, I can create a Snagit folder within the screencast.com that's just for CBCI. So once the file gets uploaded, I could move it over and put it directly. put it directly into your folder so that it makes things easier. You can just as easily do that in a Google Drive as well. So there's no mandate that you have to do it through Screencast, but it does provide a pretty economical and easy way to go about making an upload. Good question.

I was just looking at the pricing on screencast.com and You can actually get a free account with 2 gig of storage and 2 gig of bandwidth a month. Their paid accounts are 25 gig of storage, 200 gigs of bandwidth per month for either $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year. So it's still a pretty affordable option.

Yeah, and I did To TechSmith's credit, because we've been using this for so long, I think I just got to the point where I exceeded the storage capacity and I was getting alert notifications that I was going to run out of storage. So I contacted them and I bought another chunk of storage for like $30, and it's a one-time cost, whereas some of the online storage, if you increase your capacity, that Increases your annual cost. It's just a one-time cost, and they're just you know yep we'll just buy it not a problem and and that was it. So the process was super easy. The the folks at TechSmith coincidentally are a Michigan-based company right up the road in Lansing. So these guys are literally like 45 minutes away from my home, which is kind of cool. One of these days I'd like to pop in and. Let them know that I've been bragging about them and just kind of chat because I do really love their software. But, you know, it's not a Silicon Valley— not that there's anything wrong with that, but, you know, right here in the heart of Michigan, it's kind of cool. And I didn't realize that when we started using their services.

So I was looking at the package pricing on Camtasia and Snagit. It's only $224 for the package. Camtasia alone is $199. So if you have a need for Camtasia, the bundle pricing is really good on that. Yeah.

So cool. You won't be disappointed.

This product— we used this product a lot when we were doing some webinars with B. Fields about 10 years ago.

Yep. Our blogging for bankers. I remember that. We should touch base with her and see what she's up to. Yeah. So cool.

Good.

