Do you have an intense fear of job interviews? You’re definitely not alone, with most people feeling anxious and nervous when placed in interview situations.

While it’s certainly normal to feel nervous before an interview, you don’t want panic attacks or intense fear to get in the way of you getting the job you want. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing that you have the skills, experience and competencies to do the job, but stage fright and nerves get the best of you on the day.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are techniques and strategies you can use that will help you feel more calm, confident and collected before a job interview. And a lot of it comes down to good preparation.

You can learn more about how to prepare for job interviews, and get some really good practical advice and tips, with this excellent 30-minute online course – Interview Skills.

This is a real world, up-to-date explainer course that uses animation to keep things fun. It’s designed for anyone who gets nervous at the thought of attending an interview, to help them feel more confident and deliver their best performance at their next interview.

The Importance of Preparation for Your Interview

Our nerves tend to play up when we are caught unawares, or have to think quickly on our feet. When you’ve already played over possible questions and scenarios in your head, you’ll be more able to respond in a calm and collected way.

As the course trainer says, “the preparation for your interview should start the minute that you find out your application has been successful.”

Scope out your prospective employer’s website in detail

Check out their social media feeds to see how they engage with customers

Learn about their values and corporate social responsibility

Have they won any awards or launched new products or services?

Can you identify what makes them stand out from the competition and why this makes you want to work for them?

“Find out more about the company you’re going to visit, make sure that you are confident and calm before you get there … know what you are going to say about your abilities and achievements.”

All of these things are important parts of your preparation.

Top Tips to Improve Your Interview Technique


The course also provides a section on top tips for improving your interview skills.

As they say, often it’s the little things that can make a big difference – and this is certainly the case with job interviews. You’ll learn about the importance of non-verbal communication, body language and posture. And certain things you should never say in interviews.

Interviews often end with the interviewer asking if you have any questions for them – and this can really trip some people up! You don’t want to get through all your answers unscathed, then unravel in the face of this question. This course will help you prepare for that.

You also need to always make sure you read the interview invitation or email carefully. Check to see if they’ve asked you to bring along certain qualifications or certificate. You might also need to show your driver's licence, passport or working visa documents. And don’t forget to bring extra copies of your job application and CV.

In this section of the course, you’ll even find tips for nailing (the dreaded!) interview presentations, and how to see them as a valuable opportunity to showcase your ability.

Learn the STAR Method for Answering Interview Questions

One of the best things about this online course is its attention to the STAR method. Haven’t heard of this before? Well, you’ll find it helps a lot with answering job interview questions.

The STAR method helps you create well-articulated, clear responses to interview questions that are based on competencies. The method is quite invisible to the listener, coming across as natural, but demonstrating to interviewers how you meet the criteria for each competency.

Situation – a brief description of the situation and context of the story (who, what, where, when, how)

Task – explain the task you had to complete, highlighting any challenges or constraints (e.g. deadlines, costs, other issues)

Action – describe the specific actions you took to complete the task

Result – close with the result of your efforts, including clear stats or figures to quantify the result if possible.

You can create a pre-prepared list of responses that you can use when questioned on possible competencies or skills.

My other favourite take-away from this course? Learning how to turn around the “what’s your biggest weakness?” question. You can make this question work for you. As the course recommends, “turn an area of weakness to your advantage and let the interviewers know that you’re prepared to upskill, with the outcome of bringing new skills to your role and sharing them with the team.” Very solid advice!

Hopefully the tips, tricks and learnings of this course will help you feel more confident and at ease about your next interview. If nerves hit, remember that almost everybody feels nervous about job interviews – and somehow, there is comfort in that!


Why not enroll in the Interview Skills course now?


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On Tuesday August 22nd we ran The eLearning Assist for the first time and had a lot of fun sharing some of our knowledge with our attendees. We know that sometimes it can be hard to attend webinars, so to give everyone that was unable attend a chance to get involved we have put together a recap of the event.

Every episode of The eLearning Assist is run be a different member of the Go1 team so that you can tap into the knowledge within the team covering all aspects of eLearning from creating content, learning principles, improving processes, selling courses, compliance, and expanding your training program. Our inaugural host was learning design expert and account executive in the Go1 Brisbane office, Eduardo Gomes.

