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This week Jonah shares with you six tools that will make working with your team easier as you expand your magic business.  

#1: Slack

Slack documents your conversations. How many times have you communicated with a freelancer in an email thread that goes on and on and on and on, or have you shared information and you have to go and dig through it. Slack makes that communication a little bit easier, a little bit more searchable, and is a nice place to communicate with your team that is outside of email, outside of Facebook, outside of everything.

With Slack, if you have multiple team members, then they all may have conversations with you and you may have conversations with other individuals, and they may have conversations with each other. For Jonath, that’s been a real lifesaver. Slack has a nice place to put everything to organize your work communications.

#2: Asana

With Asana, you can have a project within a project. You can have tasks and within those tasks you can have sub tasks. You can even have recurring tasks. You’ve got a place to track everything, and it really makes it simple because now you don’t have to dig through email or slack or anything else like that.

You can set goals, you can set deadlines, you can do tons inside of Asana. Jonah uses it completely entirely for free, and it really is a game changer and it gets you out of a long thread to give tasks and into a really easy place to write out tasks, communicate about tasks, add people, and manage people on task.

So if there’s one person doing something, you send it to them. If there’s multiple people and it’s all visible, it’s really effective. Jonah found this probably doubled or tripled the amount of work that he was able to do with his team, just because it was clear and organized and not very hard to learn.

#3: Loom

Loom is a screen or camera recorder that takes that file and immediately puts it in a folder on the web and gives you a link that you can share. It takes so long to record a video on your camera, upload it to a drive, and then send that drive link to someone. Same thing when you send some sort of screen recording, some sort of tutorial that also takes a long time, you have to save to your computer. And it’s usually a ginormous file.

Loom makes the whole process of recording yourself, recording your computer or recording yourself and your computer at the same time really, really easy. 

#4: Google Drive

Google Drive is really important. Once you’re using a team that is going to be sharing files back and forth, you don’t want to just send a file that’s going to disappear. You want the space, and it’s really important to potentially pay Dropbox or Google Drive to get that couple hundred gigs or maybe terabytes of cloud storage to be able to put your photos or videos or projects or anything else like that. If you have to go and upload from your hard drive, photos or videos, every time you have a new project, it’s going to slow you down working with your team.

If you’re working with your team, if you’re writing things together, if you’re creating videos together, creating documents together, graphics together, anything, then you probably want to invest in some sort of cloud storage.

#5: Zoom

Zoom! Zoom is important to have meetings. And, as time goes on, we are going to have teams that are more and more global and it’s nice to be able to share your screen and also see each other and all that good stuff. You know Zoom, you just experienced a pandemic. So you know all about Zoom, but it really is that important.

If you don’t use Zoom, you can use Skype or another platform that you like to use but Zoom did a really good job and Jonah pays for it because he does virtual shows and it’s pretty good for his team. Jonah even pays for the recordings because it’s great to have the recordings of things that you teach to your team and you may want to use it later.

#6: LastPass

You need some sort of password manager and password sharer. Instead of you giving your team members your password to log into your Zoom account to grab a recording, you share with them the LastPass link. They click that link and it fills in the form and they don’t even see what the password is.

So they’re able to use any usernames and passwords that you have and log in from wherever they are. It’s so easy for LastPass. And at a low price point it’s very reasonable to manage all of Jonah’s passwords to make it easy to share with team members.

Upgrade Your Business

Jonah would love to know what software you use with your team. Was there one that he forgot here that you use? Do you think one of the ones that you use is a better version of something that we have here?

And if you are growing your team and want help growing your magic business then send an email to info@discourseandmagic.com with the subject “Upgrade” and Jonah will get you some info about upgrading your magic business. And that might mean working with a team member and adding some software to make managing that team easy.