Quick Tips for Gmail Google Workspace Users (30m) from live conference session MSAE 2022 Bay City MI

get this thing running. Recording is now in progress. So I'm going to hang out like right here, and, um, you're going to have a lot of fun in this session because, get this, not only am I going to be recording this like I said, but take a look at this. What PowerPoint? What, what do you mean what PowerPoint? Here's what I mean. I got 30 minutes, that's it. I'm not going to use PowerPoint, but this is what I'm going to cover in the session, a one-pager that is on the conference website. So you can go get this and then now watch the YouTube video, assuming this posting works, to watch all of this again and go at your own speed and master the content. Cool. Now, second thing, are all of you using Gmail for work or just personal? Personal. Personal. Okay. Now let me ask you this, with that, me saying that, um, Are you using Outlook at work? You're on Outlook for work? Okay, I'm doing the session that's just like this for Outlook users at 4:30 today, so you can get the double whammy. And I might do the exact same thing if this works. Um, this is the first time I've ever tried this. Yeah, but let me tell you something, you should like it. It's a good program. It's awesome. So is this. That's what we're going to show you today. Sound good? All right, so let's dive in. Like I said, I'm not going to do PowerPoint. I'm going to dive right into this. Part 1, we're going to talk infrastructure. And when I say infrastructure, here's what I mean. Here's my Gmail. Now, did you notice that down the side they've added these buttons? This is your Google Workspace, Google Calendar, Google Keep, which is their notepad equivalent to OneNote. You have Google Tasks and Google Contacts. Now that's interesting. Email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes. How many of you used to use Outlook? That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes. And let me show you something that's really cool here. If I were to click calendar button over here on the side, I'll get a mini view of my calendar right over here. On the side screen. But look at this, this is a pop widget which allows you to open it into a full page. So now I can see my full-page Google Calendar. Now you'll notice I already had it open because I have my calendar— I'm going to show you why in just a minute— my calendar actually opens before my Gmail when I launch my Chrome browser in the morning, and I'll show you how I automated that. Cool. But wait, there's more. Look at this. Here is Contacts. And if I go back to here, here is Keep. Keep is your notepad. You can take all your notes, personal, professional, whatever you'd like. And notice it also has a pop widget. And if I click the pop widget in Keep— by the way, notice my little zoom bar. Did you know you can move your zoom bar out of the way when it gets in the way? That's pretty cool. Uh, take a look at this. Yeah, you didn't— yeah, boom! That's— it has nothing to do with what we're talking about today. But here's the thing: Google Keep is a killer awesome notepad. And now let me show you something even really killer cool about Google Keep. I will open up Priorities 2021. Notice that you can bring in pictures. Notice that you can bring in additional content. You can actually have, I believe, live web links in here. Let me try this. Actually, I'm gonna try this. Https://randalldean.com. Yep, that's live. So you can have live links. But wait, there's more. Look right down here. You can add collaborators, and if they also use Google, they can then access and share these notes too. They can read them, and they might even edit them. By the way, are you using Docs, Sheets, and Slides? Okay, you can do the same thing there via Google Drive. Okay, I know, what, too much too fast, wow. But remember, that's why I'm recording this, because I'm going to post it on YouTube hopefully tonight so you can go watch this again. Now let's go back to this though. So I'm going to close that. I'm going to come back to these notes a little bit later because I want to talk a little bit higher level how I'm using them, but I just want you to see that this is your basic Google Workspace suite of tools. Notice Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, Google Keep, which is your notepad. But wait, there's more. Do you know about the Google Rubik? I call it the Rubik because it's on most of these Google screens and it looks like a Rubik's Cube. And if you click on this, it is your launch pad for getting into your other Google popular tools. And now notice inside of here, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Meet. By the way, I learned this right before the session. If you pay for the professional version of Google Workspace, which I believe for an individual user is $7.99 a month, That allows you to use Google Meet just like Zoom and even be able to record your meetings and presentations. Okay, so now notice Contacts. There's Google Drive, which I mentioned earlier, which is a launchpad where you can save and manage your stuff, and even things like Google Photos. But wait, let's go a little further. Notice down here, Docs, Sheets, Sheets and Slides. That is their equivalent of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And you can build basically very similar documents and files utilizing these tools to what you previously may have done using Microsoft. I will