August 2017

630.850.9039 Do you look at your inbox and want to cry? If so, you’re not alone. According to widely cited Radicati Group research, the average person gets 120 business emails every day. If you don’t manage your emails, you could end up in another statistical majority. People spend at least 14 percent of their workday on email alone. Is it any wonder that a recent Harris Poll found that only 45 percent of our workdays are spent on actual work? If you’re looking for the solution to your email woes, start with some of Silicon Valley greats. BEZOS DELEGATES If you want to watch a corporate team start to sweat, see what happens when they get a “?” email from Jeff Bezos. Business Insider reports that the notoriously easyto-contact Amazon CEO will forward customer complaints to his people and add only a question mark to the original query. Getting that dreaded mark is a little like getting the black spot from Blind Pew the pirate. You know that a day of reckoning is at hand. Follow Bezos’ lead. Instead of answering all emails yourself, ask, “Can this be better handled by someone else?” Forward it to your team and save yourself the time. USE AUTO REPLIES You can also use auto-reply tools to manage the flood. Tommy John CEO Tom Patterson did just that after his emails skyrocketed Continued pg.2 We love this stuff! Our passion is helping businesses use technology to run their organization successfully and profitably. Your Image Here What’s New This monthly publication provided courtesy of Catherine Wendt, President of Syscon Inc. August 2017 Seven years ago, I was driving from IL to OH for a German Choral Directors’ Conference and had a phone interview with Lenny Palmer for our PC Technician —and the rest is history! Lenny has been a valued member of the Network Team, and been responsible for Hardware quotes and orders. He also has some fans who send me fanmail every now and again. We are excited to announce Lenny’s promotion to a Network Engineer. He has finished a focused training session and is wrapping up a Certification. Congratulations Lenny! - Catherine Wendt Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Secret To Avoiding Email Overwhelm -- 1 of 4 - All Things Tech August 2017 A Celebration and a Special Guest (continued from page 1) from 150 to 400 a day. He tells Inc.com that “there weren’t enough minutes in a day to answer all of them.” So he didn’t; he set up an auto-reply to tell people that he only checked email before 9 and after 5 — and to please call or text if it was urgent. The result? “It forced me to delegate and empower others to respond,” he says. Suddenly the flow slowed to a trickle. DO YOU GET MORE EMAILS THAN BILL GATES? And it really should only be a trickle; Bill Gates reports that he only gets 40–50 emails a day. Ask yourself, “Should I really be getting more emails than Bill Gates?” One possible cause for email inundation, according to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, is other employees sending too much email of their own. He writes, “Two of the people I worked most closely with ended up leaving the organization within the span of several weeks. After they left I realized my inbox traffic had been reduced by roughly 20–30 percent.” If you have overcommunicators in your ranks, ask them to tone back the digital flood. SET BOUNDARIES Creating a hard buffer between your email and your life is another CEO tactic. Arianna Huffington doesn’t check her email for a half hour after waking or before going to bed, and she never touches it around her kids. That space to breathe is essential to maintaining a worklife balance. And if it gets bad enough? Etsy’s Chad Dickerson has a solution: email bankruptcy! He tells Fast Company that every few years, he just deletes everything and starts fresh! Not all Silicon Valley gurus have it figured out, however. Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t get 120 business emails a day. No, according to an ABC interview, he gets closer to 700. He just gets up at the crack of dawn every morning and starts reading. Hint Water CEO Kara Goldin does the same thing, preparing for a 12-hour workday with a marathon email session. Emulate Jeff Bezos or Arianna Huffington instead and watch your email stress melt away. I’m going to give this some thought, but I’m still not convinced this is going to help me. How about you? Would love to hear your experiences. Cathy and Larry Sightings Catherine presented a Core Business Plan to her C 12 Business Group. A lot of work to prepare, but great feedback from the members! Larry enjoyed a nice long bike ride with friends in Galena. The rivers were very high due to the recent storms. ‘If all else fails, you can always serve as a bad example.’ - Unknown 630.850.9039 In June, Focus on the Family celebrated 40 years of providing radio broadcasts, magazines, marriage support, Adventures in Odyssey radio dramas, and on-demand counseling in support of the family. We were excited to celebrate with them in Colorado Springs. Vice President and Mrs. Pence were invited, as well, and it was a pleasure to hear both of them speak. The presentation was live-streamed and even had Stephen Curtis Chapman giving a mini-concert. We were so thrilled to have an opportunity to meet them in person! -- 2 of 4 - Shiny New Gadget Of The Month: Petnet is looking to upgrade pet care with their new automated SmartFeeder, targeted toward pet owners who frequently travel or with packed, variable schedules. After you install the SmartFeeder app on your phone, it’ll ask a few questions to get to know your animal, including their age, weight, activity level, and food type. This last feature is particularly interesting, as the feeder will recommend feeding amounts for dozens and dozens of common cat and dog foods, though users report it can be a little finicky. After it gathers the information, you can set up regular, automatic