Well, the next solution that I wanna chat about, as we talk about efficiencies and working smarter, is a project management portal. And there's a lot of them out there, but we, we've tried a lot of them. Podio, Basecamp, Teamwork. Oh, what are some other ones that are out there? There were some homegrown ones. WSI Corporate came out with a handful of solutions for project management that also, I think, worked pretty well. But Mark and one of his professors actually at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I believe, Put him onto this platform called Asana, and we took this one for a trial. And even though I will occasionally chase a shiny object when the next quote unquote latest and greatest online project management system comes around, or I see an advertisement because I've been cookie-ed or identified as somebody that likes project management sites, we still keep going back to Asana for its simplicity. They've added some new features which have been pretty cool. And we started working with the Asana platform before we introduced any customers, and you can do that at no cost forever. So we ran the Asana system internally for about 2 years. And so if you go to asana.com, on their pricing page, you can see it's $9 a month. Per member billed annually. They've got a little chat, you know, they're always eager to help you. So a lot of sites now are getting these little chatbots, which is a whole other webinar probably. But we started with the free program, got us access to up to 15 team members, which is way more than what we would need even when we invited some of our network partners from the WSI family into the system. It did give you a restriction to only having people within your existing organization using the service. So when you want to invite people that are outside of your organization, then you would want to take a look at the paid version, kind of figure out how everything's going to roll. For the most part, the free version was really a great solution for us. We've actually had, I think, one or two banks that we worked with over the last couple years so impressed with Asana that they've actually gone out and gotten their own instance and started implementing Asana internally. As a project management system within their own, within their own organization. And you can, again, because you're doing that as part of your own organization and there aren't that many people that are involved, you can do that for free, and it's a very, very cost-effective way of doing that. But if you're not familiar with the project management platform, it really just provides a web-based organizational area for you to post items and tasks and assign responsibilities. One of the things that you can do is you can either create a template. So I've pulled up an example of a templated system here where we've got a new template that we use when we get ready to kick off a new website project, for example. So this could be a new product launch for your organization. It could be a monthly newsletter. It could be an annual customer appreciation event or a picnic or your Christmas party, but you can create those events and you can then save things as templates. So you can see I've got this actually saved as a template. I can remove it as a template. And then when you get ready to do a new project, you can simply go and create a new project, and then that allows you to use a template or start from scratch. You've got the ability to add users up here. And, for example, if I go into this area, we can go and we can sort things based off of the due date, for example. So you can see we're gonna roll this. So the project kickoff is gonna start this week, and then we've got developer and team Q&A and website audits. And then any of these items, when you click on them, you now have the ability to assign responsibility to people. You can modify the start and from date. We use a third-party tracking code called TimeCamp, which integrates into this that allows us to track time. So from a billing perspective, if you want to use this internally within your organization, it's a separate cost, but it's really quite inexpensive. You can actually click on start and it'll track this task and record how much time. So then you can have that all aggregated up into a master time tracking sheet. And it gives you the ability to then understand billable versus non-billable and categorize different tracking metrics. You've got the ability to, just like social media these days, you gotta have a like button. You can create different tags and categorize things. You can build subtasks. So if the project kickoff involved 3 or 4 different items, maybe we needed to make sure we created the agenda. We built the sitemap of the existing website. We can go in here and we can click on little sub-items, and that allows us to create subtasks if we so choose. You could upload files as attachments, which makes it really nice. So if you are having to do something that involves large file sizes, for example, a lot of the website projects that we work on, the images and other sorts of photos. We want to have the biggest and the highest resolution graphics to start with, and then we can resolution them down so that they look good on the website. A lot of times when you're emailing those big files back and forth, that causes a delay. Sometimes email attachments exceed delivery, things will bounce back. They don't really have— I think you've got a 200-meg file size restriction here. And it just makes it really easy for you to upload items directly into the project. And then as you add files, it puts them in a specific files directory. So it's saving those for you out on the web as well. Makes it really easy. A couple of the other things that we really like about this platform is you can specifically mention people. So for example, If I wanted to say, hey, Mark Sherman on our team, I need you to take care of this. You can see that I've added Mark. It creates a record of all of the different activities that are going on. So there's a nice trail of who said what, when, and where. And then as I add Mark or other people, we can get followers to automatically get notifications of when there's updates. And all this information ultimately flows back into the user's email. So if they wanted to just respond to an email, it will post, or they could click the link in their email and it'll take them directly to— directly into the platform, and they can go ahead and make their update that way. So, you know, it's really a pretty slick platform. Not a whole lot of cost involved, especially if you're using the free version. You can quickly create— if I wanted to build a brand new project using a template, you can see I can click on a new project. It gives me the ability to select a project name, or I can select from a template. And then the other interesting thing is Asana has created some templates for you as well. So you've got a sample meeting agenda if you want to use this for strategic planning or your employee onboarding. I mentioned events. So you can get an idea. All of these are already preconfigured for you. So if you don't have a process in place now and you know that you should, this gives you at least a running start where you can go in, make some tweaks, and that's kind of what we did is we took one of the templates for a new website project out of their marketplace, made some tweaks to it, and then saved that into the system. And now I've got this as a template. So, just makes it super easy to go ahead, or like I said, you could create a brand spanking new one, add a description to let people know what's going on. This also provides you the ability to have it in a list view, which is what I've got showing here, or you can set it up as what's known as a board view. And we've tried this on a couple of projects, and it works okay. A board view is much more card-based. So you would have different categories or stages, and then as elements transfer or move through the process, you just basically drag those cards and move things over from, from one stage to the next. So for more simple, I guess, type of activities, that seems to work probably pretty good. But we, gone back really to the list layout at this point just because it seems to allow us to have a little bit more control over how everything actually flows. So I, I've said a lot of stuff there, and if this is the first time that you've really seen the backend of a project management system, your eyeballs might be crossed right now. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit pause. And Jeff, since you are like the master of all good questions, see if there's anything within the, the last 5-minute blurb that sparks an interest that maybe we'd want to spend a little bit of time taking a peek at?

Well, the things that I like about what I'm seeing with this product is the integrations. It integrates totally with the G Suite Google platform— Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Forms. It also has a ton of other platforms that it integrates with— Dropbox, OneDrive, Box. Sorry, I had to cough.

Yeah.

