 I'm going to kick off as we've got those who are joining, hello and welcome. So, as I said, I'm Sethi Danvers and I'm the events and engagement leader always possible. So thank you so much for joining us today. This is the third session in the final series of Recover and Rise, SME, Digital Accelerators. So I hope no one's suffering from the January blues. I'm ready to get the business ready for a great 2022. So for those who are new to the series, these events are run by West Sussex County Council and have been taking place in September, so back last year. They're organised to help smaller medium businesses to utilise digital tools and gain expert knowledge and advice on how best to go for your online presence and attract and retain new customers. So previous sessions from other partners include in Freedom Works and Creative Bloom have presented sessions on getting online, customers are marketing and systems and productivity. And this, well the second week, we've moved on to the final series. So this is run by always possible where I'm from and we'll be looking at growth expansion and new products. So the aim of the series is to help you, help your businesses create the right conditions for growth in a digital world, something we can't ignore any longer. So this includes tools, automation, online sales, cybersecurity, which we did last week and keeping productive, which is what Linda will be covering today. So I really do hope you'll be able to join us for future sessions. So they'll be running every Tuesday and Thursday throughout January and the link for the booking is going to be shared here. So I also want to take this time to introduce you to our digital champions. I mentioned Lisa Erding who's joining us today. And yes, so ultimately all attendees that are going to be joining, you are now eligible to eight hours of free specialist support from one of our digital champions. There's seven of them, expert in all range of digital tools. So specialisms in consultancy, marketing technology and all aspects of digital adoption. So I'm just going to put them up here. Lisa on this slide here is joining us today. So she's going to be speaking after Linda's speech, but she's going to be on hand throughout. So any area she's going to drop in today. So there's the other three as well, as I said, there's seven of them. So I'll get her to explain a little bit more around how you access your support at the end of the session. So the digital champions, as I said, they're joining us all the sessions and can give you a bit more information on how to get your support and expertise that they have. So there's some details here, but I'll get Lisa to cover that off at the end. You'll all have individual needs. So the specific support, so whether it's someone in marketing or someone in another specialism, they'll direct you to the right person that can help your specialism. So this slide she's going to show the session we're running today, Technology for Growth. We'll be continuing all our sessions from series four throughout January. So please find them all listed here. We'll include the link again to Book and I'll talk to you about today's session. As I've mentioned, Lindsay's going to be joining us in a second. Lindsay is a business coach and trainer specialising in time management and productivity, helping businesses, owners, teams and organisations improve their time management, increase their productivity and get more done. Lindsay will be spending this lunchtime with you, exploring the various apps on the market and how you can use technology to save time and increase sales. So over to you Lindsay. Super, thank you so much Stephanie. Thank you for your warm welcome this morning. Delighted to be here with you and to run this webinar with you this morning. Before I make a start, it'll be really useful just to put you up in the chat and be great to sort of know who you are, where you're coming from and your business or where you work and also feel free to drop down in the chat any challenges that you're particularly experiencing in the moment or you've experienced in the past. Often people are showing very similar if not the same challenges so it'll be really useful just to kind of gauge where you are at in terms of accessing technology and productivity tools to help you. So yeah, just to put in the chat where you're working, your role, where you're working and any challenges that you're particularly experiencing, that'll be really helpful. Thank you and I love how St John has put in the chat that his productivity challenge is getting it all done. Yes, that is a very common challenge and I think it's often it's about adjusting our expectations of what we can get done and finding ways to support us and processes and systems in place to reduce some of that overwhelm that we can experience of trying to get it all done. Not enough hours in the day sometimes so but hopefully the tools and the techniques and the tips I'm going to share with you this afternoon will help you with that. Great, super, thank you very much for those that have commented in the chat and they're lovely to virtually hear about hear about you and your business and I'll definitely be having a look into those a little bit later on. Super, so you are in the right place. How do I use technology to save time and increase sales? That's what we're going to be focusing on this afternoon. So, Stephanie already introduced me but just to recap, so I'm Lindsay Siegel founder of Heads Up Coaching. I'm a business coach and trainer specialising in time management and productivity and I live and work in my home office in Brighton Hove and yeah, I'd be delighted to be with you here this afternoon. So this is just a bit of an overview of how I help. So I work with business owners, teams and organisations to improve their time management increase their productivity, get more done and ultimately reach their goals and I do that through offering group training, courses and one-to-one coaching. So there's a little bit of an overview of how I help. So these different modules the first one is business planning and development. I'm just going to talk through a little bit about these. So that's just really helping people and businesses to achieve their business goals by creating an action plan with the next steps for their business particularly topical at the moment whilst people are setting new goals for the year. Then time management and productivity which is my area of specialism and that's where I help sort of people to learn different tools and tips and techniques to help manage their time and their workload, boost their productivity and get more done. I also run a training programme that I've co-created which is productivity and well-being because they're kind of both size of the same coin and that's really helping to boost the productivity and performance of teams whilst also prioritising their mental, physical and emotional health and well-being. Then there's email management so helping to manage email overwhelm gain control of your inbox and boost your productivity. I offer a website review where I help people's websites to work better for their business and improving its content design, usability and effectiveness and then there's accountability so that specific coaching that I offer to help keep people on track and accountable to achieve their business goals. I also run something called Action Learning which brings a group of people together. It can be a team where it can be separate people that come together to work on an idea or a challenge that they're experiencing and it's kind of like a peer support session so three sort of structured questioning and support encourage people to find solutions to those challenges or those implement their ideas and then they share the feedback with the rest of the groups so people can learn from their journey and often