 Okay, that's all I heard. So as you'll quickly learn, I love tools and apps and all this kind of stuff. To the point my team kind of hates it because I change things quite often. But we're going to dig into a whole bunch of these, so we'll take kind of questions as we go and see where we are. But I'm going to try to cover a lot of specific apps we use, why we like them, ones we don't use, and why we don't like them, but why you may still like them, all that kind of stuff. As was mentioned a minute ago, I work with Green Mellon Media, you've heard about that already. I work back there. Some of you know Allie who didn't make it this weekend, Chantel who was here yesterday. All Things WordPress Meetup up there, go to allthingswordpress.com. It redirects to a more appropriate URL because you're not supposed to use WordPress in it. But it makes it easy to find us and we have a Slack team for that and all kinds of stuff. So check out Meetup there. So to get started, yeah again, I have a lot of slides, I'll go pretty quick. So please stop me if I glaze over something too fast. But before we really dig in, I want to sort of tell you where I'm coming from with this stuff and how I approach these tools and why I choose some over others. A few pieces that are different to me than may be different to you. So to start on the left, we always aim for inbox zero, we're big believers in that. We get tons of email, we keep tons of email, but between my two inboxes I look, I have 375,000 emails in them from the decade and none in the inbox. So we're all about keeping the inbox clean so we know what's going on. And then secondly, we always look to be online, there's lots of great tools to work offline and local development and all that. That's not how we work. We want to be online and make sure we're online and spend the money to make sure we're online. These tools reflect that. A lot of these are, most of these are useless if you don't have a connection. I don't like Verizon, they're paying, they're expensive, they're rude, but they have by far the best coverage so I'm not going to butt off my nose despite my face. And then next, all these tools to the extent possible are platform agnostic. I'm a Windows guy, I have Android, Ashley's on iPhone and Mac and so I want tools that work across all these things. As a result, most are web based, I'm a big Chromebook fan, we have actually three Chromebooks in our house for the kids, a Chrome box for the computer and you know, I want stuff that will just work across whatever we throw at it. There are a few exceptions we'll get to, but most of these should work on anything. And so as a result of that, most Apple apps are out, not that I'm against them per say, but iMessage and some of those just don't work with other people so they don't work with us. The other thing that sort of influences this list is about getting things done. Show of hands if you've read this, yeah good crowd. Yeah, it's a great book, I mean it's decades old, they re-released it, but it's very conceptual on how to get things done and I'm a firm believer that green mill and media would not exist without it. When I started the company I was working full time at a church, I also had some blogs I was running inside and I was trying to start a company and I really had to have my crap together to make it happen and this book really helps with that. His main philosophy for those of you that haven't read it is to have a mind like water, kind of a zen thing. So the thought is you should react the way a steel pond reacts to a stone throwing it. The small pebble it reacts a little bit, the big rock it reacts a lot and we all know people that freak out about everything because they don't know where things are. So have your stuff together, know where things are and you can react appropriately. Sometimes you do need to freak out but sometimes you don't and so this way if you know where everything is you can react as you need to react. We can do a whole topic just on that but great book if you haven't read it I would check it out. Time to break up the various tools into eight logical sections. A lot of these kind of overlap but I've sort of broken it down the best I can. The slides are already in our Slack channel for the group so you can find them there. So again if I go too fast you'll find that and a lot of the slides I have a link at the bottom to find out more about that or to link to a blog post we wrote about it or something where you can get more information and again all those are on the slides you can grab them whenever you need. So let's dig in. Section number one email and tasks I've kind of broken this section with a few of those things. Google apps, how many of you guys use Google apps for your email? A large majority, wholeheartedly recommend it. That or maybe Zoho or Office 365, they're all good ones but I mean for five dollars per account per month I mean it's nothing. Just use that to make it very easy to get things taken care of in there plus the slides and running this through Google Slides. It's been nice I have my slide decks which I'm not a designer so I can say hey Ashley go log in and make my slide look better and she can. It's very nice to have all that stuff shared and again I jump from computer to computer it all just works. We'll talk about some of the other specific Google stuff in a little bit. To hit inbox zero again a little bit I think Google apps helps make that more possible. Merlin Man, are you familiar with Merlin Man? He did a lot of inbox zero kind of stuff five or ten years ago. Based on his Twitter he's kind of crazy now but he had some good videos back in the day and I've got those listed on the GMM.2 Get Inbox Zero as a post I wrote a few years ago that has some of those videos on it. A few things Google does in particular I like there's a feature they're called Send In Archive. Simple little button in Google apps not a big deal but instead of sending an email going back to your inbox selecting it and archiving it takes you five seconds but five seconds at 100 emails a day is 50 hours a year from one little stupid button and they have a lot of little stupid buttons like that that can save a lot of time. Other ways I like this to help me keep my inbox cleaned out is a feature I call auto resurrection. I don't know what they call it but it's really just the way things work where it keeps conversations together. Allie can send me an email say hey load this PDF on the site. I don't know what she's talking about so I'm replying to say what site and archive it keep it out of my mind. When she replies back and says oh put it on Megan's site. Oh great the first email has also come back with a thread so it's all there for me I don't need to keep track of it separately. I can archive it get out of my mind if I trust that she'll get back to me. Now if you don't trust them we'll get back to you need to keep track elsewhere but for people you trust it makes it easy and then the beautiful search in Google apps I don't worry about folders and labels and all that stuff too much because in theory according to Merlin Mann you should be creating dead husks of your email there's something in there you want to get out of it an appointment you put on your calendar a file to put on a site deal with it kill the email archive it just in case but in theory you shouldn't be going back in rummaging through stuff so if you do they have a great search so if you spend again 5 or 10 seconds trying to figure out where to file an email times 100 emails a day it becomes ridiculous. Ashley's been using Google inbox more I've kind of gone back and forth it's sort of Google's other way to get into your Gmail it's worth checking out I've gone back to Gmail for now but it's got some neat things to make your workflow even better so some cool stuff in there if you use Google and again Zoho has their great mail office has theirs but you know that's the way we like to go there. For tasks we use Teamwork.com for a while you can see we switch from Asana to Teamwork so we have a link there with our blog post GMM.2 Asana Teamwork we switched them early last year and that post talks about why