Remote Work Digest: September 23, 2015

The latest on all kinds of information, news, and resources that help you make working remotely better.

Image from Lifehack.org

Image from Lifehack.org

10 Tips for Working from Home | Emily Schuman, Thefashionspot.com

Blogger Emily Schuman has worked at home for almost seven years. According to her, procrastination has been a part of her day and then she would work late into the night just to get the next day’s post finished. Here are the changes she made in order to be much more productive when working at home.

  1. Staying in pajamas may sound more appealing but getting dressed and doing your hair will make you feel that you are ready to conquer the day.
  2.  Set up an office space. It will help differentiate the times when working or when hanging out at home.
  3.  Set specific hours. It’s easy for the lines to get blurred and shutting your office door when the days ends reinforces the idea that work is done for the day.
  4.  Always make it a point to take a morning walk and regularly have small breaks.
  5.  Working for yourself means you may lose certain perks like access to employer’s retirement plant and health insurance. Implement a plan with those types of benefits and/or work with a reputable accountant to manage taxes and payroll.
  6.  Socialize. Schedule a couple of lunch meals out with friends, several meetings and a nighttime event.
  7.  Remember to take advantage of flexibility.
  8.  Stock healthier foods. It’s hard to stay away from the refrigerator when your procrastinating and picking on fruits, nuts and crackers are better options.
  9.  Make a to-do list. Using work flow programs like Asana can help keep you accountable.
  10.  Take a minute or two to tidy up your work space. It’s nice to come in the next day and feel inspired instead of dejected because of a mess.

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Delegate Managing Projects to Other User(s)

In many cases, the owner of a Worksnaps account is also the person who manages projects and places users into the projects. In other cases, an account owner might not be the same person who manages projects and users. For example, a finance manager creates a Worksnaps account and sets up the payment for the service, however the responsibility of setting up projects and users belongs to another person in the organization. In this scenario, the account owner can delegate managing projects and users to other people, while projects created by the a delegated person are still owned by the account owner therefore accounted towards the owner’s subscription quota.

Here is how to delegate managing projects to another user.

  • Go to Manage >> Manage Users
  • Edit the user whom you want to delegate
  • Select Basic Info tab on the left
  • You will see an option “Allow this user to create project on behalf of myself“. You can turn on the option.

delegate_user_01_medium

delegate_user_02_medium

Once this is done, the user (in the above example, Jane Stein) can create projects on your behalf. You can delegate up to 3 such users.

Here is how Jane Stein sees when she is trying to create a project. She will have a drop-down list to choose whether she wants to create a project for herself or for Jack Spear who allowed her to create project on his behalf.

delegate_user_03_medium

 

You can now blur screen shot images

Sometimes screen shots contain certain sensitive information and you want to have extra protection over them. Worksnaps now has a feature to allow you to blur the captured screen shot before being transmitted to the server. The blurred screen shot images will make it not possible to recognize the regular size texts, most typically texts with fonts of size 10-pt to 13-pt.  This provides an added level of security while keeping screen shot monitoring useful.

As a manager of a project, you can turn on the image blurring option for a user. The followings are the steps how to do it.

  • Go to Manage tab and select Manage Projects.
  • Go to Users tab, then go to User Settings in Project for a target user.
  • In the middle of the User Settings page, you will find an option “Blur the screen shot images“. Check it to enable image blurring.
  • Click Save Changes button to save the setting for the user.

Once this is done, the user will send the blurred screen shot images to the server.

blur_screen_option

Here is an example of the blurred image comparing to the original for illustration purpose.

Screen shot before being blurredscreenshot_non_blurred

Screen shot after being blurred (and sent to the server)screenshot_blurred

We hope that you find this feature useful. Please send us any feedback or question and we always look forward to hearing from you.