At Bauhinia Solutions, we love everything that has to do with organisation – and that includes email inboxes.
In fact, organising your inbox is often overlooked, but it is such a critical part of managing your daily workload. A cluttered inbox is not just overwhelming. It can really create problems because important, time-sensitive messages can get lost in the noise. This can lead to missed deadlines, forgotten tasks and potentially, very disgruntled customers.
By organising your inbox, you are able to quickly prioritise, respond to, and find information. This makes it much easier for you to stay on top of important tasks.
How Do We Organise An Inbox?
Sorting emails into folders is one of our favourite things to do. It can help you keep track of necessary documents and conversations, saving you time in the future when it comes to referencing information. Taking the time to create a simple system for keeping your emails organised will make managing your workload much easier. If you dont know how to create rules/filters in your inbox, you can read this blog, where we take you through the process, step by step.
Labels are also a great way to help you prioritise your emails. They work by assigning emails with different levels of importance. For example, if you want to focus on a certain project, you can create a label for it and assign all related emails to that category so they are easy to locate when needed. You could even colour-code labels so you’re immediately able to identify which messages are more important than others at a glance.
Similarly, creating labels for specific contacts or topics within your inbox will make it easier for you to find the exact information you need quickly and easily. Organising your emails with labels not only makes them easier to read through but also helps keep track of tasks that need completing. By assigning deadlines or reminders and attaching them to certain emails, you can make sure that tasks are being tackled in a timely manner and nothing is slipping through the cracks.
You can also use labels to monitor group projects or collaborations with other team members, making it easier to manage multiple conversations at once. Using labels is a great way for busy professionals to stay organised and maintain efficient email management habits.
By creating categories for different emails, you’ll be able to find emails more quickly and spend less time sorting through your inbox. If you are not sure how to create labels, you can refer to this blog, where we explain the whole process in more detail.
These days, there are so many tools within the inbox that make organisation a breeze. We have our favourites and we have learned over time, which ones work, and which ones don’t.
Small Price. Big Rewards.
Organising your email inbox to maximize efficiency, may require some initial effort but reaps many rewards over time. It’s worth taking the time to set up an effective system that works for you and keeps your inbox under control.
Organising emails doesn’t need to be a time-consuming process, especially if you know what you’re doing. We manage so many client inboxes, that we are seasoned professionals when it comes to the setup, and we know exactly how to get an inbox running like a well-oiled machine.
It’s definitely worth investing some effort into setting up a system that works for you, and keeps your inbox under control. This way, you’ll be able to manage your workload much more efficiently and stay on top of key tasks with ease!
If you need help organising your inbox, feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to assist you.
Death by PowerPoint is a phenomenon caused by the poor use of presentation software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Notes, Google Slides, etc.
Key contributors to death by PowerPoint include confusing graphics, slides with too much text and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud, or even a dysfunctional slide deck, marred by technical glitches and the inability of the presenter to cope with the pressure of presenting his/her slides. Death by PowerPoint is easily recognised by observing the audience members’ glazed eyes or yawns, glances at their watches, nodding heads due to boredom, furtive use of smartphones, and trips to the bathroom.
Common errors people make are:
Too many bullet points. More than 6 is risky.
Too many words on a slide. Nobody listens when they’re reading.
Too many fonts are unnecessary and distracting.
Same with too much bold, underline, and italics.
Clipart… really? Avoid it. Period.
Too many colour variations. Bright colours can be blinding.
Not checking their spelling
So, what can you do better?
I recommend watching the Tedx talk given by David JP Phillips, a renowned presentation skillstraining coach, international speaker, and author. In his talk, he lays out five keys ideas to simplify your PowerPoint and make it attractive to your audience.
If you don’t have time to watch all of his presentation, here is a summary of his five points:
1. Only One Message Per Slide
When there is more than one message, your audience has to divert their attention to each message, which in turn reduces their focus.
2. Use Contrast and Size to Steer Focus
Use less words, and instead use big and contrasting objects. They ground your points, are more visible to your audience, and encourages the audience to focus on what you’re saying.
3. Avoid Showing Text and Speaking at the Same Time
People will read the text and not listen to you, which ultimately will make your audience forget both what you say and what is shown on the PowerPoint presentation.
4. Use Dark Background
It is not something we necessarily agree with, however there is a place for using a dark background for your PowerPoint. The slides should only be a visual aid and not the focus. The would purpose of a dak backgroun is to shift the focus to you, the presenter.
5. Only Six Objects Per Slide
Six is a magical number in terms of presenting. Anything more than six would require drastic cognitive energy from your audience to process.
In Summary
Remember that, ultimately, it’s you that the audience should be paying attention to, not your slides!