ultimately we kind of switched back their interface got a little clunky for us but a few months ago their CEO saw my post and assured me that they're going to be cleaning up their interface soon those two months ago so I don't know what that means but hopefully soon they'll get that taken care of but if you're not familiar with Teamwork it's a lot like base camp but better base camp has some big holes in it that is never could get passed you can't do recurring tasks you can't do some elementary things that are just silly to me so if you like base camp I think you would love Teamwork it's worth checking out. While we're on Teamwork they have a product called Teamwork Desk which is beautiful similar to Zen Desk and Fresh Desk and some of the help desk kind of things what I like about it though is clients don't realize we use it for the most part they can just email us at a special address and it goes into Teamwork Desk and we can deal with it reply back in there and they just get an email back so clients just email us and see emails back but on our end we can track how many times they've emailed us we can direct things to other people a lot of you know we had Susanna who's around somewhere she's in here but all of our Teamwork Desk stuff was going to her and she left for a great new opportunity so I just turned the faucet and pointed to me and now we have Brooke and now we're going to slowly turn and point it to her instead clients don't know or care they can continue to email us get things taken care of it's beautiful and it's essentially free you get I think 150 tickets a month for free and there's like five something ticket after that or something so it's beautiful works out very well and again yeah we just set up a special email address for everyone so like Kathy Druin you know our organizer she loves sweet tea so if she was a client of ours I said alright email sweet tea at Greenmail and Media if you need us to do something if she does that it flows in here goes directly to Brooke or whoever and we can deal with it internally Kathy doesn't need to log in anything or do anything silly she can just email us like she likes to and it's great so even though we left Teamwork we stuck with Teamwork Desk we researched other options saying hey we're not with them let's find a better solution haven't found one this is better than for what we need better than Zen Desk better than Fresh Desk all those and again it's essentially free so it's awesome so Asana which we used before Teamwork and then eventually worked our way back to Asana again last October this is where we keep all our tasks all the stuff we need to do every day we spend a ton of time in here the catch with Asana for us is everything is temporary this is not a filing storage solution for us either we'll talk about those this is just for stuff we need to do get it done get it out there move on with our life I mean stuff's in there for months at a time we get a new project we drop in all their tasks you know for the coming months it's not quick but this is again not a place to go back and look at stuff we stored up they had a huge upgrade last fall I mentioned a lot of that in the post there GMM.2 back to Asana there's like a half hour introduction video that is phenomenal shows you all the great ways it works how to make it work for your team the big thing for us was it was so much easier to add a task in Teamwork if you want to add a task it had to be in a task list before to be in a task list it had to be in a project before you had a project it had to be in a client so once you had it going it was good but if you want to add a quick task it was kind of a pain so with Asana you just add a task boom if you want to put in a project you can you want to sign it somewhere you can be just drop stuff in quick you can paste a notepad file of ten lines of poof they become ten tasks it's easy just to get stuff in get stuff out get on with your life the one catch with Asana that we don't like I was talking this morning with some folks they don't have start dates with Teamwork you can have a start date and an end date so stuff will bubble up we need to start and you'll still know when it's due Asana only has due dates the way we worked around that is we make a lot of our stuff doesn't have due dates per se it's you know we got something let's get it done as soon as we can there's not a date specific so we use the due dates as start dates saying here's we can start on if there is a hard due date we put in the name of the task so upload that PDF March 22nd we know there's a hard date on that for whatever reason but most of them just do it when you can you have a question to a degree yes not not great I think Teamwork is better that Teamwork has Gantt charts and you can do a lot of deeper reporting with this you can go back it'll show you for any project it'll show you the number of title have like a bar chart showing number of tasks open versus completed and you can always go back and see the completed tasks but it is a little tricky to see how many tasks and so-and-so complete between this date and that day you can do searches and count it but not great for that so if Teamwork is much more powerful I think part of the problem is we weren't using that power for us but again depending on your situation Teamwork may be a much better solution so others in this realm would be like OmniFocus and Basecamp and Trello I know a lot of folks use Trello it'd be that kind of thing it'd be deciding between those so there's our tasks files and notes so again we don't store stuff in Asana we store stuff in other places and our big challenge last year was trying to get it all in one place you know we had drop dot Google Docs and Google spreadsheets and Google Drive we had notes in Evernote we had hundreds of gigs worth of stuff in Dropbox it was tough because we want to look for one client we say well we have some stuff in Evernote some notes and we have their documents here but then all their assets are over here and it was kind of silly it's all in Google Drive and we'll talk about that in a minute how we made that work ultimately though what I like about those is just I don't keep anything stored local I jump I use this computer from time to time I have a big desktop at work I have a separate desktop at home I want stuff to just be wherever I am storing it local is just silly and if a computer crashes I don't care I mean it's not good but I get a new one and hook stuff up and it's all there there's you know you can use carbonite some of those which isn't a bad idea but becomes a pain to get stuff back with this is just all there it works out well I do use dual factor authentication make them super secure that is the risk is getting hacked but it works out well so I always like to ask you know think about that if your computer right now just is done it just catches on fire you know how screwed are you hopefully not too bad but there's that so Dropbox again we had everything in Dropbox we can't escape Dropbox a lot of clients still use it and that's fine so we still have pieces in there we mostly moved to Google Drive so we're trying to find a way to have all our real-time notes like in Google Drive and all our files in one place and Dropbox has a new thing called paper which is their real-time editing thing both two big flaws it doesn't have a spreadsheet component or a presentation component yet and it's separate we have here's our paper notes for this client and here's all our files for this client instead of being in one folder but still in two places which is silly I'm sure they'll fix that eventually but so that kind of ruled out Dropbox for being the the end all the all solution we looked at box.com which is really more powerful than I thought I hadn't looked at it a lot until last year and it really does well they have a feature called box notes which are their real-time document editing but again no spreadsheets they do put it in with your files which is what we wanted the big problem with that mostly for Ali's situation she likes to do a lot of things through finder on her Mac and Google Drive puts even if it's an online document it