The blog

For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

”There’s no time”

But when will you find the time to show this to your col­league? And isn’t it dif­fi­cult to doc­u­ment how to do some­thing while try­ing to keep up when some­one shows it to you for the first time?

Show­ing remote­ly in time and space

Late­ly, as I have been build­ing my col­lab­o­ra­tion with my new assis­tant, I have been remind­ed of how easy – and even pleas­ant – it is to show some­one by record­ing a video of me doing it. I make a screen record­ing of me doing what I want to teach, sim­ply put.

I use the app Snag­it, and I think it’s phe­nom­e­nal. For exam­ple, when I need to show my assis­tant how to pre­pare a draft for a blog post, I start the screen record­ing func­tion in Snag­it and turn my micro­phone on. Then, I cre­ate a blog post the way I want it done and explain what I’m doing and why, as if my assis­tant were right beside me.

When I’m done, I click ​‘Stop’, pos­si­bly trim a bit from the begin­ning or end of the video, save it, and send it to my assis­tant. Now, she can watch it all the way through, fast-for­ward and rewind, repeat when need­ed, and have it avail­able when­ev­er she wonders,”how did David want it done?” So easy!

If you haven’t tried teach­ing some­one some­thing using screen record­ing yet, I high­ly rec­om­mend it.

Do this

1. Find out which apps you can and are allowed to use for screen record­ing. For Win­dows 11, Microsoft has its own ​”Snip­ping Tool” app . Atlassian’s Loom (for both Win­dows and MacOS) seems very pop­u­lar now, as does Snag­it , which I use myself.
    
2. Next time a col­league asks how to do some­thing or the next time you’ve fig­ured out how to do some­thing, show your col­league and your future self (who will lat­er won­der how you did it) by mak­ing a screen record­ing. Be sure only to cap­ture what you want to show — not any sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion that may appear in the back­ground of a win­dow or some­thing sim­i­lar.
    
3. Send the video to your col­league or save it where you store oth­er cheat sheets and man­u­als so your col­leagues can learn what you know when it suits them best. 
   
   As you can imag­ine, you need to be care­ful about who has access to the record­ing. Don’t upload it or save it any­where where unau­tho­rized peo­ple can see it. Of course, you should fol­low your data secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy for this file, just like you would for oth­er files and documents.

Quick­ly learned

By spread­ing your knowl­edge to oth­ers through screen record­ing, you can teach oth­ers direct­ly, even if both of you have full cal­en­dars. If many col­leagues need to learn the same thing, you only need to show it once. Plus, it does­n’t take any longer to show than it takes to per­form the task you’re teach­ing, plus a few min­utes of edit­ing time after­ward. Simple!

How do you do it?

Do you also use screen record­ing? If so, what for? What do you usu­al­ly record? Write to me and tell me! I’m sure there are more uses for this sim­pli­fy­ing for­mat than I have thought of so far. I’m curi­ous to hear how you do it.

(Look­ing for more tools to make your day eas­i­er? Learn about the writ­ing app Ulysses that I use for most (if not all) of my writing!)