Annie Croner:
Welcome to the Whole Assistant Podcast, where assistants come to embrace their badassery and discover how to show up more strategically for their careers, their executives, and most importantly, themselves. I'm your coach, Annie Croner. Join us as we dive into the skills, strategies, and mindset that will help you unleash your full potential. Let's go.
Annie Croner:
Hello and welcome to this episode. During this episode, I'm going to do something I have never done before, and I'm going to share some tech tools to help you work smarter, not harder. And the reason I have not done a podcast episode like this before is because I don't consider myself a technical trainer. One time at apc, I did a technical training on Trello. It was a disaster. Technical training is not my forte and I know that there are several tools that I use in my workflows that I. I have clients using their workflows and I'm kind of revamping how I'm going to be training on processes for this next round of Leveled up and we're going to be talking a lot about tech tools and to incorporate in your workflows to streamline everything. And I have found some really cool tools that I want to share with you guys.
Annie Croner:
I also know that I have a few clients that are really curious about AI and how AI can help serve and support them, and I will do a ChatGPT conversation with somebody later. I'm not going to cover ChatGPT in this specific podcast episode, but I am going to share several tools that may be helpful. And the question I always ask my clients when they say they want to learn more about AI, I always ask them, what is the use case? Like, what problem are you trying to solve for? Because it may be that there's another tool that's equally as helpful that has an AI component attached to it, but it may not be an AI, a generative AI tool in and of itself. So I know that no notion has an AI component to it. Several other project management tools have an AI component to them, but they are not in and of themselves 100% AI generated, meaning that you're going to have to put data into them based on your specific use case. You're going to have to kind of build them out to be what you want them to look like. So I think the first question I would have you all ask is like, what is it you're trying to solve for with the tool? Because oftentimes you're like, I just want to learn all the things. That's great.
Annie Croner:
And I'm all about incorporating tools into our workflows to streamline our processes and to make life easier. Because oftentimes with these tools, once you set them up and you get in the habit of using them, it's done, just kind of a one and done setup and then you're good to go. So today I'm going to share a few different use cases and the tools that may help you with each use case. And first of all, top of mind for me, because there again, I'm going to be diving deep into this in this next round of Leveled up when we talk about processes. As you all know, I'm a huge fan of developing your processes and systems. And I'm going to be training on this topic in a unique way that I've never trained on it before, in that I'm going to actually have a list of tools for my clients to use, have a list of tools that I have vetted that I know work well because I've utilized them in my own workflows, have a list of tools that I've not vetted, but I know I've heard are good for people to explore if they want to explore a different tool. So as I'm considering how I want to train on process moving forward, utilizing some of these tools is something that is really top of mind for me. So I thought I'd pop in here today, pop on the podcast and just share some of the tools that I've been using that I really love and kind of a use case for them.
Annie Croner:
So the first, obviously when we're talking about tech tools that will help us and process development, capturing the process is a big challenge for a lot of us, meaning that either we sit down and we take the time to type out our process, which I'm a fan of, because that also helps us articulate our value proposition. But there are other more streamlined ways for capturing that information. And a very straightforward way to capture processes is, is using a tool called Loom L O O M so you can go to loom.com and what loom does is it captures your screen in video form. So you can go ahead and capture your process and then put that video somewhere. And if you upgrade your Loom account, I think the first it's they've got it for free for up to five minutes. So most of our processes we can do in five minutes or we can break them down to do in five minutes or less. So it's great for that. And then you can share the link to those videos with anybody who may need to know that information as well.
Annie Croner:
I like the idea of actually downloading the Loom video. So before I heard about this other tool, which I'm going to share with you in a minute, before that, I would download my processes for creating a LinkedIn event, for example. And then when I had my community manager, Jess go in and create a LinkedIn event for me, I would just pop her the loom in our SOPs, in our company SOPs, and she could go in and access that. So that's a great way to capture all your processes. Now, if you do want your processes to be written out, there is another tool called Scribe and The website is scribehow.com and I'm going to link to all of the tools that I'm sharing down in the show notes. So please check that out. They're all linked down in the show notes. But Scribe is a great tool for capturing and documenting processes.
Annie Croner:
And what Scribe does is it will capture your screen a lot like Loom, but then it will go back and break down your process in screenshots and then describe what's going on in those screenshots. Now, Scribe is very sensitive, so it follows your mouse. If your mouse lands on anything, it's going to capture that information. It is kind of a pain in the butt to go back and edit the Scribe. But what I like about Scribe is that it's not in video format. You can actually record yourself. It will screenshot what needs to be a screenshot and then you can actually have a written sop, standard operating procedure for whatever it is that you're trying to capture, whatever process you're trying to notate. So I do like Scribe for that reason.
