Have you sat in a video meeting in the last twenty four hours? Was it super enthralling? Did you not want it to end? I'm imagining that your answer is probably a big, fat no. Let's face it, most of us are suffering from death by zoom. And despite the fact that the average video meeting goes for forty five minutes, research by Microsoft suggests that brain fatigue sets in at about the thirty minute mark. This is not ideal, especially when our days are filled with back to back video meetings.
So today I want to share with you some tools for making video meetings suck a little bit less. My name is doctor Ramatha Inba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, show about how to help you do your best work. So let's get into my favorite tools for having better video meetings. My favorite app right now for dramatically improving video meetings is mm hm. Yes that's
right spelt mmmm slightly confusing. So mm hmm is a really easy to use version of OBS, which is something that only the total nerds like me will have heard of. So on OBS with a lot of training, you can configure your video screen in a way that you can resize yourself, add things into the background, and do things like show slides while you're in the foreground and the
slides are in the background. It's very cool, but it's very complicated, and personally I have not been able to learn how to use it, not that I've dedicated much time to doing so, but my dad, who is a tech wizard, did, and I think because it was so complex, I was never motivated enough to actually use regularly. But when I discovered m HM, it's basically the idiot's version
of OBS. So why I love it so much. One of my pet hates about doing presentations in virtual meetings or doing virtual keynotes, which I do almost every week, is that the slides end up taking up the whole screen and the human in this case me ends up
being the size of a postage stamp. And when I think about presentations, like you're connecting human to human, and when you can't really see the human that is talking to you and you can only see their slides, you lose a lot of that connection and that empathy and report that comes from doing face to face presentations. So the thing I like most about is that you can have your slides in the background and you can be
in the foreground on the same screen. So it says, if you're just doing a normal presentation and you've got slides on the wall behind you, just like you would in a real life scenario, and look, then there are these other fun things that you can do with m Like there are lots of different virtual backgrounds, some of which are animated, which is kind of fun, although possibly distracting.
You can easily resize yourself, make yourself bigger or smaller, you can reposition yourself on the screen, and there are different visual effects that you can add in and it's really really awesome. So it's something that I'm now planning on using whenever I do virtual keynote presentations, which is about once a week, and I'm also going to use it in meetings where I need to be sharing slides as well and still want to make sure there's that human connection. So check out HM which is mm hmm
dot app. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Okay, something else that I've been loving for doing better virtual presentations in meetings is using a combination of Google slides and integrating that with slide o. So Slider you can find Slider at sli dot do and Google Slides you just google that and slider might be something that you've experienced in conferences, normally in the form of a mobile app where you can vote on poles or do q and eight all from me mobile phone.
And what I found is that Google Slides and Slider integrate really, really well, and the combination creates an awesome way to make sure your presentations are super interactive. So, for example, if you want to integrate poles into a meeting with slider and Google slides, you can actually see the results coming up live on the screen that you're sharing. So I reckon this is really fun, particularly for presentations or larger meetings where you're looking for points of interaction
and engagement. And let's face it, any meeting could do with a little bit more interaction engagement, I think most of the time. So I strongly recommend checking that out. I know I've enjoyed that a lot. Now, a final thing that I'll recommend is really useful for making your virtual backgrounds look great, because let's face it, virtual backgrounds, which so many people use, can look a bit rubbish. If, for example, you have dark hair like I do, and you have a chair that has a high back that
is also dark. Virtual backgrounds don't like this because it makes it hard to distinguish between what's the human and what's the inanimate object or objects in the background that you're trying to disguise with a virtual background. So I found this really cool thing that is a green screen, but not your normal green screen, not one that's going
to take over your entire study. So essentially, if you imagine a big circle about two meters in diameter that literally attaches through velcrob onto the back of your office chair, and if you're sitting close enough to your computer, which you probably are based on how most people position themselves, it actually acts as a green screen, which means there'll be a high contrast between you as the human and the background. So if you're using virtual backgrounds in your meetings,
they're going to come up a whole lot clearer. And to take this a step further, if you're using the m app to share slides or deliver presentations and you use the virtual backgrounds included in that as you should, it means that it looks super clean and professional. So those are three things that I have found to be really,
really brilliant for creating better video meetings and presentations. And you know, specifically when you are presenting slides in a meeting or if you're doing a presentation to a group of people, it makes for an infinitely better experience. That is it for today's show. Now, if you've been loving How I Work and need something else for your podcast fix, you might also enjoy Mum and MEA's podcast Lady Startup Stories.
Each week, Georgia Love, who you might remember from The Bachelorette, sits down with female entrepreneurs to ask how they built their businesses. Georgia was recently joined by Nicole lu the founder of kin Fertility, which is an online service that brings the contraceptive pill to your door.
How call that?
So they talk career pivots, disrupting a very regulated industry, and what it's like being a female founder at twenty five. Take a listen to this excerpt.
I think one of the first main things I would have loved to know and just like be mentally prepared for, was that not everyone is gonna like you. I think growing up, I've always been a people pleaser, and I think, like I've always wanted to like get everyone to love me.
And I think like when you launch something out into the wild, you actually just have to learn to accept that not everyone is going to be your customer or not everyone is going to be the person that needs your brand, especially when we launch the pill, Like no, not everyone actually is even for the pill. But we're not actually trying to sell the pill. We're just trying to so like a way to access it if you
need it. I guess what keeps me going is like seeing the reviews of like the lives were changing, and like how much it's impacting people, And that's what I have to keep focusing on rather than the people who are like will just never actually need this.
You can listen to Ladies Startup Stories with Georgia Love wherever you get your podcasts. So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.