by Felicien | Apr 9, 2019 | Education
Email is one of the best ways to communicate with people in the business world, but it’s also one of the biggest time drains for those same individuals. Some of the most productive people turn their email completely off and only check it a few times a day, but is there more that you can do to stay productive throughout the day without stressing out that you’re missing important messages? This quick email productivity hack may be the answer that will help you stay more organized and less distracted throughout the day.
Delayed Email Delivery
Even though it’s a core part of Microsoft Outlook, few people realize that you’re able to delay the delivery of emails until a later date or time — and even fewer people use this function on a regular basis. Delaying the delivery of your email is a great way to ensure that people receive your message when they are most likely to act upon it. If you need someone to provide a crucial report for you but they’re currently on vacation, sending an immediate email request is likely to get lost in the waves of requests they will be wading through when they return to the office. If you delay the message until a day or two after they are back in the office, you’re much more likely to receive a response without having to follow up again.
Scheduling Your Day
Another great way to stay focused during the day is to schedule all of your emails to go out at a certain time, perhaps around the time you will be leaving for the day. This allows you to answer emails at preprogrammed times throughout the day, but not being a slave to pinging notes back and forth when you would prefer to focus on other tasks. The hope is that others will respond to your requests at the end of their day, and you’ll have a wealth of actionable responses waiting for you when you come into work the next morning. It’s not difficult to schedule emails for delivery at a later time, and this simple productivity hack could save you over an hour each day — providing you with a significantly greater amount of targeted time to pay attention to what you need to accomplish each week.
You’re not getting more hours added to your day, and there’s almost always more than you can accomplish in any given week. Using these simple email scheduling tips to delay your email deliveries helps you eke more work (and fun!) out of the time that you do have available.
by Felicien | Apr 9, 2019 | Education
Passwords are a problem. In one sense they are exactly the opposite of what they should be. They’re hard for users to remember but easy for intruders to guess or steal. The user frustrations with the current system make it ripe for abuse, and that’s exactly what’s taking place every day.
The best solution for lawyers and law firms alike is to implement a password management utility. We’ll take a look at that solution after exploring the nature of the problem in greater depth.
The Problems with Passwords
Can you even count how many digital sites and services you’re required to log in to with a username and password? Most people have upwards of one hundred. It’s challenging, if not impossible, to keep them all straight without some kind of assistance. People usually resort to one of several very insecure methods to solve this. One of the most common is reusing the same username and password on multiple sites.
Password Reuse Is Easy but Dangerous
Security professionals will tell you that reusing passwords is dangerous. This is because when (not if) your credentials are captured or stolen on one site, you become vulnerable on every other site that uses those same credentials. The problem here is that it’s just so easy to reuse passwords, especially on accounts we don’t consider to be sensitive in nature. Nearly half of security professionals themselves admit to reusing passwords, even though they know firsthand the dangers of doing so.
Strong, Unique Passwords Are Too Hard to Remember
If you’re not supposed to reuse passwords, then what should you do? Ideally, you should create a strong, unique password for every site. Each one should be lengthy (the longer the better) and should contain a mix of lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The longer and more complex the password, the harder it is for a computer to crack it. People won’t be able to guess Gbje23+3zp?$T0n very well at all.
The problem with a password like Gbje23+3zp?$T0n, though, is obvious. You’ll have a tough time remembering even one of those, let alone a hundred.
Experts will suggest other tactics, like turning a familiar phrase into a password. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth a new nation” could become “4s&7yaoFbfaNN”. This method uses the first letters of each word (along with numbers and symbols where appropriate) to create a passcode that’s nearly inscrutable but that’s easier to remember.
This method helps, but it doesn’t scale well. It’s true you’ll have an easier time reproducing that than the previous example, but you’ll still have a tough time replicating that a hundred times over.
The Solution: Password Management
The best solution to the password conundrum is using a password management utility. Setting up a password management utility isn’t difficult, and putting one in place greatly increases your digital security. Once you’ve set up a password manager, you don’t even need to remember all those passwords. You just have to remember one.
How Password Management Tools Work
Password managers are programs or apps that function as a digital safe, or a digitally encrypted locker. All your passwords are stored inside the safe. Password management tools will also help you create long, complex, unique passwords for all your accounts. Some can even do this automatically once you supply your existing credentials.
With a password manager, it’s easy to maintain a different complex password for every account, because you no longer need to remember those passwords yourself. You just need to create and memorize one very strong password for the password manager itself.
