Protecting your information

First and foremost, the most important thing you should be focusing on is how you set your passwords. Not all websites and domains require you to have a very secure password, and it’s important that you know what makes your password secure. Using things that can be tied to you are risky examples of passwords, especially if it’s public knowledge – and using numbers relevant to you is also risky. For example, if you’re someone who is known to be into cars – and having your password as “carlover” is not secure. Putting your birthday or birth year next to it doesn’t help either! Having a randomly generated password might be the ideal way to go about it, so long as you write it down somewhere.

No matter what you sign up for, you should know that your password will never be asked of you. If you ever are asked to give over your password, it should be a signal to you that the person is not who they say they are and are trying to get access to your personal information. If you’re signed up for Gmail, and someone claims to be an official working for Google, you should decline their request immediately.

If you are on the edge about giving away your physical address to an individual or a business online, you can avoid that too! There are services like physicaladdress.com that can prevent you from needing to give out your address to sites and individuals that you don’t trust. This way you get to still receive your mail and packages, but through an anonymous postal service that won’t give away your physical address. You never know who you can trust online, and this is sometimes a necessary step in protecting your information.

Using trusted websites

When it comes to browsing sites that are new to you, you should always make sure you can trust them before you give away your information. Sites that are well-designed are typical, though not always, more trustworthy. This is because websites are expensive to have designed, and it’s generally only sustainable to businesses that are legitimate. Some sites that are poorly designed might be riskier for you to give your information to and should be avoided if you’re not sure whether or not you can trust them. It’s better to be safe than sorry when handling private information.

The post Keeping Yourself Safe Online appeared first on AppTrawler.

What factors affect productivity?

There are a number of different factors that impact productivity. Productivity is a personal issue. It is something that needs to be measured, nurtured, and improved at the level of the individual.

After all, we all have different ways of working and different motivators, right? Focusing on this will enable any business to truly unlock the key to productivity.

The following are the key drivers in terms of productivity:

• Our habits
• Our choices
• Our task style
• Our motivations
• Our de-energizing actions
• Our clarity or lack of it
• Our perceptions
• Our unconscious incompetence
• Our general lack of self-awareness
• Our reluctance and ability to change
• Our access to self-coaching support tools

We believe these are the key factors impacting productivity. It’s a personal matter, so it needs to be tackled on a personal level for the entire organization to truly benefit.

In order to accelerate your business, productivity must be measured, nurtured, and improved at the level of the individual. For this to happen, a combination of three critical ingredients are needed: learning, coaching, and alignment. 

Productivity can be learned

Productivity requires people to expand their individual capacity to respond. This involves a combination of learning, coaching, and alignment. Until now, the focus has been on ever greater access to learning, but the mistake is that it was clustered around skill acquisition, rather than being viewed as granular. Moreover, the people that really needed the coaching were not gaining access to it – it was simply a luxury for managers and others in high positions. And, alignment has been absent altogether!

Managers are the Catalyst

Ineffective managers are stifling productivity more than effective managers are catalyzing it. This leaves a management deficit in unproductivity organizations. Being managed demands a personalized approach. Managers need to accommodate a person’s motivations and task styles. This demands a manager with a high level of emotional intelligence so they can understand all members of their team. They also need to communicate with clarity so that all team members truly understand their roles and how their efforts align with their motivators and overall picture.

The three sides to the triangle: alignment, coaching, and learning

Alignment

Let’s begin with alignment. People achieve more when their actions are aligned to an outcome.

If we are to sustain our performance and continue to achieve, four elements need to be aligned:

• Motivation
• Clarity
• Task style
• Energy

We need to have self-awareness. We need to recognize how we get things done in our own personal ways. This could be using certain tools, whether you need to convert a video from MOV to MP4 or share files with your team. It could mean taking audio notes rather than written ones.

The interplay between the four elements mentioned above builds cognition and practical integration within our daily routine.

This is something that flows into other aspects of our lives. We feel inspired once we have found the ability to self-solve. It’s a snowball effect, getting more and more powerful, stimulating change.

In the workplace, to ensure what really matters happens, alignment is the most critical ingredient.

Coaching

Next, we have coaching. Coaching and productivity is the equivalent of lubricant and an engine. The latter cannot operate without the former.

An issue a lot of businesses face today is that coaching is merely reserved for the more senior employees. It has wrongly become a privilege.

When coaching leverages new granular learning, people benefit from greater awareness and an empowered sense of responsibility.

Learning

The third side of the triangle is learning. Learners are more self-aware. They have critical personal insight as to the reality of their choices and the consequences that will come if they make that said choice.

Because of this internalized accountability, people’s approach to learning is freshened. They do not merely view it as acquiring a skill. It is about enhancing their own ability to self-solve.

This drives engagement and improves productivity by initiating a gradual transition to learning autonomy.