people are sort of experiencing similar struggles and ideas and opportunities so that's something I also offer alongside a workshop which is Coaching Skills to Greater Human Business where people can learn practical solutions focused coaching skills to strengthen communication, productivity and performance of their team. So that's just a little bit of an overview about who I am and how I help. On to what we're going to cover this afternoon so the learning aims and outcomes for the webinar today is to understand your relationship with time and your productivity style to apply a range of strategies, tools and techniques to plan and prioritise your time and tasks use a range of different tools to minimise distractions and track your productivity understand the latest e-commerce tools and understand how you can save time and increase income with different digital tools so before I carry on I just want to sort of just remind you really of sort of principles for the webinar so anything you disclose in the chat will be confidential so you get to the streets of confidence or it's been non-judgmental space where you can ask questions and feel free to share experiences and challenges that you're experiencing want it to be a positive experience and openness to new ideas listen to the person who's talking and please feel free to ask any questions at any point so the chat is there for you to ask any questions and we will be building in a Q&A session at the end of the session as well so moving on to understanding your relationship with time and I'm purposely putting this at the beginning of the webinar today because I think when we're thinking about time management we're thinking about productivity and we're thinking about sales and growth within our business we really need to understand the relationship that we have with time because we have different relationships with time but generally there are two different types and there is a chat called Tad James who identified these two different types of people and he labelled them three time people and in time people so I'm going to share a little bit about those different types with next and I invite you to have a think about which one of these you identify with sometimes people have a bit of a mixture of the two but yeah I'm going to share that with you and invite you to share in the chat which one of these most resonates with you so three time people are generally organised they're punctual they meet deadlines they like using lists and they're planners then you've got in time people who tend to be spontaneous they focus on the here and now they have to work quite hard to be on time it doesn't necessarily come that naturally to them they often have several projects on the go at the same time and they can become easily distracted so I'll just recap on those again three time people and in time people and I invite you in the chat to just to share which one of those most resonates with you and Gillian's saying a bit of both yeah that's sometimes people do say they kind of they get bits of one and bits of the other of some people they're making lists and they're trying really hard to be on time so they're free time but with a little bits of in time as well yeah lots of both so both Annie Marie, Lisa, St John St John's saying fairly in time but trying to be free time yeah that's really common a bit of both for Eila in time for work but more through in person so yeah that's very very common often people they're so they kind of have all these systems in place in their professional lives but yeah they kind of want to escape from that in their personal lives so almost kind of rejuvenate and bring themselves back to work again after sort of the weekend or holiday so yeah that's quite common to be different in your personal life and your professional life but yeah I thought it was really really super interesting and it definitely when I came across this it really kind of made sense it made sense with me personally but also thinking about the people that I work with and my husband as well and just kind of understanding those differences I think it's important and we're going to move next on to identifying your productivity style so again I really want to invite you to think about which one of these most resonates with you for those of you that work in a team think or work closely alongside others to have a think about which one of these categories they fall into as well so first we've got the prioritises so prioritises they generally prefer logical, analytical, fact-based critical and realistic thinking they use time effectively and efficiently by focusing on the highest value task and they complete work quickly so that's the prioritises then you've got the planners they prefer organised sequential planned and detailed thinking they maintain detailed lists and they frequently complete work in advance of deadlines moving next on to arranges so arranges block out time to complete work they encourage teamwork to maximise work output they excel at partnering with people to get work done and they make decisions intuitively in real time as events unfold and then last of all we've got the visualisers so they see the big picture they don't spend time on the details they tend to think strategically about projects and they manage multiple ideas simultaneously they get a brainstorming solution to problems and they drive innovation so often people in more senior positions or directors of the company or founders sort of having that overview role so just to recap on those for you so you've got the prioritisers you've got the planners arranges and visualisers so again in the chat invite you to just drop down which one of those productivity styles resonates most of all with you and Vic is saying all of them and that is a sign of a brilliant brain that you're bringing it all together sometimes one that is a bit more dominant but sometimes people kind of juggling these different productivity styles or at the same time I love how Vic is put a frazzled brain hopefully not after today hopefully not after the webinar this afternoon John is saying arranger but moving towards a visualiser and Stefan is a planner and an arranger Emma arranger and planner yeah it's quite common to kind of have a bit of both but as I said one of them tends to be tends to dominate super that's great to hear thank you so moving next on to I wanted to kind of set that scene really and before we kind of delve into tools and techniques I just wanted to kind of set that scene for your relationship with time often the people that you're connecting in collaborating and working alongside with may have a different one to you and that can sometimes be really really complementary but it also can cause conflict so I wanted to share that with you today and thinking about your own productivity style as well so we're going to move on to tools and techniques next for planning a purpose to start with planning because that is the starting point for managing our work and our time everything starts with the plan so I'm just going to share a technique with you that's really really helpful to kind of create focus and efficiency and ultimately save time and that is batching so it comes from kind of like the batch cooking where you kind of you batch cook recipes and you batch cook quantities of meals together to help save time for your time up so when thinking about batching time it's really thinking about what tasks that you do regularly that you can batch together that will save you time and also ultimately increase your focus sometimes people then find it's easier to kind of create themes whether that's throughout the day or throughout the week or even have a day theme for example focusing on content emails finances what working batches also does it helps us to mono task so rather multitasking when we're judging lots of different roles