898 – Make things easier and faster: Tom talks Office Productivity Hacks

Episode 898 – Office Productivity Hacks
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 898 is Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about office hacks. And these aren't Microsoft Office hacks. It's your office hacks. Most of you probably are in home offices or whatever your office is. A lot of these little productivity hacks I'm going to give you that I've been using for years and years and years and really help you out. Hope you didn't miss episode 897. That was how to alienate a Super affiliate. I want you to do the opposite of that and attract super affiliates. So they put you on the map or make your map way bigger. How about that? That was episode 897. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That alienate a super affiliate was 897. Today is 898. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:25] All right, so these are all miscellaneous things. I just sat down and, uh, and wrote down, jotted down some of the things that I've been doing, some of them for many, many years. Some of them only came around recently. It just helps me be more efficient at doing things. And, uh, the first one I'm going to give you will change your freaking life, okay? And that is going to dual monitors.

[00:01:50] When you're working at a desk or something, you know, you can even hook a I think nowadays you can hook your cell phone and your tablet up to a second monitor, a bigger monitor, but it just totally changes your life. In my lower office and my other office, I have four monitors set up. I can be working on a website, uh, have browsers open, have, um, a word document open, and I can pull everything in which way? Uh, easily. And then I could be watching tennis because one of the monitors is also a TV. All right. So I mean, it really changes your life. Just go to dual monitors. I mean, if you go to a pawn shop and pick up a used piece of junk monitor and stick it, you know, Macs and PCs both can handle multiple monitors. It will change your life. I'm telling you, you just work so much faster. All right, next thing is a stand up desk. And I have both a stand up desk and I have what I, a bunch of professors created years ago called an iPlod. And basically I took my treadmill and it had rails on it, and I put a a shelf across it to put my laptop there, and I could watch TV or walk instead of sit. And I, you know, some of you know, I had a really bad back injury recently and was really laid up and I couldn't sit in my easy chair and all that.

[00:03:19] And so I started paying more attention to posture and everything. So I got my I plot out, I didn't have to get it out. It was it's there. But my I've been working for months and months now on, I think probably last six months I've been standing up to work and it's so much better. Losing weight and and moving is better than sitting. They say sitting is the new smoking. So, uh, get yourself a stand up desk. Or if you have a treadmill that's just, uh, close or hanging on it or, you know, put, put it, uh, together and it can really help your health and, uh, posture and aches and pains. Okay. Um, I also have, uh, this is something very recent. Um, I've always known about these things. I just never bothered to do it. But I have an overhead light pole. So what is that? Well, it's a it's a pole that reaches from wall to wall above my podcast station here. And it gets rid of the the upright stands that hold my lights. So you're not tripping over lights all the time. So, um, I forget, uh, there's there's different ones. If you have a smaller room, you don't need to buy the fancy expensive ones from like BMW photo. You can go to Home Depot or order it from Home Depot or Walmart or something.

[00:04:45] There's things that contractors use that expand and hold up plastic in front of doorways to keep, uh, one room clean from dust if they're working and doing, you know, drywall or something inside. So so you can use one of those up to about 12ft wide. Now, the one I got is 16ft. So I had to put a little bit of a brace for it. But this gets all the stands out from your your room. You're not tripping over light stands all the time. Okay. Let's see. Um, uh, Mike. Boom. So some of you've seen me on interviews where I have a thing clipped to the side of my desk, and then the microphone, I can move it around in front of my face. I can stand up with it and everything. I happen to have a rode one, but you can get those starting at 20 bucks and have your microphone where it's not sitting on your desk, where you're going to bump the desk, and that's going to be heard on the microphone. So so that's that. And then you always want to have shock mounts so that any kind of vibration doesn't get through on your good audio. So those are, those are, uh, little audio tips. And I have a mini selfie stick that has tripod feet that fold out. So if you're using it as a selfie stick, you just keep the tripod feet closed and hold on to them like a handle.

[00:06:14] But if you're by yourself and you don't want to have your hands tied up, you can sit this up on something. I know I was down at the beach doing a shoot one time and by myself, and I just sat it up on one of the walls down there and opened the tripod feet. And then I had a tripod there without carrying a gigantic, you know, big tripod with me. So mini selfie stick with tripod feet. Then another thing is a silent fan. A lot of you may not know that they make these fans that for studios that are quiet, but they still get airflow in. You know, a lot of times or I've on many, uh, podcasts, I've told you don't have your air conditioning or heating running to get that noise on your audiobooks and your podcasts and everything, but it can get hot. And, you know, it's 93 degrees today. So I have a silent fan running and keeping me cool while I'm talking to you. And the air conditioning is not on, so that's a silent fan. Another thing is, sitting right here on my desk is a label maker. I can't tell you how how great that's been to have that, because I have so many drawers and stuff all over the place. And, and I opened up six drawers because I know something's in this cabinet, but I can't remember which drawers.