In Episode 1, we took a closer look at how to get started with blended learning in your organisation. Eduardo provides some great tips that can help you to plan and execute a successful blended learning program, and well as tapping into the informal learning elements that exist amongst your team.

Our live demo in this episode covered course creation within the Go1 Platform. Eduardo walked us through how to set up a course, add learning items, include in person events as a part of a course, and some best practices when it comes to how you should work through the course creation process.

You can view the full webinar video below to learn more: 


If you have any questions about any of the items covered in this episode please let us know as we'd love to help you out! Also, if there are any topics that you would like to see us cover in our next episode, let us know so we can make sure we include a demo to walk you through everything.

Don't have a Go1 Portal? Sign up for a free portal today!

The eLearning Assist: Episode 1 catchup - blended learning & course creation

Sometimes an employee of your organization may request to access the personal data you have about him or her. Such requests are also known as Subject Access Requests. “Personal data” is not just a figure of speech - it’s also a very important legal term when it comes to corporate policy.

For example, you may think that your name is personal data because it’s information that other people and organizations use to identify you. However, by itself, your name is not always personal data because there can be many people in an organization with the same name. At the same time, a combination of your name and other information that makes you uniquely identifiable, for example, you name, address and telephone number, do become personal data.

The Data Protection Act of 1998 is a law in the UK that deals with the issues of personal data collection, protection, and processing. It defines eight principles that organizations need to understand and adhere to in order to ensure lawful handing of personal information.

How organizations collect and use personal data

Your company starts to collect personal data about the employees from the moment they apply to work for the organization.

Personal data is not limited to obvious personal information such as name, address, or date of birth. It also includes employment history with, employee training, disciplinary actions, external website usage and more. This data can be contained in a variety of media - from print to electronic sources.

According to the Data Protection Act of 1998, employees have the right to know what information their employer collects about them and they also have the right to access the information.

While this may seem easy on the surface, it’s not. For example, during the tenure of an employee, an organization is likely to collect an array of information about external online resources that employees have access to such as website analytics, stock photo websites, news and blogs. This is a TON of information. Access to social media also poses a challenge. The organization may store personal data on central servers, individual computers, USB keys, external hard drives and mobile devices.

Organizations often use personal data to outline a path to accomplishing goals by analyzing personal relationships of their employees with customers, vendors, and employees of other organizations. For example, a sales manager may want to know which sales people have a background and connection in a certain industry before sending them to the industry trade show.

An organization may also use personal data to identify employees that pose risks to the organization or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are the best candidates for promotions.

Some of the recent issues about the privacy of employee data have appeared because of employer health programs. According to an article in Fast Company Magazine called “How Fitbit Became the Next Big Thing In Corporate Wellness,” employers all around the world are providing their employees with activity trackers to promote exercise and healthy lifestyles, which, in turn, decreases the rates of obesity, diabetes and cancer and boosts employee productivity.

In the United States, FitBit’s corporate customers include BP, Bank of America and IBM. The retail giant Target agreed to offer 335,000 Fitbit trackers to the employees as a part of its health program. Barclays offered the trackers to 75,000 employees.

These are just a few examples that come with sensitive privacy and personal data handling issues. For this reason, you want to be sure that you know what the law states when it comes employee data, subject access requests, and processing them properly. 

IBEC, a business and employer association for organizations based in Ireland, stated in an article from 2016 that the Data Protection Commissioner has observed a steady rise in the number of subject access requests in the recent years. Most of them are regarding complaints from individuals that occur after “relationship breakdowns.” If you want to avoid costly lawsuits and inquiries from the government about the ways your organization handles personal data, you need to make sure that you process all subject data requests as required by law.

Secure your business with data access training

For most companies, building a strong project management discipline is a key priority. Strong project teams help companies to reduce risks, cut costs, deliver on time, and produce results – all important things for any business.