Which is all, which is all good. The challenge I've run into with a number of these online project management platforms is that they don't play well with the, the other services that I use. This one seems like it's done a really good job integrating with major services.

Yep. So you can see I just went through and created an example. So we've got the test Free Webinar Wednesday project. So it's got some instructions here. So you can see there's a README, shows you how to use the template. You also have the ability to bold. So Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italics. So you can add some emphasis. If you type a hyperlink with the full URL, which includes the HTTP with or without the S, it'll convert it into an actual hyperlink so you can link out. A lot of times we'll create a task and we'll paste in the hyperlink of the Google document that has additional information or maybe is the worksheet or the folder where the Google documents are actually located. And then once you complete a task, you can simply go ahead and click on the little checkmark. And then it shows you that the item has been marked completed. You have the ability to go back and see everything. So if you only wanted to look at completed tasks or incomplete tasks, or if you wanted to look at all tasks. So by default, incomplete tasks remains the choice so that you're only seeing the things that you actually need to work on. And then kinda moving forward, if I check a few more things off, there's a little feature where you might see a little flying unicorn zoom by as you, as you complete things. We'll see if we can get the unicorn to show up here. Maybe it's not gonna do it if we're in test mode. Yeah. Looks like it's not gonna show up. But every once in a while, you'll get this little unicorn that will fly up across the screen and give you a congratulations. So it's designed to provide a little positive reinforcement that you're getting your work done, which is kinda cool. So, and then if you find out that, oh, whoops, I really didn't want to, you know, take the meeting goals, you could uncheck these items. And they will go back into the platform and resume where they were at. So somebody mistakenly, Jeff goes through and creates some things. You can see here's how the subtasks work. So I can check off the little subtasks as well. There's my little unicorn dude. I don't know if you guys saw that. Actually, he wasn't a unicorn. He looked more like a yeti with horns. But they changed the little characters. Each of the subtasks can also be given a specific start and end date. So you can kinda build those in, and you can assign responsibilities. So maybe I'm the one that's responsible for the instructions, but I really wanna make sure Jeff looks at this. I can assign Jeff. And then you also have the ability to dive into specific subtask details. So I can click on this little box, and now I'm on the subtask with additional information. And you can do subtasks of subtasks. You can get, you know, you can go pretty far down the rabbit hole if you decide that you need to do that. But I can add some subtasks here if I wanted to, or I can click on this, and it takes me back to the main task, and I can see all the information that's here. So very powerful solution. Pretty cool way of getting organized. I like the templates. You can also use it for some internal conversations, almost like a Slack type. I will admit we're not using the conversation capability within the system, so I don't have a lot of feedback here. The calendar will automatically place any items that have been assigned a date. So if you put— so let's go back to list, for example, and let's say I've got a date. I'm gonna create a start time. It's gonna go from now until the end of the month. I want everybody to read the instructions. I can go ahead, assign it. And then if I go to the calendar, now you can see that that shows up on the calendar automatically and gives you the ability to see how this is working. There is a third-party service that I also want to mention that I have started using called Instagantt. So you probably are familiar with Gantt charts and the ability to tie things in.

Mm-hmm.

So one of the things that the Asana platform doesn't do, and I don't know if they're just not going to do it because they've got such good integration with Instagantt, Or if it's on their roadmap, and if it is, I'd be really concerned about Instagant being able to remain a viable organization. But Instagant gives you the ability to authenticate into— you can kind of see here we've got this templated new solution. So I can go in and actually take a look. And now if I make changes in any of these, it'll automatically synchronize back and forth. And I've got the ability to do a Gantt chart where I can see what tasks and other sorts of things need to be completed. So now I've got a graphical representation, and I can go through this. I can actually export this as a PDF file so I could send it to the clients. We can create a public shareable link so anybody could click on a link to get to this and review it. So it, it, it's got some nice Gantt chart capabilities with Instagantt. So from a one-two punch perspective, using this tool along with the TimeCamp system and Instagantt, you really got a, a pretty economical way of, of having a very powerful project management platform with time tracking and Gantt charts and other sorts of And I'm using the free version of Instagantt, which allows you to synchronize 3 projects at the same time. So what I've just simply been doing is adding a project, removing a project, and not keeping an active one out there.

