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Time Management

Take Charge Of Your Time To Manage Your Job Better

Time is money, or so the saying goes. People who manage their time effectively get more done and go further in their careers.

Make the most of every minute with these useful ideas:

Act on email promptly. Don’t leave emails in your inbox, whether you’ve read them or not. Spend a few minutes on a regular schedule responding, saving, or deleting messages so important emails don’t get lost in the electronic clutter.

Do your most important tasks first. Identify your priorities (and those of your boss) so you know what’s critical and what’s trivial. Then take care of your top priorities first thing in the morning instead of putting them off or waiting until you’re “ready.” The rest of your day will flow more easily once you’ve got the important stuff under control.

Identify quick tasks. Make a list of everyday jobs you can do in five minutes or less. Tackle these when you’ve got a little spare time—between meetings, or waiting for a long document to print. That way they won’t distract you when you need to concentrate, or waste your time when you should be working on more important things.

Take good notes. Don’t try to remember everything. When you’ve got an idea, or realize you need to do something later, write it down. Review your notes regularly so nothing slips away.

Just say no. Avoid tasks and projects that don’t directly contribute to your primary objectives. Use your list of priorities to identify work that you need to do. Turn down (politely) requests to take on irrelevant work, or negotiate for a deadline that allows you to focus on your key tasks.

While managing your time better, it’s also a good idea to improve your relationship with your boss.

Impressing your boss isn’t about insincere flattery or hogging the spotlight. The best way to get attention and credit is to do your job as well as you can – and follow these tips:

Take notes. Carry a notebook to any meeting with your boss, and use it to record his or her instructions. This shows that you place a premium on detail and accuracy.

Save money. Look for ways to cut expenses in your organization. Most managers are under constant pressure to keep costs down, and yours will be grateful if you can help.

Arrive early, stay late. Don’t be a clock-watcher. Your willingness to put in extra time will show your dedication to the boss’s objectives and your organization’s success.

Dress well. Even in a casual-dress atmosphere, pay attention to your appearance. A professional wardrobe will stand out.

Keep the boss informed. Don’t be a gossip, but do give your manager a heads-up on anything happening in the workplace that could affect his or her goals.

Do a little extra. Seek out the small tasks that other people forget, or the big ones that everyone avoids. Going the extra mile will make a lasting impression.

Be organized. Keep your work area clean, and have the information your boss needs ready at any time. You don’t want to waste your manager’s time while you search for documents under piles of disorganized memos.

Double-check your work. Don’t be in such a hurry that you don’t have time to proofread your email or confirm the facts in a report. Small errors can undermine your credibility and reputation.

The Internet: Employees Are Wasting Your Money

By Tech Experts Staff
With today’s tight budgets every business is making cuts in some fashion. One interesting fact is that, in the United States, businesses waste some $760 billion every year on unproductive payroll.

If companies could find a way to cut back on this waste, then they would not need to cut as much elsewhere.

What do employees do to waste almost a trillion dollars a year? According to numerous studies, employees waste an average of just over two hours per day on unproductive or non-work related activities.

If you take that average and multiply it across your workforce, how much money could you be saving if you knew how? Fortunately we can help!

Internet Abuse Costly
While we don’t have a way to solve all of your company’s time wasting issues, we do have several solutions for the number one time waster by employees: Internet abuse.

Internet usage is the cause of nearly 50% of wasted time in the workplace! That adds up to 364 hours of wasted time per employee per year.

This is an incredibly easy fix, technically, and there are numerous prevention measures you can implement.

Acceptable Use Policy
The first prevention measure to help to prevent misuse of company time: Let your employees know what is – and is not – acceptable on your company network.

While most employees know that being online and goofing off is not right, if they haven’t been told they tend to not think twice. Implement a comprehensive acceptable use policy in your employee handbook.

Employees should be told what is acceptable and what consequences are in place should the acceptable use policy be breached.

Implement Filtering
The second way to keep employees from misusing the company network is to have proper measures in place to prevent unauthoroized use.

Most higher end routers have the ability to add websites to a filter and block them. This is a great way to prevent employees from having access to unauthorized or unnecessary websites.

If you don’t mind employees having access to websites such as Facebook during certain hours of the day, say lunch for example, then a policy can be put in place to allow access to these websites only during the specified hours.