As an employee, taking the time to improve your project management skills can be a great way to boost your career, while making yourself more valuable to employers. What’s more, project management skills are not limited to employees working in a project manager position – they are a set of techniques and tools that can be applied to any role, helping you to achieve goals and manage your workload more effectively.

Whether you’re managing small, relatively simple projects or rolling out complex, large-scale initiatives, a little extra study into project management will go a long way. These five online courses will help you understand and use project management tools and techniques, developing your skill set and building your confidence in this area.

The best place to start? With the fundamentals, of course. Project Management Fundamentals takes you right from the start, so it’s great for anyone who is new to the subject or is keen to start their study from scratch.

This online course explains the basics of project management, covering the following project steps:

Establishing project goals and objectives

You’ll receive plenty of practical tips for how to keep your project on track, manage your project team and report on project performance. You’ll also get an introduction to using the Microsoft Project software, which can help you manage the scope, budget and schedule of your project.

Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC) Simplified for Everyone

This next course is great for providing an overarching explanation of the project life cycle. Understanding the PMLC helps to provide a holistic view of project management, which is really useful for anyone who likes to have that ‘bird’s eye’ view of things.

The Project Management Life Cycle course walks you through each phase of the life cycle:

With each phase, you’ll learn what tools you need and how to use them, providing you with the tools to complete a Business Case, Project Plan, Project Schedule, and Implementation Plan. You’ll feel confident in knowing when to engage your team, how to prepare your schedule, how to create a high-level budget versus a low-level project budget, and much more.

This course is a great way to acquire the knowledge you need to manage a project from beginning to end.

Project Management: How to Manage Project Costs?

Want to focus specifically on the money side of project management?

A large part of project management is knowing how to manage costs, for the duration of the project. To be a successful project manager, you definitely need to know how to keep costs under control and not blow your budget. This is important for projects of all sizes and scope!

This online course does just what it says – teaching you How to Manage Project Costs. The course materials will give you a deep understanding of the cost management aspect of projects, teaching you how to:

Estimate costs required to accomplish project activities

Apply the best tools and methods for cost management

You’ll learn all the best practices of project cost management, with plenty of videos and quizzes throughout the eLearning course to keep you engaged and focused.

Project Management: Time Management for Project Managers

Aside from money, what’s the other precious resource that needs to be closely managed? Time.

While it’s important to know how to manage project costs and budgets, you also need to know how to effectively manage time, to ensure your project stays on track and delivers within the required timeframe.

As a project manager, time can be one of the trickiest things to manage, as there are often delays and interruptions coming from areas that are outside of your direct control. With Time Management for Project Managers, you’ll learn everything you need to know to master effective project time management.

As the course description says, we need to be aware of the “Triple Constraints of Project Management: cost, scope, and time. If any one of these constraints is out of balance with the other two, the project is unlikely to succeed.” This online course will show you how to master schedule management, activity duration, project schedules and more.

We’ll leave you with something a bit different – a snapshot of some cool software tools that you can use to manage your projects.

Choosing a project management tool isn’t as easy and straightforward as it sounds. Usually, the only way to find the right software tool for your project is to sign up to a program, give the free trial a shot, then see how the rest of your project team likes using it. Often you get stuck (or financially locked into!) using a program that isn’t really all that great for your needs, but you don’t have the time or money to look elsewhere.

With Project Management Software Previews, the process of choosing project management software is made easier, as it helps you to find the best fit for your needs.

This online course allows you to watch short videos that give you a window into the top-rated, established project management software systems. You’ll be able to see first-hand what major hosted project management software systems are available, and view the layout of each software system.

This way, you can quickly and easily access the information you need to further evaluate the software for your business, and choose one or two to test with your team. You can even show them the video of the one you like first!

Online courses to improve your project management skills

Many organizations only go as far as to comply with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements, without providing specific diversity training.

The scope of financial losses that an organization may incur because of the lack of diversity training is much broader than lawsuits and government investigations. If you have a diverse team and provide no diversity training, you will still be losing money even if you never incur any diversity-related legal expenses.