and responsibilities at the same time that can really pay a price with our focus and our attention our energy we're encouraging to mono task or solo task so I'm just going to give you just a kind of a moment just to think about which tasks that you do regularly that you could batch together and therefore block out into your your diary or your calendar your schedule so just give you a moment to think about that please feel free to drop in the chat I'm sure other people would really like to hear about the kind of different tasks that you batch as well because it might be might give them ideas of tasks that they can batch also so thank you Lisa for kicking us off so yeah brilliant example there Lisa blocking out time to clear all your emails I think that's a great idea and it's something I definitely encourage in my email management workshop is to rather than kind of having emails kind of running as this thread throughout the day that's actually quite time consuming and kind of takes up a lot of our focus just to batch it all together block out time to clear your emails and to write and respond to emails so yeah great example thank you Lisa any other examples so yeah same with Vicky also always batch and she batches emails anything different any other tasks and things that you do in your day to day running that you could batch as well thank you Eila focus time on finances yeah another really good example rather of just batching something together so you can really kind of get into that headspace this is what I'm working on at that moment and it helps you not to get distracted and really helps to increase your focus and productivity social media planning is a brilliant example of batching so some people schedule their social media post in advance or they think about creating content for the social media so really good example of that alongside with finances great thank you so much for your contributions so for thinking about how you can time batch there were some apps available to help you do that there's just three here that I've put that are recommending for you so there's any.do there's tick tick and there's hour stack so it's something you may you may wish to do kind of manually as you're thinking about planning your day or planning a week but there's also digital tools available to help support you with time batching next we're going to move on to the thinking about time blocking so Annemarie shared with you early on this morning a weekly planner that will look like this hopefully you've got that either printed that out or you've got that to hand and if you don't it might be useful just to kind of quickly make a note of this and just kind of try and try and create this yourself so I'm just going to talk through what time blocking is it's a really really popular productivity tool and a time management tool that enables you to plan your day hour by hour batching similar tasks together and the recommendation is to divide up your working hours into blocks of time hence it being called time blocking and anything between sort of 20 minutes and 90 minutes anything less than 20 minutes are things it just know shouldn't take you very very long to do that are good sort of fillers and 90 minutes is sort of probably the maximum amount of time that we can really fully focus on something before our energy and our attention starts to shift and we're probably ready for something different so within that weekly planner that you've been sent it's been really helpful to first of all add to write him or to type him any meetings or appointments so you have let's just take this week we're only on Tuesday so use you know use the week you're currently working on any particular meetings or appointments in your personal as well as your professional life jot those in first because then it helps you to see the time that you do have available and often people think they've got loads of time and they actually have quite little and often people think they've got only a small amount of time they've actually got quite a lot so it's a really good visual way of just seeing what you what time you have available and the last point on this is sort of reflect and review so when you're time blocking your your week and your day things will often shift and things you know things change meetings get cancelled deadlines get extended stuff happens so it's always a moveable feat that you can adapt your time blocking to to meet the needs of your schedule at that particular time so just to show you the slide again that's what your weekly panel will look like and it's also a really good opportunity to write in any personal commitments as well so if you're you know doing the school run or walking the dog or you know you do yoga at lunchtime jot those in as well so you can really kind of get that feel for the time you have available within your week so just some top tips here to help you with that so as I said write in your personal commitments client appointments and meeting when you're thinking about planning a week really sort of align those with your goals so choose tasks from your goals and that could be your sort of your annual goals your monthly goals or your weekly goals but really keeping those in line I'm going to invite you to highlight so either using a highlight pen or a different colour pen to kind of highlight your power hours and your power hours are when your energy and focus are at their highest so for the majority of people there in the morning that kind of like 9 to 11 9 to 12 slot is often when people are at their the highest focus and highest of energy and often sort of later on towards the end of the day as well but it's different for different people so it's really important when we're thinking about our power hours that you can then match your your kind of most important task to when your energy and focus are at their highest also when you're on your planner as lots of you've commented already you know batching tasks things like email identifying time for admin and also really important to schedule in breaks it's really you know I'm a really big believer on that we need breaks for our productivity we need to boost our concentration to kind of boost our well-being to regain focus especially if you're working at screen for a lot of the time it's really good to get away from that so scheduling your breaks then you let you know when they're coming and it will help you kind of maximise the time that you do have available so I think that's all of those yeah so I'll give you just a couple of minutes to fill that weekly planner in I appreciate for some of you thank you Annemarie just added it into the the document in the chat as well and I appreciate that for some of you your week could be quite different from week to week whereas some of you it might be quite consistent quite similar so just feel free to use a week you're currently working on to fill that out thank you Lisa saying she uses Outlook calendar to block out timing batches brilliant then I use a scheduling tool so clients can see when I'm available for meetings, booking slots I'm going to meant yeah that's great Lisa thank you and I'm going to talk a little bit about that later on and Vik has had to do this for today 73 excel spreadsheets oh my goodness my brain is just feeling fuzzy at the thought of that but good luck any feedback from that please feel free to drop in the chat it's very useful when I work with my one-to-one clients I always you know ask them to to fill this in and it's really insightful often people kind of they they when they see it all in front of them sort of visually in black and white it can be quite powerful I've had people that turn around and said to me gosh I'm just not spending that as much time in my children as I want to or I'm not I'm not I need to create more time for exercise or I'm one client it was amazing actually she realised