The Long and Short of Data Backup
Having a comprehensive data backup and recovery strategy in place can absolutely save your business. This means it’s extremely important. Unfortunately, too many businesses don’t consider their backup and recovery systems until it is too late. Let’s unwrap what makes a successful backup and recovery platform work, and how to get one for your business.
Many business professionals use data backup and disaster recovery as if they are interchangeable, but this is simply not the case. Data backup is the act of making copies of your data while disaster recovery is a process that includes the act of actually restoring the data using the data backup. Obviously, the two systems are related (as one can’t happen without the other), and today we’ll take a look at why they are both integral to the continuity of a business.
Data Backup
When you first implement your backup solution, you should be focused on which data (and how much of it) you want to back up. It’s important to remember that not all data is as important as other data and therefore it is critical that you think about what data will be necessary to keep your organization functional if and when you experience operational troubles. As a rule, you should try to back up as much as you can without it affecting your ability to restore later on. The ideal data backup process will happen automatically without any resource dedicated to running it, as user error has sunk more than a few businesses in need of a data backup.
Disaster Recovery
On a related note, disaster recovery deals with the process of restoring your data following a disaster. The main way of measuring effectiveness of disaster recovery is speed. How fast can you get back into a comparable situation where you’re not operating at a loss? You should also consider where you’re trying to restore from. Best practices dictate that you have at least three copies of your data with one stored in the cloud, and two stored on-site for ease of access. Furthermore, you need to consider running automated tests to ensure the disaster recovery process will work the way you want it to when you need it most.
Does your business need a hand with implementing data backup and disaster recovery? Our all-in-one Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can provide you with a powerful preventative solution to ensure your organization doesn’t fall to unexpected disasters. To learn more, give our IT experts a call today at 651-234-0895.
Policies that Every BYOD Strategy Needs to Abide By
One of the most effective means for a business to shave a few dollars off its budget (and potentially boost employee engagement, for that matter) is to adopt something called a Bring Your Own Device policy—effectively, an agreement that allows their team members to access business-owned documents and files on devices they personally own to get their work done. While these policies have been shown to be very effective, they also need to be carefully considered so they can be adopted appropriately.
Let’s take a few moments to review some practices that are recommended for a secure BYOD implementation.
Determine Acceptable Parameters
Device and OS Requirements
For your productivity to remain intact and for your organizational security to be preserved, the tools your team brings to use need to meet the baselines that you set—otherwise, there is likely to be a shortcoming that leaves an opening. Certain workflows may require a specific operating system to be used, simply for the processes to be compatible. Keeping track of your team’s chosen hardware will help you determine if their devices are eligible to participate.
Accepted Software
On the topic, your business workflows should have defined software solutions identified for your team to use so that processes can flow smoothly. Make sure your team knows that they are expected to use these titles for their work processes and that they are expected to have certain protections in place on their mobile devices before they can use them to work.
Upkeep Policies
When using a personal device to access your business’ network, there needs to be some supported expectation that the user will ensure that the device remains functional and secure. This could mean that only authorized dealers or professionals are authorized to perform basic maintenance tasks and that these tasks are carried out promptly.
Security Preparations
Encryption Policies
In terms of protecting your data from the prying eyes of hackers, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more effective method than encrypting it. Considering this, it is important that you encourage/require encryption to be put in place as a part of any BYOD policies you implement.
Password Standards
We know, we know… the importance of secure passwords is a topic that has been covered frontways, backways, and every which way for a long time. However, once people start to follow these guidelines, we’ll stop bringing it up. When it comes to strong passwords, make sure your team is using them on all their devices, and that these devices are set to lock if an incorrect password is repeatedly entered.
Data Handling Guidelines
Where your data is concerned, you need to also establish the proper means for it to be stored and accessed while an employee is using a personal device. Ideally, your BYOD plan will have the means to block any data transfers to an insecure device as well as establish the proper procedures for accessing this data.
