With technology being readily available to everyone, there are a lot of nifty tricks and tips that you can use. But unlike most articles of this nature, these hacks are some unique ones that you might not have even heard of before.
Learn about these various hacks and boost your productivity even further with devices and apps alike!
1. Hacks to Improve Video Calls
With the pandemic, many businesses were forced to use video conference calls for their meetings. We’ve seen plenty of mishaps and people might be familiar with most of them now, but there are still settings not everyone is familiar with.
Zoom Previews
In Zoom, you’re allowed to see a preview of the video feed before joining a chatroom. You can avoid potentially embarrassing moments by simply:
- Tapping on settings
- Go to the Meeting tab
- And look for the option that says “Show Video Preview”
On Windows and macOS, clicking on the cog in the top left corner to get to the settings. Clicking on Video will ensure you’ll always see a preview from this point onward.
Facetime
If you’re using the Apple exclusive app FaceTime, there is a way for you zoom out of video thumbnails when talking to someone if the conversation has more than two people. This feature allows you to look at the person that’s talking and you won’t be losing track of them either. How you do this is by:
- Going to settings
- Tap on FaceTime
- Turn off the ‘Speaking’ Toggle
You can then enlarge a particular video tab by clicking on it directly.
2. Find Where You Spend Most of Your Online Time
We have trackers for our weight, how much water we’ve taken in, how many steps taken and more. There are naturally going to be time-track apps that monitor our online activity too.
The beauty of these apps is that these work in the background and log usage time automatically. After a week, you’ll have a good idea of how you’re using time on the web without recalling.
Apps to be looking for those are ManicTime and Rescue Time. ManicTime tracks every app but also reviews documents opened. This makes it more project specific than most other time-tracking apps.
Rescue Time on the other hand scores you to get a better idea of how productive you are.
3. Tech Hacks to Break Procrastination
Procrastination is always a lingering problem and there have been several productivity apps available. But if the idea of downloading yet another app – even if it can help you – bugs you, then you can use this hack.
In Windows and Mac devices there is parental control settings which restrict what kind of sites you have access to. Here is how you enable them for each device:
- On iOS go to Settings – General – Restrictions. There you can turn on parental controls and block sites.
- For macOS you go to System Preferences – Parental Controls
- Windows users go to Settings – Accounts – Family and other People
- Android users are the only ones that have to download an app to block websites specifically unfortunately.
4. Saving Instagram Posts in Their Original Format
Instagram is a highly popular app that shares videos and photos and encourages their users to be creative and truly express themselves. If you’ve been scrolling through those feeds, you have likely seen videos or photos that you really liked and had a desire to save in the future.
The problem with that is Instagram doesn’t allow us to do any of that – unless that content was created by you.
However, there is a hack to get around that:
- Open a browser
- Open the original site
- Right-click and click ‘view page source’
- Press Ctrl.Command + F to open up Find and type jpg in the search bar
- Copy that code and paste that code in a new tab.
- From there you can right click on the image or video and download it.
Nifty trick but just be sure you don’t use this for wrong purposes!
5. Transferring Contacts Across Phones
For anyone who doesn’t use an Apple smartphone, transferring contacts from an old phone to a new one can be nightmarish. However, there is a very easy trick to make it so much easier.
All you have to do is export the contact library file and move it to an internal storage before importing your contacts to your new phone.
The steps to doing this is simple:
- Go to Contact Manager of your old phone
- Click Import/Export
- Click on ‘Export to .vcf file’.
- Send that file to your new phone
- Click on the import option from Contact Manager
6. Various Desktop Tech Hacks
The last batch of hacks are exclusive to desktops but they can make your day so much easier:
- To make everything uppercase in a word document you don’t need to painstakingly type it out. Highlight the text you want to change and press shift + F3.
- Closed a browser by mistake? Press Ctrl+Shift+T to recover it.
- Want to proofread an essay? You don’t need to read the whole document. Put the text into Google Translate and it’ll read the text out. This will help you find mistakes much easier.
Try These Hacks
Technology has made our lives dramatically easier and more convenient than ever before but there are still things that we can learn from it. Try out these hacks to make your interaction with technology a bit easier.