- What's up guys Peter Moriarty here,
great to have you here.
And this week we are covering how to get your life organized
through getting your files organized.
This is one of my favorite topics
because I'm an absolute addict
at having everything in my life well organized,
and that includes my digital life of course
as well as the rest of my life.
And if you don't know who we are
our business is called It Genius.
We're all about helping small businesses play a bigger game
which means we're all about helping small business owners
achieve the freedom, the time freedom,
the flexibility freedom, and everything that they wanted
to achieve in their business.
Now, we do that through solid technology strategy.
We help businesses go through the different stages
of business growth
and we ensure that they have their technology right
at each stage of the business.
So whether you're already a moderately successful business
and you've got a team and you wanna make sure
that you've got all the foundational technology strategies
right in the business or you're just starting
you wanna learn some of the basics,
or maybe you're a business that is really successful
and you're in scale mode, you've got a larger team
and the business owner is starting
to kinda like get off the tools.
At each of those stages in business,
we can help you to make sure
that your technology strategy is correct,
your personal technology strategy is correct,
and so we can support you to live a better life.
That's what we're all about,
we love tech and we love helping people with tech,
and so very happy to be here with everyone today.
So, I'm gonna take you
through five different sections today guys.
We've got first up why you should trust the cloud.
Next up we're gonna be talking about
why you should be using cloud storage
for your business files.
Then number three I'm gonna share
with you how to actually audit your files
and where they are now,
how to start the big cleanup process.
Number four is if you're still a user of Dropbox,
why you might consider switching to Google Drive
or if you're currently using both,
I'm gonna try and convince you to move everything over
to Google Drive.
And then the last one number five
is that actual migration path
of getting everything into Google Drive
and getting all the final steps
and bits and pieces in there.
Now, a couple of ground rules
for doing a live stream with me
is please make sure you are posting
as many questions as possible into the chat,
`cause I'm gonna have breaks
where I answer all of your questions live.
So make sure you're posting your questions in the chat
and I'll cover all of the questions that you have.
I want this to be as valuable as possible for you
and it's gonna be the most valuable
if you're actually sharing with me the questions
and I'll be able to answer them for you.
Cool, all right.
So let's get into our first section
and that is why to trust the cloud.
Why is it a good idea to trust the cloud?
Now, we find for most businesses,
they end up in a little bit
of a hodgepodge of business systems,
and we call this subscription overwhelm
or subscription fatigue, where you sign up for one thing
and then you sign up for another thing,
and you end up with your stuff everywhere.
Now, unfortunately for most business owners
everywhere also includes their local desktop as well.
So you've got files sitting on your desktop too.
And for many business owners,
you know over the last five years
I think everyone's pretty got used to, you know
using the cloud, right?
Most people are using xero.com for their accounting,
most people are using, you know,
Zoom or Slack or Dropbox
or something that kind of like involves the cloud
to get their business done.
But we find for most business owners
things can feel like a bit of a mess.
They can feel like you've just got too many apps
and too many things to have to worry about.
Now, we like a philosophy of simplicity
and I am a big fan of Tesla motorcars.
And Tesla is a very, very simple machine
in that it only has a very small number of moving parts
when you compare it to a gasoline car
which has a cooling system, an electrical system
and a dry, you know drive trains and axles and gearboxes
and all these other bits and pieces to make it work.
The Tesla is very, very simple.
It could even be criticized for being too simple,
but it is actually just very simple and it works.
There's just less moving parts.
And that's the approach that we take to technology.
Now, what does this have to do
with actually trusting the cloud?
Well, what we find is for most business owners
they don't have a disciplined approach
to where the data goes.
They're not trusting Google or trusting Microsoft
or whatever vendor you're working
with for your cloud storage to place your files
in one safe and secure location.
And I have a horror story to share with you.
Once upon a time I had a laptop
and it had important data on that laptop
and I dropped, it was actually a glass of wine
it wasn't a cup of coffee,
but we couldn't find a stock image for that.
I dropped it on the laptop and it zapped the laptop,
and immediately it was gone.
It was one of the new model MacBooks
where the hard drive was basically like wired
into the logic board,
and there basically wasn't a way for me to get back
any of my data.
And basically any of the data on that machine,
which thankfully was very very little
that had not been synchronized to the cloud
would have, was basically gone.
Now, it was about 1% of my data
that I lost there, but it was, you know,
like a couple of hours work basically.
There was some files on there that I hadn't yet uploaded
or put into my Google Drive.
