Protect Your Time. Get Yourself a Recording Sign.

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One of the funniest little purchases I've ever made, that was unbelievably valuable to my productivity is a recording sign for my studio. I put it right outside my door and when I turn it on, everybody in the household knows I am not available for questions or unless it's an emergency, please don't interrupt me.

Now, I use this both for when I'm recording somebody, recording myself, or I'm deep into producing or in the zone on working on my businesses. Anything - it's just to keep people out of breaking my concentration. Not that my household has any vindictive reason for doing that. It's just oftentimes there's bills to be paid. There's somebody coming to the door. There's a question about a service. There's a phone call. There's the yard guy. There's so many things that when you work from home, cause a massive distraction. And so I decided I'm going to get a recording sign.

My name is Zion and I am the founder of the Triple Threat Artists, an online producer course with myself and my friend, Josh Doyle, who is an amazing producer. We teach students online to become singer songwriter, producers, a triple threat. If that interests you, if you could use some help in this, come join our community. It's a boutique small community where we help each other. Everybody knows each other. It's a lot of fun. It's really, really a lot of fun.

We have office hours every week where we meet and connect and help each other. And we have 130 videos on how to learn certain things about production. If that interests you click the link below. We'd love to see you there. We also have a couple of freebies check those out as well.

All right, let's get into this.

Now I picked this up from Amazon and I'll put the link below. I personally attached mine to a little switcher that you can control remotely. It's a wifi switcher that once you hook it up, you can control it through your phone app or you can control it through Alexa, you can actually say in fact, watch this:

Alexa, turn on the recording sign.

Alexa, turn off the recording sigh.

That makes it super easy to turn on and off. Also, I use something called a StreamDeck  on my desk, which is basically a little switch box with a bunch of physical buttons. This is made for gamers, but I decided to put it to use for my businesses. And I love it because I can control all my lights. I can control my recording sign. I can set the mood for a certain type of video I want to make, I can engage certain things. It's pretty stellar. I like automation a lot.

One thing I would definitely recommend if you get into home automation stuff and you start buying lights, stick with one brand, make sure it works with apple devices. So that's apple friendly. I think they call it home kit friendly. Make sure it works with Alexa. You never know when you might switch over to another platform.

So make sure it works really well with other different applications. But stick with one brand. I have worked with five or six different brands. And so my home automation app folder on my, my phone is just chaos with the amount of log-ins I have to do. So keep it simple.

I'll show you real quick how I set up my StreamDeck in case you get one. This is the little app that comes with it that you have on your desktop and you can have different pages. I have a smaller StreamDeck. A lot of these are lot bigger and you have a lot more buttons. I don't feel like I ever need very many buttons. In fact, I think I have almost too many, but I have my home screen allows me to go into the folder that has my lights. I can turn everything on and off really quickly.

This button here allows me to kill everything. And it puts my computer into sleep mode. So I can just hit one button and walk out of the room. This button here allows me to just turn on all the lights at once. So everything's very bright. So if I'm cleaning the room or just need a lot of light in the room. This one's kind of more of a work environment so the lights are a little bit lower.

This one is more for on camera. If I want to go on camera, I have a certain settings. I can have preset. This is the launch zoom. I've got other applications. This is just a computer. This is the let me know the CPU level of my computer. These buttons actually just control how bright my little StreamDeck screen is. So if you want to minimize that, you can do that.

But I created these two buttons that are record lights. So to do that, there's a lot of, I won't go into all the features of how to set up a StreamDeck, but for this feature, for this button I used what's called a web hook.

So I'm connecting to a URL. So when this button is hit, it actually goes out into the background and goes to a URL. And that URL I created with IFTTT, that is just an automation type service. It's kind of like Zapier, where you can connect applications together. And I put a ton of made a ton of different little, what they call applets, which are like little features. Like when I hit one button, my Phillips lights turn into the ocean color, the can lights work mode. I've got all these different settings. This took me a long time.

I set this up a while back. But one of them is the record sign on and off. So if I go into that and look at that it's on right now and I can see the activity and stuff. But if I go into the settings for this basically it's saying if I receive a web request, which is what is being sent for my StreamDeck, then connect - turn on the lights for SmartLife. So I set up the IFTTT, this app with SmartLife the home automation tool that you have to have on your phone for that plug.

So, yeah, I can see some of you rolling your eyes right now. Like this seems like a lot of work. Don't worry about it. Just go turn the light on if you want to use it that way.

But if you want to geek out and have things just automated, so you can just go into certain modes and certain things happen, just know that you can get one of those plugs that you can get from Amazon, I will put the link below, put your record sign in that, and then you can automate it so that everything turns on and off when you want it to. Then you don't have to get up to go turn on the light to say to everybody in the house 'I'm not available right now.' You can do it from your desk.

All right, guys, I hope that helps if you'd like to geek out on things like that, and you've come up with solutions. I'd love to hear from you.

Please send me a note back and definitely subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the like button.

All right, I'll see you next week.

Zion

Recording Sign on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009CF5VCG/ref=cmswemrmtdpBGX99762NCKPP3105NN5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Stream Deck I Use:
https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck

Smart Life Plug:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NPVW91F/ref=cmswemrmtdp97HXA9QSETTA9FQYVQ5K

This episode was produced and marketed by the Get Known Service