MBA1191 My Video Message Productivity Hack

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Hey O. Welcome to the $1 MBA Show Business Lessons served to you fresh every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn my video Message Productivity Hack. This is a hack that I recently picked up that has saved me so much time and I want to share it with you. It's using different types of videos to communicate in your business. If you were to transcribe a one minute video, depending on how fast you normally talk, it would be around 300 to 400 words. To write 400 words would take you far longer than one minute. And that doesn't even include all the editing and the spell checking that you would do, punctuation, all that stuff. If you were to write a 400 word message, it would take you at least 20 to 30 minutes. So in today's lesson we're going to save you about three to four hours a week with my video message productivity hack. I'm going to show you how to use it, what to look out for, what tools you need to make it happen. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business as we know, time is money. In fact, it's more valuable than money because you can't make more time. You only have 24 hours in that day. So I'm trying my best to maximize the time that I have. So I picked up this productivity hack, or this productivity habit, I should say, that saved me so much time. I want to explain it to you. And it's the idea of shooting certain types of videos instead of writing out messages. Now, there are four scenarios or four types of tasks that this lends itself perfectly for. And I'm not here to tell you that you can shoot a video for any kind of message or any kind of text or any kind of body of writing. No, I don't really believe that, you know, documentation matters in a software company, for example, when you're developing a new software. But a lot of time consuming tasks we do, like email, like social, like getting back to customers about explaining to things. Like a lot of things I'm gonna mention today can easily be replaced with video rather than writing out messages. So let me just explain exactly what I mean, what tools you need, and then give you the four scenarios or the four types of tasks you're gonna be using this technique for. So this technique is very simple. You're gonna shoot a short video instead of writing things out. Now, in some scenarios, this video is just gonna be you with your phone, a selfie video. In some scenarios, you're going to be recording your desktop, your screen on your computer, and explaining something to somebody. This is going to be a whole lot faster and easier than writing things out. So what tools do you need? One, you just need a phone, really a smartphone with a camera for most of the videos we'll be talking about today. And two, if you want to record your screen, you need some sort of screen recording software. I highly recommend cloud app because they store all your videos, all your screen recordings up in the cloud and you just provide a link to the person. But if you don't want to pay for a software, you can always use QuickTime, for example, to do some screen recording, which is absolutely free. All right, let me give you the four scenarios, four types of tasks. You can use this technique to save you a ton of time. Number one, social media. Listen, there are reasons why you may want to be on social media to respond to messages in really productive groups, answering questions, having interesting discussions with people in your marketplace. But one of the fastest ways to respond to messages on social, especially on your phone, is with a quick video. It doesn't have to even Be a minute. It could be 20 seconds. This makes things so much easier. Now, word of advice, you're gonna have to get used to shooting video live quickly on your phone without feeling totally self conscious. I've done a lot of live video. I've done over 500 webinars, I've done over 300 recorded videos. So I'm pretty comfortable in front of camera. But if you don't have experience being on camera, this is a great way to get out of your shell. It's just to hit that record button on your camera with your phone. Don't worry about a script, just respond to the question, respond to the message in person, on camera. This is not only gonna save you time, but it's gonna be even more personal and it's gonna stand out. Facebook highly prefers video over written, text or even images. Now if you post a video, you're most likely going to show up in people's feeds more than just text and image. So if you're out and about, you can easily record a video on your phone and respond to social media messages with video. Much, much more efficient and faster use or task number two Customer support emails. If you're doing customer support or your team's doing customer support and you're trying to help a customer with a specific issue, a specific task, shooting a quick screen capture video is going to save you time than writing up emails, doing screen captures, walking them through it, and it's going to help the user have something to refer to and you know, kind of follow along with. Again, it's more personal to hey John, I got your message, I want to help you out. So I shot you this quick video. Let me show you how to do this. It looks like you took the time to go the extra mile and it kind of clears up confusion. Again, you can use cloud app for this task. It makes it super simple. You can pop in a link, Hey, I shot you this video. Take a look. Alright. Third type of task you