While we don’t recommend access to websites such as Facebook on company networks, due to the possibility of easily accessing infected websites, ads, or popups, there are some companies that allow this.

Some companies have smaller networks where it is harder to justify the cost of a high end router, but still want to be able to control their employee’s network use.

For companies like this, there are other options. For example, there are some DNS providers that specialize in blocking non-work access. You simply point your router to the service to block the websites you don’t want employees to have access to.

One other option for those on a tight budget is to manually block websites by turning on the content advisor within each computers Internet settings and allowing only those specific sites an employee needs to complete their work.

Monitor Compliance
The final step is to have some sort of monitoring system in place and let your employees know it is being checked. Letting your employees know their usage is being tracked and monitored is generally an effective deterrent.

There are many different monitoring systems that can be installed on a user’s workstation and that run silently in the background. These systems can monitor everything on a user’s computers from keystrokes to taking screen shots of a user’s computer.

If you would like to speak with us on steps to improve your businesses productivity and cut down on wasted time give us a call. No matter what the size of your business, there are steps that can be put in place to help combat this rampant problem.

Internet Security: What Are They Surfing At Work?

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

A recent survey of business owners and IT managers found that employees are using company computers, Internet access, e-mail, and other resources to conduct hours of non-work related activities.  And the problem is on the rise.

Some of these activities simply waste time, like day trading and monitoring eBay bids. However, some of the activities are malicious and can cause serious issues with a company’s server and network.

Here are a few incidents that were reported by the IT managers that were surveyed:

• One employee was caught running a gambling website and acting as a bookie for his co-workers.

• To bypass the company’s web filter, one employee was caught using his desktop computer as an FTP server for the other employees. He had downloaded and saved over 300GB of material, all on his work computer, using his company’s Internet connection and undoubtedly slowing down their systems.

• One employee was caught giving away confidential information such as price lists, contracts, and software code for application development.

• Another employee had a pretty lucrative side business stealing and selling company inventory on eBay.

• One woman was caught running an online “outcall” service from her desk.

• One employee was caught renting the corporate IP address to hacker friends to attack other company’s computers and networks.

While these scenarios seem outrageous, they are not uncommon. Of the 300 companies surveyed, almost one-third have fired an employee in the last 12 months for violating e-mail policies, and 52 percent of companies said they have disciplined an employee for violating e-mail rules in the past year.

Educating your employees through an acceptable use policy is simply not enough. If the requirements are not enforced, employees will accidentally or intentionally violate your rules.

That’s why every company needs to invest in good e-mail and web filtering software. Just having it in place will act as a deterrent for such activities. If something really is going on – like an employee leaking confidential information to a competitor or sending racial or sexist jokes through your company’s e-mail – you’ll be able to catch it and resolve the issue proactively, instead of reacting to it after the fact.

Additionally, a good web filter will prevent employees from accessing inappropriate material online, wasting time on non-work activities, downloading viruses and spyware, and using up company bandwidth to download photos and music.

Email Is Making You Stupid

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

“The research is overwhelming. Constant email interruptions make you less productive, less creative, and, if you’re emailing while you’re also doing something else, just plain dumb.”

That quote – and the headline – comes from an article by Joe Robinson in Information Week magazine. When it arrived in my inbox, I was compelled to read it.

The fact is, as business owners, our lives have gotten incredibly more complex as we become more and more connected. Smart phones keep our email in front of us 24 hours a day, seven days a week – which compels us to be available on the same schedule.

The study Robinson sites was conducted by the University of Minnesota. It found that managing “peripheral tasks” – those things we do while we’re also doing something else – triggered twice the number of errors, and increased levels of annoyance by anywhere from 31 to 106 percent.

Time Is Money
Given our constant state of “connectedness” to clients, employees and prospects, it’s easy to think that we have to respond instantly to a request. I get caught in that trap: Thinking I’m being efficient when I handle something immediately.

Interestingly, Intel conducted a study of employee productivity, and found that email overload cost the company almost $1 billion a year in lost productivity. Each day, a typical office employee checks email 50 times, and uses an instant messaging application 77 times.

Interruptions like this not only sidetrack employees from their jobs, but also lower overall attention spans and increase stress by measurable levels. Job satisfaction and creativity also suffer.