Necessary Prerequisites
Data Removal Circumstances
When an employee’s device has access to your company’s data via a BYOD strategy, it is critical that you retain the means to rescind that access as needed—like if a device is lost or stolen, or if an employee leaves the company. You may also want to include the right to review an employee’s device for company-owned data so that it can be removed if they were to leave so that your data isn’t brought elsewhere or abused.
Lost or Stolen Device Procedures
On the topic, your team needs to have a reporting process to follow should something happen to their device that will help to ensure that mitigating actions can be appropriately taken. Reinforce that these reports need to be promptly submitted to help minimize the potential impact of such occurrences.
Breach of Policy Consequences
Finally, you need to establish how employees will be reprimanded should these policies go unheeded or disregarded. While the loss of BYOD privileges is a common tactic, you should also seriously consider what is acceptable before an employee should be terminated. Once these distinctions have been made, share that information with your team when they opt into your BYOD implementation, so they are aware of the severity of such indiscretions.
A Bring Your Own Device policy is an essential piece of the modern office’s IT considerations and is something that we can help you out within much more detail. Find out what needs to be done by calling 651-234 0895 today.
An Entire Year Later, Remote Conferencing Still Makes Workers Nervous
For all its benefits, remote conferencing isn’t the easiest means of doing work for many people, as many have found out through experience. With businesses quite literally forced into this approach for some time now, employees are starting to feel the toll. Let’s discuss some of the impacts that long-term remote conferencing has had, and what can be done to minimize them.
Conferencing Can Be Stressful…
…although I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.
Widespread remote conferencing has been an asset for many businesses for over a year at this point, in many cases allowing them to remain open when they would otherwise have little choice than to close. As a result, many people have remained employed during a time when many simply have not had that luxury.
Of course, there has been a cost—a cost which, for many, has been deducted from their mental health.
Consider the implications that come with mandated remote conferencing: not only are your team members communicating primarily through a screen for most of the day, but there’s also a good chance that most of their social life has been digitized as well. It should come as no surprise, then, that conferencing can lead to something now commonly referred to as “Zoom anxiety.”
Named for the conferencing app that saw significant gains from this time in isolation, Zoom anxiety is more or less what it sounds like: nervous onsets and tics developing in response to perceived challenges and embarrassments while video conferencing. Whether you’re afraid of what your coworkers might hear through your mic, see through your webcam, or even not see or hear due to technical difficulties, Zoom anxiety can have some unpleasant impacts.
The Various Causes and Effects of Zoom Anxiety
Embarrassing oneself in front of coworkers, managers, and clientele isn’t a new phobia. However, with the tendency that many people have to let their guard down in the home, remote conferencing brings those fears from the conventional workplace into the home.
Consider, for a moment, the advertisements that the coffee brand Folgers has been running—where remote employees compensate for stressful situations caused by remote work with a cup ‘o’ joe. These ads, one featuring a woman smoothly using her mug to obscure her curious son from view and the other playing on the classic working-at-home-without-pants gag with brand-accurate red underwear, put a lighthearted face on very real concerns that people have developed.
Apple has taken a similar tack, showcasing their collaborative solutions by telling the story of a team of “Underdogs” who work through the stresses of remote operations to collaboratively build a better mousetrap (or in their case, pizza box).
Amusing as these ads may be to view as an audience member, many remote workers now understand that the anxiety these scenarios cause isn’t something that can be chuckled off—regardless of how funny it was to see Professor Robert Kelly’s kids crash his 2017 interview with BBC News.
This is particularly the case for quieter and less-extroverted employees, who would prefer to primarily be seen in the office, not so much heard. It can also be challenging for those who feel that the theatre of video collaboration puts the pressure on to perform more than they would in person. Many people have become overly aware of their own body language, distracting them from the substance of what is being said.
Numerous gendered issues have been shown to be exacerbated, with the too-common issues of women being spoken over or judged negatively for speaking too much, happening more frequently than in an in-person setting.