that she was spending all her mornings on social media and was going down a rabbit warren and sort of being sucked into posts and being sent off in different directions and just making quite a subtle but powerful shift which was moving her social media to the afternoon and using her morning time for kind of deep focus work really made a big difference so I think it's a really useful exercise to do so just give you another kind of minute or so just to fill in your planner and to drop in the chat any any reflections any observations any feedback from that would be would be great I think also what happens when you have a weekly planner it can then help you to create daily planners you've got that overview for the week you can see where you're spending your time and it will then help you to create daily plans for the next day as well okay so going to move next on to task management so task management is using collaborative tools so you and your team know who's been assigned to which work what's been done what's outstanding and help you to manage your time more effectively so just a couple of examples I want to share with you the first one being Trello which is a super super popular productivity tool a bit like a project management tool as well actually and it's helping to manage track and share tasks with your team or end clients it can be used and or clients using task cards and project boards so it's based on sort of the Japanese Kanban style so it's almost imagined like using post-it notes and you've got different post-it notes and it's enabled you to have that overview of what there is to do what's being done at the moment and what has been done as I say it's really helpful to use that you may want to use it personally individually it can be really helpful to be used amongst the team and also managing clients just to answer your question Vicky it is an app it's a you can download it's free and that you can pay for kind of more advanced elements to it but I think it's free and it comes with like 10 boards to start you off with so yeah highly recommend it and it's been used very very effectively amongst a whole variety of different companies actually and managing different time and tasks so that's Trello and then one of my personal favourites to do is I always sort of jake with people saying that I should be receiving commission from to do is because I'm always sharing its brilliance and sort of singing its praises so to do is a time management task management app it's again it's free you can pay for more detailed sophisticated elements to it but I've never needed to do that and to do is what's brilliant about it is that it syncs across all your devices so you can have it on your phone you can have it on your laptop you can have it on your tablet and it and it syncs across all those devices instantly and what to do is does it really helps you to plan your day it helps you to add prioritise and move tasks it helps you to remember deadlines and due dates and it integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar and Slack so it's almost can become like a one stop shop for your for your to do using your tasks it's kind of organised very very easy to use it kind of is creating to three different areas you've got today you've got upcoming which is the next seven days that's like your weekly overview and then you've got inbox which is anything beyond those seven days what's particularly good about it is that it's basically like a to-do list but a digital version the little circles next to them are where you just click and then it deletes it's almost like the equivalent of crossing your item of your to-do list what's particularly good about it is you can share it with other people you can move them around you can move these different items around so I do that to help me prioritise this is what I'm doing first this is what I'm doing next this is what I'm doing later so it's almost like chronological order throughout the day if you don't get around to doing something what's particularly great about it is you then just click on the little calendar symbol and you choose when you are going to do it so you might then just move that over to tomorrow or move that over to next Wednesday so it's a really good way of just kind of capturing all the different things that's swimming around your head and having them in that one go-to place highly recommend it couldn't function without it to be honest so that's to-do list there are other task management apps available there's things which is can be used with Apple reminders again used for Apple and to-do which is kind of like a to-do list equivalent if you're using Microsoft personally I find to-do list the best and it's the most popular thing it's got like 25 million people of kind of downloaded it it's super popular and super effective okay so that is that moving next on to prioritising so great quote here by Stephen Covey so most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important and often people kind of intermingle these the urgence and importance and I'm going to sort of just work with you a little bit and the softening about how you can separate these and into time scales so there's a prioritisation grid often also known as the Eisenhower matrix and that helps you to concentrate on the highest value task on your to-do list so there's a kind of matrix here that's been split into four quadrants and I'm just going to I'm just going to kind of go through which each of these are what they represent and give you some examples so it's a little bit worthy to begin with but hopefully you're kind of you're following and get your head around it so you've got important and urgent so that's when you need to do something now it's of high importance and high urgency you can't pull it off you can't delay you need to do it now then the next quadrant along you've got important and less urgent so that's when you it's important needs to be done but it's not as pressing so you can schedule it then you've got less important and urgent so that might be it's urgent to someone else but it's not as important to you and that's when you can delegate things and then you've got less urgent less important delete so it's not urgent it's not so important delete get rid of it and it's really I find it really helpful to have this quadrant I mean you can just you know kind of have it printed out and have that visually or it could be something you're kind of just sifting through in your mind that when you've got your tasks and to-dos and deadlines that you're that you can filter these out into these different categories often people are working in this kind of important urgent phase so they're doing everything now everything feels immediate everything feels of great importance but that isn't sustainable and that firefighting mode can lead very easily to burnout is quite hard to kind of to maintain that so the the ideal is that we're working in this box here in the less urgent important so we're we're scheduling we're planning ahead we're thinking one step ahead of ourselves we're freeing up our time so when when an urgent and important task does come in we've got that time and energy to to respond and to do it now so that's prioritisation grid otherwise known as Eisenhower matrix I'm going to move next on to attention management so when we're thinking about productivity and time management we're also thinking about how we can match our attention to the time that we have available and the tasks that we have to work through so for productivity to go up disruptions must come down and you know unfortunately we're we're living and we're working in increasingly disruptive times where whether it's social media whether it's our phones whether it's working from home having pets around maybe you know children as well in our home whilst we're working from home or hybrid working you