Annie Croner:
So that's one good process development tool as well. So Loom and Scribe, check those out. I'm also a big fan of templatizing. So for any of you who have ever taken one of my time management courses or anything like that, or have already gone through Leveled up in my time and energy saving productivity hacks lesson, I talk a lot about templatizing. I also talk about templatizing when it comes to your processes and procedures. And there is a really cool tool that I actually learned about from a junior executive assistant. She reached out to me, she sent me an email. She's like, annie, I love Text Blaze.
Annie Croner:
I looked into it. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I mentioned it on one of my calls inside of Leveled up and one of my clients in there reached out to Text Blaze to get a demo and Then they reached out to me. They're like, oh my gosh. If you're reaching out to Executive Assistance, we're happy to have you be an affiliate for us. So I'm now an affiliate for Text Blaze. So if you end up using Text Blaze, I'd really appreciate it if you would actually click on the link below. Because that is my affiliate link for Text Blaze.
Annie Croner:
But I was a big fan of those long before I actually became an affiliate. And what Text Blaze does is it takes a snippet, so a written snippet and you can then create a unique passphrase and then you put the phrase in and then that. And then that snippet will auto populate. So this is really great. For emails that you send on a consistent basis, you can create a template in Text Blaze and then go back and anytime you need to send an email with that specific information in it, you can go ahead and go like slash, whatever and then it'll auto populate. So how I'm currently using this is say I meet with somebody on a discovery call and they want to learn more about my coaching and I send them a follow up email afterwards and like, hey, it was really great chatting with you. Here's an outline of what's included in your package. I've actually created a template for that that I popped into Text Blaze so then I can all have to do is do dash proposal and then it auto populates in my email.
Annie Croner:
So I don't even have to worry about rewriting that email a million times or locating a template in a document and then copying and pasting because Text Blaze automatically does that for you. So Text Blaze is a Chrome extension that you can get. It's really streamlined. I love it. And they've got. So there's so many use cases for this. But say you send out regular correspondence for board meetings or whatnot, you could literally have a different Text Blaze snippet in your Text Blaze for each board meeting type of correspondence that you send out. And it's really streamlined and it makes it so fast.
Annie Croner:
So check out Text Blaze. It's really, really awesome. Obviously for task tracking. I'm a huge fan of Trello. No big surprise there. If you've been listening for any amount of time. I mentioned Trello a lot. The reason I love Trello is because you can literally see everything laid out.
Annie Croner:
It's kind of a Kanban board system. So there's lists and then under the list there are little cards is what they're called. And the cards are where Your tasks go, and then you open up a card and there's this whole other slew of functionality. There are checklists and cards that you can create. There are customized color tags that you can create. You can create a deadline for your tasks. You can create recurring tasks, which is one of my favorite things. So when we talk about really streamlining your workflows, automation is a big piece of that.
Annie Croner:
And I love that in Trello you can create recurring tasks. I also really like that you can email tasks to your Trello board. Every Trello board has a unique email address. So lots of functionality in Trello in terms of your task tracking tool or system. I have also been playing around with Notion because I now have a team. Now, Trello was really great for managing my tasks as an executive assistant. I love that I could archive items and then pull them back to my board, come in review time. I could pull that information and like, create my value proposition list or my brag list that I could then present to my executive on all the additional things that I'd done for him throughout the year.
Annie Croner:
So just lots of functionality in Trello I really like. But one thing Trello is not really great for, or I found it's not really great for, is collaboration. So I really love Notion for this. And Notion is a slow burn and you have to play the long game with it, meaning that Notion is basically a blank slate. But what I love about Notion is that they have free templates for about pretty much anything. So I have my Habit Tracker in Notion, I've got my dashboard in Notion, where I can click on my financial tracker, I can click on Prospect Tracking, I can click on anything, I can click on my to do list and it pops right up. So Notion is a bit of a beast to tackle, but if you have the patience for it, it is also a super helpful tool because you can literally make it be anything you need it to be. So you can make it to be a collaboration tool, you can make it to be a webpage that you share with other people, other collaborators, that sort of thing.