What Happens When Organizations Neglect the Issue of Diversity

Legal expenses of not training your employees in diversity can be huge. In the 1990s, the top management of Denny’s chose to neglect the discrimination problems that was running rampant within the company. As a result, a class-action lawsuit was filed and Denny’s had to pay tens of millions of dollars. In 1997, Texaco paid $176 million as a part of a class-action lawsuit settlement due to discrimination issues. In 2000, Coca-Cola paid $142.5 million to settle a lawsuit that very well could have been avoided if the proper diversity training had been used.

The definition of the term of diversity is “the state of being diverse.” The definition reflects of the reasons why diversity is such a controversial subject: it is a state of being. It is impossible to “do” diversity or “learn” diversity because a state of being is not a collection of facts or a description of a limited set of behaviors. Teaching something that “is” can only happen as a process and needs to include “doing.”

Diversity training always starts with awareness about the issue and then considering the goals of the organization. It’s also about understanding the various federal and state laws about discrimination that exist. In order to truly have a bulletproof diversity training program, the executive leadership and management teams need to be working toward the same training benchmarks.

Diversity awareness is a good place to start, but this is merely “square one.” Employees that are simply aware of the subject often lack the practical skills and guidance that they need to apply the diversity initiatives effectively. That’s why you need a clear and concise roadmap that takes your team from point A to point B.

While the issue of diversity training is relatively new, it’s based on very fundamental concepts about human psychology and the way that people behave. Effective diversity training is based on principles that psychologists and sociologists have known for many years, and one of the obvious and fundamental principles of human psychology is that people like to deal with people whom they understand and like.

Many diversity conflicts arise when individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities haven’t been given the opportunity to learn about each other. This lack of understanding can lead to conflicts and obstacles that can hold your organization back. As we mentioned before, it can also lead to very serious and costly compliance and legal problems.

Effective diversity training creates a new neutral space, a place where interactions between members of a certain group of people happen based on the individuality of its members and not based on their identity as a part of some other group.

When this happens, your team members can develop new relationships, create new connections, and communicate in a way that respects and explores everyone’s personal values.

Corporate practices that accomplish these goals can be formal or informal. They can occur at work or after-work. For example, common participation in sports is one of the ways that you can bring people together. Ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries, beliefs and practices have no impact on your ability to throw a football or go bowling, and so it goes with corporate initiatives as well.

Another way to illustrate the benefits of diversity is through storytelling. When people share stories about their lives and important events, people from very different backgrounds can see the similarities between the stories and realize that they have more in common than they previously thought.

Diversity training can help your organization in many ways. It can boost the morale and spirit of the teams within the organization, for example. It can also help your team members learn how to solve problems with creative solutions. When you are accustomed to looking at the world from multiple perspectives, you can see things from new and creative angles.

Many exercises in diversity training are based on problem-solving and decision-making, which can help employees apply these strategies to their work initiatives.

At the end of the day, diversity training isn’t just about compliance. It’s also a powerful way to train your teams to view the world from different perspectives and ultimately increase the productivity, efficiency and quality of your organization.

We understand that managing a learning portal can be tough work, so we want to make it as easy as possible for you!In our August update we have some exciting new tools that will streamline the way that you import and assign users to their managers, improve the way you track in person events, make updates on our social learning tools, and more.

Learn more about all of the updates below.

Administrators can now bulk assign users to a manager

When importing your learners into the Go1 Platform, you can now save time by setting up the import to include assigning users to a manager. Simply navigate to your User dashboard, click Add User, and select CSV file. Here you can download a template if you don’t already have one - this will ensure your data is in the correct format, or upload your CSV file. You can then preview your data prior to clicking Import.

Training GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Groups are a great social learning tool in Go1, and now you can further customise the display of your Groups by including a course image. When you are creating a new group, or editing an existing group, you will now see the Group Image option where you can add the image of your choice to represent your group.

Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Manually record a learning event or course completion

With the introduction of in-person or live learning events to courses, we have now made it easy for an individuals to record having attended a live event or having passed a course. This provides the user with more flexibility in how they manage their learning. This can be done by going into a users profile, selecting Learning Records, and completing the form as shown below.

