Efficient Stuff – Doing Things The Hard Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppq_ZeaHIhE Transcript with Timestamps 00:00Hey there, Adam. Here today I wanted to talk about whether or not you should be using Monday.com in 2023, just for some background. I've been using it, I guess for about two years now. I have a whole playlist on Monday.com with a couple of different ways to use it. I would suggest starting there if you're really interested. I do want to do a quick overview. I am a North Carolina attorney. We have a small law firm with two lawyers and five well, five full time staff, one or two part time right now. We use it within our firm for some very specific tasks. My suggestion is, long story short, yes, you should use it if you are a small team. I would not suggest using it if you are just working by yourself. I would also suggest if you are using it to learn how to use the automations. 00:46Otherwise you can probably go with something easier and cheaper that's the real too long didn't watch. I know that's bad for watch time. Stick around so I can show you what's going on, pricing, how I use it, and really a basic understanding of what you want to be doing with this program if you're going to use it. All right, so Monday, it is advertised as basically a project management tool. Task management, project management. They've started to build out more customer relations management type software CRM. They're definitely trying to go for a wide range of uses as opposed to very specific range of uses. Take that as you will. The pricing is actually quite transparent, which is a nice plus compared to a lot of other programs where you have to call them to get an enterprise pricing. The way it works is you have to pay for at least three seats if you want to do premium, which is a whole different range. 01:47There's another video in the playlist below about why I think that's silly. You have to buy a specific number of seats, and then it's a cost per seat. We currently use the ten seat plan, and then we use Pro. We are paying $160 a month, I believe. And you can pay monthly, yearly. Yearly is cheaper. The reason we use Pro is because it allows all of these automations. I'm going to jump into that briefly, but if you're going to use this program for any real good use of it, basically I would suggest expecting to pay for the 16 seat a month, or potentially the ten seat a month plants. So that's the pricing. Pricing pretty in range with other tools of a similar nature. All right, so now let me get into the actual program. You're going to see some sensors and gray out areas because it has client names. 02:43I can't show you that. Okay, so here's the home screen from Monday. You're going to see that it's got workspaces. Each one of these workspaces can be used for different tasks. I'm going to show you the one that we use the most. Quite simply this page by itself the way I've got it set up now is a perfect example of how to use Monday in a very efficient way. In my business we have to do medical records requests which is I do personal injury law. We have to get medical records from providers and this area will be grayed out. This has client names, this has provider names like different hospitals and pharmacies and whatever else. The way this basically works is we send out requests. The medical providers usually ignore it for a while and then we have to say, you'll see initial request at the top, and then we'll scroll down. 03:37You're going to see a first follow up, meaning I've sent it once, they haven't responded, then you're going to see they denied for some reason. They say they don't have records for whatever reason and then there's a second follow up and then eventually if they still won't give us what we're supposed to give us there's a stuck being can't get it for whatever reason. We have one specific person in our organization who handles it. It will slowly work its way down the list and then if you get to all the bottom complete they sit here for a while and then they are archived and disappear. This is a workflow for a very discreet type of tasks and it has a couple of different people who use it, our medical records person and then also the people, other staff members such as our paralegals who will assign them tasks. 04:22The automations are really the key to using Monday. You see some of them are disabled for various reasons but essentially the way these automations will work is when certain conditions are met or when the statuses are changed and requested to followed up to stuff to done, to whatever they will move and they will send emails and notifications and change due dates based upon these automations. The automations really are the key to making this program work correctly. Without automations you might as well just use a piece of paper or a Google calendar or something else to track them. You'll see the second most used board is this deadlines board and we make sure you have it. It's set up to send reminders on certain deadlines on certain items and it will send it to you as an email. We'll send it to you as a message in here. 05:21However you want to set it up, the world is your oyster. Really the best use of this program is for a discrete narrow repeatable processes. I have not found it to be great for using checklists so it's not a great checklist piece of software really. What it is it is a discrete tasks. So you really get into a process. If a process is repeatable, it's the old small firm or I guess it's an MBA maximum. If you do something more than two times it should be written down. If you do it more than