The casual office conversations that once fostered cooperation and even helped pave the way to better business relationships and advancement opportunities are gone—and we haven’t even mentioned the tendency for awkward silences to arise, only to be broken by two people speaking up simultaneously and immediately deferring the floor to the other.
Fortunately, these are ways that one’s anxieties can be quelled, regardless of whether they come from technical issues, miscommunications, or simple discomfort with the situation.
How to Reduce Zoom Anxiety
There are a few ways that you and your team can fight back the nerves that come from an overexposure to video conferencing.
Reconsider the Need for Video at All
Before you access a call, ask yourself how important it is for you to be seen in this meeting—or if video is even necessary. Sometimes, a simple call will do the job just fine, and won’t require your team members to put themselves on display.
Get Rid of the Mirror
One of the most common places for people to look while in a remote meeting is actually at the image of themselves that most platforms will provide… studies have shown as much to be true. As you can imagine, this can lead to employees stressing about their appearance and mannerisms far more than they normally would, adding to their distraction and distress. Encourage your team members to disable the self-preview feature in your chosen collaboration solution to avoid self-inflicted criticism.
Cover Your Camera
For privacy’s sake, make sure your team knows that it is okay for them to cover their physical camera. This way, they can enjoy their privacy until the need arises for them to be visible. A piece of tape or a small sticky note can suffice, but dedicated covers are also available for that very purpose.
Have Someone Take Point
One of the biggest issues that remote collaboration can bring about is the perceived lack of structure that a meeting has. Like we mentioned above with the extended silences and overlapped talking, it can be hard for people to gauge when it is the right time to speak up. Assigning someone to chair the meeting enables that person to direct the attention of the group to the person who is contributing.
Grin and Bear It
Finally, it is perhaps most important that everyone in your organization understands that real life is still a thing, especially when someone is working from home. As such, some background noise or other such interruption is only to be expected. Make sure you are open with your team about understanding the realities of their situation and work with them through it.
We’re Here to Help You with the Technical Aspects of Remote Collaboration
Of course, the most positive outlook in the world isn’t going to make your remote interactions any more productive if the infrastructure isn’t there to support them. Point North Networks, Inc., can help you acquire, introduce, and manage the solutions you need to take your remote collaboration to the next level. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out more about what we can deliver.
Do Google’s New Policies on User Data Privacy Indicate Larger Changes?
Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, online privacy has been highlighted significantly in recent years—in no small part due to the sale of our profiles by the tech giants that provide today’s most (in)famous websites… including and especially Google. Having said this, it is also important to acknowledge that some of Google’s recent policy changes could suggest that this may change at some point.
Let’s dive in and see what we can piece together.
How Google Makes Its Money
In fairness, there are a lot of answers to this question. For our purposes, we’ll focus on just one.
The short answer is simple: by selling advertisements.
Make no mistake about it: whenever you use the Internet, you are being watched. Giant platforms, including and especially Google, monitor your activities while using their services and use it to create a knowledge base of user behavior.
For instance, by using a combination of Google Search, Google Analytics, and Google Maps, Google could likely deduce that a user in Anytown, USA looking up “best pizza in anytown” would be interested in the most popular pizzeria. By analyzing which websites, phone numbers, and navigational directions got the most positive reaction after coming up as a search result, Google’s algorithms can figure out that this user would be happy to get the result for “Mario Rossi’s Fine Italian Ristorante and Pizzeria” and continue through the link to the establishment’s website.
This is that website’s goal—for more users to click into it, where they’ll be more encouraged to do whatever that website is trying to get them to do. As it stands, Google’s search results are organized based on an extensive list of factors far too numerous to go into depth with here… basically, it depends on how much Google likes how your website is put together, how other users have behaved after clicking the link to your website, and again, so much more.
As a result, Google has some leverage here, effectively serving as the gatekeeper for a staggering amount of Internet traffic. This puts them in the position to profit from these other websites.
One way that they do so: selling advertisement space in key positions on their search results pages. Another way: selling ads that are personalized to your web browsing history.