creates a little file on your computer so you can see it in there and click on it it opens in the browser box doesn't they say this is an online document doesn't show up on your computer at all and for her that's kind of a bummer she's in there there's no document you have to go online to see it and again no spreadsheets kind of made it a killer so Google Drive is where we ended up we've poured everything into there again some clients have Dropbox and we're fine with that you know we'll use what we can even move most of our Evernote over which we'll talk about in a bit one thing we love about Drive I didn't even realize with Dropbox if I share a hundred gigs with one of you we both have to pay for the space to cover that with Drive only the owner has to pay for it so I moved everything over I moved 350 gigs over so I pay a bunch for space the rest of my team doesn't count against them they have all those files they can access them doesn't count against their storage caps now it's cheap and he has ten bucks or whatever it's not a big deal but it's kind of nice the one catch with Drive that we had to work through and almost made us keep looking for a solution that probably doesn't exist is you can't selectively sync subfolders so in Drive and Dropbox you can go in again we have hundreds of gigs in there we can't this laptop is great but it's a small small SSD and I can't put everything on it with Dropbox you can go into a subfolders they sync this folder not that one yes this one with Drive it's the root folder yes or no for the whole thing and so for us we had a folder called green melon with all our stuff in it that doesn't work so what we ended up doing is creating like eight root folders for different things that way you can selectively sync different ones in there kind of awkward but once we have it set up and then we have to share it eight times and stuff it's set it worked pretty well so we have like our active clients our archive clients our leads design resources tech resources our stuff just you know a handful of folders for what we need I pretty much need our stuff and our tech resources alleys more in the leads and active stuff for all her in design files so we can sync individually the pieces we need but still get all of it on the web and it works well then inside of a client just an example of kind of how we put things together we have folders for files like the contract has some in-design files to PDFs and just stuff you find in Dropbox inspiration is just a bunch of JPEGs meetings is a bunch of the Google Doc like live docs we can all get in and share them together photos is more JPEGs and then some more loose documents at the bottom that are more the real-time Google Docs so it's all in one place whether it's a virtual document or a JPEG or whatever all in one folder it's beautiful it works out pretty well and again almost almost free it's you know ten bucks a month for me I think that's about it so works really well another one Google keep when you Google keep few few hands this kind of goes the whole opposite direction this is for super quick notes more just for yourself Apple's I notes or whatever they call it is essentially the same thing in that case it works because again this is just for me so as an Android Windows guy it works it does work on Apple stuff but if you're just using it for yourself and you have a MacBook and an iPhone and stuff that works fine too but I love it just for quick notes just a quick oh I need to pick this thing from the store grocery lists or don't forget to add that other piece it's just a way to add quick notes I can add it via voice from the computer again it syncs all around keep.google.com is the site for that totally free and again works on any platform but really we you know it has sharing but we don't share stuff in there too much we have other ways for that then it's kind of handy it syncs to my watch which is kind of neat so there was a shopping list it actually was kind of convenient because instead of having two hands on the phone I could keep pushing the card or holding the bag and check things off you know more fun than useful but it's kind of fun so why not and my wife you know we share our shopping list so she could add things to it while I was there and it would show up you know so kind of fun I like like Google stuff Evernote is next which we don't use nearly as much anymore if you heard me ever talk in the last five years I've loved Evernote it's been great but it's been great so see you later a couple reasons one they're kind of falling apart I know if you follow tech news but their upper staff is going in and out and they're kind of a chaos it's slow to sync compared to anything else you know Google keep is essentially real-time Google Docs is real-time they sync every 15 minutes or whatever it takes a few minutes it's not a big deal but they're not going to fix that anytime soon it's going to be years but really the problem for us now there's no place for it we have all our stuff in Google Drive I have my super quick notes and keep why do I need a third place in between so it's not necessarily bad I'm they're not going out of business anytime soon but just doesn't have a place in our lives anymore so you know it's been been great you know I still have I still have a couple hundred notes and I need to someday go and move elsewhere but just just not anymore so kind of sad but no more no more Evernote one we looked at that was really surprising solid was Microsoft's one note and one drive one note being their Evernote quick note thing and one drive being their Dropbox kind of competitor the Microsoft product so Ali and the other girls like oh well we don't want that but it's actually awesome on Macs from what I heard the Mac app has thousands of reviews all five stars they say it's phenomenal on Mac so the platform agnostic piece works pretty well there didn't quite it's not quite real time it's kind of Google Docs was before Google Wave came along and made it awesome where you can type in every minute or so you'll see it catch up with the other person so it works but if we want to I love Google Docs real time we're actually typing Ali's up here we can bold stuff and other people can jump in doesn't quite do that so that's kind of what killed it for us the one piece I do use though is they have office lens it's a mobile app for scanning stuff really a great mobile scanner you throw a business card at it and it'll automatically crop to the right size and stuff and if you know Diana Nichols she has a card with her text like written sideways on it looks cute and every other scanner just blows up on that and it can read it and still interpret her text is and does a good job so I scan stuff through there keep it and then later process it and add them to LinkedIn or put it in other systems we'll talk about later so it's worth checking out at least but again didn't didn't quite have a permanent home other than the scanner for us physical files I won't get into too much there's different ways to do that but Merlin man we talked about earlier has some great stuff a great philosophy called 43 folders so you can read gmm.to 43 of my folders we're basically have 43 folders in a drawer 12 one for each month and 31 one for each day of the month and it's great for wedding invitations and birthday invitations and concert tickets and all the stuff like you're gonna put somewhere safe so you don't lose it and then like what I put it where I wasn't gonna lose it it all just goes in there I won't get too much in how it works but it's really kind of nice just for anything you have there's already a place for it and every month the month folder comes up you open up put it in specific days put that month at the back everything just lives there again this talks not really about physical folders per se but yeah mm-hmm yeah it is time to so yeah with all these with the sauna and teamwork and all these it is time consuming to move stuff around I kind of enjoy doing that so that helps a little bit and it's also like I've heard a good principal to school move their teachers every few years because it makes them clean out all the junk