SMART Blog

Smart Services has been providing independent agents with proactive, fast, and expert technology services since 1991.

Discover Better Gifts with These 3 Google Search Tricks

Discover Better Gifts with These 3 Google Search Tricks

With the holiday season just around the corner, you’ll be spending a lot of time on the Internet trying to find the perfect gifts for the loved ones in your life… but do you actually know how to find exactly what you’re looking for? Today, we want to give you a holiday gift in the form of a guide on how to make the most of Google’s search functionality.

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Sick of Sifting Through a Packed Inbox? Unsubscribing is Easier Than You’d Think

Sick of Sifting Through a Packed Inbox? Unsubscribing is Easier Than You’d Think

The average email inbox can easily become packed with so many unwanted messages… not necessarily spam, per se, but threads and feeds you’re just no longer interested in. Fortunately, there are capabilities baked into Gmail and Microsoft Outlook alike that allow you to remove these messages from your concern.

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Three Simple IT Habits That Will Immediately Improve Your Workday

Three Simple IT Habits That Will Immediately Improve Your Workday

Take it from us: technology, for all its benefits, can be frustrating.

That being said, it can bring a lot of value to your business when implemented and maintained properly. 

Let’s talk about some quick habits you can deploy to make your workday much easier when working with business technology.

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Stop Typing the Same Email Over and Over! Use Templates Instead

Stop Typing the Same Email Over and Over! Use Templates Instead

If you’re reading this on the day it's posted, it's Wednesday. How often have you had to rewrite the same messages, over and over, in your internal reporting and client interactions so far this week? Probably quite a bit, and certainly more than you’d prefer.

The trouble is, this is all wasteful. Not only does replicating this message over and over spend valuable time, but it also uses up mental energy… plus, simply copy-pasting can easily lead to errors and oversights. Fortunately, modern email platforms offer templates that can be used to generate consistent and quality messages. Let’s review how.

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Unlock Peak Productivity with Micro Mental Resets

Unlock Peak Productivity with Micro Mental Resets

How often do you find yourself feeling the weight of your agenda putting pressure on you, stressing you out, and—counterproductively—distracting you from the task you’re currently working on? Believe it or not, one of the best ways to power through and stay on track is to step away and take a minute to get your stress back under control. 

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3 Simple Productivity Hacks That Will Dramatically Improve Your Work Performance

3 Simple Productivity Hacks That Will Dramatically Improve Your Work Performance

If you feel like you never have enough time to work through your to-do list, you’re far from the only one. If you make small adjustments to the way you tackle everyday tasks and responsibilities, you might be able to change your productivity habits for the better. Today, we want to explore just that: how you can make the most of your workday with simple, easy tricks.

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Tip of the Week: Use Snipping Tool in Windows 11 to Take Screenshots, Scan QR Codes, and More

Tip of the Week: Use Snipping Tool in Windows 11 to Take Screenshots, Scan QR Codes, and More

The Snipping Tool is a handy little utility application integrated into Windows that provides users with significant screen-capturing capabilities.

Let’s review how to use it and how it can prove valuable to your business.

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Tip of the Week: Chrome Tips to Save You Time (and Energy)

Tip of the Week: Chrome Tips to Save You Time (and Energy)

It’s no secret that Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers in the world, if not the most popular. Still, most people don’t use the browser to its full potential, and they leave so many wasted opportunities to save time and resources on the table. Today, we want to highlight some of these tips, but also a couple of features that perhaps you didn’t know existed for Google Chrome so you can continue to get more value out of it as a business and productivity tool.

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Reposition the Taskbar in Windows 11

Reposition the Taskbar in Windows 11

Windows 11 takes a page out of Apple’s design playbook and features a taskbar that, instead of being off to the side, is smack in the middle of the toolbar. While some may like this change, others may not.

Fortunately for these others, a simple setting change can return the taskbar to its familiar place like on older versions of Windows.

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Tip of the Week: You Need to Know These YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts

Tip of the Week: You Need to Know These YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts

Websites also make excellent use of keyboard shortcuts you use every day to improve your productivity. YouTube is an excellent source of entertainment and education, so today, we want to help you get more value out of it with keyboard shortcuts. Here are some of the best that you should know.