can use my video message hack is email. Email is a nightmare for most of us. We got a huge list of emails in our inbox waiting for us and I would say about 40% of those emails you can respond with video. Again, this is super easy when you're doing this on your phone. Some of them you're gonna have to respond via text, but a lot of emails, like sales emails, you can respond to the video. A lot of emails like, you know, maintaining your relationships with your professional network. Hey Chrissy, it's been a few months since we've Touched base. How are you doing? Let me know how you doing with your business. Just wanted to reach out and shoot this quick video. Let me know how you're doing. Boom. Done. Again, totally direct, totally personal, and it's gonna save you a ton of time. You might get emails, people you know pitching you ideas or asking you to be on their podcast or, you know, to be interviewed for their, you know, blog. So much quicker to answer via video. Hey, George, thanks for your email. Can you give me a bit more information about what you're propos? Would love to support your work in any way. Feel free to be totally direct with me because it'll save us both time. All right, George, thanks again. Bye. Done. If George is somebody that, you know, admires you, looks up to you, wants to work with you, this video is going to mean so much to them. I definitely love using video when I'm reaching out to people I want to partner with, if I want to partner with somebody, if I want to do some sort of marketing campaign with them, a video is a lot more personal and it shows, hey, I thought a little bit outside the box for you and shot you this personal video. No text expander. The real me, right? And the fourth use case I love using this hack is with your own team. Team communication. If we're doing a new procedure, if we're rolling out a new feature, if we're doing a new promotion, it's so much quicker for me to explain it all on a quick video with my camera, on my phone, with a screen grab, with cloud app, shoot it real quick and send it to the team either via email or via whatever productivity tool you're using or project management tool like Basecamp or Trello or whatever. And it allows everybody to be on the same page. It allows you to also communicate asynchronously. So if you have a remote team where everybody's on different time zones, you can easily communicate the same message to everybody and they can watch it on their own time. I also do this sometimes if I want to recap a meeting that we had because somebody maybe was absent or sick. Yes, I know we can record these video meetings, but sometimes the recording fails. So a quick video recap right after the meeting allows me to just quickly say, hey, sorry you missed the meeting. This is what we discussed here. You can find the minutes. Here are the people you need to speak to so you can do your tasks. Love it. It saves so much time.

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Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. A couple last tips and mentions as I wrap up today's lesson on this video message productivity hack. Number one, keep your videos as short as possible because again, if you're shooting it from your phone and you're sending it via email, you want to make sure the file is small. Also, it's hard to watch a long video as a message. So in my examples today, you saw that they're all like maybe 10, 15, 20 seconds long. I would say a minute is the max and that's if you have to explain something in detail. Number two, do not waffle. Get to the point, be direct and watch your ums and ahs because those filler sounds will take up time and will distract them. And last but not least, I want to give credit where credit's due. Somebody who does the social media video messages so well is a mentor of ours, Dan Martell. Dan is a SaaS coach and former founder of some really successful startups. He's also a well known speaker, so again, he's comfortable speaking and being on camera. But I saw him do this in groups in a way that is so, so efficient, very direct, very personal. And he answers questions very quickly with this technique. So I added social media, Facebook, Twitter, you name it to the ways you can use this productivity hack in today's lesson because of Dan Martell. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, leave us an itunes rating and review. Let us know what you think of the show. Mention what your favorite episode was or what you learned in that episode. Reread every single review so we can know what we're doing right so we can keep on doing it. Also, don't forget to hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, we're on all those platforms. By hitting subscribe, you get our episodes automatically so you never miss a beat. The episodes will show up right on your device. Automatically? Did I say automatically? Yeah, I think I did. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I love about business is building that network and communicating with other people and those relationships you build. But it's a lot of work to maintain those relationships. So by trying to find ways to save time to still communicate on a regular basis without feeling the burden of all the time you have to take to write long emails, it's a huge, huge blessing. You should definitely take advantage of that. And again, it's also great. Practice on being on camera and just being yourself on camera. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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