Productivity Tools for Home or Office

Last Friday we attended the Small Business Summit in San Francisco, hosted by our Professional Organizing Association, NAPO-SFBA. Here are the most useful productivity tools we learned:

Virtual Office

Attorney, Jeena Cho spoke about how to set up a virtual office. She is able to work from home and be virtually paperless.

Her two must-have tools are:

Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner

and

file sharing site

Productivity

Hot tips from a panel of productivity experts:

• We can only control our behavior and attitude toward information overload
• Productivity = vision + quality. Make a vision for your life to help keep your task choices in line with what is important to you
• There is no such thing as multi-tasking
• Mindfulness and meditation are good tools for keeping perspective and managing overload. Headspace is an app that can help you get started
• Set specific times to check and respond to email instead of letting it interrupt your day constantly. Use the signature line of your email to set an expectation around response times

 

Apps 

Our favorite app: HomeZada. This cloud-based application helps you create a home inventory and manage upkeep and improvement projects for your home. It’s free to use their home inventory function. But the time tracking tool for figuring out when to replace filters, clean gutters and flush water heaters is promising.  We look forward to test-driving HomeZada and sharing more about it.

 

Cloud Security & Privacy

No huge surprises here; basically if you choose to use the Internet your data and information are not all that secure. Key things you can do to increase your protection:

• Use complex passwords! Use lots of them. Ideal passwords are a string of 3 unrelated words (so you can remember them) with mixed in capitals, numbers, and symbols. For example the password: curtainbeachdog could become Curt@1nB3@chDog
• Pay for apps instead of opting for the free version. Nothing is truly free! If the company can’t make money off your purchase they will make money off of selling your data to others
• Actually read the terms of use and privacy policies of companies and only do business with those whom will protect your privacy

We’ll explore more about these topics in the coming weeks.  What are your favorite productivity tools?