Google’s Recent Announcement, and What it Means
Google’s revelation that they will no longer create or support trackers that can follow an individual’s behavior and activity across the Internet has some significant ramifications regarding privacy and the Internet as a whole.
This is a sizable shock, as it seems to say that Google plans to hamstring one of its profit centers. However, it is important to clarify that this isn’t the entire truth.
Rather than eliminating tracking altogether, Google is simply shifting its approach to doing so. Instead of using cookies to compose in-depth profiles for each user, Google is shifting over to evaluating trends amongst groups of similar users and phasing out the comprehensive data collection that their past efforts were based in.
This “privacy sandbox,” as it is called, will allow users to be anonymously bundled together by browsing behaviors and other interests, with the data these groups generate being sold to advertisers. The idea is that this way, an advertiser can still target their most likely prospects, without that prospect’s information changing hands more than they may anticipate.
Caveats and Conditions
Of course, Google has left themselves a few loopholes in their new strategy. First, if a user signs into a website using their Google account, that information can still be tracked and used to shape advertising. Plus, this change only applies to the websites—mobile apps are still fair game as well.
This new sandboxing approach has already inspired scrutiny from regulatory bodies, with officials in the United Kingdom investigating these tools to catch any anticompetitive features. This comes as Google is also facing numerous antitrust lawsuits stateside, suggesting that this change in tack could be construed as an effort to show how important customer data security is to the corporation.
So Really, What Does This All Mean?
In terms of Google, these tactics seem to telegraph that the company is preparing for a future where data collection is much more controlled than it is now—and that Google is in a place where the downsides of such tracking have overtaken the value that these activities once net them.
In terms of the Internet as a whole, a player as large as Google might inspire other large providers who have not yet addressed how they balance data collection and data privacy. Having said this, Facebook’s current battle against Apple’s privacy-boosting features show that this approach will certainly not be universally accepted, either.
One way or another, this move will likely create some shifts to the Internet as a whole—and should reinforce how you need to be careful about your own organization’s data collection and storage practices.
Point North Networks, Inc., can help you out in that regard. To find out how our solutions and services can make your company more secure, efficient, and compliant, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
Tip of the Week: Make Your Laptop Trackpad Less Annoying with ClickLock
The laptop is one of the great productivity tools in modern business. Their portability gives them immense value. There are some cons to using a laptop, however. One is the trackpad. While they have improved over the years, they are still not ideal, which is why you see many people who use a laptop for productivity bring along a wireless mouse. One of the biggest problems people run into is that they have a hard time with the click-and-drag feature on the trackpad and this makes working in certain programs maddening. Today, we have a tip to make this process much simpler.
Disclaimer: You will have to change your settings for this tip, so if you don’t feel comfortable changing things inside your Windows OS, let your IT provider know and they will assist you.
ClickLock is a Great Tool for the Laptop User
ClickLock is a feature offered inside Windows that eliminates the frustration of the click-and-drag problems you have on your laptop, as it allows you to start and stop your drag option by simply pressing your left button a little longer.
It works like this:
- Hover your cursor over the window or item you are trying to move and press and hold the (left) touchpad button for a few seconds. This activates ClickLock.
- Once ClickLock is active, simply release the mouse button and move the cursor freely to where you want your window or item to go.
- Once it is positioned, press the (left) touchpad once again to confirm your drag selection.
You will immediately see the improvement. Like many options that don’t come by default, you have to activate it in your settings.
Activating ClickLock
To use ClickLock, you need to first navigate to your Control Panel, from your Start Menu:
- In the Control Panel, navigate to Hardware and Sound.
- There, find the Devices and Printers section and click the link to the Mouse
- In the Buttons tab, check the box labeled Turn on ClickLock, click Apply, and then Ok.
We hope this will help you be more productive and reduce your frustration when working on your laptop. For more great tips and tricks return to our blog soon.
