Have your working hours changed?

Well you’d think after working from home for over 10 years, this whole lockdown thing wouldn’t have affected us at all. Well, not sure why but yes things have changed. We are obviously still working on our usual customer work, but also obviously work has dropped off. The majority of our customers are accommodation providers and bearing in mind the whole of Scotland is closed to tourists at the moment it does mean that we have a bit more time on our hands. This has led to strange working hours – Katie can be found in front of her computer in the early hours of the morning, Gavin needs to be reminded to come and eat his dinner – and it has also shown that there is time for other things for a change.

All those jobs we’ve been putting off, never enough time to concentrate on our own business, let alone the housekeeping and de-cluttering of our laptops and general online filing… the time is now for this work to commence. Who’s with us?!

Google Drive

If like us you use GSuite for business for your email, every time you click on an attachment to open it, it puts a copy in your Google Drive. Our drive was literally littered with images, files, documents, spreadsheets you name it we’ve got it from the last couple of years. Could we find anything we actually needed? The answer was a definite no! Long ago we unlinked the sync option to our desktops, it caused more bother than it’s worth and even though we’ve now cleared it all (well Katie has, Gavin is more organised and has proper folders for his work) we are still not going to link the sync back up.

We find that Google Drive is not as good as Dropbox, that’s just our opinion, it may work for you but it is extremely useful linking to various software platforms we use for customers and is a great resource for producing interactive sheets on a monthly basis for customer reports, we are however guessing you probably don’t need these things! By the way if you would like your Google Analytics set up so that the information you are looking at actually makes sense, do give Gavin a shout, he can cut through all the nonsense and give you real time up to date relevant information that you can use for your marketing efforts going forward.

Dropbox

The hero in our software arsenal! A couple of years ago whilst sat drinking a cup of chamomile tea Katie managed to tip the entire contents of the mug over her laptop. Immediate failure, lots of swearing, a call to the insurance company…. a new laptop and Katie was able to carry on working that same afternoon.

We use the Dropbox sync on our laptops, we connect to the same account because we are usually both working on the same customer, our Dropbox folder on our laptops has become our ‘my documents’ folder. If either of our laptops fail again, we can be up and running pretty quickly.

Saying all this, our Dropbox was a bit of a mess of folders. We use Dropbox with customers and every time they share a folder with us we have to remember to file it correctly, this doesn’t always happen! Anyway, no more is our Dropbox a mess of folders, it’s a beautiful categorised vision of beauty. It’s a bit like getting to the bottom of a pile of paper filing that’s how it felt when this task was complete… bit sad isn’t it?!

Mobile Phones

Katie is a picture taker, Gavin is a resource downloader. Both of us are linked to our Dropbox so everything is backed up, however, all these pictures and files remain on our phones. So, we’re going through and deleting and tidying and removing those apps we installed a while back that have never been used. We both have Google phones, having used a Blackberry, iPhone and Samsung Galaxy in the past we can both finally say we’ve found phones we can both use, they work perfectly with all our Google accounts and we’re super impressed with them. There was no huge learning curve either, unfortunately I don’t think Google will pay us for our recommendation but thought it was worth mentioning.

What next?

Our downloads file on our laptops, our emails, our contacts, bookmarks, browser sync… the list is seemly endless. Not sure how long lockdown will last but pretty sure it won’t be as long as the list of digital de-cluttering tasks that we have!