ten, then it should be automated to some degree. The process should be automated with policies and procedures. The idea here is we use it for stuff like medical records, for deadlines that are very repeatable and automated in that we want them to be done the same way in the same order every single time. 06:23If you are very process centric then this would be a good program for you. I also have a couple of other use cases off of my playlist. Let me pull that up real quick for you just to give you an idea to some other potential use cases. So I've used it for doing this. Escalating false list is very similar to what I showed you on the medical records. It essentially goes down the list as you do follow ups and then eventually it gets to the point of it being stuck, at which point perhaps the CEO or manager, whoever steps in because they get a notification saying something's really not going right here. Recurring tasks are basically you can set it up to hit done and then it will set the deadline out 30 days and then you have to do it again. The tracking is okay. 07:16You can tell what's overdue on the list just by clicking on the dates and seeing what date if it's passed. It's not the best for that. As far as tracking, if you're like a manager who really wants to see if stuff is overdue, it's possible, but it's not super well built for that. Another one there's my rant on why it's so expensive. Automated emails is another thing you can do. You can have it set up to set an email every 30 days. You can have it follow a set procedure. You can have any basically just to enter the email in there and do it that way. Another useful potential way to use this program. Really again, if you can figure out how to use the automation, which let me show you some of the options. If we go to add new automation, you got lots and lots of options and then there's actually a template. 08:10Here are some of the basic ones. You can change it to different people, change the time periods, you can have it send emails, you can have it create new tasks. There are just a near infinite number of different ways you can structure this and you can create custom columns. Really if you have some computer science background or you are just a very logical data oriented individual, these automations are great. I know that there are people you can consult to help you create automations. There are people in basically the Monday.com marketplace that will help you build stuff for your business. You're getting into a little more expensive and custom usage at that point. Yeah, you can do it if you want to do it that way. I do think that this playlist will get you started. This will show you how to do some very basic stuff and yeah, I think that's a really easy way to do it. 09:11With that being said, should you use Monday in 2023? Yes. You can see I've been using it for a while now. I used it for probably six months before I made some videos on it because I just found it to be so useful. It is not our primary or single task management we also use it's called a case management system specific to lawyers that we use for checklists. Again, this is not a checklist program. It's a processes or workflows type deal. It's good for individual processes that are repeatable. It's not good if you have to it technically has a dependency feature where you can say if this, then that if you complete this task, go to the next. It does have that functionality. I don't find it to be terribly robust and you can't really structure it in such a way that it will be repeatable. 10:06I would say if you're trying to use this for very specific like start to finish and you have a very complicated system or process that requires like a logic tree three or four different choices that have to be made, then not great for that. Very good for a process that has a couple of choices that you can just basically use. That what I was showing you with that status menu. Or if you just need to go to second request, stuck, not working, done on a patient. If you want to just have a couple of different choices, works great for that. If it's like you complete something and then it needs to spit out another choice not so useful for that not my ideal tool for that process. So I hope that this was helpful. I know this was a tiny bit rambly there at the end. 10:58Really what I wanted to say was if you are interested in this program, watch some of my videos. It hasn't changed. It's gotten better. They've cleaned up some of the automations. They've included new features, most of which I don't use, but they do exist. There is some additional functionality that I have not picked up or used because I haven't needed it. The stuff that I showed in the earlier videos in this playlist still exists and I still use. If you watch a couple of those and that seems like functionality to be useful to you, then I think you should check it out. There's a link in the description below to sign up for Monday. If you click on that and you sign up, then it helps me, it helps the channel. So I would definitely appreciate that. If not, let me know if you have any questions about specific use cases. 11:49I definitely am interested in making more videos on Monday at some point, once I get back into the flow of things. I've been making videos on other topics such as Obsidian and a couple of other things. We're using Microsoft Teams now to some degree, which I may do a video like this on that at some point. All right, well, I hope this was useful and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks. Bye.

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