Once you’ve set up a password manager, it will autocomplete the login fields on most websites. For the few that don’t auto-populate, you can access a database of your account credentials and copy and paste the proper credentials into the corresponding fields. All the major password managers also offer some degree of integration with both iOS and Android. Your passwords remain accessible, yet secure, on your mobile devices.
The Security of Password Management Tools
Password management tools stake their reputation on their security. They aren’t perfectly secure—nothing is. The Washington Post notes some of their flaws. They are, however, a vast improvement over most people’s current password practices. No one gets access to your vault without your master password, and hackers won’t get that password from the utility makers since they don’t store your master password anywhere. There’s no database to be hacked.
On that note, make sure your master password is itself long and complex. Consider using the “familiar phrase” tactic described earlier.
Conclusion
Lawyers have an obligation to keep their digital accounts secure. Doing so manually is difficult if not impossible. Implementing a strong password management solution is the answer. If you have more questions about implementing a quality password management system for your law firm, we’re here to help. Contact us today to discuss the options available.
by Felicien | Apr 8, 2019 | Education
Our days are full of distractions, from phones that don’t stop ringing to apps that don’t stop dinging. Each time we pause from one task, it takes us several seconds to a few minutes to get our minds back on track. This may not seem like much of an impact, but it can really add up over the course of a day. Not to mention all the time that is lost during meetings because someone was multi-tasking when they are asked a question and needs to regroup before they answer. It may seem like this is simply the way we do business today, but there are ways that you can eliminate distractions and be more productive during your workday.
Be Singularly Focused
Each task that passes your desk isn’t the highest priority. When you rigorously prioritize your work, it can help create a singular focus on the task at hand. When you absolutely must get something accomplished, train yourself to turn off everything else — turn your phone on airplane mode, pause email notifications and send your office phone straight to voice mail. Close all applications other than the one you’re working in at that moment, or go old school with a pad and paper in a quiet corner of the office where you know you won’t be disturbed. This singular focus on a task allows you to put all of your brainpower behind it, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly and efficiently you’re able to get things accomplished.
Be Ruthless in Meetings
Meetings today can be quite a challenge, with people working remotely and others tied to their laptops or tapping away on their phones. If you want to have a truly productive meeting, then you have to get a little ruthless! Schedule your meetings for a shorter period of time, and set up the expectations as soon as everyone is in the room. Ask for agreement from the room that everyone will leave their phones off and turned over, so they are not running the risk of distractions. Even a 15-minute meeting can accomplish great things if you have the full mental capacity of everyone in the room focused on the task at hand.
Being productive doesn’t have to mean constantly locking yourself into a corner or alienating colleagues by closing your office doors. You can find pockets of productivity in your day when you can focus on your most important tasks, providing you with the structure that you need to help move your organization — and your life — in a positive direction.
by Felicien | Apr 8, 2019 | Education
You don’t think about a small business in middle America being targeted by hardened Russian cybercriminals, but that’s exactly what happened in the case of Smile Zone. This Missouri dental office caters to children, looking for ways to provide them with a higher comfort level with dental procedures. Smile Zone had not yet invested in any aggressive cybersecurity measures, because they didn’t expect to become the target of malicious attack from overseas. Unfortunately, they were wrong, and their lack of planning for cybersecurity cost them over $200,000 due to a simple phishing scam — money that Smile Zone has never been able to recover.
Determining the Attack Vector
It didn’t take long for investigators to determine the attack vector, as it was a simple phishing email that was launched on the computer that Smile Zone used to conduct their banking business. With the information stored on that computer, the Russian cybercriminal and his associates were able to tap into the bank account of Smile Zone and create a transaction for $205,000 that looked perfectly legitimate to the bank. Unfortunately, that also meant that the bank would not accept liability for the transaction — something that they would have done if the account were a consumer account instead of a business account. What’s worse, the cybercriminals left the back door of the business open so they could help themselves to more funds in the future if the vulnerability was not addressed in time.
Why Russian Hackers Target Small Businesses
It’s hard to imagine, but why would a well-known Russian hacker who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List waste their time attacking a small business for “only” a few hundred thousand dollars? The answer is simple: small businesses are less likely to have invested in cybersecurity. Not only are the businesses perceived to be less secure, but cybercriminals are looking for an ongoing payday — not a one-time bankroll. Small to mid-size businesses may not even notice relatively small amounts being shifted around until the dollars add up to a significant amount of money. This allows these nation-state actors to slowly siphon away funds that could otherwise be used to fund payroll or grow the business. Even if small businesses do have passive cybersecurity, they may not be actively monitoring their transactions and systems in a way that would allow them to see the fraud happening in near-real time. Symantec defines the time between the injection of malware or a data breach to the discovery time as “dwell times“, and they average 191 days before many businesses discover that their systems have been compromised.