[00:07:37] It seems seems stupid, but you will find all kinds of uses for little handheld label maker. I think it cost 20 bucks. Uh, you know the labels. Is what they get you on, just like inkjet printers. But they last a long time and put some batteries in it and boom, you know, you can really be more efficient because stuff is labeled. It even works on, you know, what wires go, which, you know, I got I got different, um, mixing boards here and interfaces for the computer and everything. And sometimes I forget what's going on so I can label it. So that's a label maker then. Uh, this one's going to probably crack you up a stapler. But here's the thing. I tried so many new staplers and they all really suck. I'm using a staple gun that I had when I had my nightclub days. This was in the 80s, all right. And it's the best stapler. It never messes up. It always doesn't jam everything. But anyway, get yourself a stapler because the paperwork gets flopped all over the place. And this paperless society they keep talking about is, I don't know, I haven't seen it myself. All right, uh, battery checker. You can get these little battery checkers that'll check double A's, triple A's and nine volts and just keep it handy because a lot of us have batteries for a keyboards and miscellaneous devices. The label maker and everything.

[00:09:11] And I got double A batteries laying all over the place, I think. Is that are those good ones or those bad ones? I don't know, I just throw them in the little battery checker and I see if they're, you know, throw them away. And I did move to a lot of rechargeables, which will save you a lot of money in hassle. So, uh, but a little battery checker cost almost nothing. Uh, go on Amazon and have it handy, and you will thank me for it. All right. See how. See why I get the big bucks, folks having all these high, uh, PhD level ideas. Oh, man. Okay, next one is a stylus. Now, I didn't start using these until I started doing TikTok, and my fat fingers were always hitting the wrong buttons, and I was trying to edit. And you have to drag these little things to trim the videos. And. And then I saw somebody online using a stylus and I said, oh man. And it's perfect if you have long nails and things like that. But if you have fat fingers, long nails, or if you just want to be, uh, make a much easier on yourself to, uh, use your cell phone and tablets, get a stylus and they're on Amazon. I have this white one that's more expensive, and it is actually nicer. I mean, it has a battery in it for something. I don't even know why, but.

[00:10:33] Oh, I think you can use it on a, on a tablet to write on, you know, like these artists do. But there's cheap ones. You get three for ten bucks and you're going to lose them before you wear them out. And it'll make you so much easier manipulating your cell phone, especially if you want to do any video or audio editing or anything intricate on there. It's way easier with a stylus. All right. Uh, wall hangings. Uh, this is how you can get better audio in your wherever your office is, home office or even, uh, home office is actually easier to get good audio when you go into a stark, uh, office building, and they have all these stark walls, and the audio bounces off them and everything. But if you're at home and having trouble with echos and not the highest quality audio, get some wall hangings. They're cheap and they can be very decorative and hang them up on your stark walls and, carpet is better, if you have a ceiling. I mean, I've Derek Decker even puts a big umbrella, like a porch umbrella over top of his, his editing place or his, uh, recording place, because you just don't want the audio bouncing all over the place because it comes back into the microphone and makes you sound worse. You don't want to sound worse when you can make easy things to do better.

[00:12:00] Uh, Scotch tape. Uh, you always need it. I'll tell you. The scotch where I use scotch tape the most. When I'm doing an interview, a podcast interview, that's video. I always like to have notes, but it's really obvious that I'm looking at notes if I just put them on my desk or something. So what I do is I take a piece of Scotch tape, I take my bullet points to make sure I want to get covered in the interview. I don't get to all of them because I go for the flow. You know, whatever the interviews, whichever way it's going, I got to be great and take care of the host, you know? So but there's things that a lot of times the coast, the host just lets me roll, like doing a master class or something like that. And I don't want to forget anything. So a lot of times I'll scotch tape my bullet points right up next to the, uh, webcam on this iMac here. Now they can't see it, but I'm looking direct eye contact into the webcam. But the notes are right there, and I don't have to look away. So that's what I use my scotch tape for, plus a million other things. But that's the the really important thing I use it for. Let's see a couple more here. Um, I recently got a full size keyboard. I was using this Mac keyboard that's like, I don't know, two, two inches wide, and my finger's bigger than the whole damn keyboard.

[00:13:31] And so I got sick of that, hunting and pecking when I'm really a fast typist. So I just. I think it was 20 bucks or less, I don't remember. I got ordered a mac, a keyboard for Mac that's USB, plugged it in, and now I have a full size keyboard and I type really fast. So that's, uh, full size keyboard. And then, um, I'm going to say power strip, but everybody knows what a power strip is. You know, you plug in a bunch of things at one time, but I have a power strip that I got from the local music store that smooths out the electricity for all your electronics. I don't really remember what it's called, but it's a it's basically a high falutin power strip that protects your equipment and gives you nice, smooth electricity in it. So that's, uh, power strip. All right. There's a bunch of office hacks for you, make you more efficient, make you sound better, uh, make you look better. Because if you, uh, if you if you scotch tape your notes, you can look directly into the camera and check your batteries and get a good old, you know, try to get a stapler from a yard sale that's, like, 50 years old. All right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.