Can you show us how you can attach files to a project?

Sure. So if I go back into the list, and if I just click on this little guy, I can go in. And by default, we typically just use computer, but you can connect your Dropbox or Google Drive account if you wish. But if you just click on computer, this comes up. We can go through. And if I wanted to take a PDF document, I could just click on that. You'll see if I scroll down here a little bit. The file is being uploaded, and now the file is available. If I decided, you know what, I don't want this file on the system anymore, I can go through here, and it might take a while for the file to synchronize up, but I can actually delete this. I can also pin something to the top. So if it's really important, I can make sure that it's always at the top, or I can go ahead and delete that altogether, and then I can delete the file as well. And then take it off of the system. So if you've got some sensitive information that you just wanna use Asana as a temporary, you don't want it hanging out for everybody else to get access to, you can go in and you can just use that temporarily, and then you can delete it from the system. The one other feature that they just added that I think is pretty cool is a comment-only role. So let's say I'm doing a project for Jeff and his new company, and I wanted to make sure I maintained absolute control of any new information that got put into the system. Maybe we've got an email that we've requested Jeff and his crew to send to us for any new information, and then we post it, and Jeff can comment on anything. But if we wanted to restrict Jeff or anybody on his staff with the ability to post things into Asana, we can actually lock that down as well. We've not gone to that extent because our clients are pretty good about posting. But you do have that ability. I know we've got one of the production teams that we work with. They actually use a different platform called Wrike, and they have implemented a comment-only role so that they maintain control of any new items that get into the system so that they're identified correctly, they're tagged appropriately, they're assigned to the, the right individual, they're given an appropriate date. And then once that goes out, they tag the customer, and then the customer is aware and can comment and share and upload, but they just can't create tasks. So that, that recently— I just noticed that today when I was picking around, just kinda seeing if there's any new services. in the system. They have a really robust help area. So they've got a quick start. They've got their apps and integrations. You probably were over on that page, Jeff. But they've got a really nice integration area where you can see a ton of different platforms that they support, which is pretty cool. So So, yeah. I, I would say between Snagit and Asana, that's probably where we spend a vast majority of our day taking care of customer projects and support and, and all that fun stuff.

Can you show us, if you attach a file that's in Drive, how that looks?

Yeah. Let me see. Let me go to Google Drive. We don't use this function, so it's probably gonna give us a, hey, let's walk through the entire, the entire process just to see how it works.

Probably just—

and I've authenticated.

You already.

Yeah. So I've gone through. So if I wanted to go into, like, this image directory, for example, Nope. Doesn't look like there's anything in there. So let's take a look and see what's in the PDF directory. Let's give it a second. Maybe it takes a while.

Yeah.

I might need to reauthenticate because this isn't something that we use, and maybe this is one of the reasons why we don't use it. Let's go down here. And let's take a look at a bill pay. There we go. There's a bill pay update. So let's take a look at this guy. We're gonna go ahead and attach that. Looks like I was just picking folders that didn't have any content in them. Shame on me. So I've gone ahead, uploaded this directly so you can see it actually takes the image and puts it directly into the Asana platform. So if we go here, let's see. We'll test Dropbox, see if it's connected to my Dropbox account. Yep. I need to log in with Dropbox, but acts the same way. So if I do that, sign in. And then we can go through here. I'll probably stay away from my 2013 Vegas pictures. You know what they say, what happens in Vegas. So probably a good— but if we take a look, so let's say I want to upload. Looks like the Dropbox integration is a little bit more robust in the sense that I get to do multiple selections, which is kind of cool. But if I click on choose, we scroll down here. You can see these images are loaded. And one of the cool parts when you upload an actual image, because now that we got some files in here, if we go over to the files directory, we can see it looks like these probably still need to synchronize. But when the file gets fully loaded into the platform, You have the ability to actually see images here, which is kind of cool, whereas the PDF obviously just shows it as an icon. But then you've got the ability to actually see the images as thumbnails once everything loads and gets kind of updated into the platform.