And for many of us who are, you know,
considering what we do with our machines
and our computer strategy, most of us are still in the space
of having local files sitting on our local computers.
Now, the portability of being able to pick up a device,
log into an account,
for me it happens to be my Google Workspace account,
I can then access all of my data immediately
just from signing in online
because it's all cloud-based, right?
And so, from there I'm able to get my bookmarks,
I'm able to get all my downloads,
I'm able to get access to all the other apps
that I have that I need access to.
And that basically allows me to do all of my work.
And so in the instance where I spilled a glass
of wine on my laptop
and that's not the only computer I've killed or lost,
I ran over one with a car,
I had someone steal one out of a car I've, you know,
accidentally done an update and completely wiped it
and had to start again.
In each of these instances because I was able
to trust the cloud and trust that my data
was being stored safely,
it meant that I was able to just log in with my username
and password and get access to all of my data.
So, I have a test for you.
If I was to take your laptop away from you right now
or take your desktop computer away from you right now,
is there anything that you would miss on there?
Is there anything that is not stored in the cloud right now?
And if there's something there that you're going,
oh yeah I haven't uploaded that just yet?
Well then that's a bit of a gotcha,
it may be time to think about storing that data differently.
So, some of the most important things for me
are not just being able to move between different devices.
Moving between different devices is cool and it's useful,
and I have, you know, a few different laptops
and machines that I work from.
I can sign in and then I just kind of immediately
get access to what I need.
But the most powerful thing about having everything
in the cloud for me
is how it enables collaboration with my team.
And so for our team, we're a distributed company.
We've got over 40 employees on our team,
and we all work from different locations.
Now, some work from home, some work from coworking spaces,
I have a little studio that I work from sometimes,
sometimes I work from the road when I travel
and I have a adventure truck
that I work from completely remotely
in many different remote locations.
And so, we need to be able to get work done
even though we're not in the same physical location.
Now with the COVID pandemic
everyone has been forced to work from home,
but that doesn't mean that everyone's working
from home productively.
Using cloud-based technology
like Google Docs, like Google Drive
and Google's other collaboration tools
means that people can actually co-author
and work on documents live,
and they can co-author and work on them in real time.
Now, this document here that I've actually been authoring
with my team member Angel who's my Marketing Manager,
we've actually been working on this together.
And obviously we just kind of jump on a meeting,
we work on the slide deck together,
and basically from here, we can both work on a file
at the same time.
Now I haven't prepped her for this even though
she is probably listening,
but I'm gonna show you guys what it looks like
when I go into the revision history.
I can open up my version history.
And it's actually gonna show me
if I go back to an earlier version of the slides,
it's gonna show me all the changes that were made
by different people who worked on these.
And I can see changes that I've made,
they're highlighted in purple there, and then changes
that angel made have been highlighted
I think in orange, I'm not sure exactly
where they are, there we go.
So, changes that angel made
have been highlighted there in orange.
But as we're working on the document
we can actually work on this live,
and so there's no saving and attaching
and sending on an email and sending it to someone else.
There's no like, you know, putting it in a folder in Dropbox
and waiting for it to synchronize.
You know, when I get a spreadsheet from my accountant
or from my bookkeeper and we wanna collaborate on something
and have a chat about it, we just open the Google Sheet
and we work on it together at the same time.
And this is a radically different way of working,
`cause if you think about how do we normally do meetings
or how did we do meetings in the non-cloud world?
Well, you know, everyone would show up to the meeting
and, you know, maybe it was in a boardroom
if we were in a physical space together,
and everyone would bring their own little note, pad and pen
or whatever they're using to take their notes,
and they'd sit down and they'd take their own minutes
from the meeting, their own notes of what was said
if they were even taking notes,
and then they would take down their own action items.
But if there's five people in the meeting
you're gonna have five different sets of notes
from that meeting, potentially five different sets
of action items.
And so, working on a collaborative document
and working in real time is a real game changer
for not just the speed at which you work,
but the way which you collaborate
and the way in which you can empower your team
to collaborate as well.
I don't have time to go into detail
on that, we've got plenty of other videos on that.
You can check out our YouTube channel on those.
So curious on your thoughts guys,
share with me your feedback
on working collaboratively and working in the cloud,
and do you trust the cloud?
Are we now at a point where everyone
just kind of like trust the cloud is cool now?
Or do we still have some people
who are in the mindset that I'm safer
if things are on my local computer?
I'm curious about that because, you know,
I've been doing this a long time
and I've seen people's attitudes shift,
but we still have from time to time
someone who says I don't know if I trust Google.
(bright upbeat music)