Video Hub

It's a minute before your next video call, but you don't remember where the link is. Is it in your calendar? Your email? You could either frantically click through your tabs, digging to find that meeting link, and risk being late—or you could try Google Meet. Meet integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar and Gmail, so anyone with a Google account can easily organize video calls with the click of a button. This certainly simplifies the process of organizing impromptu video calls within your company or among friends. But if you use other apps to book remote meetings with clients, manage projects, or follow up with leads, you may find yourself switching between various tools more than you'd like. Automated workflows send information from one app to another, so you don't have to worry about copying and pasting and can instead focus on the stuff that requires brainpower. See how you can use automation to streamline your Google Meet calls. Our automated workflows are ca...

My editor Deb loves to ruin things. One time she used her Ph.D. in Italian to ruin an entire emoji. The emoji in question is a common Italian hand gesture that, roughly translated, means "what the hell?" This isn't how our team was using it. At some point, we collectively decided to use this emoji to mean "perfection." From what I can gather, people thought it represented kissing your fingertips, the way chefs sometimes do. Dozens of people used the emoji this way until Deb pointed out the (hilarious) discrepancy. And you know what? Some people still use this emoji to mean perfection. They will probably never stop. This is a harmless example, but it does point to the inherent ambiguity of emoji—and communication in general. Symbols only have meaning because of a shared cultural context, which means you can't assume everyone is interpreting emoji the same way. That can lead to some awkwardness—especially in a work context. Once upon a time emoji were ...

In mid-2017, Josh Gross decided he wanted to throw a pizza party for his team. The catch: his company, digital product agency Planetary , is a completely distributed team. So he needed to figure out how to get pizzas to Romania, India, and around the corner in Brooklyn. He wasn't sure if it was possible, but he gave it a try. After half a day of research, he figured out how to place orders in six different countries. And the next day, he and his team had a virtual pizza party. "It was such a collectively entertaining activity because of the novelty of it," he told us. "Sharing that experience even though we were so spread out was a nice change of pace." They did it a couple more times, and eventually, Josh decided to see if other teams might want to join the fun. In July 2019, Planetary launched Pizzatime , a service that would organize virtual pizza parties for distributed teams. They had a few bites, with companies like Animalz, Product Hunt, and Customer.i...

A global pandemic forced Bay Area employers into remote work. Now many employees will keep working from home, even when others return to the office. Several local tech giants, including Facebook, Square, and Twitter, announced that employees can opt to work from home after the stay-at-home orders end. Will people who can live anywhere decide to stay in the area? We wanted to find out, so we surveyed over 1,100 Bay Area residents. About Zapier: Zapier helps businesses grow using the power of automation to connect 2,000+ apps. Founded in 2011, Zapier has always operated as an entirely remote company, and today has 300+ employees working in 30 countries around the world. The majority of Bay Area residents are now working from home at least part-time (64 percent). 34 percent of residents say they're likely to move out of San Francisco in the next two years. If given the option to work remotely, this increases to 46 percent. The top reasons cited for wanting to leave are the cost...

It's tempting to say yes to every work request that comes your way—and that instinct makes sense. You might feel empathy for a coworker who needs your help. You might want to please the people paying your salary. Or you might just come across a project that sounds way more fun than what you're currently working on. But by defaulting to yes, you'll end up deprioritizing important work and focusing on low-impact tasks instead. Or if you end up doing your priority work and the new tasks, you'll just plain burn out. So before agreeing to do something, you need to consider your own priorities and the opportunity cost of saying yes. Easier said than done, of course. That's why we have a trick at Zapier that helps us lean toward no. Say no with snippets Here's how it works: Pick a text expander app . (At Zapier, we use Alfred —we even have shared team snippets.) Decide what text shortcut you'll type when you want to say no (e.g., nopenope ). Write a snippe...

The majority of my social interaction happens on Slack now. That's just the reality of working from home during a lockdown. It feels familiar, in a way—I can't go out at night, my emotions are totally out of control, and instant messaging is the primary tool I have for connecting with other people. I'm back in high school, basically. I think it's time we all lean into that feeling and straight-up pretend that Slack is AIM or MSN. I asked my Zapier coworkers to do exactly that—and they delivered. It felt weirdly like traveling back in time. Status messages were filled with song lyrics. The phrase "a/s/l" came up multiple times. And our business casual profile photos were replaced by scene kids, marching band geeks, and more than a few senior photos. I was shocked (and delighted) by how quickly this all happened. Was it productive? Not at all. Was it nice to have something—anything—to talk about with my coworkers besides These Very Challenging Times We All...

It's become commonplace to digitally ignore each other . And we have so many ways to do it—phone calls, texts, social media. But at work, everyone's favorite way to ignore people is through email. It's way too easy not to respond to emails and hope the person on the other end goes away. But as organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote in the New York Times , it's also just plain rude. Sure, you're probably getting a decent number of spammy requests, and you don't need to respond to those. But when you get an email that does merit a response, just write back. Here's why all of your excuses for not responding are terrible—and how you can make yourself actually respond. There's no good reason to ignore an email Folks have all sorts of excuses for ignoring emails that merit a response, and precisely zero of them are reasonable. Here are the four I hear most often and why they make no sense. 1. I don't know the answer to the sender's question...

Microsoft Teams is a team chat app—essentially Microsoft's answer to Slack. Until recently, it was only offered to companies that paid for the upper tiers of Microsoft 365, but now there's a free version that is, in many ways, more generous than Slack's free version . The problem? Getting started with Microsoft Teams is really confusing. I've been setting up and testing software professionally for over a decade, and I struggled to log in for the first time. So did a few of my colleagues, including a senior engineer. "Free" doesn't mean "consumer-friendly." Microsoft Teams feels like it's built for organizations with a company-wide Microsoft 365 subscription and an IT staff responsible for rolling things out. But if you're using the free version of Teams, it's just you against the app. Here's our guide to setting up the free version of Microsoft Teams, with a breakdown of what is and isn't offered in the free version. Not s...

Our recent work-from-home report showed that two-thirds of folks who were forced to work remotely would prefer to be in the office. But that leaves the remaining one-third who aren't looking forward to coworkers who chew loudly and don't understand the concept of inside voices. If you fall into that group, you might be considering asking your manager if you can continue to work remotely even once everyone else goes back to the office. Some companies, including tech giants like Twitter , are adjusting their work-from-home policies. But others just won't. If your company doesn't plan on letting people continue to work remotely, you'll have to ask. We've gathered some tips from managers, HR folks, and remote employees, on how to gracefully and, hopefully, successfully ask to work from home. 1. Be sure that you want to work remotely If the rest of your colleagues will be going back to the office, it's not a small thing to ask if you can be an exception. So ...

You're doing serious business on your Mac—so much serious business that it doesn't all fit on your screen. You might think you need to buy several large monitors to contain all of your business, and maybe that's true. But a few tweaks can free up a lot of space on your Mac, which just might be enough to accommodate all of the business you need to be doing. For example, some tasks are easier with multiple windows open side-by-side. I like to have a browser window open for research and another application open for taking notes. This isn't easy if you're using a Mac with the default settings—there's not enough room to put two decently sized windows alongside each other. Here's how my screen looks before any adjustments. Who among us doesn't constantly have a browser tab open with the homepage of the company they work for? It's a normal human thing to do. A single Chrome window takes up almost all of my screen space, making it hard to take notes. Th...