Myth Of Multitasking
Again, from Robinson’s article: “Human brains come equipped with two kinds of attention: Involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention, designed to be on the watch for threats to survival, is triggered by outside stimuli – what grabs you.

It’s automatically rattled by the workday cacophony of rings, pings and buzzes that are turning jobs into an electronic game of Whac-a-Mole. Voluntary attention is the ability to concentrate on a chosen task.”

As your attention span is bounced around by constant interruptions, your brain changes: Interruptions erode an area called effortful control, and with it the ability to regulate attention.

In other words, the more you check your messages, the more you feel the need to check them – an urge familiar to BlackBerry or iPhone users.

The cult of multitasking would have us believe that compulsive message-checking is the behavior of an always-on, hyper-productive worker. But it’s not. It’s the sign of a distracted employee who misguidedly believes he can do multiple tasks at one time. Science disagrees.

People may be able to chew gum and walk at the same time, but they can’t do two or more thinking tasks simultaneously.

So, how do we crawl out of the attention void? Interruption management. Here’s some things I’m trying:

Turn off all of the alerts that let you know you’ve got mail.

Pick a few times per day – four maximum – to check your email. Outside of those designated times, keep Outlook closed.

Don’t let email be the default communication device. Communicating by phone or face-to-face saves time and builds relationships.

Respond immediately only to urgent issues. Just because a message can be delivered instantly does not mean you must reply instantly.

Severely restrict use of the reply-all function.

Put “no reply necessary” in the subject line when you can. No one knows when an e-conversation is over without an explicit signal.

Resist your reply reflex. Don’t send emails that say “Got it” or “Thanks.”

Use automatic out-of-office messages to carve out focused work time, such as: “I’m on deadline with a project and will be back online after 4 p.m.”

Please email me at tfox@expertsmi.com and tell me about your interruption management methods. I’ll let you know in the next few months how it goes.

Triple Efficiency And Save Time With Templates

Imagine, a pre-made template created just for your need! You could potentially triple your efficiency with a time-saving template at your fingertips.

Using templates can speed up any job. Visit www.office.microsoft.com/templates to view, search and download hundreds of free templates ranging from inventory sheets, to schedules, and business cards. You can even find newsletter templates just like the one you are reading right now!

Save time
Using a template can save you from those creative blocks that stall progress. Have you ever tried to create a brochure from scratch?

When you have a template handy, you can save countless hours of trying to arrange the graphics to balance the page.

Structure your workload
Creating presentations, invoices, diagrams, agendas, and other forms can become streamlined processes that anyone can help you complete.

With a template saved for each job, you literally have expert level graphic arts and designs incorporated right into your work, creating a more efficient way for you to complete your duties and improve the quality, too.

Get great design ideas for nothing
Imagine if you had to sit down and structure every document for your company. It would take forever! Templates can cut preparation time and costs as well as provide a reliable and consistent format for your business reports, transactions, and other processes.

What about a website
Are you considering a new website or makeover for your current one? While a template site doesn’t compare with a custom designed site, it can save time and money when you need to get your site updated. Take a look at the premade templates available at http://www.templatemonster.com/.

You can search through hundreds of website templates by style or category. You have the option to buy a copy for as little as $62, or buy a “unique” copy for $2,500+.

Plus, you will need a little help from a web designer to post the site on the Internet and make it work, but it is considerably less than an entirely custom website.

What’s the difference? A unique copy removes the template from the company library so no one else can purchase or use that template.

The downside is that if other people have already downloaded the template, they will still get to legally use their copy.

Don’t wait another minute! I am sure in reading this article, you thought of at least three projects or processes in which you could use a template. Get started today!

Sit Back And Relax. We’ll Do The Driving

Remote support software put a technician at your desk, without ever leaving the office
It goes without saying that nearly everyone has a computer not only in their office, but also in their home. Just about everyone has experienced a problem at one time or another, and many times, the problem can be pretty simple to  resolve once a technician starts working on it.

Larger companies have IT staff that can address and fix most problems in person because they are in the same building as the system with the problem.

Small to medium size businesses, however, generally can’t justify having someone on staff to resolve PC issues when they come up. Home computer users often have to carry their machines in for service.

