What if I told you that you could prepare for meetings, stay on task in meetings, oh
and collaborate in real-time before, during, and after meetings without ever even leaving
your Google Calendar?
Well, you can with this free Chrome extension.
Hey friends!
I’m Tasia Custode and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips and
app reviews.
Today’s video is made in partnership with what I think is the best Chrome extension
for remote meetings, Shepherd.
I’ve been lucky enough to partner with them for this video, but you all know me, I do
not take partnerships lightly and I can tell you with certainty, that I am obsessed with
the Shepherd Chrome Extension, and I think by the end of this video, you might be too.
So, let’s go.
So first, let’s talk about how to set up Shepherd.
You’re going to download Shepherd for free from the Chrome Web Store.
I’ve got links to both Shepherd’s site and the Chrome Web Store link below.
Next, you’re going to connect your google account to Shepherd.
So, you’ll give access permissions because Shepherd is connected to your Gcal and Google
Meet.
Once you have it set up - I think it took me less than 2 minutes, you’ll tell Shepherd
how you will use it.
This helps taylor Shepherd to your needs and job.
Now I refreshed my Gcal after setting this all up.
But that’s really it - you can begin using Shepherd how you wish.
Shepherd is a google calendar and Google Meet plug-in, essentially.
You can add agendas, take notes, and prepare for upcoming meetings all from the right-hand
panel of your google calendar and Google Meet.
One of the features I like is that everything is integrated nicely.
Shepherd is not a separate thing you need to toggle between.
You can select an event on the calendar, whether it’s a meeting or not, and you’ll be able
to open Shepherd from here and instantly start taking notes.
You can also just open Shepherd by clicking directly on the logo on the right-side panel
if you prefer.
But no matter how you get here, this is really great for meeting prep in order to prepare
all your notes before even starting the meeting.
It can definitely help you stay on track during your meeting, which I’ll tell you more about
a bit later.
But you can also invite others to join Shepherd from here, and invite contacts to collaborate
too.
And any team members you have included in this meeting will appear right here for you
too.
And to be clear, you and your team members have to be using the Shepherd Chrome extension
in order to collaborate like this for meetings.
And speaking of meetings, you can also join your meetings directly from this same right-hand
side panel.
But before we do that, let’s get a little more familiar with this Shepherd panel.
So you and your team can collaborate in real-time under the ‘shared notes’ section.
You can @ mention team members and you can also assign tasks to team members.
Pro tip: if you select the forward-slash key you’ll have a quick options list where you
can at mention someone, add a task, add a table, bullet list, number list, checkbox,
links, quotes, images, GIFs, and so on.
I love a bulleted task list or a checkbox so you and team members can check off their
tasks as they complete them.
You can also head over to the ‘my notes’ section to take your own notes that aren’t
shared with the rest of the team.
This is great if it’s a note that doesn’t really pertain to anyone on the team but is
something you need to remember or follow up on in the project or meeting.
These are notes just for you only.
So the only other way someone else would see them is if you were sharing your screen with
your My Notes tab open.
There’s a tasks tab, which is pretty self-explanatory.
You can add and organize tasks for the team here.
So this is a great little progress-report section where you can organize the tasks based
on status.
Then there’s the private notes section where you can message privately with specific meeting
attendees, and not the entire group.
So you can invite the ones you want in the private chat and that person will get a notification
to join the private chat pertaining to this meeting and you can message privately with
each other.
There’s a previous button on the bottom which I’m going to touch on later because
it’s really helpful during a meeting.
So for now let’s head to the quick add task option at the bottom, where you can add a
task and description, assign the task, and add a due date for the task.
There’s also a quick add template option at the bottom.
So, if you find yourself using the same or similar meeting agendas over and over again,
you can quickly save that as a template to use again, rather than starting from scratch.
But wait, there’s more!
Shepherd also comes with some pre-made templates for you.
So, if you click on templates and then select ‘browse’ you’ll have a list of Shepherd
templates.
Simply select insert to use a template.
Then of course you can just customize the template however you want.
But let’s say you’re making this super organized meeting agenda prior to your meetings,
and you want to share this with someone outside of your organization who’s on your meeting
invite, but doesn’t have Shepherd.
Well, guess what?
You can do that too!
