For all the time we spend promoting productivity-enhancing technologies, we’d be remiss if we didn’t address the source of quite a bit of inefficiency: the user. People get distracted from their tasks all the time and the bounceback rates from these distractions aren’t great. Let’s go over a few tips that you and your team can use to help identify and avoid distractions throughout the workday.
Passwords are quite literally everywhere nowadays. With so much of modern life now controlled or held within user accounts, keeping your passwords both secure and straight in your head is crucial. Many web browsers now offer some built-in password management utility to help make this process more convenient for the user, but is this option available at the cost of security?
The Windows operating system comes with more than its fair share of capabilities, many of which are accessible through the appropriate keyboard shortcut. Because remembering so many would be a challenge for some (and impossible for most) we’ve put together a list of those associated with the letters found on the keyboard, with a few extras tacked on for good measure. Make sure to take note of any you may find the most useful.
Working from home has made it clear to many that they weren’t prepared to do so—not by a long shot. In addition to the many other stresses that came with these challenging times, the lack of a sufficient and proper workspace has proved to have its impacts on the human body. To perhaps help remedy this, we wanted to offer a few considerations that might help a remote worker benefit ergonomically.
Have you ever been using your computer and you realize the operational indicator light next to your webcam is activated, only to realize that you never closed the video conference you were just on? Well, what would happen if you noticed it and you didn’t have that software up and running? If you are not an exhibitionist, it would likely freak you out to know that someone might be looking at you as you use your computer. Today, we will get into what to do to ensure that you aren’t being spied on through your webcam.
For the Windows user seeking to take a screenshot, there is no lack of options. Most notably, many keyboards today offer a Print Screen key that allows the user to capture an image of their entire display. Having said this, there are better options, such as the platform’s integrated Snip & Sketch tool, with its greater functionality and greater ease of use.
It can be said that most of 2020 and the first couple of months of 2021 have been difficult for most people. Not billionaires, of course, but most other people have found the past year difficult on some level. That’s why it isn’t surprising to hear people talk about workplace burnout. Today, we’ll define burnout and what is being said about it.
Email remains a popular tool in the business setting because of its undeniable usefulness in the office—but having said that, it can have its negative impacts on your productivity simply due to how much it can take to manage it appropriately. With so many messages that are crucial for you to keep track of coming through email, let’s go over a fancy trick to help you manage your messages in Gmail.
For many people, their mobile device contains a mixture of sensitive information and personal details. In some cases, some of the data isn’t even theirs—instead, it belongs to their workplace. Naturally, this makes many people less inclined to share the use of their device, but most people also want to avoid being rude.
While no email platform is immune to mismanagement, Microsoft Outlook can quickly become filled with outdated and redundant messages that detract from the communication that it is meant to provide. Fortunately, there is a bit of a hack that you can use in Outlook to help prioritize your most pressing messages. Let’s dive into it.
With Windows 10, you have no shortage of features and capabilities to take advantage of. One such capability: the use of a virtual desktop. Found near the Start button in your taskbar, the Task View button enables you to create and manage these virtual desktops, which we’ll discuss here.
Email is undeniably a useful tool, but it can be a real drag on productivity and a hindrance to manage. Then again, there are some messages that you absolutely need to keep track of as they contain sensitive information. Gmail makes keeping messages under your thumb simple.
If you’re trying to share an idea in a presentation, adding a brief video clip can make it very simple to communicate with your audience. With this in mind, it is quite helpful that Microsoft PowerPoint makes it simple to embed a YouTube video directly into your presentation, whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.
In our last blog we gave you some advice on what to do if your phone has gone missing, but if it has been stolen or lost for good, there are more pressing issues than the anger and loss you feel; you need to ensure that you and the people you do business with are protected. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to make that happen.
Imagine for a second you are out to a socially distant dinner date with the friends that you barely get to see. You wrap up dinner and say your goodbyes and when you get to your car you realize that you don’t have your phone. COMPLETE PANIC! Your whole life is on your phone. Now imagine that when you went back to the restaurant to get your phone, it wasn't anywhere to be found. We’ll talk you through how to proceed.
Information technology is a critical tool for many businesses today, which means \\it is crucial that your IT is compliant to a few key best practices. Let’s go over these practices so that you have a roadmap to ensure that your operations can remain secure and productive.
The Google Play Store is the Android operating system’s primary source of applications and widgets and can do a lot more than many might first think. Let’s consider a few useful tools and tricks that are incorporated into the Play Store that you should keep in mind.