How Virtual Environments Can Work For Your Business
Hardware is expensive, this much is certain. When a small or medium-sized business is looking to get the most bang for buck from their technology investments, they have to consider hardware to be the most crucial part of the equation. One option that businesses can take advantage of today is to use virtualized environments. Whether these computing environments are hosted onsite or in the cloud, a business can extend the usefulness of their IT budget by utilizing them. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of virtualization on your business.
Business Computing is Shifting
There was a time, not too long ago, where there weren’t a lot of options when it came to business computing. The small business that wanted to expand its computing infrastructure would buy a server and use it for a dedicated purpose. This strategy gives the business the most control over their hardware, data, and applications, so for the business that has an onsite IT support team, it’s logical.
It’s also very expensive.
One of the main problems with this organizational computing strategy is that it doesn’t utilize the capacity of these servers. The servers are used for a specific purpose and that can leave a significant amount of resources unused. This underutilization is a wasted opportunity. By using virtualized environments, new hardware can be more effectively utilized, and therefore, can help control hardware costs.
Here’s How Virtualization Works
Instead of running one server for every mission-critical application, you run several virtual machines on one server. Each virtual machine only uses the hardware resources that it needs, meaning that three or four servers can be consolidated into one. You will get the same performance out of one server with many virtual servers on it as you would get from multiple in-house servers.
Pros of Virtualization
Outside of the admittedly hefty upfront cost of virtualization, the reduction in hardware costs you see down the road make the strategy a sound one for almost any business. Not only do you save money on buying servers, the environments are accessible from nearly any device. This means that you cut down on your workstation spend, and you can take full advantage of remote workers. All-in-all, businesses that commit to virtualization can save between 40-to-60 percent on their organizational hardware costs, and see reduced management, utility, and maintenance costs as well.
This also allows you to spend more time driving your business forward and less time managing it. Virtual servers can deploy new environments in minutes, expediting the process by a substantial amount. Virtualization also makes security and data redundancy much easier as your IT admins only need to work on one server rather than several, and back up one piece of hardware.
Your Company in the Cloud
Another consideration is hosting your virtual environments in a bigger virtual environment. Cloud computing is more affordable and secure than ever and companies have been paying attention. By using cloud offerings to extend the benefits of virtualization you’re effectively paying to host your company’s servers in the cloud. This can be even more cost effective than using virtualization on your own in-house servers, but it does remove some of the control you and your team have over your hardware.
Either way, if you aren’t considering virtualization, you are probably wasting money. If you would like to learn more about virtualization for your business, contact the IT professionals at Point North Networks, Inc., at 651-234-0895 today.
The Right IT Can Be a Real Moneymaker for Your Business
All businesses, in some way, shape, or form, exist to generate revenue—whether their profits are retained for their own benefit or dedicated to supporting some other cause. Either way, this balance makes the difference between the investments a business makes and the return these investments see a critical consideration. By using modern technology, today’s organizations can tip this balance to be more in their favor.
Let’s consider three ways that you could leverage technology to ultimately benefit your cash flows.
Improving Operational Efficiency
Let’s jump right into it and acknowledge something: the more you can effectively accomplish with the time, energy, and resources you’ve invested, the better off your company will be. Today’s technology offers a means of doing so through automation.
Rather than having an employee commit time to certain tasks, modern IT can easily carry out these tasks with minimal oversight or interaction. With predetermined triggers to instigate key processes, you and your team can spend less time on busy work and more on tasks that will help to increase your business’ dealings.
Whether you need to track and organize data, send out repetitive communications, or generate insights and reports, there are some means of carrying these out properly.
Subscribe to Business Services
Business technology is, in a word, expensive. Whether you need a specific software suite to support your operations, or improved infrastructure hardware, or more storage space for your team to use, the associated costs are typically substantial if you plan to support it yourself.
Now, today’s technology opens a new option: cloud-based services. These services can be tailored to better fit the situation of the business using them, in terms of the number of users and specific services rendered. That way, you can optimize your budgetary spend to suit your precise needs, eliminating waste and freeing up more of your budget than otherwise possible. Furthermore, these services give you more flexibility overall, as your delivered services can be trimmed to match your precise needs more closely.