in the closet and it works well for this too you know we move from teamwork so oh yeah there was this project with these two tasks that they never responded to on let's maybe get back in touch with them or oh this guy actually was in three separate folders so now we can get it so it gives us a chance to clean up but it is a pain so yeah that's worth fast internet helps when you're moving 300 gigs worth of stuff in one shot to but yeah good question there so you have 43 folders if you need a solution for that most you probably have physical folder stuff taken care of so I don't want to spend too long there communication so a lot of our communication we've already covered we talked about email we use email a ton we can't escape that and a sauna has great conversation stuff comments again if you watch the videos for a sauna it's neat you can have conversations for a project in at large and inside of a conversation to create a task right there that filters through and it does neat stuff but beyond those there's certainly other communication we use and two big ones for us one is slack you guys are hopefully a little more familiar with slack now because of this weekend if you want my slides you have to go there to get them I can give them to you other ways too but but it's one of those things I'd heard about for a year so everyone was talking about I didn't get it I didn't understand why we want that we're a team of five we're in the same office why do we want that but I read enough folks that said you'll change your life so alright I'll try it and so I convinced everyone we have to try this and we about after about two weeks it clicked in we can't go back I guess the short way to explain it with slack for those you don't know what it is it's basically a chat room kind of thing in a way that you can add images and links and other things but slack the free version after ten thousand messages it starts pruning off some of the old ones unless you pay for it we're a team of five we blow blew through ten thousand a long time ago and we use it a ton it's pretty awesome yeah in slack there's a channel for every talk so you can go in I'll post it on Twitter we'll have it on WordPress TV there'll be a number of places later we can get them so yeah slack I heard a couple weeks ago someone said slack is vapor and I thought that was a good way to handle it again it's not a place to store things and keep them long term it's just for conversations kind of water cooler stuff don't counting it always being there but it's just a great water coolers way to put it and so for ours I won't go through all the channels but just again for the five of us we have 20 different channels we talk about a sauna we talk stuff about our clients that we don't have a place in a sauna for maybe a new client or something we have a general channel where the you know Susanna was doing some coloring books and stuff but it all hot things like a channel for lunch so we can say hey who's bringing their lunch tomorrow we're going out because that was a problem we come in and two people bring their lunch and two thought we're going out and so you know it's important you know things like recipes I'm not in there but they love recipes you know Susanna as you know left us a few weeks ago for a new job and we took out a slack and she's already sad she's lost the recipes channel from the other girl so that's part of the perks of staying with us so that's how it goes she lost out so just yeah lots of things like that I think I don't even have the new one other have a new one called home or office because we're in the office most days but we'll work from home once or twice a week and we've had a few situations where not everyone quite got the message would show up and be by themselves we have a channel just for that like hey we're all coming in tomorrow cool yeah so it's just nice just for all that real-time water cooler stuff if again a web app a windows app a Mac app an Android app an iPhone app just anywhere you want to be it connects and works great the other communication we use a lot of Google Hangouts really the first four years of Green Mellon we were virtual and this was our office Ali and I would spend hours a day and hangouts just working on stuff together from our separate houses we still use a lot just for quick messages in the office it does get a little confusing you know do I put this on Slack or is it a message in Asana or is it a hangout or an email I mean I'll admit things a little hairy there so we're trying to keep it pared down a bit but it is great so we keep it up most of the day and say hey Ashley come here for a second she can wander over instead of me having to yell down the hall you know it's kind of nice for those of you haven't used Hangouts it's kind of iMessage and FaceTime combined you can do quick messages with each other or do a chat or do a big group video chat lots of things all at once where it's better than iMessage again as it works on Windows or Mac or iPhone or Android or anything you want it's wonderful for that let's see moving on next here education or reading so one of our core values we have is education in three different ways one is for our clients we like to train them and you know teach them what's going on one is for others like here and in our meetup and that sort of thing and for ourselves this is for ourselves is how tools we use to keep ourselves educated on top of things big one is Feedly any of you guys use Feedly only a few wow so Google maybe made a good decision so years ago years ago three years ago maybe Google killed Google Reader which is a way to pull in blog feeds on one place and I still miss that because Reader was great and I don't know why they did that Feedly is essentially the same thing you find blogs you like and pull them all into one place and every new post it shows up in one little feed there so you have to go visit all the separate sites to see what's going on with them I have 534 blogs that feed into mine so I have a ton in there I don't recommend that because you have to commit to it to do that many but it's blog about WordPress and blog about SEO and our clients what they're writing in my kids teachers have blogs I get those in there and they all just kind of come in one place I'm sure of those 534 a third of them are probably dead you know don't post it doesn't matter I don't have to go see if they're dead or not if they have a post it comes through if they don't it doesn't it's beautiful so I use Feedly quite a lot again they have a web app good mobile apps for the devices you can start I don't read a lot in it it's more I kind of flip through and save things for later and then kind of go back when I have time and read the post I want to read and share them and do that kind of thing it'd be a good time saver instead of them go check out different sites all the time this let them all come to you yeah correct RSS feeds feed into Feedly which yeah RSS never caught on quite like myself and a lot of others thought it would and based on their hands that use Feedly it's probably accurate but it is kind of handy it is good way if you follow a lot of blogs will send them come to you you can come to your inbox instead and filter to a folder and there's different ways to do it but I like this so works well for me a lot of them end up in pocket anybody use pocket okay there go a few more hands so it's kind of a place to save things you want to check out later does a few neat things to help with that one it gets things out of your inbox out of your Feedly you know save them here to read later but also it cleans them up a lot blog post for the most part once they're in pocket it gets rid of all the junk around the side and gives you the post in the middle which is kind of nice makes just easier reading you can keep all your stuff in there so in theory I read stuff in Feedly star it you know try to read it's out this is a long one I'll throw it in pocket for later to keep Feedly free and then pocket ends up that's where it's full of stuff that I haven't gotten to ever so but when I'm bored some days I'll pop in there a little bit lots of videos and just any