PowerPoint can be used to create great visual aids, but the success of your presentation is determined by the way you deliver them. So, tell your story with a confident, compelling physical presence, and master it by rehearsing it 10 to 15 times.
Looking for ways to simplify and streamline your business? We’re here to help. Click here to schedule your free call!
A full inbox can seem overwhelming. It can even lead to feelings of stress and anxiety. Organizing your overflowing inbox can often be one of those things you find yourself abandoning in favour of other, more appealing tasks because the sheer volume of emails is too daunting.
Unfortunately, an overflowing inbox can be likened to an unwelcome weed in the garden. The longer you leave it, the more it grows.
Why Is Email Management Important?
Emails make up about 80% of what many office employees deal with daily. An important email that gets buried under unimportant emails due to disorganization and clutter, can have devastating consequences.
Hiring a remote assistant to review and organize your digital communications may help to simplify your life and boost your productivity.
Here are some of the benefits of email management:
1. Maximize Efficiency
Having a well-organized inbox equips you with the tools you need to manage your daily to-do lists. If a time sensitive and important email comes through, you will be aware of it and can switch up your schedule to attend to it if need be. In the same way that an email can come through that negates the need for planned work. By seeing it timeously, you can save yourself hours and frustration.
2. Lighten Your Workload
Generally speaking, there are often other team members who can help with daily tasks or respond to emails on your behalf. Unfortunately, these tasks often don’t get delegated because an inbox is either left unattended or is too disorganized.
By delegating email management to an assistant, they will be able to stay on top of the emails coming through daily and hand out tasks to capable team members. By the time you sit down to look at your daily emails, many of them may already have been resolved and ticked off the ‘to-do’ list.
Your clients will be happy their emails do not go unattended and your workload will be significantly lighter.
3. Be Proactive Instead of Reactive
A good assistant will be well versed in the different email software and can harness the power of each one. They should be able to utilize folders, tags or other features to sort your emails. This makes locating important emails a breeze.
The assistant can also help you create rules in your email program or filters to automate managing certain messages. Rules can be set up so that when an e-mail is received from a specific sender or with a certain subject line, it automatically gets filtered into the relevant folder. An inbox with many clients can be quickly sorted so the ones which need urgent attention can be prioritized.
With a little bit of know-how, your inbox can become a tool for efficiency rather than the distraction that keeps you from getting anything done. By implementing systems, you are better able to identify and resolve possible problems before they become a roadblock in your day.
4. Save Time
Responding to daily emails can take up huge chunks of time. Many times, the responses are repetitive. An email template is a document containing all of the components of an email message. It allows the user to quickly draft emails by entering information into predefined areas in the template, instead of having to write every detail from scratch each time. Managing emails can be made much easier if you use templates.
A skilled assistant can show you how to create professional and efficient email templates. With the correct training, they can also respond on your behalf if the emails are repetitive or a FAQ. This allows you to respond quickly to clients which keeps them happy and saves you time and money.
Using An Assistant to keep Your email Inbox Under Control
If email management is a thorn in your side, it might be time to contact a professional service who can help ease your peace of mind every day. We provide business services that can manage your inbox for you. We are pros at sorting through pages of old mails, deleting all spam and organizing your email to make life easier for you.
We take the time to learn about your business so we know how to handle your emails more efficiently, allowing you to spend more time managing your company’s development. As part of the initial discussion we identify the right times, and how often we will allocate to responding to your emails. We’ll also create email templates for consistent messaging and organize your inbox to better help you power through your daily tasks. Assistance with email management allows you to focus on running your business smoothly without being bogged down by time-swallowing, unimportant emails.
Your business deserves tailored support that lets you focus on your clients, not your admin. Book a free discovery call to learn more!
More and more, our lives have gone digital and no one ever thinks about backing up their digital life until it’s too late. We’re quickly filling up our hard drives with digital photos, music, videos and documents, and in doing so we’re flirting with digital disaster.
Think about it: Your computer crashes, your phone is lost or stolen, or some other misfortune strikes and all of your precious data is gone. In a millisecond your family photos, home movies, years of work, and digital music collection could vanish forever. It could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a data-recovery service attempt to get the lost data back, but there’s no guarantee they’d be successful.
This is a disaster that doesn’t have to happen.
With today’s advancements in external storage and backup solutions, backing up your digital assets has never been easier or faster. If you need to restore something, you won’t have to rummage through a stack of CDs/DVDs with an external hard drive solution. The good news is that getting started on a backup program is simple.
In this blog post, we’ll go through five ways to back up your digital life, as well as the various backup solutions available.