say this, I still think Microsoft Excel is better than Sheets. It, it just has more capability, more features. It's been around longer. But if you're just doing basic spreadsheet type stuff and nothing truly complicated like, you know, pivot tables and cross, you know, table comparisons and things like that, Sheets is fine. It'll totally work for you for like really simple spreadsheet type work. But you've got all this here. But wait, there's more. So when I first started using these tools, probably a decade ago, By the way, a little side story, you're going to love this. How did I get into teaching Google Suite and Google Workspace after being known as the guy that was teaching Microsoft for all those years? Because I went to one of my major university clients and I was there and they told me, they said, hey Randy, uh, we really enjoy your time and email management sessions for our staff, but we're switching to Google early next year. Will you be able to teach those programs? And I went, yes. If anybody ever asked that, that's your default answer. You don't have anything? No, no, yes. And by the way, I had already been using Gmail a bit. I'd been poking around in it. That's what allowed me to get in and take a look under the hood and really dive into this stuff. Let me show you something super cool. You have something out here that is available to you if you're using your Chrome browser. And by the way, I strongly recommend on your PC to use the Chrome browser for the Google tools because they were built to work with each other. Now, you— can you use the Chrome or the Google tools on a Firefox or Safari? Yeah, sure, you can use them there, but on Chrome you're going to get everything that you're sort of hoping to get. So it make— just makes some sense to do that. Now, here's the interesting thing though, as part of this Chrome Web Store. Now notice this: chrome.google.com Web Store. You're going to want to get to know this because when you get to know the Chrome Web Store, this is a place where you can go— now listen to me closely— to get apps that you can add in to your Chrome browser on your PC. No, this is not Google Play for your phone where you get your apps. This is apps for your PC Chrome browser. See the difference? And let me show you something that I have almost never seen before. The app I want you to get is right here, Shortcuts for Google. Now I'm going to show you this. This is the person you want to get it, apps.jurison.co. I've been using this for probably 8, 9 years now, which means I've been using this since before the little Google Rubik I just showed you a minute ago. Why did I find this app? Because I wanted to find a tool that would allow me to launchpad my favorite apps and tools in Google, in Chrome. And they didn't have the Rubik yet. But this is what I have never seen before. You tell me if you've seen it. Now you see a lot of these, a little over 4 stars, 4.5 stars. How many apps that have been out there for quite some time have a full 5-star rating with over 4,600 ratings? This thing's got full 5 stars. Because what you can do now is notice that it's going to say, I've already got this, but Here it is right here. I've downloaded it into my Chrome browser. Let me show you what it does. It's actually a pretty slick little tool. If I click on Shortcuts for Google— oh, that looks familiar! That looks a bit like the Google Rubik. Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Keep, Drive, Slides, Sheets, Docs, Maps, YouTube. Wait a minute, YouTube Creator. Wait a minute, Play Store, Earth. Hmm, interesting. Let me show you something that's cool about this thing. So it's very similar to the Rubik. However, you can come up here into settings with this little side tool, and when you go into settings, you can actually choose the apps and tools you want to add as your own personalized list of Launchpad shortcuts to your favorite apps and tools. Now, right now it's on the popular— let me move this zoom bar back up to the top and let me go over here. I want to show you something. I'm going to switch it to by name. Now, if I switch it by name, this is now in alpha order, and I just want to give you a feel for what's going on in here. Oops, went back to newest. Sorry, let me do it back to by name. I don't know why I jumped newest. All right, let's try this again. These are all apps, tools, and activities that you can now create as push-button ads to your Chrome browser. And did you see that? I just got to the letter B. There's literally hundreds of these tools. Now, what I would recommend that you do first time you go into this scan slowly through these tools, see if there's anything in here that would be super relevant for you and your work, your business, your personal life. And then if you see something that you say looks cool— oh, I just saw one that I thought looked pretty cool. Let me go back and find it. Blocked users. That's interesting. I want to take a look at this. Now watch how I can use it. I just pick it up and I drag it over and then I drop it. And now that's part of my toolkit. When I go up to the app at the top, if I launch this here, you'll see there it is right there. So that's going to be one I'm going to check out because I'm curious. I wonder if it's going to be able to make me able to stop certain spammers from coming into my Gmail account. That's what I'm betting it does. Haven't checked it out yet. However, what this means is you