any single web page whether it's a blog post or page you can keep in there to check out later and see what's going on and then the other one I thought I'd mention is Kindle I'm sure a lot of you use Kindle's to read on stuff the one thing I thought was neat I discovered a few years ago you can see all the things you've highlighted on the web and go to I think it's yeah go to Kindle dot Amazon dot com and log in and so this is neat if you're reading a book and highlight things especially like the tech book or something you want to execute from you can highlight as you're going through reading and later come back see all the things you highlight okay now I'm gonna go do what he said here and do what he said here and try this thing out here and and go back through and see those things and you can see popular highlights from other people and it's kind of neat to see that stuff later so now when I'm reading a Kindle even though I don't get here often I'll still try to highlight things I want to look at because I know it'll bubble back up later when I get around to it so yeah Kindle dot Amazon dot com for that social media any questions with that section over I know I'm going real fast here but we're getting there we're halfway through maybe social media I'll keep short because there are a zillion tools for social media and that deserves the whole talk in and of itself but I'll show you two that we use fairly often that a lot of you probably do one Hootsuite hands for Hootsuite yeah good number people use Hootsuite great way to schedule posts and read posts and keep up with stuff for those that haven't used it you can just kind of have different columns of stuff feed in here's this Twitter account here and here's this other Twitter account here and here's my Facebook page here and you can do different things coming in and then schedule posts to go out I use tweet deck from time to time to they're kind of scaling that back more and more to kind of a cleaner interface for that I don't have a slide for it's not that important but the other one we use mostly I use is buffer which is kind of nice that's where you can set up times during the day I have like four blocks set up during the day of here's one I want to share stuff and anything I throw in here fills in the next spot so if I'm in a feedly binge going through reading I want to share this people love that and this one too I won't tweet out six things all at once it'll spread them out over time and so I have it set up I can set it up I have the paid version for six bucks a month or something you can add multiple accounts to it so I have my Twitter Green Mills Twitter Green Mills Facebook my Facebook my LinkedIn Green Mills Google Plus and Green Mills LinkedIn so I can say this article is appropriate for it is more personal want to send in my Twitter Facebook it's like a business one maybe to the Facebook group and you know you can choose where to send things out from there Tom this is just easier just to toss stuff in quick and have it scheduled out automatically HootSuite you got a I think you can do more of it now in HootSuite but it's just simpler especially on my phone I can just hit the button four and say yeah put this out to those four go without having to log in and schedule the time for you pre-schedule I have my four blocks or whatever five blocks at 10 a.m. 2 p.m. whatever they are they're always set you know forever and whatever I throw in it just fills the next available slot so HootSuite tomorrow for a schedule this to go out tomorrow morning more carefully playing things this is dump a bunch of stuff in it but then spread it out so it doesn't just overpower which is kind of cool I typically post more just manual I prefer to be a little more authentic and post when I can but sometimes I have a bunch of stuff and I can toss it in there and it's kind of nice you got well I'm not sure on iphone how it works but in in Feeley there's a share button so I hit share and I say I'm gonna share it to a buffer and buffer pops up over my screen I can do it there or you can go and paste it in yeah gotcha yeah gotcha okay good good thought I hadn't thought about that in a while and I think HootSuite does similar you can say HootSuite schedule this out at the best time you think it should be today and it'll pick based on similar kind of patterns what's going on so yeah good good point next section development and again I don't want to get too far in here because there's a lot of other talks that dig way into development I don't want to but that's part of what we do so I thought I'd share some of the tools we use there the first one is kind of a big standout filezilla in that it's the one that doesn't work on chrome books and that sort of thing it's a windows and mac application you have to download it's just for ftp so if any of you've ever had to ftp files you likely use filezilla it's the most popular one out there the neat thing about it is they have a mobile or what are they called a pocket version a usb version it used to be hot to have application that could run off the usb stick and put it in a computer so I said okay if you can run off that I can put it in dropbox it'll run out of there and then I can run it from any computer and have the same version of filezilla with all my clients already in it instead of having to keep up with five different versions and I don't have this guy added to it yet it's all off of one and even with the mac version the windows version you can it's complicated to set up once you have it you can say hey on the mac version look for the list of clients in dropbox here and so that way we all stay synced up you know if actually add someone to filezilla that we have next time I pull up they're in mine too and I can connect to them instead of us having to keep track of you need to add them and I need to add them and so you can learn more about filezilla filezilla-project.org do be careful installing it's a very well known reputable program but the installer likes to add toolbars and stuff that they shouldn't be doing at this point but so be careful installing but it is great program yeah where they let the separate version you download yeah you can have it run off that but again I took the usb version and put it in dropbox and then just drag the link to my desktops all my all my different desktops so they all run the same version and then again if I add any client to it on any computer they're all saving it in the same place they sync around and stuff so works well one for those of you here friday we talked about a little bit is code anywhere codeanywhere.com for those of you you know it's an IDE it's meant for editing code on a site so if you don't do that then don't worry about that but it's a web based code editor basically the advantage there is you go and it'll edit directly on the server which is dangerous you got to be careful there we have our development servers all online so again doing local development doesn't work well for me because it actually needs to get to it or whatever you know one of the side of town it's all just you know whatever website dot dev you know have set up here this will let us just access it directly and edit files right on it which is very convenient and again because it's web based we all use one login so if ashley adds someone to it i log in next time that clients in there too i can hop in and change whatever i need and get things done heads version control and does some other neat things in there it's 20 bucks a month or something i haven't looked lately it's relatively cheap i saw them years ago and i was a little scared because you're putting in credentials into the system you don't know but over the last few years they've raised 50 million dollars in funding and i mean they've grown up they're pretty legit now i feel pretty safe about recommending them but certainly proceed at your own risk to some degree there but again this is back to our philosophy of i can't do anything here if i'm not online so i make sure to the extent possible i'm always online that's how we do that for those that like to work offline or other things phpstorm is the most popular id