Month: January 2017

As a business professional, knowing the specific technologies that can help your business grow is important. Not all technology will work for you and your coworkers, but the technology that will work can do things like increase efficiency, minimize downtime, and support daily productivity.

Here are a handful of workplace technologies to consider for your daily IT consumption.

Apps

Use the right apps, and your productivity can reach a level you never dreamed possible. With the right string of apps by your side, every part of your workday stands to improve.

Do more, in less time. Take better, more strategic breaks. Get to work quicker and with less hassle. Share and collaborate with ease. It’s all possible with an app… you just need to know where to look and what integrates best with your working style.

Dual Monitors

Just because your computer came with one screen, doesn’t mean you always have to limit yourself to one screen. In fact, if you do a lot of data entry or if you’re consistently involved in multiple activities at once (for example, scheduling, checking-in, and order processing), two or three monitors can improve your productivity and even help reduce on-the-job stress.

Website

Good technology doesn’t just exist to improve your productivity. It also exists to create a more modern business, strengthen your relationship with consumers, and build up your brand. And what better way to do this then with a website? However, these days, if you have a website that is outdated and not mobile-friendly, this can hurt your business more than help it.

With a good website, your business can reduce communication hurdles, limit consumer frustrations, and market your products and brand with ease. But to do this, you’ll need a website that looks good on a phone, is easy to get to, and even easier to maneuver through.

Document Sharing

Documents are an old-fashioned piece of business, but the way you use, share, and move these documents around doesn’t have to be so old-fashioned. Find a more modern way to handle document sharing, and you can improve a whole mess of things, like productivity, collaboration, and even employee morale. With a tool like Dropbox, OneNote, Evernote, or Trello, document sharing will take on an entirely new meaning.

Instant Messaging

Communication is an important aspect of any team, and ultimately, it can have a major impact on how successful your business can become. However, the best business communication is multilayered, and one piece you should definitely incorporate within your multilayered communication strategy is instant messaging.

This method of communication makes it easy to communicate with coworkers – whether they’re sitting across the building from you or across the room. And with a platform like Skype, for example, you can integrate your messaging capabilities with your email, share documents, and even see if someone is available to chat or currently tied up in a meeting.

Bad habits come in all shapes and sizes, and they even come in the digital variety. And these digital bad habits are just like most bad habits – hard to break, expensive, and can potentially ruin your reputation.

But which online habits are the most damaging to pick up? Here are a few to watch out for.

Where is thy passcode, sir?

There are way too many people in this world who don’t lock their mobile devices. But it doesn’t make any sense. Is it really that difficult or time-consuming to type in a few numbers or swipe a simple pattern? And if it is, is dropping a passcode really worth losing data over?

If anyone snatches one of your devices, the only thing really protecting your data is a passcode. If you don’t have one, that person will have an all-access pass to everything inside it.

Put down the mouse and step away from the clicker.

The power of the almighty click… aimed in the right direction, a simple click has the power to destroy reputations and topple an entire business. Despite this, though, people are still as clicker-crazy as ever. They click on ads that are too good to be true, click on links that are clearly malicious, and click on anything that looks even remotely clickable. Knock it off, and direct your click with a little more caution.

You remember to recycle the 3 P’s: plastic, paper, & passwords.

A password is meant to be reused, right?

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That would be a ‘no.’ Passwords should not be reused, recycled, or anything else that beings with a re-. If someone gains access to one account, then they’ll gain access to all your accounts. And I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty terrible. So DON’T do it.

Every email deserves an opportunity to feel loved.

No. A big, fat, resounding, in-your-face, makes-you-feel-stupid, no. The inbox is one of the most widely-used avenues of attack, and the people behind these attacks are getting better and better at putting together emails that look and sound legitimate.

So, no… not every email needs to be opened, read, or clicked on. You must remain suspicious of all emails, and think before you ever click or download anything contained inside an email.

Is there a limit to how many times someone can click Remind Me Later?

How many times have you received a prompt to update your PC or phone and clicked on the Remind Me Later option?

Actually… don’t answer that.

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Stop postponing updates. Just stop. You do it once, and you’ll probably do it again and again and again. And pretty soon, it’ll be 6 months later and you’ll still be clicking Remind Me Later.

Why yes, Mr. Stranger. Mi teléfono es su teléfono.

It’s probably not a good idea to let people use your devices for an extended period of time. Sure, your mom can send a text through your phone and your coworker can look something up on your laptop; however, it’s important to not let this get out of hand.

In other words, don’t do anything like let a stranger make a call on your phone or allow your friends to take your tablet out of town with them. It only takes a few seconds to swipe data off your devices, so be careful.

It’s a New Year, so how about we get you ready for it? Starting with your technology.

Here are a few quick tips to get you and your tech up-to-speed for the coming year.

Clean out your inbox.

Whether it’s your personal inbox or your professional one, there’s no better time than the present to clean it out and get it organized. Go through all those emails that have been sitting in your inbox for months, and do whatever you need to do to check them off your to-do list. Set aside some time for later that can be dedicated to each email and get a handle over your inbox.

Also, take this opportunity to ensure your folders actually make sense. Do you still need them all? Are they labeled correctly and do they accomplish what you need them to accomplish?

And lastly, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. For the next week or so, take any email you get that you no longer want to get and unsubscribe from it. Do this for just one week and it will have a significant impact on your productivity inside your inbox.

Go through all those photos.

It’s probably safe to assume that you have over a thousand photos stored on your phone. It’s pretty normal at this point. However, this can affect that whole having-storage-on-your-phone thing. This being said, take an hour or so to go through your photos. Delete all those repeat shots and keep only the best photos.

After you’ve done this, consider uploading your photos into the cloud and off of your phone. A good app to consider is Google Photos. You can organize your photos with ease, search by tags or dates, and benefit from unlimited storage.

Delete unused apps.

Did you download an app eight months ago, use it once, and then forget it ever existed? Most likely. And if you’re anything like everyone else, then you’ve done this multiple times, which means your phone is probably littered with a handful of unused apps. So… deal with it.

Take a few moments, swipe through each screen, and delete any app you haven’t used within the last month. And if there is an app on there that you feel you might use at some point in the future, delete it. When the time comes, you can download it again.

And then delete it again.

Change all your passwords.

Passwords. It’s time to change them. Odds are you haven’t done so in a while, and if you have, it was because you forgot your login credentials and the website made you do it. Because of this, there’s likely to be no consistent strategy to your online passwords.

Go through each of your accounts, update your information (like phone number and security questions), and change your passwords. If you can, create passphrases and include capital letters and characters.

Organize your digital filing system.

This one might take a little longer – depending on if you’re looking at your home PC or your work PC – but your files should all belong somewhere and your folders should all make sense to your personal productivity and daily workflow. So, your documents might be filed away in the appropriate places, but does this actually do anything for your productivity? If not, take the opportunity to adjust how you organize your files. Analyze and restructure.