In the past, clients would call us with a problem, perhaps an error message that pops up when they try to open a document. The technician would try to ask the right questions, and try to visualize what the client was experiencing so we could resolve the problem.

Home users would have to disconnect their system (taking care to remember exactly where the cords plug in) and bring the machine into our office for service. It isn’t very convenient, and trying to remember how everything plugs back together can be a real problem.

Well, all of that has changed now! You can sit back at let us drive your computer using remote control.

We’ve invested in software that lets our technician view and operate your computer remotely, without you ever having to bring it in for service, or have a technician come on site. Nearly everyone has high speed Internet now, so the software runs very quickly and efficiently.

This remote management software makes diagnosing a problem a lot easier and quicker than before. Our remote control software is encrypted for security (your data is never sent over the Internet unprotected) and requires that you give permission in order for it to work. It’s very safe and secure.

Once connected to your computer, the technician can view your desktop and take control of your system. He sees the same screens you do, including any error messages. It is just like having one of our highly trained technicians sitting right there with you.

Our clients have found this remote support software to be one of the most time saving and useful tools in our technology toolbox.

Unfortunately, for problems that are more in-depth, or hardware related, remote control doesn’t work. For simple error messages or software issues, sit back and let our technicians help you remotely.

 

Slowdown Means It’s Time To Boost Productivity

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

I attended an industry summit last month in Orlando, Florida, sponsored by the company that develops the software we use to run our business. Over 750 of the computer industry’s top service providers all converged in Downtown Disney for two days of training, sharing of best practices and panel discussions on the future of the computer service business.

Not surprisingly, a frequent topic of discussion among the attendees was the economy. While I know companies and people are struggling, I think in large part the media builds up the hype and frenzy to the point of near mass hysteria. “Bad news sells papers,” as they say.

Being involved in these discussions at the summit did drive home the point that we need to be the trusted business advisor for our clients. This means we need to do more than fix your computers – we need to help you maximize your technology investment, reduce costs and lower overhead. You don’t want computers – you want what the computers can do for you.

This has never been more important than right now, as we’re watching the economy rise and fall like a roller coaster.

This idea won’t be popular with your employees, but one of the areas where we can help you make an immediate impact on your bottom line is by increasing productivity. The Internet has become a way of life for nearly everyone – and almost every staff person has Internet access right at their desktops.

If you have a medium sized company with 10 regular, work at their desk type employees. Let’s assume, too, that each person makes $20 per hour after taxes and benefits. If each employee wastes just five minutes per day on the Internet, your annual waste is over $4,300. If they spend 15 personal minutes per day on the Internet, the annual cost is more than $13,000. An hour per day? The cost skyrockets to more than $50,000 per year.

There are plenty of options available to limit and monitor Internet usage at your company, and I’d encourage you to implement something immediately. There are some options that won’t cost you anything more than an hour of one of our consultant’s time.

If you know that employees are spending time on Myspace, for example, we can block access to that website. Or, you can make Myspace a hot monitoring term, and start recording a screen shot every second while an employee is on that site.

We also have the ability to block any external sites at the firewall level, so there’s no need to monitor employee’s computers. With a firewall, we can deny and allow sites based on their category (research sites are allowed, while lingerie sites aren’t). Call me at the office (734-457-5000) and I’ll be happy to discuss options with you.

If you’re concerned about violating employee privacy, here’s a little secret I’ll let you in on: The good employees don’t care. And secretly, they’re going to be happy you’re cracking down on the slackers.

Tracking Down “Bandwith Hogs” – Should You Monitor Employee Internet?

For many businesses, tracking employees use of software and the Internet is an absolute necessity for employers who are juggling productivity with employee privacy while trying to remain competitive in an increasingly fierce market.

Many computer professionals consider the problem to be crucial in today’s market.

What do you do if you’re an employer, and you want to retain your employees? You must keep salaries high, or they will go else-where. But you also can’t raise your prices, or you will be outpriced by competitors.

The answer is to increase productivity. You look around the office but don’t see people wandering the halls or talking at the water cooler. Everyone’s at their computers. The question is, what are they doing at their computers?

There is much anecdotal evidence that demonstrates the growth of personal use of computers during business hours, and there are many programs that track the URLs that employees visit, how much time they spend online, and the amount of bandwidth that Internet use is taking up.

