Helpful hacks and how-tos.

On today’s Up To Speed, we get to peek into an Up To Speed brainstorming meeting, or at least its meta version. Real or not, this brainstorm gives you a lot of useful tips on how to improve your productivity from our resident work hacks guru, Up To Speed producer Chris Schuster.

Tab organizer

You can organize your tabs into groups by right-clicking on the first tab you want to group. Hit “Add Tab to Group” then “New Group,” write your preferred name for the group, select a color if you like and hit enter. From there, just drag any related tabs into that group. This helps when working on a specific project with multiple documents. When you need the documents, just click the group name and when you don’t need them, click it again to collapse all the tabs into one, saving a lot of room at the top of your Chrome browser.

Un-sending a sent email

Regretting an email that has gone out to the world? Here’s where Undo Send comes to the rescue. Just go into your Gmail settings, select “See all settings.” In the middle of the page, you should see “Undo Send”. Just increase the time period to 30 seconds to give yourself some extra time to double or triple check an email before it goes out. When you hit Send on an email, there will now be a little window at the bottom left of the page letting you undo the send. That ticking clock almost magically helps you become a better proofreader.

Granting doc access

Is it a pain to give your colleagues permission to edit a doc? At Up To Speed we use a Google Team Drive. With a simple request form, Chris was able to have a permanent Google Team Drive created that everyone on the Up To Speed team has access to. Any stored file is automatically available to our entire team. That way we don’t have to constantly be sharing permissions. After being added to a Team Drive, you can find it listed under your “Shared drives” in your Google Drive.

The Slack channel for non-slackers

A great way to stay up to date on all of the latest productivity hacks is to follow the-working-tools Slack channel. There’s info about useful tools like Google Chrome extensions that further organize tabs and a simple Verizon Color Palette extension that gives all of Verizon’s brand color codes to ensure your presentation can easily match our brand. Check it out.

Now it’s your turn

Do you know of some handy work hacks? Don’t keep them to yourself! Send them to the Good Mailbox at good@verizon.com and we’ll look to share them at some point in the future.

Until next time, work smarter, not harder!

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