Collaborative Post¦ Although many people are starting to return to their offices and physical workplaces, there are still many of us that have chosen to remain at home and take advantage of the remote and hybrid work opportunities given to us. However, one of the biggest problems with working from home still remains; outdated or confusing home technology that reduces our productivity.
While some may have access to tech support services and additional help to solve home office tech problems, the reality is that most people don’t know who to turn to if something breaks or doesn’t work correctly. They’ll need to Google it, email their supervisor or manager, or just figure it out themselves.
So here are some tips to help you be more productive at home and overcome these productivity concerns.
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Get to know your home office and its technologies
Using your home office does take a little bit of time and familiarity. Depending on the software and hardware you use, it might take you a couple of weeks or even months to familiarise yourself with all the little quirks and features that you might run into. However, it’s important that you actually try to expose yourself to your home office tech so that you have an easier time learning from your mistakes and picking up on nuances that you might have ignored in the past.
One of the biggest hurdles to tech familiarity is just getting out of your comfort zone and accepting that you’re going to be a little lost at first. However, as you ask for help, search on Google for advice, and even ask friends or family members for help, you’ll slowly start to build up your tech knowledge. You can then apply solutions for old problems to new issues, and you can start figuring out how your home office tech works.
Outsourcing your IT services when possible
If you’re working for a company then there’s a good chance that they’ve already got a team of IT professionals that handle most problems. However, if you’re working at home for your own business, then you may want to try outsourcing your IT services when possible so that you personally don’t need to bother managing them. Not only does this take a lot of time and effort, but it can actually be rather costly in terms of how much time you spend.
As such, we suggest looking for an IT service provider to help with your technology-related needs. For instance, maybe you’re searching for a cloud backup service to help ensure that your data is kept secure. If this is the case, then relying on an IT service provider will give you peace of mind and allow you to focus more on growing your business rather than on tech-related issues that you might not be familiar with.
In short, managing your own home office tech can be a good idea, but only if you’re willing to commit to the learning process, take notes when necessary, and generally just build up experience. If that’s not in your interests, then outsourcing is usually the better option.
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.