As the most common Internet browser, Google Chrome is in a position where they always need to be coming up with new draws to maintain their hold on the market. Their latest efforts may help them to do so. Let’s take a moment and examine what Chrome is implementing, and how you can use it to your advantage.
Mobility is important to today’s workers and can be valuable to many different types of businesses; so much so that businesses demand that employees stay connected. Sometimes, especially when in public, this can become a social problem. Today, we will discuss mobile phone etiquette and five ways that you can improve yours.
There are a lot of Android apps that are good for productivity, but Google Keep offers a particularly significant advantage. Today we’ll take a brief look at Google Keep and tell you about some features that will help you use it proficiently.
With today’s software solutions, the fact that collaboration is possible has helped many business processes move more efficiently. Despite this, there is also the potential for these solutions to contribute to confusion within your business. Take, for instance, changes people make in Microsoft Excel. Fortunately, Excel offers a means for you to track changes made.
Not many Android users are aware of the Google Lens application, and the supplemented utility that it can bring to your device’s camera. Let’s fix that by going over what Google Lens is, and how you can use it to your advantage.
In the office, there are certain courtesies that most people follow, simply to make sure that the environment remains a peaceful and effective place to work. Working at home (as many have) makes many of these courtesies redundant. As many return to the office, resuming these manners will be important. Let’s go over some of the biggest shifts that your employees should remember as they head back to the office.
While the Android platform is a highly capable mobile platform, there are a few oddities baked in that can create some annoyances for the user. To help you out, we’ve assembled a few tips to help you prevent these annoyances from impacting your use of your mobile device.
The COVID-19 pandemic has a lot of people spending a lot of time at home. As a result many people are getting more out of their Internet service. With school starting back up and people still working from home, the Internet needs to be available for everyone in the house. One of the best ways to make this happen is through Wi-Fi. Oftentimes, however, setting up a Wi-Fi connection can be troublesome. Today, we thought it would be useful to give you a couple of tips that can help you get the most out of your Wi-Fi network at home or in the office.
Searching for something on Google seems stunningly self-explanatory: type in what you’re looking for, press Enter, and like magic, it appears. However, there is a lot more that you can do, if you know how to use Google’s full capabilities. Let’s go over how these capabilities can be harnessed to your advantage as you perform your next search.
If you’re the average business user today, you probably rely on a smartphone to manage much of your life, both personally and in the professional sense. As our phones have become so central to our lives, hackers now have the opportunity to attack through malicious applications. For this week’s tip, we wanted to go over a few ways to tell that an app might be an attack in disguise.
When most people think “spreadsheet,” they’re thinking about Microsoft Excel. Yet, for how well-known it is, many people are unaware of many of its capabilities. This is particularly true of the shortcuts available to properly format these spreadsheets. For this week’s tip, we’re sharing a few of these formatting tips.
While remote work has been more widely implemented than ever as of late, many people still find themselves struggling to remain productive throughout their workday. We wanted to share a few tips to help them really make the most of working from home.
Despite many having to work from home for some time now, a lot of these people still haven’t quite gotten the hang of remote productivity or have developed some less-than-productive habits. This week, we’re providing these people with a few remedial tips to make their efforts while working from home as effective as possible.
Productivity is always an important consideration when it comes to your business’ processes. That’s why, for this week’s tip, we’re going over how to boost your productivity by adding some of your G Suite documents into your bookmarks bar.
One of the most important things that your business needs to do—especially now—is to communicate with the clients you serve. To guide you into doing so to the best of your abilities, let’s go over some tips for you and your team to keep in mind pertaining to your communications.
Today’s software solutions are generally built with a single goal in mind: productivity. Here, we wanted to go over a few tools that any business seeking improved efficiency in its operations should strongly consider, especially based on what the world has been experiencing recently.
There is a lot that needs to be done in the typical business each day, and with so many steps involved in each process, it can be difficult to stay on track. Without the right information, it is basically impossible to remain productive. To help keep up your productivity and morale, we’ve put together a guide to help you task out your objectives for this week’s tip.
In the workplace, projects are used to push operations forward. This makes your ability to manage your business’ projects truly important as the global economy turns back on. To help, we’re sharing three tips that will help you most effectively do so.
With its all-purpose functionality really coming to the forefront in the office, your Internet browser is likely one of your most used computer programs. Considering that so much of your time is spent using the Internet, we thought it would make sense to share a few shortcuts to make it more efficient for you.