know there's endless disruptions whether it's food in the fridge or deliveries at the door it's really really difficult at times to to give our time and our tasks our fullest attention so I'm going to share with you some ways of dealing with those distractions using some digital tools so the first one is focus so it's something that temporarily silences all notifications or allows only specific notifications i.e. ones that match your task unless other people know that you're busy so when you're kind of focusing on your deep work especially during your power hours that we talked about earlier you've got focus there to kind of just block out some of those notifications and let other people know you're busy so not to disturb and distract you self-control is also available to keep you focused online by blocking sites by blocking certain sites that could be distracting at certain times and there's also forest app which helps you to stay away from your phone and stay focused on your work there's also the do not disturb kind of mode in your apps and where it's possible to change your phone notification settings particularly on Slack something like that to let people know that you're focusing on your high focused tasks and not to disturb you during those times a really really popular and effective technique is called the pomodoro technique and it comes from pomodoro being Spanish for tomato so it kind of comes from back in the 80s when kitchen timers people had these kind of kitchen timers in the shape of a tomato so that's where it comes from and so I was going to talk you through the pomodoro technique and also show you some digital versions of that to use as well so pomodoro technique is particularly effective if you are feeling overwhelmed it's particularly effective if you experience difficulty in focusing or maintaining focus or you need a certain amount of time to focus on your task and then having a break and then coming back to them again so what happens you choose a task to work on you set a time on your phone for 25 minutes you then start your task and at the end of the 25 minutes the alarm will go off and you take a short break up to five minutes and you then repeat that process you set another alarm another timer for 25 minutes you work on a task when the alarm stops you take a break for five minutes you repeat that process four times at the end of the fourth time you take a longer break sort of 15-30 minutes so when you add all those increments of time together you're looking at around about two hours which is a really good amount of time to really kind of get focused and really kind of devote yourself to to some deep work so thank you Vicky I've never had a pomodoro technique a new one for me excellent glad to have shared a really really effective and really brilliant pomodoro technique everybody I know that's used it finds it really makes an impact and really helps their focus and attention and just a supportive tool that's available so that's that's pomodoro technique and then there are there are two apps that are available that basically replicate that process but digitally so you've got Pomofocus and you've got focus to do so it's Pomodoro Timer and to-do list and essentially it's there are apps that are on your that can be on your phone or your your computer or device and you've got that kind of 25-minute countdown and you can see how much time you've got left and really just kind of help me to focus on making that quite visual so I'm thinking next about tracking productivity so there are different kind of apps and tools available to just to help you get a greater sense of where you are in terms of managing your time and your tasks and your workload so there's Toggle which tracks the time that you spend offline, online, on desktop and mobile and it tracks how much time you've spent on each task so it's really a good way of looking for trends, spotting trends and analysing where those peaks and troughs are then there's Rescue Time so that logs the time that you spend on websites and apps and groups your activity into three categories then being productive, neutral and unproductive and it gives you a daily score from 0 to 100 so if you need that sort of bit of extra accountability and feedback on how your productivity is then Rescue Time is brilliant for that and again it just sort of helps spot for trends and peaks and troughs and gives you that kind of feedback on your productivity and then there's Clockify which logs exactly how much time it takes to send emails, complete a project, to fill out with clients so it's giving you that feedback but it's also helping you to kind of measure how long things are taking and to put that into your planner and are they phone apps I think they are available on desktop as well Lisa saying Toggle's useful for businesses where you're dealing with multiple clients in one day you can log time by client project and then get a breakdown of it useful to help with invoicing thank you so much for that feedback Lisa that's great, thank you also Google Calendar has something called Time Insight which tracks your productivity so it includes a complete breakdown of your time how much time you spend in meetings and the people you meet with and then it's easy to kind of make adjustments and review your time and tasks and meeting time with that tool as well Moving next on to client communication so there's something called CRM so maybe you might be using one of these already or something you might be thinking about for the future so CRM is a customer relationship manager and it helps you keep track of previous, current and potential clients so it's really kind of following that sales and marketing journey really from that initial point of contact to maintaining and investing and growing those relationships so again it's a bit of like a one-stop shop where you can track the communication and the collaboration that you're having with your customers and that sales process and there's three examples that I've got here for you so salesforce, HubSpot and Insightly it'd be great just to kind of hear in the chat for me those of you that are using a CRM at the moment and which one you use and how effective you are finding it or if it's something that you are thinking about using for the future because saying you're using a good old-fashioned whiteboard and sometimes that is brilliant I think what's particularly good is you can share this with other people in your team and share it with other collaborators as well this is using HubSpot yeah I've used HubSpot before and also found that effective anybody else any other examples that are being used or experiences of using it I haven't heard of that one so John thank you so Zoho so I'll look into that and how would you find that John what's your experience of using Zoho good okay so those are just some examples of different CRM systems for you then what are you thinking about collaborating and communicating with clients or with the members of your team or collaborators thinking about sort of collaborating with documents I think we're definitely living in times when we're sending lots of documents back and forth and it can be quite hard to sort of keep up and keep track and follow that kind of have those systems and processes in place to support you particularly in terms of sales and increasing productivity so there's some file sharing systems that ensure everyone's working through the same document you can work with them in real time so they're kind of completely up to date and live and you can use them to keep track with your own team and also with your clients and some examples there are Google Drive and Dropbox I think it's really good to have that one-stop shop where all your documents are just helps you to kind of yeah keep on top where things are have that go-to system being able to share them easily with others as well