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Tip of the Week: Stop Location Data Collection on Your Mobile Device

Tip of the Week: Stop Location Data Collection on Your Mobile Device

At the beginning of this year, a massive data breach struck a location data broker called Gravy Analytics and took possession of a dataset with 30 million points from devices worldwide. This data could potentially be used to track individuals and their movements, tellingly, through healthcare, government, and military facilities. 

Unfortunately, nothing can be done about data that has already been breached, but preventative steps can and should be taken to protect your business. Let’s discuss how to prevent your applications from tracking your movements.

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Tip of the Week: Getting Windows Off Ghost Screens

Tip of the Week: Getting Windows Off Ghost Screens

If you want more productivity from the workday, then multiple monitors can help you achieve this goal. You might run into the issue of “ghost monitors,” though, where your PC believes you are connected to screens when you’re not. If you experience this issue and your application windows are off-screen and unobtainable, you’ll find this week’s tip helpful.

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Tip of the Week: Simple Privacy Steps on Android

Tip of the Week: Simple Privacy Steps on Android

Your Android device offers a lot of capabilities in its little frame, with many people relying on theirs to keep their lives organized and generally handled. Many businesses even rely on Android mobile devices. This should only reinforce how critical privacy and security are.

In light of this, we’ve shared a few simple tips anyone can do to help make a smartphone that much more secure. 

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Tip of the Week: How to Adapt to a Business Disaster

Tip of the Week: How to Adapt to a Business Disaster

“Stuff” happens. While this may not be the kind of thing you want to consider in terms of your business’ operations, it is something that must be done if you want to be prepared for the moment when all of that “stuff” hits the fan (as so many businesses are now learning firsthand). We wanted to share a few best practices and tips to help you stay positive during this, and other, serious crises.

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Tip of the Week: Monitor Your Hardware While Out of the Office

Tip of the Week: Monitor Your Hardware While Out of the Office

Businesses are just now starting to reopen as stay-at-home orders are lapsing or going to lapse. For many of those businesses, remote solutions have got them through this ordeal and for many others they continue to deploy a remote workforce. For companies still promoting telework, monitoring your local IT environment is something that you need a solution for. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some of the best practices you can use to monitor your IT while out of the office.

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Tip of the Week: Four Essential Network Management Practices

Tip of the Week: Four Essential Network Management Practices

Businesses depend on their networks to effectively complete the tasks they need to accomplish, making it critically important that the one you rely on is managed properly. Let’s go over a few tips and best practices that can help you ensure that it is.

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Tip of the Week: Three Ways Collaboration Can Be Improved

Tip of the Week: Three Ways Collaboration Can Be Improved

Collaboration is critical for a business’ success, but with more teams than ever split amongst their homes, it is arguably even more crucial to their operations. For this week’s tip, we’re going over three ways that your team can collaborate more effectively while making remote operations work.

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Tip of the Week: Backup’s Value, in Two Scenarios

Tip of the Week: Backup’s Value, in Two Scenarios

Each week, we try to provide some tips to help you out in some way. This time, we want to take a somewhat different approach and instead present you with two potential scenarios that your business could encounter—one with and one without a backup solution in play—and let you see the benefit that our tip this week (protect your business with a backup solution) can present.

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Tip of the Week: How to Effectively Task Out Responsibilities

Tip of the Week: How to Effectively Task Out Responsibilities

With so many things that need to be accomplished each day, it always helps to have all the information needed to complete these tasks. If a task has no context assigned to it or no insight into how to approach it, productivity and morale are going to suffer. To prevent this, you need to properly task out your team’s goals. Here, we’ve provided some practices to help.

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Tip of the Week: Opening Your Needed Programs on Startup

Tip of the Week: Opening Your Needed Programs on Startup

If you were to look at any company’s list of priorities, chances are that “productivity” could be found somewhere at the top of the list. Current circumstances being what they are and many processes shifting as a result, this productivity is likely more of a challenge than normal. As any bit of saved time can increase productivity, we’re dedicating this week’s tip to a minor change you can make to accomplish this goal.

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