Speaker 1: Google Workspace can massively boost the productivity of a small business owner. But most people aren't really scratching the surface of the power of this amazing tool. Let's dive into how we can get you more productive if you're a workspace subscriber. Today's video is structured around the grow methodology gather, refine, organize and work. We're going to start with gather and the key concept here is building a great foundation for your business. Now Google Workspace has lots of different tools, there's tools for communication tools for collaboration, tools for file storage, this is all about you making sure that you have the right foundational tools in place. Now most businesses are probably going to have your document processing, your communication tools, your collaboration and productivity. But you're also going to have something outside of that ecosystem, right? Whatever you do to deliver your product or service. If you're a restaurant, you probably have deputy for rostering. If you're a e commerce business, you're probably running on Shopify, most businesses are going to use something else. We use a sauna for most of our workflows, because we're a consulting business. And we use that to manage our projects. And so you're going to have the foundation layer of Google, which is going to be all of your basic tools. And then you're going to have other specialized tools that live outside and above Google Workspace as well. When I think about the concept of gather, I think about having that good foundation and then other apps on top, but nothing that you don't need. You see, business owners often have a bright shiny object syndrome where they jump from app to app and try out all the new whiz bang tools when they first arrived. But what that can result in is subscription overwhelm. And for anyone who's ever used Slack instead of Google Chat, or maybe you're using zoom instead of Google Meet those additional tools add up in cost, but also complexity in your tech stack, it means that you always have to provision yet another app for your team. And there's always another potential security leak. If one of those apps access gets into the wrong hands. My recommendation here is to go all in on Google as much as possible use the Google tools where you can. So instead of Evernote, use your Google Keep instead of Slack, use a Google Chat and where possible use Google Meet instead of zoom. And I got plenty other videos on why that's a good idea. Next is refine and Google Workspace is good at helping us to actually get things done. How do we refine the amount of information that we receive on a daily basis, which can honestly feel like a bit of a barrage? Well, there's two tools that you may make use of inside of Google, but these come with a warning. Google Keep is our first tool and think about this as a more googly version of Evernote. It lives within the Google ecosystem. It does all kinds of cool things like if you add an image, you can automatically search for text within that image. And Google Keep is encrypted with your Google account, meaning that it comes with you everywhere. And you've got the amazing power of Google Search. Now, I don't love Google Keep because it's not really great for collaboration. But it is good for jotting down notes before I put them into another system. Our next tool is Google Tasks. This again is really useful if you want to just jot down tasks for yourself. But my personal recommendation is that you don't use this for collaboration tasks. There are much better tools out there for collaboration and sharing work with your team. But I think these two tools are good on an individual basis. Another way to refine information is to collect it into a Google Doc or Google Spreadsheet. Did you know that you can type doc.new or sheet.new and it'll open new files, pretty nifty feature. Now if you're the kind of person who likes to organize a project on a spreadsheet, not quite my taste, but it is there, well, you can actually mention colleagues by name and that will bring their contact card right into the cell of your spreadsheet. This also works in a document and you can even assign a task that way. Now again, I don't like this system for small teams. But the functionality is there if you've got two or three people on your projects, then this might be workable for you. Once you have a larger team, my recommendation would be that you use a dedicated shared task or project management solution. It might be Asana, Monday, Trello, Wrike or any of the many tools that are available for small business task sharing. Number three, we're up to organize, let's organize your files and organize your schedule. Now Google Drive is useful because not only can you store your own files in your My Drive, but in shared drives, which is a business only feature, well, you can set up a business folder where files are owned by the company. Now anyone who's collaborating with that folder, if they place a file into the folder, they'll receive a warning and it will say do you want to transfer the ownership of this file. Now that is excellent when you're working with contractors outside your business and you don't want them to accidentally delete files on you. Or if you're working with staff that you want to create a document but not have the ability to move that document or to delete that document. Great feature built right into Google Drive as long as you're on a business standard or higher plan for Google Workspace. Next up is Google Calendar and man is this useful with a business team. The thing I love about calendar is that now we can set our work locations and our work hours. When I go to schedule a meeting with my team, not only is it going to give me information like what meetings they have on their calendar, it's going to let me know when they work based on the time zone that they're in. And it's also going to let me know whether or not they've got the day off because I can see their out of office information right there on their schedule. Did you know that if you go to send an email or a Google Chat message to someone who's set as out of office for the day, you'll also get a little warning, pro tip for you there. Now here's a tip for power users. If you're the admin of your workspace account, you can create groups. And with those groups add different staff for your different teams in the business, and then invite a group to a calendar event. Here's something very cool. If you have a group based recurring meeting, anytime a new staff member joins, all you need to do is add them to the correct group, and they will retroactively receive an invitation to any recurring meetings that that group has been invited to perfect for the weekly all hands or for the sales teams weekly sales meeting. Finally, we come to work and Google is really not just about planning. It's about execution. Google have amazing document formats for you to get more work done. Some of my favorite features of working with Google Docs are the ability to go back to any point in history with the revision history and see every single change made to a document right down to the cell level inside a spreadsheet. Next suggested changes is a great way to collaborate on documents and have somebody else make suggested changes to a document without actually committing them to save. It allows you to approve them as the owner or the approver. And then the document is only changed when you deem so I love the Google's documents are also bringing in AI features like duet, allowing you to create a whole document with just an AI based prompt. And the other AI features in spreadsheets, which have been there for a number of years now, which will help you pick the right graph for your data, or even allow you to ask natural language questions and get insights and responses from Google on the information inside your spreadsheets. Finally, meet is now packed with features like q&a, polls and the ability to record a meeting and automatically have it saved into Google Drive is absolutely awesome. I love that meet have added features like transcriptions and even live captioning in multiple languages now opening up accessibilities for more diverse teams. If you're new to the channel, make sure you check out the rest of our videos on Google workspace. There's plenty to learn around here. And I'd love to know in the comments, which of these productivity tips was the one you enjoyed the most. I'll see you in the next one.