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"Find a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life" is nonsense. I love writing. That doesn't mean that writing isn't work. That doesn't mean I'm excited to start every day. And that doesn't mean I don't get burnt out. And, honestly, if anything, loving your job means working more . It's harder to check out at 5:00 p.m. when you actually care, which makes it way too easy to just keep working. The quote should probably be "Find a job you love, and you'll work constantly, neglect your relationships, and also probably have poor hygiene." (Someone please stitch that on a pillow.) It's easy to imagine that remote work will help with work-life balance because you can stop working whenever you want. But there's a flip side: you can start working whenever you want. It turns out people do that, a lot. Bloomberg recently reported that people who started working from home in March are working three hours more per day tha...

Contact forms provide an accessible, user-friendly way to get info from potential clients. They're useful, but if their responses remain stuck in your form submission tool, powerful information can quickly go to waste. Every contact form submission is full of potential and is far more than a few lines of information. It could be: A warm lead that just needs the right messaging to convert A customer who needs support The feedback you need to take your product to the next level If you connect forms to your other apps, you can turn these entries into business growth drivers. Use automation to get the information from your form tool into the places where you connect with customers and plan your work. Make follow-ups instant Some of your biggest sales won't say yes—at least not at first. To keep those leads warm , you can use Zaps—what we call our automated workflows—to instantly follow up, effortlessly update your team, or automatically set up a call. Once you connect yo...

If you run a small business, you're probably trying to tackle a huge amount of tasks with a lean team. But nowadays, a smaller team doesn't mean you have to settle with getting less done. If you use automation, you can streamline processes across all of your departments. That efficiency means you run just as effectively with fewer people. Make important hand-offs seamless If you're working with a small team, you may not have separate departments discretely handling essential interactions with customers and clients. Instead, you might manually pass the baton—or that document to sign—to whichever team member has a few minutes to spare. These kinds of off-the-cuff processes can inevitably lead to lost documents and unhappy clients. Zapier can integrate numerous account management systems, allowing you to make this core set of operational processes nearly hands-off. DocuSign is one of the best ways to securely send, receive, and sign important digital documents. When your c...

Google Meet is now available for free . The app, which is Google's answer to Zoom, offers a tight integration with Google Calendar and real-time captions (complete with a ****ing profanity filter). The change means that free Google users—anyone with a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address—can head to meet.google.com to schedule or start a meeting. Until now, only paying Google customers could create a meeting, although anyone could join one. (Note that some free users may not yet have access, but anyone can sign up to be notified when that changes for their account.) This means Google Meet is looking eerily similar to Hangouts now. Here we'll look at the differences between Meet and Hangouts and then walk through some limitations on the free version of Meet. Confused about Google's (many) applications for chat and video calls? Check out our guide to Google's chat and call services for a quick breakdown. Google Meet vs. Hangouts Google Meet in action Google...

I really love working efficiently. Mostly because working efficiently means spending less time working. And as a technical writer turned marketing wordsmith, my tip for working more efficiently is pretty simple: read the guides of the products you use the most. Yes, they're dry. No, the hours are not billable. But it will only take, at most, half a day, and trust me, it's worth it. Guides come in all shapes, sizes, and recycling bins. If yours falls into the last category, remember that you can find most user guides as PDFs online. And web apps also have user guides: the help center. I unapologetically advocate for reading all the help docs for the apps you use. But I don't need a guide! "Ludicrous! Guides are for people who can't figure things out on their own!" Yes, but not only. As a purely hypothetical experiment, imagine for a second that you've been using the same setting—standard wash—since you bought your washing machine (possibly varying the te...

Growing your business is probably your ultimate goal. But an unfortunate side effect of success is that as your business grows, so does the amount of work. No matter how sophisticated your marketing tools, without automating some of that work, you can find your efforts become fragmented. This makes more work for you and your team, even as you implement tools designed to make things more efficient. Automation can help you turn your advertising, email, social media, and event management tools into a cohesive marketing suite. A robust suite of marketing tools, powered by automation, keeps prospects engaged, even when you're focused on other work. Here's how to set up your own marketing automation. Build an advertising program that runs itself Modern advertising happens across mediums, and each ad can target groups of users , drawing them down funnels based on their interests or demographics. You can't effectively manage ads at this scale manually. Let marketing automation...

"Twitter reacts" is an entire genre of news articles. If you're active on Twitter you've probably been featured in one, whether you realize it or not. A recently-viral tweet pointed out that you can use Google News to find out. It's fun! My co-worker Andrew discovered he was quoted in a Hollywood Reporter article about Left Shark back in 2015. I, meanwhile, was mentioned in a 2016 Dutch language Business Insider language article about the Mac battery indicator , which is extremely on-brand for me. It's neat, but it would be more fun to find out about these mentions when they happen, if only so you could tweet incredulously about it. Happily, Google also makes it easy to get realtime notifications—just head to Google Alerts and search for your Twitter username. By default you'll get an email anytime your Twitter handle shows up in a news article. If you don't want these notifications in your inbox, you can opt to use an RSS feed instead. You ...