(quickly) delegate and teach with Loom
made w/ midjourney
Ben and I have found Loom really useful. Loom is a freemium app that lets you record video of yourself and your desktop and send it to others. Specifically, we like it for the following uses:
Feedback: Delivering edits on a document or deck instead of just putting in comments or track changes.
Pre-reading: Doing a voiceover of your own deck before a meeting, so people can watch it ahead of time. This can replace the presentation altogether, so you’re not reading slides at people real time. You can also keep your slides for the meeting and concentrate time and energy on discussion or creating stuff together, with quick references back to the slides as needed.
Teaching: Showing someone how you do something, so that they can do it on their own for/instead of you. It’s much faster and clearer than writing out a stepwise how-to document and, for me, lowers the barriers to delegating.
A couple features that make this speedy and low-friction:
Loom automatically makes a searchable transcript of what you say in the video
Viewers can play back the video at up to 2.5x speed.
A sneaky additional benefit for feedback: I think Loom saves time and angst on both sides of feedback delivery because the recipient can experience the author’s tone of voice and body language. As the author of the feedback, there’s lower risk that you say something unintentionally hurtful or unclear or spend undue time wordsmithing a simple message. As the receiver of the feedback, you can read all that body language if you want or just read the transcript.
As with any tech or app suggestions here, you don’t have to use the precise tool we’re suggesting. The real thing we’re promoting is increasing the volume of your feedback, pre-reading, and delegation-focused teaching.
-eric
