Transcription
Are you tired of boring Zoom meetings? What if I told you that there's a secret filter that makes you more beautiful? And there's also a secret AI notetaker that you can use for free to make your meetings so much more productive and more fun?
In this video, I'll go through my top eight tips and tricks that I use in order to make my Zoom meetings more productive and more fun. And trick number four saves me multiple hours per week. Let's get right to it.
All right, stop. The first thing that you got to do is you got to get better lighting and a better microphone. I'm using a simple microphone like this one. It cost me like 30 or 40 bucks, and I'm using a semi-professional lighting setup in order to make the lighting look better in my Zoom calls. Here's the setup that I'm using, and it does wonders. So you should check it out.
So you're probably wondering, how much does it really make a difference? Let me show you right here. All right, so this is how it looks like without the good lighting. And now, this is how it looks like with the lighting. I look much more clear and I sound much better than without my microphone. You don't need to spend millions of dollars here. One good light, one good microphone, and you're off to the races. You'll look so much better than any of your other colleagues. I've left some links in the description, or you can just go on Amazon and check out cheap lighting gear that is also good.
The second tip I'm going to give you is how you can make your camera so much better that you already have in your computer, and this will only take one minute. So ready? This is what you're going to do. You're going to click on the symbol, click on Zoom, click on portrait mode, and you want it to be blurry. And portrait mode. I usually go for something in between, uh, the max and the min. Uh, more to the max means more blurry, and less means less blurry, but in the middle is perfect.
And now, the next thing here, which makes a huge difference, is turning on Studio Light. Once you click on Studio Light, look at this. I already look so much more in center, more in focus. Really, what it does is it makes the outside darker and lightens up the face, especially on this side here.
Trick number three has to do with taking notes and drawing on a whiteboard during a Zoom meeting. If you're ever in a Zoom meeting like this one, you can click on the bottom right side, and you can select notes or whiteboards. So if you click on notes, you can create notes, uh, modified new alt. You can click on this new symbol and start taking notes. And this can be, uh, done anything, and you can share that later with your team, as you can see here. But I'm not going to explain too much how to optimize this because my next tool is even better than this notetaking tool. So I'll share that in a second.
But before we get there, let's talk about whiteboards. Whiteboards are super helpful to collaborate with your team. It's pretty much a mirror board in Zoom. You can draw stuff, you can create system diagrams, um, and you can create text files. And this is pretty much as big or as small as you want, and anyone can collaborate. And you can put stuff on this board together and then share, share it after the meeting or during the meeting with your colleagues.
And the fourth trick is one of my favorites. It has to do with AI notetaking and summarizing off your meetings. I'm using a notetaker called Fathom. Dov video. This is a free notetaking tool that records your meetings and then transcribes it and summarizes it to you. So here's an example of one of these demos. Here's an example of it. In this meeting, you can see here how it records it, and you can see different timestamps. You can ask AI what happened in the meeting. You can get different summaries of the meeting, and you can look at extract action items from this meeting. And it overall works super, super well. You can share the meeting with whomever you'd like, and you can just share simple parts of this video with people in your team or with your clients.
Just a quick disclaimer. I've made a previous video on how much I like this tool, and Fathom reached out to me and asked if, uh, they could sponsor me to include this in a future video, and I gladly said yes because I already love this tool. But just wanted to let you know this is a sponsored segment, but I would have included them anyways.
The next tip will also turbocharge your productivity, and it has to do with shortcuts. Let's go to a call and let's try some shortcuts. If you select Command Shift and A, it mutes your video, as you can see here in the bottom left corner, and it also unmutes it if you want to talk. Command Shift and S will screen share your screen, so you can get in and out of screen shares easily with that shortcut. Let's click on X to get out of it. The next shortcut is Command Shift and V, which will turn your video on and off, and I use that when I want to get off camera for just a second and come back. And there are so many more shortcuts. You can check them all out right here under the shortcuts menu when you click Command and comma. All of these can also be custom set to your liking.
This next trick is actually more of a fun one. So this one has to do with your video capture and your video background. You can set custom video backgrounds by clicking choose, choose virtual background, and you can either blur it, or you can select one of these filters and pictures. You can upload your own pictures, and in this case, I created a custom picture of me being frustrated with Zoom with ChatGPT, and this is a really fun one. Some of my colleagues always laugh at this one.
But the key trick that not many people know is that you can also upload videos. So if you click on this and click add video, let's go to a website and download. If we go to a website, we download a stock image of people working in the background. Then we go back to Zoom. Now click on add virtual background and add video. We can select this video and select it as our virtual background, and now you don't only have a static image, but you can see the people are moving in the background. So it looks like as if I am actually in an office space. I really like this feature.
The seventh trick also has to do with making yourself look more beautiful, and that can be done with video filters. So if you click on this and, uh, click on any of these effects, it puts them over your face, and it can be fun. It can also be unprofessional, but for fun meetings, uh, feel free to try it out. And everyone is like, oh, how did you do that? Like, for example, this one. Let's put that. Yo, I'm the Rainbow Man. And people always ask you, how did you do that? And it's pretty simple. You just click here on choose virtual background and video effects. Let's turn this one off and go to the eighth trick.
And that has to do with custom avatars. Again, for virtual happy hours or for virtual events, just clicking on avatars and selecting an avatar can really make people laugh and wonder what's up because people usually don't see you as a dog or as a giraffe. And it even moves the mouth. See, if I stop talking, it doesn't move. All righty. To turn it off, go back here and click none. Click video filters, none, and come back here. And in order to make my video look good, I usually click on portrait and Studio Light.
And I'm going to end this meeting. Which of these eight videos did you like the best? Let me know in the comments. If you want to learn more productivity tips, I've put together this complete guide which gives you so many tips to be more productive and save many hours per week. So feel free to check it out. If you love this video, I know you will love this video as well. Leave a thumbs up, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.