actually now have two sets of tools to launch your platform. One right here, and a second one which is more extensive and maybe a bit more customized with more capabilities right here. Any questions on this? Can you believe we've already burnt 14 minutes of this session? We're halfway through. But, um, the key thing that I wanted to share with you is that, um, having this allows you to be able to have your stuff at your fingertips. Now let me ask this question: how many of you have an iPhone? iPhone? How many of you have an Android? Interesting, we got several more Android than iPhone in here, which is interesting because it's the Google class. I bet you when I do my Outlook class later today, it will be exactly flipped. It'll be 2 to 3 times as many iPhone users. However, there are some benefits to having an Android device if you're using the Google tools, but you certainly can use them on your iPhone too. Wait, what? Seriously? Yeah, my wife, it drives her nuts. Why do you have both? I teach both, right? And actually, for some of my clients, the iPhone is their work phone and the Android is their personal because they're trying to separate work and life, or they need to separate work and life. Because of the nature of the work they do. You know, if you've got like any kind of litigation or FOIA risk, not a bad idea, because you put your personal stuff on that device, guess what? It's available to be looked at too. Huh, interesting. Now let's go in and let me show you something. I'm going to pop in here into, uh, yeah, let me do this. I want to open up File Oops, hold on. Let's try that one more time. File, Open, see smartphones, because I want to show you something here. This is my Smartphone Success program, but I also want to show you something that's really cool about what you can do with these apps and tools in your Google Suite if you have a smartphone and it does not matter which one it is. By the way, a little PowerPoint tip: Shift+Fn+F5 launches you right into presentation mode on the slide that you're on if you're in an active presentation. All right, so now let me move out of the way a little bit because let me show you a little something here. There's my Gmail app, there's my Google Calendar app, there's my Google Contacts app, there's the Gtasks app, which integrates with Google Tasks, Google also has its own Google Tasks app. There's my Google Keep app. Wait a minute, that's exactly the same as the tools on the main basic workplace suite on your browser screen. And when I first got my Android, this was cool about the Android, I power it up Turn it on. First thing it asks— did you guys get this too? Do you have a Google account? Yes. Gmail username, put it in. Gmail password, put it in. Hit enter. Synchronizing. Did yours do that? Yeah. What's really cool about that is it then went out and looked at all of the apps I've already downloaded off Google Play including all of the Google-specific apps, and just brought them all onto the device and logged me in. And now whatever I'm doing on the computer is seamlessly synchronized to the device and vice versa. Now, if you use an iPhone, you just got to download the apps off your App Store and then log in using your Gmail username and password, and it'll work too. It's just the Android is a little bit slick in how they do it. But wait, there's more, right? There's my Google Drive app. Now with Google Drive, that means— you notice that I don't have Docs, Sheets, and Slides on what I call my center productivity panel. This is the center panel of this device. Now when I say center panel, you know how most homes— most phones have 4 or 5 home screens? You go a couple this way, couple that way. I would like— if you got 5, I want to be screen number 3. Dead in the middle, because no matter where you're at on the device, you're one or two swipes from your power tools. Now, if your Panel 3 is dominated right now by Facebook, Words with Friends, Netflix, and Wordle, I know how you're using your device, and it's not to be productive, it's to do the other stuff. This is how you make it productive, by putting your power tools here. And by the simple login, now I've got access to all of my stuff both on the device and on the computer, and they're all talking to each other, which makes it super easy. Now coming back to the Google Drive app, because I have the Drive app on this panel, I do not need to have the Docs, Sheets, and Slides app on this panel. They are on the device in the background though. Actually, one or two slides— swipes over, I have the Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps, but I don't have them on the center panel. And let me tell you why. Most of the time you're not creating a new file, which you can do using the Drive app and create new files in there. Most the time you're opening an existing file you've already done. And if you open up the Drive app and you have Docs, Sheets, or Slides as apps on your device, you click on the Google Doc you've created to open it in the Drive app it launches Google Docs, so you don't need it on your primary screen. Make good sense? So basically it allows you to simplify this. But wait a minute, there's more. Here's Google Duo. I should have Google Meet on here now too though, because Meet is their equivalent to Zoom and their equivalent basically to the Microsoft Teams video chat tool. So if you're a heavy Google user, test out Meet. And like I said, if you got the paid