and just to have that efficient way of working so again feel free to drop in the chat which document collaborations you currently use or thinking about using and an experience you've had with them do a lot through MS Teams yeah same with Felisa Google Workspace thank you I think lots of these different examples they kind of do the same thing so my advice is always you know if it's working for you and it's being used consistently within yourself but also the people that you're sharing you're sharing your documents and you're communicating with and that's great I think often what happens is people set these systems up and they don't use them or they use them kind of intermittently so it's really about developing really efficient systems and strategies and tools and they become like your go-to your go-to places to support your productivity because use Dropbox there is We Transfer as well super thanks for sharing those with us Vicky I think somebody mentioned earlier in the chat about using software to arrange appointments so often what can happen we can spend quite a lot of time particularly over email trying to arrange meetings especially when you're trying to meet with more than one other person there's lots of communication going back and forth when people are available and it can be so so time consuming so there's a free appointment scheduling software called Calendly which I really recommend where you it's a very very simple process to use you input your working hours you sync it with your calendars and then Calendly identified slots for Vicky meetings so then you can then send that link to the other person that you're wishing to meet with and they pick from the available time slots to meet with you and just reduce all that back and forth time spent over email then you've got some we're talking about e-commerce tools next so again there's lots of different tools that are available to support that kind of sales transaction thank you Stephanie it's just picking up Calendly saying it's amazing I'm always good to hear of people that are using it and using it with success so thank you for that so yeah e-commerce tools lots of different ones are available we can get a bit sometimes overwhelmed all the different choices that there are available so I want to just kind of really simplify that for you today and to share three with you which I feel kind of do what there is that needs to be done in terms of e-commerce transactions so you've got PayPal which is for a single item purchase if you're just wanting to sell one particular thing on your website then PayPal will do that for you it's very easy to use set up a PayPal account you make a PayPal button and drop it onto your website then we've got Shopify which is the most popular e-commerce tool and that's when you can buy several items and you add it drop it into a cart and you can add that shop to your existing website if you're thinking about building a website from scratch or revamping your website then you can use sort of Squarespace and Wix that will incorporate Shopify into that and then there's WooCommerce for selling items through your WordPress website so again very easy to use you're adding a shop via the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website so again please feel free to drop in the chat if you're using any of these already or if you're thinking about using them personally I don't at the moment but I'm due to be launching a product a new product that I'm creating next month so for the first time I'm going to be having yeah creating a PayPal account and having that PayPal button on a page of my website which will enable customers to buy the product easily through my website so yeah I'm excited about getting implementing that and getting that added to my website and also my business offering so Vicki's thank you Vicki so Vicki's meant ask a question which is the best to use to be honest I think it depends on what you're needing it for and how much how many items you're wishing to to be selling so I think if you're just looking to buy one to sell one thing then PayPal will do that effectively but if there's a few of them then Shopify or WooCommerce will be will be effective for that Shopify is the most popular one most popular e-commerce tool available but if it's like you're thinking of then it'd be just good to kind of do that comparison between them and see which one you think works best for you thank you Lisa if anyone would like help deciding between all the different tools is something that Coast Capital Digital Champions can help you with through the free day of funding support that's excellent thank you Lisa for yeah just for reminding people over that free resources available for you if you want to just kind of delve a little bit deeper I mean it's hard for me to answer that question not knowing about your business but the digital champions available to kind of just help match the right e-commerce tool for your business and that's great to know thank you Lisa this digital champion Malcolm Duffet who specialised in e-commerce and I specialised in productivity systems and tools that's great thank you for that Lisa okay so see how we're doing for time so what would be really helpful is to just spend a little bit of time now on reflecting so my role as a coach is to always encourage people to take action rather than just kind of you know attending a webinar for example like today and going oh that sounds good that looks good that'll be really helpful to try that and then life just gets in the way and nothing's really been changed so I think it'd be really useful just to spend a little bit of time I'm happy to kind of just go through my slides again briefly to identify one thing that you're going to start doing one thing you're going to continue doing and one thing you're going to stop doing as a result of the webinar and also to think about what you've learnt what changes you'll make what challenges you'll need to overcome and what support that you might need so I'll just give you just a moment to kind of maybe jot those down I'll have a think about that and then I will just go through the slides again if you've got any questions about any of the slides that I've shared please feel free to drop it in the chat but we'll also be scheduling a Q&A session in about kind of 15 minutes as well okay so yeah I'll just start it from here really so we've thought about our relationship with time and the productivity style that most resonates with you and then we moved on to tools and techniques for planning so I was sharing with you batching and encouraging you to think about which tasks you can batch together to help really increase your focus to build that momentum into your day, into your week and to create efficient methods of dealing with your task and your time thinking about which themes and which elements in your business you can batch together and to really encourage that monotasking as opposed to multitasking we look to those different time batching apps available to help you support you with that any.do tick tick an hour stack talks about time blockings when you plan your day hour by hour batching similar tasks together and that's when we kind of moved on to the weekly planner that's something you might want to kind of spend a few minutes filling out as well thinking about the appointments that you have available specific dates in your diary appointments meetings also your personal commitments as well helping you read to get that overview of the time that you do have available and how you can best match your tasks to your energy and to your kind of your power hours your optimal ways of working running to schedule in breaks and to to schedule in kind of personal commitments as well thinking about when you what tasks you can batch thinking about when you're at your most productive thinking also about how you can maybe