Transcription
During team meeting, your manager asks you, very nicely of course, to please take notes and share the meeting minutes with the rest of the team afterwards in a shared Google Drive folder.
Productivity tip number one: Instead of actually just moving the file into the folder, you can keep it selected, hold down Option, and drag to create a shortcut. Boom! By doing this, you get to keep the original document in your own drive where it's nice and organized, and your teammates, when they make changes in the shortcut, it will actually reflect in the original file. This is much more productive than creating a copy of the meeting notes and sharing that new document, or move the entire file over and risk forgetting where you put it. Also, if the shortcut gets somehow deleted, the original document remains untouched.
Oh, and by the way, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Jeff, and we're all about practical career and productivity tips. So if you're current student or working professional, consider subscribing for more actionable content. In this video, not only do I share nine productivity tips for Google Drive, but I also walk you through common yet frustrating scenarios you probably run into on a daily basis at school or at work. As sad as it sounds, one of my biggest fears is for you to encounter an annoying issue and not be able to find that perfect function or feature that could have helped you solve it in just a few seconds. So together, let's make the productivity gods, Ali, Matt, and Thomas, proud.
Google Drive productivity tip number two: Search your Google Drive straight from your browser's address bar. If you wanted to open a file or document in a hurry, instead of going to Drive, waiting for it to load, and using the search bar here, you can simply press Command T to open up a new tab, start typing in Drive, press Tab, and start searching for the file. If you don't have this enabled by default, you actually want to start by going to your Google Chrome settings, search engine, manage search engines, add Google Drive. In the first field, type in Drive. For the second field, and input this search string: drive.google.com. I'll link this down below, and then you should be good to go.
Pro tip: You can actually do the exact same thing with Google Search and YouTube, and I guess Amazon as well, but I don't know why anyone would ever use that platform when clearly Google Shopping is just such a superior product. What people don't know about Google Shopping, Amazon's number one in the world, does. So don't know about this. If you're enjoying the video so far, feel free to smash that like button, and if not, a gentle triple tap will do as well.
While we're on the topic of search, Google Drive tip and trick number three: Using the search within function to quickly identify the correct file, even if you have multiple ones with the exact same name. For example, you have multiple files named Notes in multiple folders, right? If you're a student, you might have notes for different classes. If you're a working professional, you will have notes, raw data files for different projects and campaigns. So what you can do is, instead of using a search bar here, go to the folder that you know the Notes folder is in, right-click, and click search within this folder. Now you can type the name of the file, and it will only return the file within that folder. So you don't have to open up multiple files to double-check you have the right document.
Staying with the search feature here, this is Google Drive after all. Productivity tip number four: Using advanced search in Google Drive to make up for our failing memory. So there are a lot of times where I don't remember the exact title of a document or file, but I do remember the format: PDF, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and who shared it with me: the product team, the sales team. When that happens, I actually just click on the drop-down arrow here to open up advanced search in Google Drive. Uh, choose the file format I remember to be, uh, photos in this case, the owner, I think I uploaded this one, and make a guess on the title of the document. Embarrassing. I remember it was pretty embarrassing. Oh, that's still there. Yeah, no, I'm not showing you though. Maybe when I hit 100k subscribers.
Google Drive feature number five: Pulling out the text from PDFs and photos. So I'm a product marketer, and I do a lot of market research and competitor analysis. Let's say I come across this, uh, WeChat post by Facebook with some pretty good insights. I take a screenshot and upload it onto my Google Drive. I want to share the insights with my team, but I'm too lazy, I mean, too time-efficient to type it all out. So what I would do is literally right-click, open with Google Docs. Google Drive will help me generate a new document with the original screenshot up top and all the text down below, uh, that I can just simply start editing and send it to my team and pass it off as my own.
The sixth Google Drive function to stay productive at work or at school: Enable offline sync. So I'm pretty surprised this is not enabled by default, but, uh, what you want to do is press T or go to your settings, click on settings, and in this offline section here, click to enable your offline sync. I find this to be a lifesaver when I'm on the road because I don't have access to Wi-Fi, when I'm on the plane or in a car, but I still need to often prepare a pitch deck or updated tricks when I'm traveling. This basically allows me to work completely offline, and everything gets instantaneously updated when I connect back to the internet.
Google Drive tip and trick number seven is three keyboard shortcuts I use the most when I'm working. The first one being the N shortcut, and for Nancy, to rename a folder or file. This comes in handy when I want to organize or reorganize my Google Drive as new projects come in. Instead of right-clicking on a folder and clicking rename here, I'll simply select it and then press N to quickly rename it. If I want this pinned on top, I'll simply, uh, type open bracket zero one, okay, and this jumps to the top.
The second keyboard is actually two combinations. Usually, we're working, uh, with the items view in the center location here, but if I wanted to jump over to the navigation panel here, I can. You type G and N to jump over. Let's say I open the recent files here by pressing Enter. I can type again G and L to jump back over to the middle center section here. I could, uh, move around with the arrow keys, press N to rename a folder, and press Enter to open the file.
The third shortcut is to open the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet itself. Very meta, and I can do that by pressing Command forward slash, and this reminds me of some of the other important, uh, keyboard shortcuts. Let me know down in the comments too if you want videos on Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as well, because they're actually a lot of cool things you can do to increase your productivity, uh, with those tools.
The last two tips are specifically for the Google Drive app on your smartphone. So Google Drive mobile hack number eight: Change the default apps used to open links and files from your phone. Within the Drive app, you can go to settings, default apps, and here you get to choose your default browser, email service provider, maps, navigation, calendar, and this is all up to you. For example, I do know that Apple Maps might work better in some areas than others, so I might have that checked when I travel.
Last but not least, Google Drive productivity tip number nine is to be intentional about the files and folders that you star and therefore have quick access to. Even as a Google Drive power user, I only have two things starred on here. The first being my YouTube videos folder, so I can quickly go in, access, and download the video thumbnails to share on my social media accounts. And the second thing is my workout routine tracker, which I would pull up every time I'm at the gym to track the weights that I'm using. Oh, and this reminds me, uh, deadlift yesterday was, uh, 500 kilograms. 500. Yeah, 500. Nice.
The point here is that I see a lot of people starring everything they think is important but never use. So if you star everything, nothing is starred, right? So first, observe the files and documents you need to use on the go and star those only, right? And if you find yourself not using a starred document for over a week, unstar it. Nothing bad is going to happen. I have a playlist designed to increase your productivity at work right over here. See you on the next video, and in the meantime, have a great one.