I. know!
So, all you have to do is click on share and you’re going to get a glimpse here of all
the share options which I’ll go over a bit later, but you can choose to add to Google
Calendar Event, select shared notes, and click on ‘add’.
Now, this meeting agenda you’ve created, all these notes in the shared notes section
have been shared directly to the Google Calendar event.
So here we are in the Gcal event and voila, the shared notes are populated right here
directly in the Gcal event for all the attendees to see.
But if you want to get out of that particular meeting and get a broad overview of your notes
and tasks, you can do that too.
At the top, you can switch to the all notes section to get to your dashboard of notes.
These will be all your notes from about a week back up until today’s date.
And remember, you can always access your notes from Gcal at any time.
So, you could go back six months if you wanted to and open your notes from an old calendar
event, as an example.
You could also switch to the all tasks tab to get a quick overview of all action items
in one spot.
This is actually quite well laid out and comprehensive because you get a snapshot of what’s to
do, what’s already in progress, and what tasks have been completed.
If you have a ton of tasks, you can very simply figure out which task belongs to what project.
Select the three-dot menu icon to the right of the task and select ‘go to meeting’
and you’ll be popped over to that meeting where you can get some context as to what
the project or meeting was about and how your that task fits in there.
So now let’s take a look at what Shepherd looks like in action during a meeting.
So, as I mentioned, you can join a Google Meet from your calendar event or right from
the Shepherd panel if you want.
Either way, once you’re in a meeting, you’re going to have the same Shepherd panel toggle
on the right.
If you open that up by clicking on it, out pops that all-familiar right side panel.
It looks the same as it does in your Gcal, but now it’s in your Meet.
And when you’ve got the panel open, your view is adjusted so it doesn’t sit on top
of any attendee's faces or anything, it’s nice and clean to the right.
So here, you can collaborate just as you did before the meeting.
So, remember earlier we talked about using the forward-slash key as a shortcut?
Well, I’ll use that again to bring up another favorite feature of mine - timestamps.
This is really helpful if you’re taking meeting minutes and need to notate something
specific at a certain time in the meeting.
Now you can easily reference back to that.
Now, still in this current meeting tab, you can check out previous notes from previous
meetings.
So, say you have a recurring weekly team meeting, this allows you to review all the previous
meeting notes, without having to leave your Google Meet.
This is great if you want to make sure you’ve accomplished the set goals prior to this meeting
or if you want to ensure you’re staying on track for this meeting.
I swear to you, Shepherd makes collaborating with a team and staying on task, so freakin’
easy.
Like, where have you been my whole life?
Anyway,
once your meeting is complete, you can click on the send button to share to multiple places.
For example, if you work in Gmail or Trello, notion or asana, or you can save your notes
to google docs or salesforce, and so many more places.
It’s really set up for you to use it as you best see fit.
So, if you want to send out this meeting summary via email, you can do that.
If you already use Trello, Shepherd syncs up with Trello automatically, so you’re
not having to duplicate your tasks over there.
Or if you want to share this via Google Docs, go forth and share however your little heart
desires.
Now as I was making this video, the team at Shepherd was a bunch of busy bees putting
the final touches on a couple of new features that somehow make Shepherd even better.
First up, you can now view Shepherd in full screen.
So, if you want to make your side panel bigger, just click on the ‘open Shepherd in full
screen’ option and a new tab will open up for you that has your notes dashboard, your
tasks and of course the current meeting notes in full screen for you.
So this is really great if you’re in an audio call and you want to quickly take notes,
you can pop over to full screen and not worry about not making eye contact with people.
And second, there are now desktop notifications that will notify you of upcoming meetings
and include the meeting links for you, so you never miss a meeting.
You can toggle on the desktop notifications from your settings in Shepherd.
So all of this is great and all and Shepherd is probably the most comprehensive Google
Chrome extension I’ve ever used.
And I’ve used a lot.
But you want to know what makes it even better?
Shepherd is completely free to download!
Ya!
My favorite thing - free!
But seriously, how cool is this extension?
Let me know in the comments below.
So that’s my comprehensive review of what I think is the best Chrome extension for remote
meetings.
Now I want to hear from you.
What do you think of these Shepherd?
Have you used it?
Will you use it?
Do you think it’s as cool as I do?
Let everyone know in the comments below.
As always, thank you so much for watching.
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Thanks for watching, see ya next time.