day theme or or kind of block out and batch certain elements together I like how Vicki's said that she's used it she always used it as a process of promodora technique just never knew it was called that more like two hours not 25 minutes for me back in the day in the corporate world thank you for that Vicki I'm glad to be able to kind of put the the name to the method that you've been using quite effectively and as you say yeah kind of blocking role lengthy amounts of time but I'm hoping within those two hours you've been able to schedule in breaks as well to kind of yeah boost focus and motivation and well-being so that was a weekly planner think about those top tips I mentioned thinking about choosing tasks from your goals to feed those into your weekly planner and to identify your power hours so I think it's really good that you know when those power hours are and it might help you to plan meetings or kind of create certain tasks that will both support your power hours and equally things that you can do when your energy is not at its highest so for example if you if you experience a post lunch dip then that could be a good time to kind of go through your emails or range meetings things like that so yeah I really recommend using like a highlighter or a different kind of pen to kind of put a circle around identify where your power hours are they may be different throughout the week or you may find they're pretty consistent I shared with you some different task management tools and collaborative tools such as Trello really helping to manage, track and share tasks with your team using task cards and project boards and also you can use that with clients as well and have that integrated into your communication system and to do this the task manager app that I really do need to be getting commissioned for helping to plan a day and prioritise and move your tasks integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar and is available on iOS, Android and desktop so it syncs across all your devices I find it particularly effective having it with me all the time so if I'm walking down the street and I have an idea of something I've got to do I can just add it into my to-do list I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I've got to really to capture that particular thought I've got it there so it's just it's really really helpful and there's other filters and labels that you can add to it and you can prioritise with it as well so it's a really really effective tool that I thoroughly recommend but there's other task management apps available as well things reminders and to-do think about prioritising and really separating the urgence from importance with our tasks and times I'm going to come back to your question at the end Ilara, okay because it's a good one so that was the prioritisation grid in Eisenhower Matrix I shared with you thinking of attention management so for productivity to go up disruptions must come down really inviting to think about what some of those distractions might be and these are some tools that you can use to help you track that and to minimise some of those distractions and to notify others as well when you need to be focusing on deep-faker track the Pomodoro technique that we've that we talked about earlier that some of you have used without knowing it was called that so that's just there as a reminder for you and some apps that will mirror and replicate that system different ways of tracking productivity toggle rescue time and pocket-fi as well as Google Calendar time insights using CRMs customer relationships managers document collaborations such as Google Drive and Dropbox calendar for scheduling meetings and some e-commerce tools so I was going to leave that last slide on there just for a moment to yeah hopefully get some sort of food thought there of of sort of identifying one thing that you can start doing continue doing and stop doing to increase your productivity it'd be great to hear from you in the chat and also anything you've learned any changes you'll need to make any challenges you wish to overcome and support that you might need and digital champions being one of those it's going to answer Ida's question now so any tips on getting buy-in from the rest of the team on new app system unless everyone uses them together the effectiveness is limited it's a really good question thank you Stephanie's put here that they've got a session about team working on Thursday and being productive as a team that'll be available I think you're absolutely right I think it is about getting people on board I think it's important to have that consistency if one of you is using one method it's really helpful to have that being shared across the team that's something I also can help with I run a training workshop series of training workshops and time management productivity so I'm happy to kind of drop you a link with that later on but I think it's also about bringing people together in your team understanding what's working what isn't working sharing good practice I think like anything give it a go try it you know have that openness and that willingness to try something new and there's the link there thank you Annie Marie for adding that in so hopefully that's given you enough time to kind of just recap on some of the areas that we've touched on today it'd be good to spend the next kind of 10 minutes or so just having some reflection and feedback on one thing you're going to stop doing continue doing start doing and yeah next steps for you so please do feel free to add those in the chat it also sort of helps with accountability if you say that you're going to do something you've identified that and you've shared that publicly you are more likely to to achieve that so yeah building in some accountability into the session as well thank you Stephanie for kicking us off so Stephanie's going to implement using the pomodori technique every day I know it works I just need to use it more excellent so that's been a hopefully a good reminder of that technique for you today Stephanie and there's digital tools available to help support you with that or the old fashioned set the timer on your phone yeah some some good feedback there from Lisa to you Isla suggestions would be that if you have a choice of apps you get the team together to figure out what the pain points are or why you can make people's lives easier and then you let the team choose the app you go for great for buy them Isla's also going to start you can pomodori technique continue blocking out time and stop forgetting to take a break absolutely and I think you know like we schedule we schedule tasks in and we schedule meetings in and we schedule you know time for example to batch emails we need to schedule breaks into our working day and there's different types of breaks you know whether they're micro breaks where you're just literally looking away from your screen and just maybe doing some stretches at your desk and just kind of looking out into a different space as well as kind of nature breaks where we get outside and get into nature and you know get some sunlight and vitamin D we've got social breaks when we meet up with other people and that could just be over the phone or it could be a virtual call or meeting somebody in real life and then you've got your kind of you know macro breaks you're like your lunch hours and your kind of longer amounts of time away where you might do an exercise class you might do some meditation or journaling but some other breaks that you filter into your day so Vic is saying yes breaks I'm guilty of not giving myself break and continuing to get it finished and done I get in the zone I think it's really easy to kind of feel like we want to keep on plowing on and just kind of I'll stop when I finish but actually our concentration cannot can't be sustained for such lengthy amounts