it's when you download for windows or mac and edit stuff on there jetbrains.com slash phpstorm other ones similar so i know a lot of folks still use dream weaver because it is for just editing stuff it's really still pretty easy sublime there's a lot of a lot of text editors out there code anywhere is the one we like but again whatever works for your workflow manage wp we switched you recently and i love them so much i can't even express it so those of you who use their new orion beta that's just about to go out of beta and become their official thing it is amazing we used infinite wp for a while i guess i should back up this is a tool for if you manage a bunch of wordpress sites at once i'd say more than two or three we have a hundred and forty one in there but it can handle any kind of size infinite wp is another one i theme sync you know the backup buddy folks they have one that's pretty good wp remote main wp they're all pretty good uh the big difference with manage wp is particularly orion is their backups we let our our clients host wherever they want to host we recommend where they should go we want it to be in their name and their control which will recommend good host to them but sometimes they pick less than good host and if that's what they really want we'll let them do it backup buddy blows up on those kind of sites i theme sync blows up on it infinite wp blows up on it orion doesn't it works on every site every time i don't know how they do it but um i think the basic idea with them is backup buddy and others they can say it's time for a backup all right ready go go go go go we have 30 seconds before it times out try to get it all in oh didn't make it it crashed again whereas orion and others just kind of meander a little bit kind of go in and grab some files they'll take a little while but they'll back it all up slowly and not kill your site not unlike code guard if you just need backups code guard does a similar kind of thing where they'll ftp and kind of grab stuff and take their time and not not hammer it whereas backup buddy and others they only have the server says there's a timeout limit when you go you better just go and they get it the new backup buddy live stash or stash live i think is similar but i've not played with it much yet but again managed wp orion is awesome pricing starts if you just get one or two sites is like three bucks a month per site when you scale up we have 141 sites and it's like 88 cents per so it's like 125 bucks for those it's the pricing is phenomenal though they're releasing their new pricing model tomorrow so i'm a little nervous about that because their pricing is still inherited if you log in now you still get to their old interface and this is their special beta one you can click to try out pretty soon once they switch over they're going to have new pricing go with it which they promise will be fair and nice and we'll love it but i'm still nervous but we'll see i wouldn't tell them this but i mean if they tripled the price i would still pay for because it is awesome but it does you know the backups are the main thing i like about it but it does plugin updates and core updates and can do other cleanup stuff cleaning revisions can do some basic seo things i mean it does a lot of neat stuff in there all in one place you know we're in there every day kind of massaging it doesn't do it all automatically because i want to see what's going on and i know some plugins you got to be careful about but it certainly saves a ton of time and it's quite awesome so we'll see what tomorrow brings with the new pricing yeah so that's that section so seo the next one search engine optimization some tools we use there google analytics this would be a whole day session i think talking about this we wanted to dive in but i assume most all of you if not all of you use google analytics on your site because it's kind of the place you start for basic tracking stuff um we cover we do full meetups on this once a year so just because it does take a lot of digging in so that's all i'm going to say there if you use it go try it and we can all talk more about it in other sessions raven tools this is kind of like maas kind of a search engine discovery research sort of tool what we like about raven is their pricing is pretty good for 99 bucks a month you can load as many sites into it as you want and well it can connect to google analytics and those kind of things it doesn't have to i can pick any one of your sites is hey let's plug it into raven and it'll go crawl your site and run some stuff without me having access to the site what that means for us is when someone calls a hey we want to meet with you next week we think about redoing our site i can right then plug in their existing site and get some numbers and have some nice reports to show whereas with other tools you need to have access to it or add some tracking code or login to analytics or you know we do all that when we can but that initial run we just drop it in there and go and get some neat stuff back out of it doesn't do everything i want doesn't track individual rankings of keywords and stuff real well but certainly does a lot and again we have heck we never take sites out so probably a hundred sites in there you know just why not leave them in there in case we need them again have all the stats connected to that there maz probably the most popular tool for this kind of thing the difference there is 99 bucks a month gives you five sites which is certainly fair they have very powerful tools nothing against them but you know just i'd rather get more sites in there for less unless it's a deep SEO thing working on we do use them for certain clients that we need to get a lot more done on but not nearly as many but it does rank track rankings and stuff over time a lot of a lot of different tools will do that and they're again regarded as the best even if you don't want to pay for them they have great blogs great videos great resources open site explorer was mentioned yesterday i think jenny talked about that in the SEO thing for looking at back links to a site that's free you can use from them their whiteboard friday videos awesome so they're a great resource even if you don't pay them and if you do pay them they have great tools there too so that's pretty awesome mazlocal is another one we use from them maz.com slash local and this is for local SEO trying to get your naps squared away your name address and phone it will look through dozens of different sites and tell you what's good and what's bad and what needs to be fixed to some extent it'll help fix them for you but a lot of them say hey hey you need to go fix your facebook because it's bad you know they don't have access to it go fix it they'll walk you through some of that give you a score for it the price for that is eighty four dollars per year per location so for one off it's not too bad you know six bucks a month or whatever if you have 20 locations though each one's a separate fee and it can add up a little bit but it does a great job of walking you through that and there are there are other tools for that that I'm totally blanking on right now but that's the one the one we use there does a nice job positionally is more similar to maz another one for tracking rankings clickos has a nice page and probably an affiliate link so i'll throw them out there clickos.com slash positionally where they've written about it i think emory wrote a nice post about how it works and how he uses it there but very again similar to maz where it's more for tracking rankings and simple things there the difference is where maz is 99 bucks a month for five sites these guys are 15 a month for 10 and pricing kind of goes up from there so you throw a lot more sites in it and track more if all you need is the tracking again maz goes deeper and better but this does a very nice job for a very good price so that works out well there moving on our last category business stuff other business tools we use we play with these as much as we play with task management stuff first one that we haven't played within a while google calendar everybody hands for google calendar