Reconsidering IT Expenses
On the topic of cloud-hosted services, the pricing structure these offer can also assist you in optimizing your budgetary spend. Rather than a single, lump-sum price to be paid up front, the cost of cloud-hosted software services is billed per month as a subscription. This helps to make your expenditures far more predictable, assisting you in managing your available budget, while also offering flexibility as your needs change over time.
Furthermore, not all cloud providers and vendors are created equal, and the market is volatile enough that one service might not always be the best option for you at a given time. Therefore, you should regularly go over your available options to ensure that you are investing as much as you can in the ideal choices.
Managed IT services offer many of these qualities, enabling you to squeeze every bit of value out of the technology you rely on. Find out more about what Point North Networks, Inc., can do for you by calling 651-234-0895.
VoIP Significantly Improves Business Communications in Multiple Ways
With all the communication tools that businesses use today, there still is no more important option than the telephone system. Unfortunately for small businesses, the telephone system can be expensive and hard to manage. However, there is a way for you to get a fully featured telephone service with some of the most important tools your business needs, at a fraction of the price you currently pay for your enterprise telephone system.
With that, we’d like to introduce you to VoIP.
What Is VoIP?
VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is a telephone system that uses your business’ Internet connection to fuel its telephone system. Rather than paying the antiquated telephone company an arm and a leg, you can now use your existing Internet connection to host a dynamic and reliable telephone platform. There are different tiers of VoIP, but today’s most cost effective, and popular, is a VoIP platform that is hosted in the cloud.
Using a VoIP system can frequently provide a business with a variety of operational perks:
- VoIP is easily manageable – Your VoIP solution will either be hosted on your in-house infrastructure or in a dedicated cloud server, making management simpler and reconfiguration possible in just a few clicks.
- VoIP enables mobility – A VoIP system doesn’t restrict your employees to only using their business telephone while physically at their desk. While it will work with a dedicated business phone, your employees can also leverage a mobile device via a dedicated application.
- VoIP provides cost reductions – One of VoIP’s most attractive benefits is how it can scale back your communication costs in multiple ways. VoIP eliminates the need to pay for phone services on top of your Internet service, and most “premium” features are generally included.
- VoIP incorporates integrations – VoIP solutions can be integrated into your other management and line of business solutions.
- VoIP offers advanced features – VoIP has some built-in options that can really be a huge benefit for your business. These include call waiting, call forwarding, instant and text messaging, and video and audio conferencing.
Naturally, higher-tier plans will have a greater selection of these features available, allowing you to boost your operations even further.
Would you like to know more about VoIP? Call Point North Networks, Inc., and our IT professionals today at 651-234-0895 to get more information.
Does Your Organization Have Enough Bandwidth?
A lot of business is being conducted over the Internet right now, in terms of communication and transactions alike, which makes a business’ capability to remain connected to its clientele even more important. Now is not the time to wonder if your business is as connected as it should be, which means that you need to know how much bandwidth you have available—and that what you do have is sufficient.
Does Your Business Have Enough Bandwidth?
Obviously, if your business is experiencing bottlenecks, the answer to this question is no. Unfortunately, many organizations will simply adjust and adapt to these inefficiencies and “make it work” (to a point, at least). Despite this, you need to be sure that you at least know how much bandwidth your business should have to meet its needs.
In addition to this, it is important to be sure that your Internet service can support your needs. With so many options—including Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fiber, Wireless, Satellite, or Broadband over Powerlines (BPL), and more—you need to know if your capacity is sized to match your consumption, and that you’re getting all you can for your investment.
Point North Networks, Inc., can help you figure this out by evaluating your broadband needs and work with your ISP to ensure you’re getting everything they should be delivering.