They also allow employers to monitor which non-Internet programs employees use.

Programs like these gives employers a snapshot to show how much activity is spent on non-administrative activity.

Some critics see monitoring of employee Internet use as something of an invasion of privacy, but workplace security experts disagree. These programs can tell that an employee is spending four hours a day on eBay, but won’t disclose the actual activity on it.

It can tell if someone is consistently downloading unusually large files, but doesn’t disclose the contents of the individual’s e-mail.

Many monitoring programs also can tell if employees are spending large amounts of time playing Elf Bowling or Tetris instead of working, and whether more official programs that the company has purchased are being used. If they’re not, then further purchases may be a waste of money.

The primary purpose of the software is not to penalize employees for “unofficial” Internet use but rather to pinpoint problem areas in weak-performing employees and to locate “bandwidth hogs” whose overuse of the Internet slows down everyone’s work.

Tech Experts offers several solutions to filter, monitor and report on Internet use on a company’s network.

Call us today at (734) 457-5000 (toll free 888-457-5001) for more informataion.

Time Awasting? It Could Be Worse Than You Know

The ‘work’ day is supposed to be about 8.5 hours, with either a half or a full hour for lunch. That’s the expectation. With any small business every hour of that day is key to business.

So what would you do if you discovered your small staff or employees were whittling away at least an hour or two hours doing something other than work?

One to two hours a day equals five to 10 hours a week–with a small staff that could translate to a full week of workable hours down the drain.

Yet that’s what’s happening in business today. According to a recent InformationWeek article, workers are still spending too much time on other things such as:

Using the Internet for personal reasons, socializing with co-workers, conducting personal business and running errands on company time.

Software now exists which can monitor employee usage of the Internet, and report on activity such as browsing personal sites, downloading inappropriate content, and using email or instant messenger services for personal use.

You won’t believe what they’re doing at work!

Survey Of Over 400 IT Managers Reveals What Employees Are Really Doing During Work Hours… And You Won’t Believe What They Discovered!

According to a survey conducted by 8e6 Technologies (www.8e6.com), employees are using company computers, Internet access, email, and other resources to conduct hours of non-work related activities.

Some of these activities simply waste time, like day trading and monitoring eBay bids.

However, many of the activities are downright malicious and threaten their employers’ existence and security.

Just look at some of these outrageous real-life stories collected from IT Managers polled:

  • One employee was caught running a gambling website and acting as a bookie for his coworkers.
  • To bypass the company’s web filter, one employee was caught using his desktop computer as an FTP server for the other employees. He had downloaded and saved over 300 GB of material.
  • One employee was busted for giving away confidential information such as price lists, contracts, and software code for application development.
  • Another employee was busted for having a side business stealing and selling company inventory on eBay.
  • One woman was caught running an online outcall service from her desk.
  • One employee was caught renting the corporate IP address to hacker friends to generate DOS (denial of service hacker) attacks.

While these scenarios seem outrageous, they are not uncommon. According to a survey outlined in the Seattle Times, of 294 U.S. firms with 1,000 or more employees, almost one-third of companies have fired an employee in the last 12 months for violating email policies, and 52 percent of companies said they have disciplined an employee for violating email rules in the past year.

As an employer, educating your employees as to what they can and cannot do through an acceptable use policy is simply not enough.

If the requirements are not enforced, employees will accidentally (or intentionally) violate your rules. That’s why every company should look at investing in a good email and web filtering system.

Just having it in place will act as a deterrent for such activities, and if something really is going on — like an employee leaking confidential information to a competitor or sending racial or sexist jokes through your company’s email —you’ll be able to nip it in the bud before it comes back and bites you in the form of a lawsuit.

Additionally, a good web filter will prevent employees from accessing inappropriate material online, wasting time on non-work related activities, downloading viruses and spyware, and using up company bandwidth to download photos and music.

Software such as Spectorsoft monitor employee Internet usage, accumulating statistics about how much time is spent on certain web pages, logging sites visited, and can block sites based on keywords, addresses, or time of day.

If you would like our help in choosing and setting up an acceptable use policy and a web filtering system for your company, call us at: (734) 457-5000 or send an email message to at info@expertsmi.com.