Out of the Box Solutions Blog

One of the earliest memories I can remember is being relentlessly reminded “organization is the key to success”.  While it might have been a comedic expression to say while cleaning up the house, becoming a business owner has undoubtedly caused organization to become more of a strategy rather than an obsession.

Your business email is a very useful tool, if used properly. Unfortunately, there are plenty of ways that your email can also serve as a major time sink. For this week’s tip, we wanted to explore a few ways to help keep email useful, rather than distracting and stressful.

Email is almost certainly the most well-known solution that your business uses, so most users probably feel as though they have a pretty good handle on it. However, many of them are probably making things more difficult for themselves - and taking more time than they need to on it. This week, we’ll go over some easy tips to make your use of email more efficient.

Phishing has been gaining notoriety in cybersecurity circles, as it has been used quite successfully in a variety of business infiltrations and data breaches. Many of the more well-known cyberattacks of the last few years were enabled by phishing. In order to protect your business’ interests, you and your team need to be able to identify these social engineering attempts. We’ll go over a few ways to do so for this week’s tip.

Signatures are unique to the signatory. With the introduction and acceptance of electronic signatures, personalizing your signature has become more difficult. However, did you know introducing something as simple as a Gmail signature can give some credibility to your business communications? 

Microsoft Windows is run on a majority of business computers. As a result, having a good understanding of some of the features that will make using the software easier is beneficial. This week, we will go over some things you can do with the taskbar that will make navigating your computer easier. 

Windows 10 is the culmination of all the prior versions of the operating system, which means it offers all the great options that earlier versions did with contemporary improvements to make these options even better. To leverage the full potential of Windows 10, we recommend following these five simple tips.

Productivity is a huge priority in today’s business world, and with today’s technology, it can be achieved at just about any time. However, with the way our brains are wired, staring at our screens late at night isn’t great for our capacity to sleep. However, there are a few settings that you can change to reduce these impacts. Here, we’ll give a few tips to help you do so.

In today’s connected world, we expect to be notified when something happens in one of our applications. However, I’m sure you’ve seen an app notify you about every little thing, or just to remind you that it exists. Even if you caught on early enough to stop enabling notifications for each and every app, there are bound to still be a few irksome and distracting ones to take care of. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss how to turn them off again.

Not too long ago, as of this writing, Microsoft began including Skype in their PCs. As a result, they created accounts for Skype based on a user’s Microsoft account…. Surprise! Now, you may not be comfortable with the prospect of people being able to find you via Skype, which is why we’re offering some tips to hide yourself from others.

Have you ever heard someone refer to an activity as “yak shaving?” Also known as “bikeshedding,” this is effectively a way to describe a specific kind of procrastination. For this week’s tip, we’ll explore how a freshly barbered yak relates to your business’ productivity, and how to keep you and your employees on the right track.

The holiday season is coming to an end, which means it’s time to get back to the grind in the new year. However, if you happened to receive an Android device as a gift (or maybe treated yourself to one, I’m not judging), you can leverage it to make work a little easier. We’ll give you a few tips how.

Of all reasons that a business doesn’t leverage IT, the one that makes the least sense to me has to be their size. There’s just a reluctance to adopt more than what - for whatever reason - is “enough” for a business of their capacity.

Microsoft OneNote is a very useful application for, as you may have guessed, taking notes. However, when we say taking notes, we feel as though we’re not doing the application justice. We’ll share a few tips to help you use OneNote to its full potential.