Working From Home: Using Technology to Create Balance
Of course, you already use technology in your life. But do you use it to your advantage? When you’re working from home, the lines between professional and personal lives blur. With work and personal lives overlapping, there are many reasons to incorporate more technology into your day, wherever you are, to make everything you have to do that much easier. Continue reading to learn some helpful tips you need to begin doing right away.
Create a Digital Signature
Your signature is your promise, guarantee, and word, all wrapped up in your name. You can leverage technology to help implement a seamless signature strategy for yourself when you sign documents. This will make the process quicker and easier to identify exactly who you are via the power of a signature.
Implement a digital signature into your workplace for PDF signing. This is easy to do with the right software and is transferable across a variety of platforms so you can sign wherever you are and whenever you need to. This tool is also available for your clients and makes working together easier than ever, especially when you are conducting business in a remote capacity. It negates any reason to meet in person across the miles or send mail at a costly and sometimes slow pace back and forth simply to gain signatures to business agreements. Now you can use technology to your advantage and accomplish your business needs right away.
Back-Up Documents and Data
What is worse than losing your painstakingly created content, client lists, contact information, and everything else on your laptop? Well, a lot of things, of course, but at the moment, it can seem like all is lost. That might be the case if you have not taken steps to back up your documents and data.
You can use an external hard drive to back up data, which is a good idea for proprietary content and as a secondary backup method. However, a cloud server is a better option for storing everything from emails to photos and documents and anything else you may have. Simply select from a reputable company, create a secure account, and then let the backup begin. Now if something happens to your devices, technology will save the day.
Use GPS
Depending on the make, model, and year of your vehicle, you may or may not have GPS installed. Regardless, you do have it on your smartphone. GPS is a multi-purpose solution to many driving problems and is an easy-to-use time-saver.
You can use GPS to plan your route a few days in advance to avoid tolls, time-of-day road congestion, and construction to find the best route. It will help you plan for gas, EV stations, and bathroom breaks on a long trip. It will assist in determining travel time from one destination to another to better plan your day. And finally, through the magic of GPS technology, you can easily pull your mileage data from your work-related driving for compensation purposes.
Set Calendar Reminders
Calendars, especially digital ones that exist on smartphones and laptops, are your friends. Make it a habit to enter every appointment and task into your calendar to ensure you stay on schedule. Watch this helpful video to learn more ways to use technology to ensure you have a productive work and home life.
Set Alarms
Alarms are helpful for more than just waking up in the morning. They are reminders to get things done or not leave things for too long. Consider this: if you are baking a meal in the oven but need to step away from the kitchen for a moment to return a work email (not too long though, for safety reasons), you might miss hearing the oven timer. Use your smartphone’s alarm instead. Let’s face it, your smartphone is going wherever you go, you will hear it, and run back to the kitchen so the chicken comes out just right.
Alarms work for your laundry, too. When you leave the laundry room, you may not hear the buzzer, or perhaps it is set to silent, and you miss it. Once again, a smartphone alarm will save a load of laundry from becoming musty in the washing machine or wrinkled from sitting in the dryer for too long.
Of note, if you have multiple alarms set on your smartphone throughout the day, it is easy to forget their intended purpose, rendering the alarms pointless. It is easy to create a quick label on each alarm when you set it and leave it on your alarm list so you can adjust the time and use it again.
Control Social Media
It is all too easy to tell yourself that you are only going to pop onto social media for a moment. Well, that moment turns into a spiraling tunnel of time lost because one thing leads you to the next, or a new message or ping emerges while you are on the platform.
Change your approach to how you engage with social media during your workday by using an app blocker. There are a variety of different ones available that will suit whatever operating systems you use and can run across different devices. The point is to help control and lessen the time lost by scrolling during work hours.
One thing to remember when it comes to social media is that you are in control. If you want to watch a three-minute cute dog video while taking a stretch break, you can do that. The important thing is to stop after one short video. And that does not mean you can check Instagram next. You have to choose how to spend your time and limit websites when you need oversight. Technology can help you with that.
Now that you have some useful tips on how to leverage technology to your advantage while working from home, make sure you implement them. Do not let the ideas here linger and fall into the background. Get your digital signature set up, create helpful calendar entries, organize your online documents, and then go ahead and unblock your favorite social media platform – but only for a few minutes.