Bulk actions added for Assigning assessors

Administrator can edit or delete a learning record

Improvements to Discussion areas for iPad users

User can now upload more than one file in their assessment submissions

Weblink LI's show warnings for site that set 'X-Frame-Option' rather than iFrame

Image and description fields have been removed from the LI popup in edit course

If an Admin clicks add new course, you are taken straight to the edit course page

Sign up for a free trial today and try it out for yourself!

If you have any questions about any of the updates and improvements listed above, please let us know and our Customer Success Team can help you out!

Try our new administrator tools in the Go1 mid August update

There’s no doubt that onboarding new employees can become very expensive and time-consuming for your business. Most hiring processes will involve writing job ads, running interviews, carrying out background checks, and organizing training for new hires, keeping HR managers and teams super busy. And pushing budgets.

In fact, according to Deloitte, the average US employer spends about $4000 and 52 days on hiring a new employee. That’s a considerable amount of time and money to invest in bringing new staff on board.

However, because onboarding plays such an important role in any business, it’s not something that you want to neglect or dismiss. Remember, each individual who enters your organization has an impact on your company culture. So you need to know how to deliver successful onboarding programs for your staff, while being careful not to blow your budget.

Sounds tricky, but it can be done! Here’s how to keep onboarding costs down, while still making sure the process is successful for both the employer and their new hires.

With successful onboarding, you’ll be able to reduce your staff turnover rate, saving you money.

Employee turnover is a huge problem in today’s workforce. Approximately 45% of companies estimate their total turnover costs to be more than $25,000 per person. From advertising to interviewing candidates and educating new hires, filling an empty position can add up to an enormous expense.

When you’re investing so much time, effort and money into this process, you want new staff members to stick around. To do this, you need to find the best solution for onboarding and training your staff. The best tech tool to use for this? eLearning.

Using eLearning to reduce onboarding costs

From software solutions to online resources, technology can be your best friend when it comes to reducing onboarding costs.

Using eLearning for onboarding allows you to develop a perfectly customized training program for each individual employee. With the right Learning Management System, you can create short, concise online courses that are tailored to the exact needs of your team members. Because the fact is, not all staff need to know the same skills or the same selection of company policies.

You want your onboarding program to reflect that, with content that covers only the relevant workplace safety, policies and procedures, and HR contacts that new hires need.  Taking onboarding online allows you to do this, keeping staff engaged and focused, while also providing an effective way for managers to monitor and gauge employee performance.

There’ll be no need for expensive training facilities, speakers, or printed materials that require updating – with all your modules, assessments and reports online you’ll save significantly over time.

Include mentoring as part of the onboarding process

Another way to reduce costs is to include mentoring in your employee onboarding process.

Mentoring is an easy way to use existing, internal resources, rather than spending money on external training consultants or programs. Pairing new employees with veteran employees in on-the-job mentoring, costs you nothing, while also working to reinforce a supportive and welcoming environment for new employees. It also allows new hires to receive informal feedback from someone who has actually been in the role, which can be invaluable for professional development.

Mentoring also has benefits for the veteran employee doing the mentoring. In fact, you might like to read our previous article on the many benefits of mentoring for employees – they include increased knowledge sharing, improved skill sets and the opportunity for constructive feedback and support.

In this way, mentoring relationships will not only save your company money, they also help contribute to a more collaborative, trusting and positive culture for all staff in your organization.

Yoav Vilner, co-founder of Ranky startup marketing agency, agrees that many big companies are using mentoring for onboarding, as “an easy and cost-effective way to train a new hire in the everyday roles and responsibilities of their new job. Moreover, the new hire has someone to turn to besides a supervisor for real advice, honest conversation and encouragement in their new role.”

Keen to read more about onboarding? Check out these two earlier articles on:

Why a Good Employee Onboarding Program will Reduce Staff Turnover

Using Online Learning to Reduce Onboarding Costs

How to keep onboarding costs down without cutting corners

We all love life’s little luxuries, don’t we?

But times change, and what were once luxuries become necessities. That’s the situation today with training for small and medium sized businesses.

Not so long ago, training for SMBs was a luxury that could not be afforded. Small businesses often had to spend most of their time simply keeping their heads above water, and dealing with the day-to-day costs of staying in the game. Highly effective training was just not a realistic option.