account You can even do your meetings and record them. Now, I was going to do that with this, but it didn't allow me to do recording because I'm still using the freebie version. No jokes. Okay, now hold on, wait a minute. Chrome browser, where I can do my search. Interesting statistic for you to hear: did you know that 4 out of 5 internet users now very rarely search on their computer for stuff? They do almost all of their searches on their device. Do you know why? What can you do on here that it isn't— didn't used to be quite as easy on here? Search by voice. You click on it and you hit the microphone and you just start talking, right? Wait a minute, try it on your computer now. It might be activated and working if your mic is live and you're using the tools. Look on your keyboard when you're doing your work on the screen See if there's a mic option to allow you to speak instead, even on your computer. It's probably there. So you can practice it both ways. Hold on. Wait a second, though. I'm in the process of writing a new book right now. Getting close to releasing. I'm going to do something weird, release the first half and then release the second half later as an ebook. Sort of cool little idea. I wrote the first draft. In Google Keep by voice. Oftentimes when I'm out driving on the road hands-free, especially in not heavy traffic— just so you know, I'm not a danger— but I would just open up a new note, give the name of the note the chapter of the book. That would be the note name in the top. And then I click in the main body, hit the mic Start talking. And now I have a full-time transcriptionist at my fingertips whenever I need it to not just create notes in Google Keep, but also probably in Google Docs too. And your emails. Yeah, you can compose your emails using voice too on your devices. Try it. Now you can talk. Anybody got carpal tunnel issues? You don't need them now. You're going to have stretched out vocal cord issues. That's what's coming. All right. Wait a second though. Hold on. Did you know that Google Drive will also allow you to take pictures of hard copy physical documents and you can then save those pictures as background information? I believe maybe even having the option to convert to PDF. So you can basically use your Google Drive app on your phone along with your phone's camera as a scan and PDF creation utility. It's scanner. Now hold on, notice right here, standard calculator app that was on the device, I've made it front screen. And here's a third-party fax tool. Hold on a second, here's my phone, here's my voicemail from Verizon. There's my text app, telephone, voicemail, text, camera, video meeting tool, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, Google Keep, Notepad, Google Drive, which gives me access to all my documents and other files— Docs, Sheets, and Slides— as well as the ability to take pictures of documents to convert to PDF as a scan I got my Chrome browser, which I can search by voice. I've got my calculator, I've got my fax machine. What is that right there? What is that? That one screen, what is that? It's more than even a computer, isn't it? That's an office. That's a top-of-the-line, fully mobile, fully remote office that can probably do 95% to 98% of the things you're doing at your— in your workstation on your computer right there in your hand wherever you're at. One little side note: get a tablet too. If you're using a Google phone, Android phone, get an Android tablet. If you're using an iPhone, still get an iPad. Why? Because interesting thing about both of these devices, once again, when you log in that first time, it's going to ask you, do you already have an iPhone? Yes, iPhone password or Apple password, Apple username, and it will bring over all the apps that you have on your phone onto your iPad automatically. Same thing for Google. And here's why. You ever done a spreadsheet on a telephone? You ever— honestly, get a bigger device, but they can do basically the exact same thing. Just one has a bigger user interface. Maybe you don't even need a computer anymore because you can do all your stuff right here. I got 5 minutes left. Now what I'm going to do is give you some big picture tips to take this to a whole different level. Tip number 1, how many of you start your day in your email? One of the first things you do. Okay, keep your hands up please, all of you that check your email first. I want to see if I have a bunch of liars in the room. How many of you get a cup of coffee before you do your email? That's funny, isn't it? All right, yeah, first I do the coffee, then I do the things. All right, uh, but you know, you get your cup of coffee, you open up your inbox. Isn't that fair? Let's go back to my Chrome browser and let me show you a little something here. This is sort of cool. Calendar, Gmail. Notice Calendar's first tab. Let me show you a little something in your Chrome browser. See these three dots? Click on the three dots, you've got options. By the way, I'm actively and aggressively using bookmarks now on a lot of articles. You ever run across an article, ooh, that'd be a good read, but I don't have time right now? Immediately bookmark it. And you can do the same on your browser device as well as in many of the apps and tools like YouTube and other places. You can bookmark or save for Watch Later to just build a powerful reading list. That's not the tip. The tip I want is right here: Settings. If you click