wow more than i thought so almost everybody love google calendar that's a typical week for mine with all the different counters thrown in i mean that's mine personal in my business one ali's personal in her business one my wife's calendar our daughter's calendar is kind of nice to toggle things on and off i won't get into too much you already use google calendar it's great but i do love love how that works related to that though is one we started using earlier this year late last year called a point lit and so the challenge a lot of you have had is figuring out hey we need to meet what when are you free next week well i'm free on tuesday well how about what are you free there like oh i already promised so and so maybe they can get that time you know we have an issue where we say okay you know we need to meet with a client next week thursday's probably open but oh no i told someone else we had tuesday and thursday so we got to hear back from them first and then we can see if thursday's really open or not it's it's horrible um and this does a good job of of alleviating that what this does is you set up you say here's the times i'm available in general nine third i have nine thirty to five i want to have a little bit for myself nine thirty five monday through friday and then look at my two calendars and ali's two calendars and eliminate all those times and leave us an hour on either side here's what's left so now we know we're open at these times so we say hey client here's here's when we're open click on one you want as soon as they click on it and say their name it reserves it on our calendar temporal and we can get back with them and approve it's good or bad or otherwise it does go further you can set up different time blocks here's a half hour meeting here's an hour meeting here's just mickey whatever but i don't want to get into all that so it's just me and ali together for an hour here's when we're available it works out great yeah yeah with google calendar yeah and it sinks instantly like if i go on it's oh man we have that whole day monday open i bet i want monday morning more free for something else i'll go into google counter just call make one say hey keep this free make the appointment and it says oh they're busy then with something called keep it free or work or whatever like 15 bucks a month something like that i don't remember for sure but it's yeah under 20 a month for it it's you know maybe 10 i don't quite remember i probably should have had more prices handy there but um but it works out great for that kind of stuff um yeah let's see uh sort of CRM stuff so we're looking for you know to manage customer lists and you know where things are in a sales process and all that um we've actually switched out of prosper works now in this uh more of a full marketing automation suite but prosper works is awesome if you just need a good CRM to see here's all my customers here that here's where they're in the buying cycle here's their phone numbers here's how they're connected to companies all that kind of stuff um a big thing this had that we lost in our new system but i love them here was lost reasons it's nice to go back and say of the deals we had in the system actually that we lost why did we lose them what was the big thing and so for us it was lack of features was a big one but it was really just one big client that we didn't get because we couldn't do apps at the time um but we can still look and see okay we lost a lot because we were too expensive we lost some we don't know why some of the competitors some that we declined we didn't want to work with them you know it's kind of nice to be able to go back and see that and then click and say all right what were those jobs do we need to change things we need to offer more features do we need to lower our prices do we need to do something different um so prosperworks.com it's between 19 and one 19 a month per person so we're I think on a middle plane we're like 70 bucks a month for Allie and I both so it was 150 bucks a month but it really was quite good the good folks just didn't do quite enough we're trying to consolidate more things and so got out of there but um I certainly highly recommend them related to that is one called Pi Sync looking for a way to sync a lot of different things together I have I use my green mail and google account a lot and my personal account a lot syncs to my phone and I might add one to one but they're not in the other so this will sync your google accounts together but it also did so it would sync my gmail.com account with my google apps account and also sync my google apps into prosperworks because that way if I added any new client to prosperworks as it sunk through it'd be on my phone um so my philosophy is quickly becoming if someone calls even if it's local I don't know the number I don't answer because I've got to know the number I've got 2,500 people in there because everyone I've ever talked to was in my phone because it all syncs through which makes it nice and because most of the time those local calls are people that have a local number in their their official google representative trying to scam you proud of something so um it works that well so Pi Sync I think it's 15 bucks a month and this is where Ali starts to get upset with me because these are all cheap but we have a lot of them they do add up so you have to kind of pick and choose your battles um and this one's kind of tough now because we don't use prosperworks I just have it for syncing my two and so I need it for that I I got to think through that a little more but it's very slick does a good job has dozens of integrations they just added um HubSpot integration last week you know they integrate lots of your hubs if you HubSpots free CRM you know if it syncs to your google or have your HubSpot sync to your prosperworks or you know sync a lot of things around different ways does a good job with it um another one like that is called full contact fullcontact.com very similar does a nice job the one thing full contact does better is you actually see your contacts on their site with Pi Sync it's doing the work behind the scenes but you don't see your contacts here it's just doing it for you and making it happen full contact says here's all your contacts oh by the way we're syncing all these out to these places you can edit them there if you want so it was kind of neat but it seemed a little buggy to me perhaps I'm not sure I have again I throw a lot of contacts in it so it could just be I had bad data I'm not sure but this work worked pretty well contactually is another business one we no longer use but I wanted to mention because it is great for what it does this is great for helping you remember to follow up with people based on when you followed up with them last so you have to go through all your contacts and put them in buckets which took me days to do years ago and I got it was okay this person is a client this person is a lead this person is a friend this person is kind of a distant friend this one's family you know you set up like six bucks and say okay for my friends make sure I've talked to them in the last three months for my leads make sure I've talked to them in the last two weeks you know you can set up different things and every morning they'll say hey here's what we're thinking you need to reach out to again this is this guy's a lead you have emailed him two weeks like oh yeah they have gone silent let me get back out to him again and it connects to the emails that pulls in your your email from both accounts you can log phone calls with it there's others that do more with actually connecting in there was one I can't remember the name but now that actually you connect to your Verizon or AT&T account we're pulling your call logs there and match them up to contacts and do some things but it was kind of buggy in other ways so that didn't work out but it's just nice it knows theoretically when you've last talked to them say hey you really should reach out to this person again their lead it's been two weeks they've gone quiet you know we try to keep up with that on our own in a sauna and in different