When people have access to actionable learning, productivity increases. This is because we as humans like to see a blatant connection between what is communicated to us, what we do, and what we experience.

Businesses today need to move towards more personalized learning. Social media and technology are facilitating this.

How it works

Through understanding the methodology and thinking behind the process of sustainably accelerating achievement, employees can enable themselves to achieve more by using a set of tools, techniques, and models.

The process is all about facilitating productivity by generating an independent change in people.

Let’s take a look at the four productivity catalysts…

1. Clarity from leaders and managers about their expectations
2. Staff provided with the personal responsibility for improvement
3. Improvements need to be given a blatant link to the most prized motivational drivers to each individual
4. Improvement is to be seen as granular – it is not about wider skill acquisition

This is the four-step recipe for productivity at any firm.

It is all about equipping people with the right techniques and tricks so that that they can make better decisions and collaborate with greater efficiency.

However, for this to be effective, employees need to be given greater responsibility within the workplace. There needs to be trust. 

Paradoxically, in a world that is so fast-paced, in order to ‘speed up’ our operations, we actually need to slow down. We must slow down and assess ourselves for what we are. What are our habitual ways? What drives and energizes us to succeed? What de-motives us? What are our typical ways of working? Only once we understand this will we be able to unlock the key to productivity amongst every employee.

To conclude, productivity is often considered a business-wide problem, but it is a personal issue, and treating it as such can bring massive gains.

The post The Ultimate Productivity Guide appeared first on AppTrawler.

Astro file manager

This is one of the widely used app used to transfer as well as mange files, pictures, music, videos, documents across devices or clouds like that of Facebook, Dropbox, Google drive, Skydrive , etc. without the use of USB cables or wire connections. It comes with a dynamic search technology that can conduct explicit search actions across locations as per specifications. It is also powered with its unique cloud hopping feature that you can use to move files from one cloud to another in a single move without any necessity to download them before transferring to your target cloud location.

ES File explorer files manager

One of the most popular Android app and also a long running overall player for file management, the ES File explorer file manager is available in both paid as well as free avatars. The app allows Android users, irrespective of their location, to manage, peruse or access all of the available files from your mobile device, and share them with others free of cost. It supports Dropbox, Box.net, Sugarsync, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Amazon S3 etc. You can also use it to access your home PC through 3G, 4G, EDGE, or Wi-Fi.

WiFi file transfer

This Android app, designed by the team of smarter Droid, supports file transfer over wireless connection from phones or tablet without any USB cable connection. It has an effortless file manager interface and can transfer multiple files at one go. It also offers easy access to external SD cards and USB external devices. All it requires is that the two devices t involved in transfer belongs to the same LAN or WLAN network.

Data Sync

Data Sync, as its name implies, allows for effortless synchronizing between multiple Android powered devices. It is principally designed to connect through Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth but can as well synchronize to your cloud or to your other devices in their absence too.

WiFly

Without using Wi-fi or cloud access, WiFly is designed to transfer or fly files of all types like apps, documents, pictures, music, game data, videos etc., from one device to other provided both share the same local area network. Additionally it supports multiple file transfers through easy drag and drop in the WiFly interface, transferred files can be opened by using any android app available on the device. You can download full files to your PC, or browse through downloaded files and folders directly on your mobiles without any need for additional supportive applications.

Conclusion

Easy migration of files from one device to another is a very needful concept in the present scenario. Given this necessity, android players and designers are working round the clock on easier and more relevant apps with wider features. So a regular check on the Android store will keep you abreast with the new developments and help you locate the perfect one that fulfills your specific requirements better and more precisely. You can always try out the free trial versions to get a better feel around the software before you invest your penny on it.

The post 5 Best Android Data Transfer Apps appeared first on AppTrawler.

Notes can also be organized using the tags feature and once written your notes can be emailed, printed, and even turned into a web page, should you want to share your ideas, shopping lists, or meeting notes with the world.

Additional functions include the ability to read notes in a full screen mode, a word counter, and pin important notes to the top of your list, otherwise the notes are organized in a most recently edited order.

The free version does have advert support but it is so unobtrusive you barely register them and with a paid version at only $20 a years they can be easily removed.

The premium Simplenote account also syncs your memos to a Dropbox account as well as allows users to e-mail entries to your account. Couple this with an increase in backups from 10 to 30 versions of each note so you can trace your revision history and you have a solid app for any budding writer, blogger and general note taker.

As a blogger I find this app invaluable as it allows me to write ‘everything’ down, access it everywhere, keep an eye on my word count and then when I’m ready, post it on the blog.

In a sea of note taking apps this is by far our recommendation for the best app in its field.

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simplenote/id289429962?mt=8

The post Review: SimpleNote – Note taking made simple appeared first on AppTrawler.