And then came the internet. This technological miracle seems to have changed every walk of life - and the business world is no exception. Now, thanks to Cloud-Based Learning Management Systems like Go1 Premium, small and medium-sized businesses can access exemplary training resources at affordable prices in ways that would not have been considered possible only 15 years ago.

So what is a Learning Management System? To put it simply, an LMS is a software application that’s used by businesses to deliver educational courses and training programs to their staff in a logical, efficient, and trackable way. The LMS powers training courses to simplify and automate the handling of this centrally important business practice.

So let’s take a look at some of the benefits that using a Learning Management System to implement your training can offer to owners of small to medium-sized businesses.

Light on the pocket but heavy on satisfaction

The most obvious benefit of LMS for training is its cost-effective nature. Unlike training of old where speakers were flown in at often exorbitant costs, LMS is an efficient and value-for-money method of training up your teams.

For SMBs, it’s vitally important to track and predict costs with great accuracy, as budgets are usually tighter than their larger counterparts. The LMS offers the advantage of a set cost, offering the business a transparent price that won’t spiral out of control.

Yet despite the cost benefits for SMBs, the quality of training provided by an LMS is second-to-none. For example, at Go1 we offer comprehensive professional development that covers areas like sales skills, HR, customer service, or leadership, that has been created by experts in their fields who know the ins and outs of their specific area of business development.

The LMS system brings with it years of experience in handling the very specific needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

Connected to the affordability of LMS training is the improved time efficiency in the implementation of said training, a real boon for small and medium-sized businesses.

Commonly, SMBs don’t have a lot of time to waste as they try to make every working hour a productive one. Though training is a major component of a successful organization, it can easily slip by the wayside in favor of more lucrative pursuits while at work.

The beauty of LMS training is that it can be accessed wherever and whenever, meaning that employees don’t have to waste time traveling to a venue or stopping important pieces of work to head off on a training afternoon. Instead, they’re able to access training as and when it’s practical and logical to do so. As training is provided online, employees can train at home or on the go, saving time for themselves and for the business.

With LMS training, time is streamlined for efficiency so that working hours aren’t wasted.

Before training objectives were easily quantified, tracking the progress of trainers was not an easy task. Often, businesses scratched their heads and questioned what training had really done for them.

But by using a Learning Management System to implement training, businesses can now very easily see how their employees are training, what they should be learning, and in which areas they can improve.

Many of the features of the LMS, such as quizzes and tests, allow HR to verify each employee’s understanding of what they’re being taught. For example, our compliance training will teach and test the comprehension of an employee so that a business is assured of the successful mastering of important regulatory practices and legal restraints.

Onboarding of new employees is also improved through automation of the actual onboarding process, which, like training, can be configured and tracked. From this progress tracking, reports can be produced that detail strengths and weaknesses of each trainer to further enhance the potency of the Learning Management System.

LMS providers are businesses too, and at Go1 we understand the need for ongoing support when making a major business change, such as the application of a new training system.

That’s why one foundation of our organization is in offering ongoing support. We don’t “set it and forget it”; instead we’re with the SMB every step of the way – from planning, to implementation, to review and assessment.

With hundreds of courses that are ready off the shelf, the LMS can provide complete coverage for every aspect of business organization, which can be customized simply and quickly to best fit the needs of your SMB.

LMS training for small and medium businesses is now a formidable and competitive alternative for the training and professional development of your organization. The time to reap its benefits has never been better.


How to provide training for small businesses

As online courses are continuing to grow in popularity across the world it’s now easier than ever to create and sell your own courses. When you are a subject matter of a subject, creating a course is easy. You pull together content, and there are many tools available to quickly and easily build your course online.

This webinar has been postponed, we will run another webinar in the near future

The problem is that once you have published your course, the real work begins; you need to get people to purchase and enroll to start generating a return on your time and effort.

Getting started with selling courses online can be challenging, especially for those who have not had any digital marketing experience - which is generally the majority of course creators.