of time and also having time away helps us to energise and come back to our work and increase our productivity Lisa saying if you have to go for a particular app you can have champions in the business who will help people understand how to use it and start with a small point for each personal team that will definitely help them and then they're like to be more accepted today in the rest of the functionality so that's brilliant that support and that resource is available for you thank you for sharing that any others any other people that would like to share things that anything they're going to start doing or continue doing or any changes that they'd like to make it's got a few more minutes and then we can open it up to a Q&A session as well it might be from people from digital champions as well I might like to to contribute to the answers for those as well okay I'm just going to share the last screen last page of my screen with you but share my contact details so if you have any questions that you didn't want to ask in the webinar today please feel free to email me them and I'd be happy to do my best to answer those questions or to refer you on to other people that can help you including the digital champions that's my website which just gives you a little bit more information about how I help and feel free to follow me at Heads Up Coaching on Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn I also have a monthly newsletter where I share top productivity tips business support and offers that comes out at the beginning of each month so you can either contact me directly and I'll add your email address to that or you can sign up at the bottom of my home page promise not to spam you um but yeah it'd be great to great to keep in contact and to hear how you've been getting on anyone any other questions or I know Stephanie's got um wants to talk to you at the little bit at the end as well and also the digital champions so there's no other questions I will pass you back to Stephanie thank you thank you Lindsay thank you for that that really is what even for me you know I'm here from or with possible but there's definitely been a lot we've been delving into around productivity you know more apparent now that everyone's working from home so how do you keep going and when you haven't got people around you that are incentivising you or you know you're sharing a chat with so it's definitely something that we're all working in across business so yeah thank you yeah at this point I just wanted to hand over excuse me one moment to Lisa so I talked about Lisa earlier she's one of our digital champions as she mentioned she's she's perfect for this session because she's specialised in productivity and all those apps so um I'll just hand it over to Lisa I've brought up your slides here just around details about accessing the support so Lisa over to you no hello sorry Steph it just was changing me to a panelist there I think sorry I disappeared for a while could you possibly go back to the previous slide and I can just run through who the digital champions are yeah of course two seconds let's look at those up here we go yep brilliant thank you so those of you who've not heard us say this before welcome the digital champions are a team of people we're all separate consultants but we're all working as part of the Coast to Capital team of digital champions and Coast to Capital is one of the partners in this programme as part of the programme by attending any one of the webinars so anyone online today is eligible you are able to get a free day of support from anyone of the digital champions so Coast to Capital will fully fund up to eight hours of support for you to help with your digital adoption there are seven champions you can see the first four of us here and you can see that we each cover different areas so Andrew is websites and CRMs I do productivity Malcolm I mentioned earlier specialised in e-commerce Rachel is an SEO expert so she can help you with your SEO plans your content plans go on to the next one Steph please yep sorry thank you Rob Lawrence who's also on the call today is a complete digital transformation expert has actually written a book called Get Fit for Digital so real experts in that area if you're just looking at digital overall Roya can help with accelerating growth and Susan looking at digital products and service initiatives and then if you would like to access this support when the slides are sent out afterwards you can click on the links there is a contact form it takes you through to the Coast to Capital website where there is a specific page about the digital champions so you can find out all about this you can find out all about Coast to Capital who also offer a fantastic range of support for SMEs in this area you just put in your contact details as it says there and where it says area of expertise required you don't have to know specifically what you need if you just put digital champion in there that is enough it says their growth relationship associates will then follow up with you there are three of them Ryan, Karen and Nasa Nasa is also on the call today and they will follow up with you to see where we can help you undertake a quick digital review that's not a scary thing and it takes about five minutes it's just 20 questions multi-choice done online to see where you need some support and then they will help you figure out which of us is the right person to help you similarly if you contact any of the seven of us directly we all work as a team we all know each other quite well so if you come to the wrong one of us if you think you need something and we think a different champion can help you better we will figure that out and we will help you make sure that you speak to the right person so it's there it's free eight hours free support please take it up because it's free why wouldn't you thank you thanks Lisa that's brilliant yeah absolutely it's there for the taking so you know all of them are specialists and depending on what area you need expertise in they're there to offer that support it doesn't take long at all so like Lisa said they're going to be joining all these sessions this week and please just take a moment just to fill those in and then they'll come back to you with the appropriate person so thank you thanks Lisa also just want to take the opportunities to talk about the next sessions we've got running this Thursday we're going to be joined by business consultant coach Emma Mills Sheffield so she'll be delving into the world of remote working something that we're all getting used to it's become the norm these days with lots of tips to support your business from onboarding and keeping your teams productive I know Islay asked a question just around different systems that you can use and how do you get the team on board with that I've been in the same situation joining the team and we do have what Lisa called these champions these people who you know we use Monday as some software it was a new system to me but there's particular people within the team that really know it know it's nuances all its little details and stuff so you have those people who can really get the team on board with using it and making sure it's effective it's a brilliant tool I absolutely love Monday it's similar to Trello and that sort of thing so yeah it's a really good one and then this next Tuesday will be joined by the wonderful Lucy Payne so she's going to explore the tools out there for innovating your business so funding and tax benefits and deep data insights something another one of those things we can't get away from we all need to be data experts these days so I really hope you've enjoyed today's session we'll include the link again on how to book onto the next ones but thank you for joining and enjoy the rest of your Tuesday and week make it a productive one thanks a lot, bye bye