This is Episode 94. Today, again, it’s just you, me, and the microphones. So please, please please let me know if you like this format. I’d love to know if you prefer these or prefer interviews or coaching type strategy sessions. Without your feedback, I’m going to go off of the latest feedback from whoever came before you right now. People tell me to just educate, educate, educate and that’s what I’m trying to do.
So today’s episode is really inspired by my own business.
I’ve shifted using my tech tools to be able to be more mobile available. And when I say mobile available, I mean that I still primarily do my work at my desk with my laptop, which is connected to a nice big huge screen with a separate mouse and separate keyboard. So I have two screens, and that’s where I do most of my work.
Then, there’s also the times where I take my laptop with me and I go sit at a coffee shop or the library, or I go and sit somewhere that I don’t necessarily even need WiFi. And in those times, I sit in front of just the laptop and don’t use the external mouse or external keyboard. Maybe I’ll use the mouse depending on what I’m doing. But I never take my keyboard with me. That was a long way of saying that my laptop is very portable.
My laptop is the crutch of what I use for my business. And on my laptop, I have a variety of tools.
Most of the tools that I use, I use within my Chrome browser. So I use Slack for communication within my team. And I use Trello for project management. I use GSuirte, so I use my Google Mail for my inbox. And I use Google Docs and Google Sheets for spreadsheets and documents and things like that.
What I have found is that sometimes when I’m out, I just don’t want to get out my laptop.
And I am so glad that those tools that I just shared with you, Slack, Trello, all of the Google Suite products, all have apps that I can use on my phone and continue to be productive to move my business forward and continue to work even if I haven’t pulled out the laptop. But in the past week or so, I have been really watching my daughter at gymnastics, rather than going to a coffee shop. And balancing the laptop on my lap while I’m watching gymnastics isn’t always the most convenient.
So I’ve gone to my phone.
I can easily use Trello from my phone. I’ve been using that for several years it feels like, but I’ve been using Trello on my phone pretty regularly to stay in touch with client projects and other things like that. I use Slack pretty regularly on my phone as well so that I can communicate with my team.
But what I hadn’t done is writing or a lot of spreadsheets.
So I hadn’t really explored the value of Google Docs and Google Sheets from the perspective of using them on my phone. I am working on a brand new funnel, a new summit, and a bunch of other new stuff that I cannot wait to share with you. And these are the things that I worked on from my phone. It was so amazing that I could just sit there, write my emails for the funnel, and then go and look up and see my daughter flipping and doing whatever she was doing at the time, and then look back down and write something else.
So what I have done is, I have created myself a little bit of a system as to how I use Google Docs, in particular, to actually create an entire flow.
It’s really funny because most of the time when I work with clients, they will provide me with a Google Doc that they’re cutting writer has created with all of the copy. It’s got a beautiful table of contents, headings, and it’s really clear and really easy for me to navigate as the tech implementer, getting those pieces into the software where it needs to be.
But I had never been the creator of those. And when I went to Google Docs to create this for myself, I had started it on my laptop. So I had started the Table of Contents by using the different headings. And I went to my phone and said, “Okay, so how do I create headings?”. It was so, so easy! You just scroll down a little bit and you get a menu bar at the top, you click a button, and you have all sorts of options for formatting. I was won over by that.
And it’s so funny because here I am such a tech nerd and someone who wants to just make technology work for myself and for my clients and for anybody who’s listening, and I had resisted using Google Docs on my phone. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to do enough. I took a step back. And I opened up the application and saw what I was able to do. So again, that just won me over. So I’m really, really excited about the potential for drafting content from my phone. And I hope that you are too. Just because you run a business doesn’t mean that you can’t do a huge amount of work or pre work from your phone.
I’m going to go back to Trello a little bit.
Trello is a very different experience on the phone versus on the desktop. On the phone, you obviously have much less real estate. So they’ve consolidated things. And things are in a few different spots. When I was first using Trello on my phone, I would use it just to kind of see what had been sent over. But I wouldn’t actually make a whole lot of action or do a whole lot of work with the Trello board with the project and moving pieces forward, because I just felt that it wasn’t as intuitive.
I would go back to the browser version in Chrome and look at it on my screen with my laptop open and I would do the work there. Even simple things like moving a card. Now, I’m at the point where it’s not a matter of just moving a card that I do only on the computer. I actually do everything, I’ll set up brand new boards for clients. I will create checklists and copy this from that and all sorts of other really functional things that helped me move my business forward. And I’ll do that from my phone.
I’m going to talk about one more thing that I do on my phone that I actually prefer to do on my phone than on the desktop or on the browser version.
That is to process the promotional emails. So you know, we all sign up for newsletters and information and things like that coming from email. And I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast that I generally read through my emails when I’m on my phone. I love how the Gmail app works where all you have to do is swipe to get rid of something to delete it. I am subscribed to a lot of newsletters. Which is a good thing because I like to stay on top of things for my own business for my clients businesses.
But sometimes there are emails that come in that are wrap up emails that I don’t need to read. Or there’s emails that come in that are in conjunction with a podcast. And I’ve actually listened to that podcast and I don’t need to read it. So I can easily swipe them away. I find that that is a very effective way of staying on top of those promotional update emails and not feeling like they’re bogging me down. And I find that it’s actually faster to do it on my phone versus on the desktop browser.
Another application that I just started using on my phone is my Adobe Acrobat Reader.
I pay for Adobe Acrobat so that I could have signing and a few other functions on there. And I connected the app with my Adobe account. Now I have access to all of the documents that I send out for signature right there on my phone. I’m able to easily check the status of things or reset or add on or things like that. So that’s another app that I never really thought was going to be practical to us from my phone. But I embraced it. And I am so so glad that I did.
That brings me to apps that may not work as well as you’d like them to.
I use Photoshop pretty regularly on my laptop. And I use it for creating artwork and for editing things that I need to put on websites. A lot of times they use it for resizing images. There are Photoshop apps that are available for the phone. I don’t use any of those because I haven’t found a way to translate what I do on my phone with those pictures or graphics into something that is tangible.
I’d rather take a time block, use Photoshop on that time block, and do it on my laptop. It’s just one of those things that sometimes the apps work really, really well and I wanted to share with you that not every app is going to do something and help you move your business forward.
We’re getting close to Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the holiday season. You know, Christmas and New Year’s is right on our doorstep. I would encourage you to understand and embrace the business of this time of year and look at the apps that you use on your browser or on your laptop or on your desktop and say, “Which one of these can I leverage the mobile version of, so that I can be productive in times that I just can’t get my laptop out?”
I encourage you to play with it. See where you can go! Definitely hit me up on Instagram and let me know what you’re using. You know what snap a picture of your screen when you’re using one of these apps and tag me in your story. I would love that. Hit me up, I am @Techofbusiness.
I will be back with an interview next week.
So if you are interested in more interviews, let me know. If you love these solo episodes where I share just how I do my business, how clients do their business, or how to use a specific software tool, let me know that as well.
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