Are There Legal Avenues for Recourse?
The unfortunate reality is that it’s difficult for the government, local police or anyone else to help regain access to your funds once they’ve been exfiltrated to a remote location. Hackers are extremely savvy, in taking just enough money that they can easily move it around without a lot of notice from others. It’s difficult for law enforcement to prove that there has been a crime, much less track down a slippery individual thousands of miles away from the crime. When your business suffers this type of loss, it’s unlikely that the money will ever be recovered — a devastating blow for a small business.
Are There Ways to Protect Your Business?
Fortunately, you don’t have to simply wait for your business to be hacked, and you don’t have to invest in over-the-top security solutions that are meant for enterprises instead of small to mid-size businesses. Your trusted technology services partner can help you understand the various options that are available to help protect your organization. This could include a variety of solutions:
Endpoint protection and monitoring of WiFi hotspots that are available to customers and employees
Rigorous password policies
Ongoing employee and contractor security training and testing
Active monitoring of your network by knowledgeable security professionals
Proactive notification systems so your technology partner can immediately begin remediation in the event of a breach
Email and website security software that helps filter out malware and spam before it reaches your staff
Robust backup and recovery procedures, to ensure your business can continue functioning even if you’re under attack
Systematic review of all potential fail points within your infrastructure on a regular basis
Rigorous management of user accounts and logins, to ensure that accounts are inactivated quickly when they’re no longer needed
Each business is unique, and working with your trusted IT managed services provider will offer more direct and detailed recommendations that will fit the unique needs of your business.
No one is expecting to be the target of a Russian hacker, and small businesses may be even less prepared than larger ones. No business is truly safe from cybercriminals unless your business is fully protected by a suite of cybersecurity measures that include active management of your infrastructure. It pays to invest a small amount upfront to protect your business from what could be a disastrous cyberattack in the future.
by Felicien | Apr 8, 2019 | Education
Here’s a quick tech tip for Microsoft OneNote. Today we’ll look at how users can share notes that they have created in Microsoft OneNote. First, though, since Microsoft OneNote isn’t one of the “Big Four” Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), we’ll look at what OneNote can do and why you should be using it.
What Is Microsoft OneNote?
Microsoft OneNote is an awesome but lesser-known part of the Microsoft Office family. At its core, it’s a high-powered note-taking program. When you first open a OneNote Notebook, it looks an awful lot like a Word document. However, it works quite differently. Click anywhere on the page and start typing. A text bubble will be created right there. Click somewhere else, and you can create another one. OneNote allows for free-flowing note-taking, and it lets users annotate their content using freehand drawing (with a mouse or on a touchscreen). It’s a great place to brainstorm or to take non-linear notes.
Sharing Is Powerful
Over the years, OneNote has also become a powerful collaboration platform. In all recent versions, users can share a notebook with numerous friends or coworkers, and those users can all edit the notebook simultaneously. This collaboration is powered using either Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft OneDrive, depending on the version and edition (home or professional) being used.
How might this help you? Perhaps you want to create a table, sign-up sheet, or tutorial guide. Get one started, then share it with your coworkers or friends. They can jump right in, simultaneously filling in details, correcting mistakes, and fleshing out written procedures in real time. This is a powerful tool for businesses.
How to Share a OneNote Notebook
To share a notebook, open the notebook you want to share. In the upper right you should see the word “Share” between some other menu options, just below the Minimize button. Click the word “Share” to open the Share sidebar. In this sidebar you can select which notebook or notebooks you want to share. Fill in the email addresses of the people you want to share the notebook with. Next, click the drop-down menu and choose which level of access you want the people to have. You may want them to be able to edit, edit and share, or view only. Next, click the big Share button.
The people you’ve shared the notebook with will receive an email explaining the next steps. Soon they will start working with your document in real time. You can see initials next to people’s changes to help keep things straight. If you’d like to hide those, click “View” up in the ribbon, then click “Hide Authors.”
Now you know the basics of how to use and share notebooks in OneNote. Time to get collaborating!
