Nowadays we do video conferencing all the time during Coronavirus lockdown with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Meet. You may wonder if it is possible to improve the audio quality during the conference meeting, if you’re not happy with your computer built-in microphone.
You can of course attach an external microphone to your computer, mobile phone and camera. This post shares how you can do it with your laptop computer (in this post, Macbook Pro), iPhone, DSLR camera (Olympus E-M1 Mark III) with an 3.5 mm external microphone. The next post will share with you how to do it with an USB based external microphone with your computer and mobile phone.
There are many good external microphone that makes use of the 3.5 mm plug. The one I show here is the BOYA BY-MM1 Shotgun Video Microphone. The BY-MM1 is compact, light weight and housed in aluminium. It also includes an anti-shock mount,which can effectively reduce unwanted vibration, cable and handling noise. Lastly, it includes a furry windproof shield, which specially used for minimizing the wind and environmental noise for outdoor recording.
To make it work with your computer, iPhone and Camera, there are some tricks however:
For laptop, just plug in the cable comes with BOYA to the 3.5 mm plug of the computer. For some reasons, I tried both the TRS and TRRS cables with the microphone, both work perfectly.
One point to note for this computer and mobile phone set up if you want to use it to record audio, make sure you unplug the microphone then you can replay the audio clip with the built-in speaker. You can of course plug in your preferred headphone / earphone for that as well.
For camera, also just plug in the cable to the 3.5 mm jack with the camera. However, since there is no battery with the microphone, you need to set up your camera to provide power to the microphone.
Here are some pictures of the microphone and setup !!
So in this part of the world, many of us need to work from home (WFH) because of the Coronavirus disease. Naturally, work from home / remote is very different from working in the office.
There are many online information about working from home but mainly focuses on the best conference tools in the market. From my point of view however, other than good conference tools, one actually needs a few other techniques and habits to make the whole WFH exercise effective, and ultimately less “conference call fatigue”.
Here are the 7 habits that can make your work more effective:
1. Have a Working Mood and Setting Up a Proper Workplace
Highly effective people will not work from home in pajama. Instead, they will change to casual wear (formal attire is a bit strange …) before they start working. The working mindset and mood is important.
In addition, find a place or corner at home to make it your workplace. Understand it is not easy if your home is not very spacious and you have your partner, parents, kids and pets around while you’re working. Therefore if needed, find a coffee shop nearby to setup your proper workplace.
In my case, I also set up my workplace with a stand-up desk, some background music (through a Spotify playlist) as well as a cup of hot black coffee.
2. Equip Yourself with Good Tools
There are many tools in the market good for conference meetings – e.g. conference tools like Zoom.us, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and collaboration tools for whiteboarding, mind-mapping, drawing, remote desktop, document sharing etc.
Select only a limited set of tools, within your company budget and don’t over-complicate the technology.
3. Preparation of Conference Calls
Send out invitation email to all attendants with meeting agenda, joining methods – conference call tool and dial up number etc. Also note the meeting time if your attendants were from different time zones, therefore a link to timezone website will be useful.
Send an reminder email to ask the attendants to install the conference software and mobile app beforehand.
More importantly, ask the attendants to test the video, microphone, share screen function to see how it works before joining the meeting.
4. Running a Good Conference Calls
Greet the attendants one by one, so they know they joined the call successfully and aware of other attendants.
Ask the attendants to find the mute button of the tool and mute it for the moment.
When it’s time to start the meeting, inform the attendants how you’re going to run the meeting, when will be the right time to ask question and the order to ask questions – e.g. one by one, or team by team.
Then run your meeting, according to the agenda. If you need to ask your attendant questions, make sure you start with the name of the attendant and remind him or her to unmute before answering the questions.
Wrap up your meeting with a verbal summary, follow-up actions and a thank-you to all attendants.
5. Post Conference Call Actions
After the conference meeting, send out an email with the summary, and follow-up actions, to all attendants.
Collect the feedback of the conference / collaboration tools.
Help the attendants to fix any connection and tools installation issues.
6. Tracking Tasks Status
Your usual way to track task status may not work anymore (e.g. Kanban board in the office), again some file sharing and online project monitoring tools will make the team’s life a lot easier.
7. Lastly, Keep Yourself Fit
Work from home also means you no longer need to walk to public transport, or carpark; you won’t walk around in the company; and you won’t walk to lunch. In essence, you exercise less if you work from home.
Therefore, instead of walking around, you shall find time throughout the day to walk, jog, or exercise in gym.
With the same token, you shall also spare some time to read, to join some online courses … as I believe you won’t want to join hours of conference meetings every single day.
In Summary
Hope these 7 habits help you a bit to make the WFH exercise more effective. If you know other good habits and tools, let me know.
I’ve been a big fan of Clayton Christensenās works for almost 20 years now, and itās really sad to learn about the news two days ago. I learnt a lot from his books and his HBX MOOC online course on Disruptive Strategy.
If youāre interested in Disruptive Innovation, Jobs-to-be-done, living a rewarding life, some unreserved recommendations –
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – http://amzn.to/2hT2JMK
You can tell the Blockchain space is maturing, when you find that there are so many research papers, books, reports, and slide decks published by big consultancy companies, financial institutes, research firms and of course, geeks.
Here is a list of the resources that I think you may find useful.
ā¦ and
Blogger, Plog / Lifetype, PostNuke, DocuWiki, WordPress in between.
Itās been 24 years since I hosted my own website (you can find the history here), and one lesson I learnt is there are always better tools out there to develop your own website. Even though professionally I use other enterprise software to build websites and applications, I reckon you can always learn more by using other tools or platforms to build your own website.
While I use WordPress to build / host my personal website (yes, youāre reading this ā michaelyung.com), I moved my photo website, 80days.com, from WordPress to Wix. I donāt exactly know why I made the move as WordPress served me pretty well to host my photos. However, the idea of trying something new pushed me to evaluate other options and eventually I settled with Wix.
The first
thing I learnt from Wix was the tool is beautifully implemented, and the next
was there were too many options, settings that it would take anyone a long time
to complete a site. You will also need to understand a whole different set of vocabulary,
before you know what youāre doing. You can control the locations of the elements
on the page, pixel by pixel ā¦ and therefore you will likely spend many long hours
to make your website looks perfect, pixel by pixel.
In summary,
Wix is great for design focus websites, but shall you do it to move websites to
the Wix ? Not likely, if the WordPress site is already serving you well.
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 