on Settings in your Chrome browser, you'll get a whole series of options to customize, but the one I want to show you is right here on startup. Take a look. Open a specific page or set of pages. Number 1, calendar. Let me show you how I did this. It's this simple. Open up your calendar in your browser, highlight it, do a Ctrl+C, which is a copy. Then get into your settings, on startup, add page, and do a Ctrl+V. And now what's going to happen is— I already did it, I'm not going to do it again— it's going to open up that tab first. So if I close Chrome at the end of the day, next day I come in Open up Chrome, first thing in the popup is my calendar, not my inbox, because I'm gonna argue, and I think if Tim Ferriss, the guy who wrote 4-Hour Workweek, was in the room, he'd agree with me. Time is more important than your money and is definitely more important than your email. Fair? Now, second thing, take a look at this. How many of you have a dual browser— dual monitor setup at your primary workstation? If you don't, you might want to get it because listen to this statistic. If you're ever doing anything cross-referencing, checking stuff from one web page, comparing it to another, pulling stuff from one document, moving it to another, comparing two emails to make sure they got consistent information, anything like that, going from one monitor to two increases your productivity by 30%, which means most working professionals, that monitor pays for itself the first day in save time. All right, if your company won't buy it for you, buy— get one anyway, hook it up, start working on it. Then you can go see your family with your time saved. Unless you don't like your family, then stay with one monitor and work longer. All right, but here's the thing, wait. Wait a minute, wait a minute. If you have a dual monitor and you have your Chrome browser open, watch what I can do. See my emails right here? Click on the email tab, drag it to monitor 2, and now on screen 1 I will have my calendar with my little task list window. And on screen 2 I could have my Gmail, maybe instead with my Notepad showing. And that means on 2 screens I can see 4 of the Google primary tools all at once. Wow. And then when you do that, remember this priorities note I talked to you about? Let's open this thing up. Let's go into priorities 2022. Notice you can bring in pictures. All right. Oh, I don't want to show that picture. I want to go into the actual note. Here's the note. Maybe my scrolling isn't working. There we go, now we got it. Uh, take a look. I do this every year. It's my big picture where I cover my key priorities for my business, who my key people are that are working with me on all my activities, and then my specific projects, clients, activities, and events down here at the bottom. Mainline is the main project, activity, event. Sublines are the subprojects. Work and personal fully integrated because I'm the president of my own company and I don't care. Now, if you have any fear of putting work and personal all together on your primary, build a work one for work and a personal one for personal and put them in separate places. All right, this is how I manage my year, and I try to look at this thing at least once a week and integrate it into my calendar and task list. But wait, there's more. We're at 2:30, but we started 1 minute late, so I'm going to give you a quick little bonus thing. How about this? Let's go to shopping. Grocery store, home supply store, office supply store, bookstore, music store. You can put down whatever you need, make it a share list with your family and your kids, and then they can put in what they need too, so you don't have to worry about missing stuff when you go to the store. Oh, wait a minute, let's go to travel. 800 numbers for all the major hotels, airlines, car rental companies, packing lists for regular trips, business trips, trips where I do presentations, even when I go camping, because I don't forget anything. Hold on a second, maybe you could have a meeting app for your staff meetings where what you can do is make it a collaboration app so that you can store possible agenda items for the next staff meeting. And have everybody integrate. And if you're going to do that, why not have a note for each of your key people where you also have a list of things to talk about with that person for next time you run into them, and make that a share note too. And last but not least, I even use this to improve my golf game. I went out to the driving range, got 4 big buckets of balls, figured out my average distance, not just with my full swings but with my chip shots, pitch shots, punch shots, even how to adjust my putting stroke. I'm not anal at all. Remember, fully synchronized with my device. I'm not trying to impress you with my golfing skills and abilities because if I was that good, I wouldn't be here. But what I'm trying to impress upon you is I don't need to keep all this stuff in my head. That's what this platform can do for you. Did I tell you it was way too much? Now you can watch me in slower speed later today when I post the video online if it worked. Thanks, everybody. Hope you had fun. And remember, this is on the conference website. So you can reference that when you watch the video again. All right, let me close this thing down. They should have it in the apps area or the session area. They said they were going to be posting everything out there. So all right. Yeah.