So I'm curious, these files that you brought in from Dropbox and Google Drive, did it move a copy of that file into Asana or If someone clicks on it, is it going to access it in the platform that you uploaded it from? Like, it's taking them over to Dropbox, or at least it's taking you over to Dropbox.

Yep. Looks like that one went to Dropbox. And if I click on this, it's actually going out. So the files themselves don't get migrated unless you do an upload from computer. And maybe that's why It's not showing up in the preview because you have to download those directly. But if I were to do the same thing here and I did upload from computer, and I went over to my Bigstock photos, and I did just a simple preview and uploaded an image, this will actually toss the image in here. Now with the image actually on, Asana as opposed to being just an image link reference. Now you can see that you can actually do a preview, and then if we go into the files area, you'll see that preview show up. So you taught me something new today, Jeff. Look at you taking, taking me to school. I appreciate that.

So I'm wondering if the, the security that you have in the platform with for the where the file resides probably applies. So if you, if you attach something from Dropbox or Google Drive, I would guess most likely the person that's opening the file in Asana is also going to have to have permission to that area within the platform.

Yep. So just so you can test it, I didn't wanna be so bold as to blast it out to everybody, but That hyperlink that's here in this that pulls up this specific asset, I've sent that link over to you, Jeffrey, through the chat. So if you wanna click on that guy, chances are—

About 7 miles long, and I actually did open it.

It did open for you? Yeah.

It did actually open.

Okay. So If so, there's probably some different ways that, you know, before you go uploading a lot of sensitive documents into the system, just double-check some of those things. The chances of somebody finding and revealing this very, very long URL, probably pretty slim to none. So this is probably a secret URL, but on the update that went through This particular post. The other cool part about this is I can take this particular URL, and I can paste and copy and send that to somebody. And that URL that I just sent to Jeff, this URL is one that would go out as part of the email notification that Eric has just made an update or uploaded an image. That one will probably prompt you to log into Asana before. Before you have the ability to see that, if I'm not mistaken.

It did, and it said I can use my Google credentials. So I'm going to see what happens when I do that. Okay. I don't have an Asana account associated with my Google credentials, so it did not let me log in.

Gotcha. That would be it. So cool. Okay, it's like 2 o'clock. Time flew. I'm like, well, this is gonna be a short one because I just have 2 things to talk about, but I should just stop saying that.

Yeah, I love, uh, love these shows when I leave with, uh, something to try new and Cool. Definitely going to be trying this one out and going to be retrying out Snagit. Cool.

Well, the good news is it doesn't cost you anything. It's not like we just spent an hour with Mr. McPherson and I go about a $1,200 drone, which I still haven't pulled the trigger on. Did you actually do that? No, I haven't, although I still really, really want one. But yeah, so anyway, so in future shows I've got a couple of other things just as an FYI. Facebook has made some pretty significant changes. Zuckerberg made a statement letter to the world basically where his been what that means with user experience and brand visibility and whatnot. We're doing a lot of talking about that within the WSI network, and I think that that would be a really good topic to bring to the show. So it looks like my good friend Carlos Guzman out of Mexico is in the process of translating one of the blog posts that he wrote in Spanish for me to be able to share with Free Webinar Wednesdays. But it looks like we're gonna bring Carlos, and maybe we'll have a Some other folks join us on that webinar as well to talk a little bit about what the shift in Facebook means if you're a user, if you're a brand. I've been hearing a lot of people in the digital world getting somewhat disenchanted with Facebook and, you know, deleting the app off of their phone because it's a battery hog and worried about privacy and time suck. And so, you know, they're kind of in that next phase of their growth cycle to figure out how they can ensure that they can maintain relevancy. And, uh, and, and so I think that'll be an interesting conversation. So stay tuned for future announcements on that. Um, I think that'll be a really good show, and we'll, uh, we'll let you know when that's coming up. But other than that, that's all I got for today. Jeff, I hope you feel better. And, uh—

Thank you very much.

You're, uh, your cold goes bye-bye by the time we have our next show.

Sounds great. Thanks for joining us, everybody.

Yep. Thanks, everyone. Have a great week, and we'll see you online at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Bye.