Oh no! I'm running late for this meeting and I really want to let the other five participants know that I'm going to arrive late.
But what do I do? Do I pick up my phone and try to send off a text or an email? Do I open up my email client here on my browser? Do I click on the event, hit this email tab and I'm still going to have to write out a message?
What if I could do all of this with just a single click? Well, I've discovered a faster way to do this and so many other tasks with a free extension. For example, all I need to do is select alt+B on my computer and I'm going to select hit Send.
This is going to send a message to the participants of my next meeting, letting them know that I'm running a few minutes late. So what is this cool free extension and how do you use it to save time? Let me show you.
So in my first example, I used a shortcut key on my keyboard to bring up this dialogue. This is Bardeen, a free browser extension which you can use to connect a number of different applications, but more importantly, execute very specific actions.
And no, you don't have to create your own from scratch. It comes with an extensive library of pre-built actions with some of your favorite tools whether it is Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, maybe it's a project management tool like ClickUp, Asana or Trello.
And of course, things like ChatGPT is built right in. So here within my Bardeen dialogue, I have a number of different playbooks which I have created or saved to my account. Now, a playbook within Bardeen is something that you initiate.
So as you saw in my example, I hit send to send an email to all the participants of the next meeting about running late. That's right. You saw that. I didn't even have to select the specific meeting.
It was just going to automatically look at the next upcoming meeting and send an automated message. These are things that I am going to trigger on my own but Bardeen also has autobooks where you can set up schedules if you want certain things to execute on a recurring basis or a recurring time.
So for example, here I have an auto book, which is going to text message me all of my week's meetings on Monday morning, giving me a summary of all of those meetings in advance. And of course, I can edit this to my liking.
Maybe I'd like to receive this every morning. Maybe I'd like to receive it on Sunday. Maybe I only want to receive the next three days meetings. Whatever I like, I can set it up here.
But before we dive into the details, let's take a closer look at some of our options here within Bardeen. Now, one of the easiest ways to access Bardeen is by selecting alt+B on your keyboard, an easy keyboard shortcut which will bring up your dialogue.
But of course you can also click on it here within your extensions, within your browser. And if you don't like this compact view, no problem. We can expand things out so we can see things in more detail.
At the top of the screen, there are three main sections: playbooks, autobooks and the last one is a scraper. Now, if you're not familiar with that term, scraping means when we are taking information from a particular website.
So if you're wanting to collect the contact details or the work history of a number of LinkedIn profiles for example, and then put that into a spreadsheet, this would be an example of how you could use that tool.
You can also use scraping functionality within our autobooks and our playbooks as well. But let's get started with the basics with our playbooks.
Now, while I've already created a number of playbooks here, you're probably going to want to get started with the explore button where they've categorized a number of different actions based on theme such as product development, personal productivity, or meetings or it has also broken it down by various apps.
And here's a little bit of Bardeen magic. If you don't see what you are looking for, don't waste your time browsing through the library. You can just come up here and tell Bardeen exactly what you're looking for and it will build it for you.
So in this example, I'm going to say create a Zoom link for my next calendar event and then add it to the description. So that's fairly detailed. It doesn't have something in the library. I'm going to let the Bardeen AI assistant build it for me.
It's going to analyze what I just wrote and then look at this. It has created this playbook just for me.
That's right. Building your own custom automation can be as simple as texting a friend, but you know what's even better is that Bardeen is smart enough to give you suggestions based on the website or the application that you're currently in.
Here I am within a Google sheet, and if I pull up Bardeen and go to the explore tab, you can see that it's going to give me a number of suggestions specific to Google Sheets.
Maybe I want to get a list of competitors and summaries and SEO keywords from a list of URLs in Google Sheets. And remember, while these are all prebuilt options you can edit any of them or if you choose, you can start from scratch.
So regardless of the different or multiple applications that you have involved and the types of actions that you want to perform, you'll be able to do so right here within Bardeen.
Let's take a quick look at one that I modified not too long ago so I can get valuable feedback from my YouTube videos. So let me set the scene. Here, I am looking at one of my YouTube videos and I noticed that there's 87 comments.
That's an awful lot of comments to go through and there's probably been a lot of new comments added since I published this video two months ago. Well, to make my life that much easier I'm going to use this particular action, this particular playbook, so I can get a summary of all of those comments and see are they negative, are they positive, are they neutral and what other valuable data can I get from this video.
So I'm going to select this and immediately it's going to crawl or scrape through all of those comments on this screen. Now again, you can adjust this to your liking. In this case, I've told it to limit it to just the last 50 comments but I could choose a much larger number if I want to.
This would probably take me roughly 20, maybe 30 minutes for me to go through every single comment, read it and decide what is best. But here it has only taken less than 30 seconds. And now I have a spreadsheet with all of this information, including the sentiment.
So if I sort this from A to Z, I can see that there's a couple of mixed comments. There's a large number of neutral comments and there are quite a few positive comments as well.
And I'm quite pleased that it has not identified any specific negative comments but there's other valuable pieces of information here too. So for example, which of these comments received the most likes? Well, I can sort from that.
I can see when exactly it was published. I can do so much more here. And it took me only a few seconds to pull that information and put it into a Google sheet. So think about other things that you need to accomplish as a part of your work or as a part of your business.
What currently takes you 5, 10, 20 minutes to accomplish that you could set up in Bardeen and accomplish in only a few seconds? Now, I know you may be thinking that editing and action or creating your own maybe difficult but Bardeen keeps it very, very visual so you can understand completely what is going on.
Going back to our first example here, I'm going to say open in builder, and we can visually see what is happening when it's sent that reminder. The first step was to find the next event, then find the email addresses of those participants and then send that email.
And remember, everything here is editable. So if I come here and select the subject, I can change that subject, I can add and copy other people on that email. I can edit this to my heart's content.
And if after sending the email I want to add another action, all I need to do is hit this plus button here so you can tweak or adjust your playbooks or your autobooks as much as you like.
So if you'd like to start adding simple automation that will save you a whole lot of time, be sure to install the Bardeen extension. To do so, just go to Bardeen.ai or click the link in the description down below.
And if you have some favorite automation tips that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