Annie Croner:
So there's just a lot of functionality in Notion too. And I'm still kind of new into Notion. I've had it in my business for the last year, but I'm really doing a deep dive currently in terms of Notion. I am also an affiliate for Notion, so if you want to sign up for Notion, you can click the link below if you want to get started. But I do love Notion just due to its flexibility and the fact that it is a really Good collaboration tool. The fact that I can that I can store all of my SOPs inside of Notion, as can you. So you can have an SOP section, you can have a task tracking section. And by sop, that means standard operating procedure.
Annie Croner:
So everything that you manage on a consistent basis should come with a standard operating procedure around that task or project. And so what I love is that in Notion, you can actually store those SOPs and then reference them. You can also reference so many other things. So if your company has an employee handbook, for example, that could be stored in Notion, you could have an entire onboarding system inside of Notion that you walk your new employees through. And each employee could have a different sheet or a different list that they work from, but it's all centralized under Notion. So Notion is a beast of a tool. It has a lot of functionality. It can be super overwhelming at first.
Annie Croner:
But I do love the variety of the use cases for Notion in terms of your task tracking. Now, there's another tool I would encourage us all to use, especially if we are unsure how our time is being allotted every week. And that tool is called Toggl. You can go to Toggl.com and what Toggl is, it's just a tool to be able to track how much time you're spending on different tasks. So you're going to pull up Toggle, you're going to toggle certain things on, you're going to toggle them off. If you get interrupted, you can hit the toggle off and then attend to what you've been interrupted by and then hit another toggle. But it's a great tool for tracking how you're actually spending your time, because a lot of us think that we're spending our time a certain way, but we're really not.
Annie Croner:
So I really do like TOGGL for this also. It's good if you're a fractional executive assistant in case you're working on a variety of different clients projects. You can actually toggle between those projects pretty seamlessly with toggl. So it's just a cool time tracking tool. You can go ahead and use it for a couple weeks and see how it works for you. But I do like the idea of actually tracking how you're using your time so you can actually see the data so that we aren't making assumptions. Okay. Another really cool tool that I would highly recommend you check out for Executive Assistant specifically is Cabinet.
Annie Croner:
And the website is joincabnet.com Cabinet is the coolest calendaring tool. So what you can do in Cabinet is you can create shadow holds on your executive's calendar that either they can see or not. You can also have a link to send times that are your executive is available. Or if you just want to list times, you can list times with live links for the person to be able to go ahead and click and book the time with your executive. If you don't want any links and you really want to be High Touch, which is my last role, like my executive really preferred me to be High Touch and we were working in venture capital so I did not mind being that High Touch, you can just go ahead and list those times. What I love about it is that the times will automatically translate to whatever time zone your person that you're sending it to is in. So it just takes a lot of the thought work and guesswork out of calendaring. And it also has a really cool function where you can go in, you can create tags for different types of meetings and it will keep track of all those different types of meetings.
Annie Croner:
And then you can do a calendar audit at any point in time throughout your year. So you can go in and pull a calendar audit for mid year review with your executive how they're exactly spending their time or the end of the year. It's just a really, really cool tool and they're also coming out with functionality, new functionality and new, new and cool things in that tool consistently. And just so that they know where you found me, I got a unique link so that they would know in the event that you found Cabinet through me that they would know that. So there again, all of these tools are linked down below. A few of them are affiliate links and then a few of them are just links so that people know where you found them. So if you found you're finding them through me, please, please use that links just so that they know. But I gotta tell you, these tools are amazing and these tools will streamline everything.
Annie Croner:
So especially when it comes to processes, especially when it comes to task tracking, especially when it comes to managing your time and then managing your executive's calendar, all of these tools are a great place to start. Now like I said, I'm not gonna tackle ChatGPT today, but most of these tools also have some sort of automation, some sort of AI feature associated with them. I know Notion has an AI feature associated with it. I think Scribe also has an AI feature associated with it. There again, ChatGPT is a whole other beast. I'm planning on bringing someone on to have a conversation with me about ChatGPT in the future and use cases for executive assistants and ChatGPT so stay tuned for that. But I hope you found this episode helpful and please please check out some of the tools I shared in this episode and let me know what you think. You can email [email protected] and that's all I have for today.
Annie Croner:
Short and sweet I know, but I hope you will have a great rest of your day and I will talk with you soon.
Annie Croner:
Hey, before you go, don't forget to grab my free Strategic Planning Session guide. This stealthy playbook will help you and your executive find clarity on their priorities so you can make a greater impact. Go to wholeassistant.com/guide or click the link in the show notes to snag your copy. And if you're loving the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review and share with another assistant ready to level up.
Annie Croner:
Thanks for listening and until next time.
Annie Croner:
Keep embracing your badassery.