Boost Your #WFH Productivity With Smart Home Tech
The current global crisis has meant that many people are now working from home for the foreseeable future. It can be disorienting and distracting for your place of comfort and solitude to suddenly become your place of work.
Support during this time can come from some unlikely sources. Whether it’s your partner becoming your office buddy or getting the family pet to act as company therapist, it’s important to reassess all the things around your home to see how they can help you work better.
One area that can definitely help you be more productive is smart home technology. Belle spoke to smart security experts Yale, for some top tips on how smart tech can help when it comes to working from home.
Manage your news updates
It’s easy to get sucked into live rolling news or social media feeds. Finding a good balance of how much news coverage you are taking in is important, so you’re kept up to date with the latest headlines without being overwhelmed with too much information.
Why not keep informed using your chosen voice assistant? Program your chosen voice assistant to provide you with timely news updates at set periods throughout the day; for example, first thing in the morning over breakfast, again at lunch and a roundup of the day’s news in the evening.
Keep an eye on your home
Working from home can be a real balancing act, as you juggle all the different aspects of home life. Keeping an eye on everything that’s going on in the home can be made a little easier with an indoor camera, with a Wi-Fi Indoor Camera.
Check what the kids are up to in the other room or keep an eye on your furry friend. You can even talk to them via your smartphone, while replying to emails from your home office!
Keep communicating with a security camera
Social distancing rules mean that you shouldn’t really be answering the front door and chatting to people on your doorstep. But, if you’re working from home, this can make receiving essential deliveries a bit difficult.
A way around this is with a security camera such as an All-in-One Camera. Simply install it next to your front door, and you can see who’s visiting or dropping off any deliveries, and you can communicate with them from any room in your home, with the help of the two-way audio functionality, controlled via your smartphone.
Put your smart plug to work
When you’re busy working at home, it’s easy to lose track of time and work for long stretches without a break, which can often lead to burn-out.
Using a smart plug, such as the Yale Sync Smart Plug, part of the Yale Sync Smart Home Alarm system, you can set schedules and control home appliances via your smartphone. Smart plugs are easy to set up, enabling you to switch most appliances on and off at set periods through the day. So, you could set up a repeated schedule of an hour switched on and then off for 15 minutes. Then, simply plug in a lamp or radio to the smart plug. If the radio or lamp is on, get to work, and if it’s off, take a break!
Office security
With more people working from home, more expensive IT equipment is being kept at home, rather than locked away safely in office buildings. In order to keep these products safe, without putting your entire house on lockdown, consider investing in a smart alarm, such as the Yale Sync Smart Home Alarm. Controlled via your smartphone and with part-arm functionality, you can protect your home office outside of work hours, while you enjoy the other areas of your home as normal.
We simply don’t know just how long this situation will last. But we do know that using smart technology is a way of making our home lives more productive while minimising disruption.