things you know we send our proposal we put a little task that follow-up in a week we haven't heard back but it gets busy we don't always do that and this kind of would catch us if we didn't again not using it now this really meant as a full CRM and it was hard to have that and prosper works and it was just and Google and just got to be too much but if you don't have one that could be a good way to go there another one that's right in that 15-20 bucks yeah yeah it was it may have been a little more I think maybe it was like 30 35 but it was reasonable but again it's just a lot of those little things to add up to be quite a lot fresh books we've used this for invoicing for years and years and love it works very well there's a couple things we like one clients can pay via PayPal or Stripe which they can on most invoicing systems now really the features we loved about this are kind of in harvest and in zero and some of the others now we're here mostly because it still works for us and we have years and years worth of data in it not that it's necessarily the best but works very well one thing I like that the others hadn't had for a long time to see when a client viewed an invoice so we can send an invoice out and see if they looked at it and they looked at it again two days later like okay do we need to bug them we know they saw it or we send an invoice out it's been three weeks well they never even looked at it maybe went to their spam you know maybe we can call them to reach out you can respond a little bit different because you know if they've seen the invoice or not which is kind of nice we're considering a more full accounting system we have an accountant that does it but the issue here is we can't get real deep and say hey how much did we spend on this project or pay this contractor you know I think it can do that I haven't gotten into it too much I was talking to Dave Cohen this morning trying to figure that out he spoke last year about these kind of systems but it was a good job for what we need and it's 35 bucks a month or again somewhere in that in that same thing per per user so we pay yeah it's double that if we have different people in it you can log in with the same account but then you don't know who actually sent what and see what's going on there works well yeah not based on viewed or not you can based on whether it's been paid or not so after 30 days it'll after 20 days I think it sends a reminder and then after 30 days it says hey you're late there's a 2% late fee you can automate those out per client which is nice we have some clients we know they pay late but they're consistent so we don't want to be bugging them so we turn that off but not based on viewing which would be kind of cool I don't think it does you know it perhaps it does I don't you know it's a deep system but yeah and then the last one kind of a weird weird program I'll talk about for a minute I have three minutes left so this should work called Anki I discovered this late last year AnkiSRS.net and I have a post about it GM or actually a link to the article I read that got me interested GMM2 Anki article so this is I was always jealous of Kathy Drew because she was so good at remembering people's names and I'm bad at remembering people's names and I discovered after watching she's not good at it she just works at it she'll go through it or meet ups you'll see you just kind of before it starts kind of go back like a little finger just like this all the way through she's like wait a second what's your name again oh yeah and she works hard at it and so this helps me work hard among other things with people's names there was a guy named Peter Wozniak 30 years ago that did some research called Super Memo there's an app today but it's fallen into disregard but it's basically flash card learning but spaced repetition he discovered the best time to re-remember something is right before you forget it but you don't know when you're going to forget it so it's like anti-lock breaks you know they work best right before you start to skid and so they do that for you and so this in theory reminds you of something right before it thinks you were going to forget it and the way it works is kind of neat so if I add again I use people as an example it's one of my decks I have in there I put someone in there and it's okay Tom Wynn okay I got Tom Wynn tomorrow it shows up again Tom Wynn yep I got it I knew that okay the next day it shows up again yep I got it right so then it puts him out like a week and so a week goes by yeah that's Tom and it's okay great now it's three weeks and so over time it spreads out you know someone like Tom I think he's in there I put most everyone in there he probably gets six months I know Tom you know so every six months it'll bubble up and it'll say oh crap what is his name I don't remember it resets it for you the idea being with it's 2,000 cards you only have to do like 11 a day once it starts spreading them out it's not a big deal you can do a lot of neat things but faces are one geography I'm horrible geography I don't know where countries are and I feel dumb about that so people have sets of cards you can download and put in so I have a geography one I put in I look at a couple cards a day do I remember that one still now I forgot it and kind of work through so 20 minutes a day and I know lots of people's names and lots of countries and other things it's kind of cool desktop version is free Android version is free the iOS version is 25 bucks so Apple people have more money I guess I think it's because they had to develop it separate due to the I don't know but yeah Lisa good point yeah I should have put that and we use if you use teamwork desk it has time tracking stuff built in Asana does not so we use one called toggle without an E at the NTO GGL does a good job Tom you have there you go yeah and I don't know I don't think so yeah yeah to put in there oh yes time tracking versus time sheets there's a couple different questions yeah yeah harvest has good time tracking built in yeah pay mo okay cool the harvest we've considered moving to the one thing I don't like harvest can't pull in your bank account stuff and try to do a spend expenses against it but it does have some very solid stuff otherwise yeah we're using what called sharp spring a lot like hub spot but made made for agencies where the pricing model is a little different a little rough around the edges compared to some of the others but really very powerful but yeah working well so far I hadn't had a chance to get that in Google spreadsheet usually yeah just because easy for everyone to hop in and put their stuff and paste links in and yeah we've played with anyone have better thoughts for editorial calendars co-schedule okay yeah I have seen that one I don't remember why we don't use it maybe I just hadn't looked at it enough so yeah it looks good but to thank you for a sec real quick just to show you a bit more on it just a quick example so this is how it looks when you pull up a card so anyone know what country that is see so we all need it yeah so you pull up this card it says hey what country is this the first time you don't know it doesn't show you the answer you say all right show me the answer and say okay it's Ghana and how'd you do you need to do it again it'll show it to you again in a few minutes till you get it at least once you got it right cool I've gotten it right a few times if I say it was hard but I got it 16 days from now and I got it pretty good a month and a half now it was easy so it's almost two months and so you tell it how you do on card so I know Ghana now it was easy so it won't show up again for a month and a half when I'm probably about to forget it again and again in theory it works pretty well to keep that going so AnkiSRS.net for that and their website is a lot of the card decks for things like Bible stuff and math stuff and science terms and geography and all that built in and then if you want to use again my main goal is faces because I'm bad at it compared to Kathy who practices her own way so now I can practice my own way too yeah and there we go so right on time any other questions