Boost Your Birth Work Business with These Google Workspace Tips!

As a birth worker, your passion lies in providing exceptional care and support for your clients. Simultaneously, you aim to conserve time and energy for yourself and your business. This is where Google Workspace comes into play. This suite of cloud-based apps enables you to work from anywhere, on any device, with anyone. It allows you to create, store, share, and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and more. Likely, you're already using Google Workspace to communicate with your clients and colleagues via email, chat, and video calls. What's more, you can do all this with a custom email address that aligns with your business name, such as [email protected].

Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) offers numerous features that can streamline your birth work and simplify your life. Let's begin with Gmail. The Alternate Email Addresses (email alias) feature enables you to manage multiple email addresses from a single Gmail account. You can even select which email address to use when sending or replying to an email. Now, you can have addresses like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] or any other address that suits your needs! This feature allows you to maintain separate communication channels for different purposes while managing all emails from a single inbox.

Next up is Google Drive's Offline Access feature. As a birth worker constantly on the move, dealing with unreliable cellular reception and insecure WiFi hotspots can be challenging. While there are numerous workarounds for the tech-savvy, the Offline Access feature in Google Drive offers a simple solution. It allows you to view and edit your files even when offline. This ensures that crucial documents like intake forms and contracts are always accessible, regardless of your internet connection. Once reconnected to the internet, any changes made will automatically sync. You might have been aware of this feature for some time now, but it could be the perfect moment to start utilizing it.

In my experience with my doula clients, I've found that contracts and documents are constantly evolving. These changes often stem from both positive and challenging experiences, as well as the ongoing quest to find just the right phrasing. There may be times when you wish to revert to a paragraph from a few revisions back because it captured your intent more accurately. The ability to toggle between versions can significantly alleviate the frustration associated with this task. This is where the File Version Management feature of Google Workspace proves invaluable. It allows you to track the evolution of a document and restore previous versions if necessary. Furthermore, it enables you to compare different iterations of a document and revert to any version of your choosing.

Now, let's shift our focus to the Calendar. As a doula, you have a variety of events to manage, including prenatal visits, births, postpartum visits, workshops, and more. By establishing multiple calendars, you can create a distinct calendar for each event type and color-code them for easy recognition. This organization method not only allows you to share your calendars with others but also enables you to subscribe to other people's calendars. Being organized in this aspect is vital for your profession! If your calendar appears too crowded or cluttered, simply toggle on and off the relevant calendars as needed to ensure nothing important is overlooked.

Similarly, maintaining your schedule and never missing an important event is made easy with reminders and alerts. Take a moment to go beyond just the title, date, and time when creating an event. Set reminders to aid in effective time management. This includes setting up recurring notifications for regular events. With customized notifications, you can create a setup that aligns perfectly with your work ethic.

My final tips for you revolve around Google Meet, a tool you'll likely use for video calls with clients or colleagues. Virtual backgrounds have been a game-changer in maintaining professionalism. Whether it's hiding a messy room or the backdrop of a vacation spot when you're supposed to be working from home, this feature has proven invaluable. To elevate your virtual presence in your birth working business, consider adding your company logo to an office background using an app like Canva. While everyone knows it's not your actual office, it adds a cool factor and serves as a great ice breaker when meeting with prospects and colleagues. If graphic design isn't your forte, consider hiring someone or asking a skilled friend to help. It's definitely worth the effort!

In addition, Google Meet allows you to record video meetings for future reference or for sharing with those who couldn’t attend. Once recorded, you can save the session to Google Drive for safekeeping and easy access in the future. This allows you to playback the recording anytime or download it as an MP4 file.

These are just a few of the features that Google Workspace offers to help streamline your birth working business. There are many more features that you can explore and customize according to your needs and preferences. Google Workspace is about working smarter, not harder; working collaboratively, not in isolation; and working from anywhere, not just from an office. I'm not sponsored by Google to share their services and products with you. I use them myself and understand how they can enhance your business operations and impress your prospects and clients. Ultimately, these tools can positively impact your bottom line. I hope this information has either introduced you to new features or reminded you of ones you may have forgotten about. Share this knowledge with your industry peers - when we help each other with the right intentions, we all succeed.