We are excited to present this webinar with Scott Cooper, VP of Marketing at Go1, and Matthias Hombauer of howtobecomearockstarphotographer.com. Scott and Matthias will be discussing the techniques used to get started with selling online courses that anyone can apply, and the lessons that Matthias learned as he went through his journey of getting started with online courses, which over time grew into a successful business.

Some of the key topics that will be covered will include:

The session will also include a Q&A, so have your questions ready so that we can help you!

Best hidden secrets to sell more online courses

What you need to know to sell more online courses

Technology was meant to make life easier. When machines automated our daily chores, we’d have more time to sit back and relax. That was the dream, but the reality has turned out a little different…

Today technology tends to take over our lives. We’ve got mobile phones that beep every time we receive a message through any one of our numerous communication platforms, as well as whenever anything happens in our favorite sport, as well as world news…

You get the picture. Instead of allowing us to control our lives more easily through technology, technology has gained the upper hand.

How do we save time through technology use, instead of losing it? Well Zapier might just have the answer.

This handy little tool saves you time to hand you back control of your life so that you can focus on the more important things. But what is Zapier and how do you use it?

As I’ve just mentioned, Zapier is here to help us save time and focus on what is important to us.

To do this, Zapier automates our lives. Our lives with apps, that is. It acts as a puppet master that pulls endless strings to improve communication between each tool and reduce our workload.

And the beauty of this is that you don’t need to know any coding or have any serious technical knowledge. In fact, it’s simple enough to use that anyone can use it.

The idea is this. By creating a “Zap”, users are able to automate tasks that involve two or more applications. The Zap defines the action that an app will take when it is triggered.

Five minutes here and ten minutes there throughout your day can really help to save time and make your working hours much more productive. And we all want that, don’t we?

Let’s delve a little deeper into the fun we can have with Zapier, and how we can best use the app to make our lives easier.

Zapier is very useful when connected to other helpful apps that can be used to manage projects and communicate like Todoist, Asana, and Slack. Because programs like these are often the managerial system between teams, Zapier can connect to them and insert helpful shortcuts that will reduce heavy labor for you.

But Zapier has many, many uses and can be used with workflow apps like Trello, sales and CRM software like Pipedrive, and information gathering apps like Typeform.

If you’d like a full list of the hundreds of different software products that Zapier can work with, then click here.

An enduring problem of working online is the ability to properly communicate – and make sure they are stuck to – deadline dates and times for meetings, calls, or other daily business.

Zapier can help make this much easier. There are a variety of ways and means to help you and one great Zap is for this is the Asana Tasks to Google Calendar Zap. This clever innovation connects deadlines and important dates created in Asana and adds them to Google Calendar. So, for teams who share Google Calendars, each member will receive updates and changes automatically giving you the freedom to set it and forget it, rather than manually reminding each team member.

This means less fretting and chasing down work for you when deadlines are approaching, and team members can always stay informed. This is a perfect tool for making team working that bit easier.

Though this Zap is for Asana Tasks to Google Calendar only, there are a whole host of Zaps to connect with Google.

Zapier can also help to shift files from email to online and cloud storage automatically, helping save precious working hours. Though useful for all teams, if you’re involved in industries like design, or perhaps a freelancer wanting to share timesheets, this Zap will be a particular joy.

With the Gmail to DropBox Zap, emails that are received in a specific Gmail account can be automated so that they are saved in their original format and uploaded to DropBox. Triggers can be specified so that personal information isn’t shared.

This is a really simple way of sharing some vital information with colleagues or friends that grants you freedom from those little irritations that can get in the way of more productive work hours.

Want to keep your mailing lists updated and automated so that you don’t have to go through a boring job yourself? Well there are many, many Zaps for that. There are currently over 100 Zaps to improve the connectivity of MailChimp, one of the leading marketing email services. This means that your email campaigns can stay ahead of the game with an easy, straightforward to use Zap.

For example, one Zap allows users to automatically add the attendees of a given Eventbrite event to your MailChimp list of choice.

So if you keep your eye on various industry events, every time someone registers for the event, they are added to the list of people who will receive your emails connected to their interest. Neat, huh?


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