5 Steps to Back Up Your Digital Life
Step 1: Backup Plan
The first step is to create a backup plan. This should include what data you want to backup, where you will store your backups, and how often you will perform backups. We recommend that you backup on a daily basis or, at a minimum, weekly.
Step 2: Backup Tools
The second step is to select the right backup tools. There are many different options available, so do some research to find the ones that best fit your needs. Use a solution that’s easy to set up and provides automatic backups.
Step 3: Perform Backups
The third step is to actually perform the backups. This step is critical – if you don’t actually do the backups, then your data won’t be safe! This is the benefit of a ‘set and forget’ automatic backup option – you never have to remember because the system does it for you.
Step 4: Test Backups
The fourth step is to test your backups. Testing your backups sounds like a pain, but it’s actually pretty easy. All you need to do is restore your data from the backup and make sure everything is there and working as it should be. If something goes wrong, you’ll know right away and can take steps to fix the problem.
Step 5: Review Regularly
The fifth and final step is to regularly review and update your backup plan. As your digital life changes, so too should your backup plan.
Don’t procrastinate! Unfortunately, the need to back up data is often a lesson learned from a bitter experience. Don’t let it happen to you. By following these five steps, you can ensure that your digital life is safe and sound – no matter what happens!
Backup Solutions for You to Consider
There are many methods for backing up your computer, but not all of them offer the same degree of protection or ease of use. The ideal computer backup is one that protects your data from all of the major risk factors, is simple to use, and allows you to recover exactly what you want without too much hassle.
Cloud-Based Backup
Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason. They offer a number of advantages over traditional on-premises solutions, including greater flexibility, scalability, and affordability. Perhaps most importantly, cloud-based solutions can help to ensure that your data is always available, even in the event of a catastrophic failure. In other words, by storing your data in the cloud, you can protect it from just about anything. Whether it’s a natural disaster or a simple power outage, your data will always be safe and accessible when you need it.
Downside? There is no downside, this is one of the safest and most secure way to back up all your files.
External Hard Drive
External hard drives offer a convenient and reliable way to back up your files. Unlike cloud-based backup services, which require an active internet connection, external hard drives can be used offline. This means you can back up your files even if you don’t have an internet connection. If you’re worried about losing your data if your computer crashes, rest assured that an external hard drive can be safely disconnected from your computer and stored in a safe location.
On the downside, external hard drives do have space limitations, and are susceptible to disasters like flood, fire, and theft.
Thumb, USB or Flash Drive
USB or flash drive backups have a number of advantages over other types of backups. They are relatively small and portable, so you can easily take them with you if you need to. They are also relatively inexpensive, so you can buy multiple drives and store them in different locations. USB or flash drives are also easy to use, so you can quickly and easily back up your files.
While this backup type is easy to use and cheap to buy, it is also easy to lose. The downside is the same as the external hard drive; storage limitations, and susceptible to disasters.
You may also want to use a combination based on your situation. If you’re travelling or having a working holiday, smaller storage that’s easy to carry when you are working offline might be the perfect solution in that moment.
Whatever you choose, with so much of our lives now stored in the digital realm, it’s more important than ever to have a solid backup plan in place.
Overwhelmed by a cluttered inbox? Let us take email management off your plate so you can focus on what matters. Schedule your free discovery call today!
The Internet has transformed our lives in many good ways. Unfortunately, this vast network and its associated technologies also have brought in their wake, the increasing number of security threats.
Computer security basically is the protection of computer systems and information from harm, theft, and unauthorized use. It is the process of preventing and detecting unauthorized use of your computer system.
Security of your online systems is important, particularly your financial systems. In this article we offer three (3) key computer security measures you should seriously consider.
1. Password Management
We recommend the following best practices for password management:
Change your password at least once every 90 days
Keep your username and password confidential. Memorise your password and do not write it down or reveal it to anyone
Do not disclose your password to anyone claiming to act on behalf of a company. Remember that no one should ever ask you for your password
If you’re using digital banking or investment services, anything that relates to your finances, please be aware of the following:
DON’Ts
Leave your mobile devices unattended after logging on to a financial institution. Always log off properly when you have finished.
Install applications on your mobile devices unless you trust the source. Understand the permissions of mobile applications before you install them.
Use untrusted custom virtual keyboards.
DOs
Set up auto-lock and passcode lock to prevent unauthorized access to your mobile devices.
Download and install applications on your mobile devices from trusted app stores, for example, App Store® and Google Play™.
Only store your own fingerprint/Face ID and on your device before you enable Touch ID/Fingerprint ID/Face ID for any financial system.
Disable Touch ID/Fingerprint ID/Face ID if your device is to be sent for servicing.
2. Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Fraudsters may impersonate your contractors and suppliers by sending e-mails requesting for changes to your payment bank accounts. They may also impersonate senior management of your bank, or if you work for a larger organisation, senior management of your company. The goal is to bypass normal procedures to make urgent fraudulent payments.
Since the sender’s email address closely matches a known address, this type of fraud often goes unnoticed until it’s too late. Cybercriminals may even hack into a real email account – from which fraudulent communications are hard to identify. As per the US–FinCEN report of Jul 19, the total value of attempted BEC climbed from USD 110m per month in 2016 to an average of USD 301m per month in 2018. Use of fraudulent vendor or client invoices grew from 30% of sampled 2017 incidents to 39% in 2018. BEC is a real threat and can cause significant financial loss and reputational damage.
How to keep your business safe from BEC:
Carefully scrutinise all e-mail payment instructions to ensure that they’re from the right person with correct email address
Verify payment requests and changes to account details using known contact details
Establish other communication channels, such as phone calls, to verify significant transactions and avoid interception by a hacker
Consider using Digital Signatures for all electronic communications related to payments
Look out for unusual changes in business practices. For example, getting a request from someone who is normally not involved in the payment process or a vendor asking for an account number to be changed
3. Phishing Scams
Everyone should be wary of online phishing scams. Phishing is an attempt by criminals to ‘fish’ for personal information such as the security credentials you use for online banking/purchase, or to convince you to click an embedded malicious file/link/QR code. Someone can send you an e-mail or SMS which appears to come from your bank or an organization you have registered with, for example:
To inform you that your bank account has been blocked and provide you with a link to reactivate the account; or
To inform you that a transfer deposit / payment advice is issued at your request and ask you to open the attached file to confirm the information.
The e-mail or SMS asks you to click on a link, the attached file or scan a QR code to confirm your bank account, username or password and in this way, they obtain your details. In some cases, your computer will also get infected with malware by following the instruction stated in the phishing scams.
Whenever there is money involved, whether it is updating bank account details or sending a payment, if something is a little odd, double check and clarify. It is always better to be safe than sorry!
Looking for ways to simplify and streamline your business? We’re here to help. Click here to schedule your free call!
Ever heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?”
Well I am here to prove that old adage wrong. While I prefer not to call myself an ‘old dog’, I have been at this computer game for a while and pride myself on my deft keyboard skills.
That’s why I found it surprising that I was not aware of some of the newer web browsing tricks published by Techspot.
Now I’ve mastered them, I feel it is my duty to share the knowledge.
Here they are, along with some old faithful’s.
1. Jump to Address Bar:
There are a few ways to jump right to the address bar from anywhere in your browser. Pressing Ctrl + L, F6, and Alt + D all get you where you want to be.
2. Automatically add www. and .com to a URL:
Save time typing in a URL by simply clicking Ctrl + Enter after you type the name of the site. Need .net instead of .com? Press Ctrl + Shift + Enter instead.
3. Cycle Through Open Tabs:
Pressing Ctrl + Tab while in a browser will flip between each one (Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go backwards). This can be much faster than moving the mouse and clicking on a tab. Ctrl + Num (1, 2, 3, 4, n..) will also take you to certain tab in that numeric order. Ctrl + 9 always brings you to the very last tab, even if it’s beyond the ninth one.
4. Instant Image Search (Chrome Only):
If you hold down the “S” key and right click on an image, it will open an image search on a new tab.
5. Go Incognito:
Pressing Ctrl + Shift + N will launch a new private in Chrome, Ctrl + Shift + P will do it in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
6. Convert Your Browser into a Notepad:
Type this into the address bar and you can write notes. Alternatively, while not as fast. Use Google Keep or Gmail’s compose mail to write notes and have those saved on the cloud as you type and go.
7. Icon-Only Bookmarks on Your Toolbar:
You can delete the name of your bookmarks leaving only the icon so they take up less space on the toolbar. In Chrome: right click the bookmark > edit > delete the name and save.
8. Copy Links Quicker:
Right click the link like usual but tap E on your keyboard to copy the link.
9. Zoom In, Reset Zoom:
Use the browser magnifier to adjust a website for more comfortable reading. Ctrl/Cmd + (plus/minus sign) does the trick. To reset to the default zoom level use Ctrl + 0.
10. Scroll Through Pages with the Spacebar:
Tapping the spacebar on a website will scroll down in full page chunks and hitting shift + space will take you back up.
There you have it! Try these tricks out and let us know which ones you already knew, and which ones are new to you.
Your business deserves tailored support that lets you focus on your clients, not your admin. Book a free discovery call to learn more!