When it comes to your broadband, here are some important things to keep in mind:
Run a Speed Test
A speed test is a great way to establish your current access to bandwidth and whether it is sufficient for your productivity. An internet consultant will have plenty of testing tools to use, but you should also take a moment to visit speedtest.net or another speed testing utility to help inform your conversation with them.
Here are some measurements to examine:
- Ping, or latency, is how you measure the reaction time of your connection. For instance, how quickly a webpage can recognize that another tab has been opened. Issues here could come from your Internet service provider (ISP), an improperly configured firewall, router, or modem, and your overall bandwidth. A ping of about 20ms is good, as a lower ping indicates a better-performing connection.
- Upload and download speed are another important consideration, as the speed of the data that you push out of and pull into your computer will help you evaluate your bandwidth. As downloads are typically more common than uploads in the business setting, it is normal for bandwidth to be more focused on downloads.
How Wi-Fi Will Factor In
Wi-Fi is a significant utility in any office, especially with the mobility that so many offices rely on nowadays—particularly when personal space is as large of a concern as it is now. This makes the prospect of losing connection in the office such an issue.
Unoptimized wireless can seriously hinder business productivity, and these issues are only worsened by insufficient bandwidth. Productivity issues are often the inciting factor behind the use of shadow IT, where these obstacles lead employees to install and utilize unapproved software without your knowledge.
Does Your Business Need More Than You Have?
If its bandwidth is insufficient for its needs, your business simply won’t have the capability to support its services sufficiently for your customers. In this way, your bottom line could be seriously impacted by any holdbacks—especially with so many of your customer-focused services being based online.
Your broadband is what also allows your team to work productively. Today’s popular conferencing solutions require a large amount of bandwidth to work effectively, and while VoIP isn’t all that resource intensive, it does require some reliable bandwidth availability. Without the resources to support your processes, they are guaranteed to become a problem sooner or later.
Lean on Us for Help with Your Connectivity
It isn’t a secret that the Internet plays a mammoth role in modern business, in such a way that a prepackaged, one-size-fits-all strategy just won’t sufficiently fill. With Point North Networks, Inc., in your corner, you’ll have a resource to turn to so that you are sure to get the connectivity you need to compete and grow.
For any assistance with your company’s use of technology, give us a call at 651-234-0895 today.
Tip of the Week: Three Questions to Help Arrange Your Priorities
The typical workday is filled with tasks—oftentimes, more than can be handled in the span of a day and all given the same priority level. As I’m sure you’ve realized at some point, this just isn’t a sustainable way to operate. To minimize this issue, we’re going over a few tips to help you prioritize the tasks that you’re given.
How to Assign Value to Your Tasks
If you want to make the most out of the time spent each day, one of the best ways to do so is taking some and determining which of your tasks should be given priority over the others. This can be accomplished through a simple evaluation of what you have on your plate, conducted through the framework of a few questions.
What Will Be the Result of Finishing a Task?
Or in other words, which task will net the most benefits once completed? Will one bring you closer to your goals, or enable you to make the most of your time? Which task will wind up serving the biggest benefit to the rest of your team? Once you’ve identified which will provide you and the business with the most good, you’ve identified which should likely come first.
How Long Have You Been Considering a Task?
Whether you’ve been actively planning or postponing a task for whatever reason, try prioritizing it instead. Regardless of what challenges the task itself will present, finishing it will certainly pay off with greater rewards than what are to be enjoyed with it hanging over your head.
Even If a Task Isn’t Pressing, Will It Enable Progress in Something That Is?
You may have some of those odd tasks clogging up your itinerary that may not be quite as important as some of the others. However, some of these tasks may assist you in completing these others. In these cases, prioritizing such tasks can make it simpler to work through your schedule effectively. The others may be able to be delegated to someone else, assuming you have the authority to assign tasks in this way.
How Have You Kept Your Tasks Organized?
Don’t be afraid to share your methods in the comments! For more help with your IT and how to use it to your advantage, feel free to lean on Point North Networks, Inc. at any time. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out more.