Laptops have proven to be one of the more useful gadgets for businesses and business users. Not only do they hold their own in performance against a desktop, their portability is another consideration that cannot be ignored. However, this portability means that they are at least somewhat reliant on their battery, which begs the question: can they be left plugged in otherwise?
Email is a great tool for businesses to use, but if mismanaged, it can quickly become a major time sink. That’s why we wanted to go over a few ways that you can use your email solution to boost your overall productivity (rather than squander it) in the form of some handy tips.
In uncertain times, one of the most important things for any business to do is to stay the course—albeit in an adjusted fashion. To help, we’ve put together a few key practices to work positively to achieve this end.
As the workers that power many businesses are remaining at home, remote solutions have proven to be a significant tool in keeping productivity moving. However, with nobody going into the office, monitoring your IT environment is necessary to make sure that the infrastructure you depend on is still in the right conditions. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some best practices to help you do so.
Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report cites phishing attacks as the most prevalent cyberthreat. With the COVID-19 outbreak pushing large numbers of workers to their own homes, it is almost assuredly still the case. As a result, it is extremely important that you and your staff understand how to spot potential phishing attacks and what to do when confronted with an attack. Today, we will provide you some tips on how to identify and remediate such attacks.
There are a variety of reasons that you may find yourself working from home at some point or another. Whether there’s something going on at the office, you’re mindfully practicing social isolation, you’re home sick, or it is just an option you want to exercise, you need to be sure that you and the rest of your team are doing so in the best way. Here, we’re sharing a few tips to help you do so.
Microsoft Word is an excellent tool for businesses to use for a great assortment of their word processing needs… especially due to the assortment of editable templates available to users. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over how you can customize a Microsoft Word template to meet your preferences.
In most workspaces and offices, “productivity” is always present on the list of goals. Why settle for one task completed in a set time, when multiple tasks can be completed in the same amount of time without sacrificing the quality of the result? This goal is popular enough for many experts and consultants to have weighed in on. This week, our tip will involve a basic overview of some such strategies so you may consider them.
The modern business uses IT in so many ways that aim to make a business move faster, be more efficient, and ultimately, produce more than it would have without that technology. Each of these technologies are powerful in their own right, but they depend on two variables: electricity and a reliably fast Internet connection. When your Internet connection isn’t doing your business any favors, you need to look into why you aren’t getting the network speeds you are paying for. After all, your business depends on it. Today, we will take a look at a few ways you can go about troubleshooting a slow Internet connection.
Technology impacts the business landscape more than it ever has, and its impact shows no sign of slowing. This is especially the case for the small business, which now has a much larger pool of competitors to deal with. As a result, it is more crucial than ever that small businesses take advantage of technology to assist them. Let’s go over a few tips that every small business should act upon.
For many businesses, email plays a crucial role in the dessemination of information. Whether it is simply interacting with clients or pushing directions to individuals, email is a simple and efficient way to communicate. One problem that organizations are running into is that individuals are being inundated with social engineering messages called phishing. This strategy is causing major operational problems for businesses, from malware to data breaches to extended downtime. For this week’s tip, we identify what exactly phishing is and how it is used to the detriment of many businesses and other organizations.
From its very beginnings, Microsoft has been creating devices and software to help users accomplish their goals. This is one reason why their solutions are so commonly found in businesses. Today, we wanted to focus on just one, OneDrive, and highlight some of its features that any business could find useful.
There is quite possibly no more famous question in IT services than “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” While it may sound like a joke (and has quite often been used as one), could this advice actually work? The short answer: it does. For this week’s tip, we’ll explain why that is.
There are a few reasons that you’d need to restore your Android device. Some reasons are good, like you finally got the phone you were given an IOU for over the holidays, and some are bad, like your old phone had just broken. For this week’s tip, we’ll assume it is the first reason, as we go over how you can easily prepare your phone data for migration.
Portable Document Format files (better known as PDFs) have become incredibly common as a means to save documents in a constant and consistent format that can be viewed on just about any device. They also allow users to make some simple changes to make it even easier to review the data they contain. Here, we’ll go over a few options for this year’s first tips.
Social engineering is a very important component of many modern cyberattacks, as the popularity of phishing scams goes to show. Protecting yourself from phishing scams will require you to be able to identify them. For today’s tip, we’ll go over a few warning signs that someone may be trying to phish you through your email.
IT inventory management, also known as IT asset management or ITAM, is an important process for any business to undergo. This is effectively the process of ensuring that all of your information technology resources are accounted for and protected. Here, we’ve assembled some practices that will help make this process much simpler.
Many businesses turn to Microsoft Outlook as their email client of choice. Did you know that Outlook comes with certain features that make it an even better business option? To help you get the most use out of Outlook, we’re sharing a few of these features as this week’s tip.
Microsoft’s solutions are fairly common among businesses, so there’s a fair chance that you utilize Microsoft Office 365, which gives you access to Microsoft’s cloud storage solution, OneDrive. Using this, your users are better able to share documents and collaborate on them… but what if you don’t want your users sharing company documents willy-nilly? Today, our tip will cover how to control sharing in OneDrive.
Project management is an essential part of nearly every business, and good management software can do a lot for you. What it can’t do, however, is actually get your team to complete the work faster, especially if they don’t completely understand why you’ve chosen that particular platform. For today’s tip, we take a look at project management and give you some tips to help your organization improve the success of its projects.
Patches are a critically important aspect of your technology. As a result, you need to be sure that yours are managed properly. We have three tips to share so you can optimize your patch management processes.
As any business owner knows too well, a budget is a very finite thing - and this can seem to be doubly the case when trying to budget for your business’ technology. Fortunately, there are also a few ways that technology can help you save some capital. Here, we’re offering some tips to help you reduce the financial toll of your business’ IT.
The Windows Taskbar is meant to assist the user in opening and managing the programs they need to accomplish their goals. Did you know that you can tweak the Taskbar to add to the utility it already has? For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a couple of the things you can do with the Taskbar - specifically, things that make navigating your computer a little easier.
Windows 10 is the benchmark in PC operating systems at this juncture. It offers users all types of great options from previous versions of Windows, while integrating some of today's most dynamic technology to provide users with the very best in organization and ease-of-use. Today we will talk about five very simple tips that will get you started getting the full function of Windows 10.
Businesses often utilize signage to direct visitors to specific points of interest in their offices, but with the advent of digital technologies, the potential for digital signage is nearly endless. If leveraged properly, these displays can be used to provide key insights into operations, as well as notify employees and visitors of important information.
It’s probably pretty fair to say that Microsoft Word has become the poster child for word processing programs - and for good reason: its tools and capabilities are very well-suited for the user’s needs. Did you know that you can even adjust Word so that it better fits your use of it? For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few ways to do so.
The popularity of Microsoft Word is undeniable, in part because it features preconfigured settings to make it easier for its users. While these settings are useful for most of these users, they might not reflect your business’ use of Word. Fortunately, you can make adjustments to these settings to increase the value that Word can offer your business. Here, we’ve put together some tips to help you make these changes, if you so choose.
Windows 10 is a remarkable tool. Having said this, it can sometimes seem to slow to a crawl… not the ideal situation when you’re trying to be productive. That’s why we’re devoting this week’s tip to speeding up Windows 10.
Time always seems to escape so many of us. What should be easily accomplishable in a morning can easily stretch to the afternoon, for what seems like no reason. The hard truth is, it isn’t time’s fault… it’s our own bad practices. For today’s tip, we’re going over how you can fight these tendencies to optimize your use of the time that is available.
How many email accounts do you have? Out of those, how many do you check regularly, and how many different platforms are they on? Too many, and you’re apt to miss something important. That’s why we’re going over how to ensure that your emails are well-organized and accessible from a single source.
The average business has a lot of internal processes, and these processes are typically pretty concrete: to accomplish this task, follow steps A, B, and C, in that order. However, due to the sheer volume of processes like these, it helps to have these processes documented for the benefit of your future employees... and, if we’re being honest, your future self. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over the proper process for documenting a task.
The great thing about smartphones, in a business sense, is how portable they are - you can literally be productive almost anywhere. Unfortunately, this also means that they can be lost almost anywhere. Luckily, there just so happens to be a feature built into Android that can help you find yours.
Sometimes, things are written in the wrong place. Fortunately, there are means of moving them if they happened to be written using a computer. These processes are relatively very simple and are so commonly used that the shortcuts are right next to each other on the keyboard. For today’s tip, we’ll review how you can cut, copy, and paste content in effectively any program you use.
The note-taking application Evernote is a favorite of many users, as it allows them to keep extensive notes in an organized fashion. Its true utility goes beyond that of a digital scratch pad, however, as it has additional features that offer much more. For this week’s tip, we’ll review one particularly useful feature: templates.
Working with technology can get pretty complicated and technical at times. We're here to help. We've got plenty of technology tips to share with the world, and we're going to unleash them on you once a week. For more helpful tech tips, search our previous blog articles. This week's tip will help you spot a nasty APT hack on your company's network.