feeding schedules for your furry friend. After that, it’s an almost entirely hands-free process, until you need to reload the feeder with your animal’s preferred food. Its $150 price tag may be a little steep for most pet owners, but for the busiest and laziest of us, it could be the perfect addition to your already-automated home. News From Our Techs So Your Copier Company Wants To Get Into Managed Services... Copiers—don’t know what any of our offices would do without these machines! They scan, they fax, make copies of course; they collate; some of the big ones can staple and even bind. These are amazing and we love doing our part to keep them working over your network. But, the copier companies and their technicians are not Computer Techs. There is a new trend for copier companies to pick up some Managed Services and get into the IT support world. There’s nothing wrong with expanding your offerings, but purchasing a Managed Services Platform, installing agents, and monitoring computers is a bare-bones component of an IT support team with experienced technicians. Quick story—we have a client who is going to give their copier company a try and move their IT support to this company since they’re getting into Managed Services. We’re already running into communication issues with the plan they sent us. They don’t seem to understand the scope of the server, firewall, backups, email structure and PST files, or even how they intend to create and license the server, then move the data. You don’t go to an HVAC company to fix your car’s cooling system; you don’t ask the drywall contractor to fix the wiring behind the wall; you don’t have your roof repaired by the tile contractor. Leave the IT Support to the Network Technicians and hug those copier folks because we need them to be experts on the copiers! You’ve Been HACKED! What Should You Do Now? There’s always a chance that your IT Security will be breached. There are a lot of aggressive hackers with time on their hands, and this is a lucrative business for them. Even with strong passwords, a firewall, country code blocks, and anti -virus software, there is a chance that one of your employees could click on a link or be fooled by an email or website and just ‘open the front door’ for the hackers. So now what? First, contact us right away. The faster you let the IT company know that something has happened, the sooner they can address it, determine the extent of the damage, and shut it down. Next, there are legal ramifications to being hacked. If personal data for employees, bank accounts, and similar have been compromised, you’ll have to notify the individuals whose information has been compromised as well as the FBI. Even a small company has responsibilities in this area. Make sure you have the right safeguards in place and continue training and re-training your staff on what not to do on the computer. How can we help? All Things Tech August 2017 630.850.9039 The Feeder of the Future -- 3 of 4 - All Things Tech August 2017 Construction Corner New IL Tax Tables, Mid-Year Well, it’s finally here; what most of us expected anyway. The State of Illinois has increased the Individual and Corporate tax rates. For anyone running payroll, that means making sure you upgrade your software to include the latest tax table changes as soon as they’re available. I already have calls from some clients who have employees asking about when to expect the change. For those of you using Sage 100 Contractor version 19, Sage has made a big deal about not making any more updates to version 19 after July 1st. With this big change, they’ve had to step back and do it anyway. S100C version 19.8.19 has the latest tax tables and can be installed right now. Give us a call to make arrangements for the upgrade. For those on version 20, it’s 20.5.163 which is also available. Contact the office and we can make arrangements for this upgrade. For those of you in our multitenant hosting environment, watch your email for the date and time when the program will be unavailable during the upgrade installation. - CMW Other Stuff This Genius Debit Card Lets Parents Control Their Teenagers’ Spending If you feel like your teen views you as a walking ATM machine, startup company Current might be able to help. Their new app— also called Current—allows you to track and control your teen’s spending through the company’s debit card. Current offers a series of robust services designed to teach your child financial responsibility while still letting them have some say over how and when they spend their money. You can set up daily spending and withdrawal limits, but you can also set up contingencies—Money that’s freed up, say, when chores or tasks are completed. Techcrunch.com – May 9, 2017 How a University Campus Is Using This New Technology to Keep Its Students Safe Remember when you got locked out of your dorm building back in college and had to wait for someone to go in or out? Those days may be gone, if new technology out of China has anything to say about it. Dorms at Beijing Normal University are being fitted with face recognition software, which will let residents in — and keep intruders and other unwanted people out. Mashable.com – May 23, 2017 Every business needs it; do you have it? 630.850.9039 This month’s trivia question: Amazon was not the name Jeff Bezos originally selected for his Internet start-up company in 1995. What name was his ϐirst pick? a) Kagera b) Bookmeister c) Juggernaut d) Cadabra Congratulations to last month’s Trivia Contest winner, Lisa Newbold, with Leff Construction, CA! Lisa’s name was drawn from the ϐishbowl for last month’s correctly answered question: What was the ϔirst web site to feature a banner ad? D) Hotwired Who Else Wants To Win a $25 Amazon Gift Card? To enter: Go to www.Syscon-inc.com/Trivia and type in your answer. All correct answers will be put into a ϐishbowl and we’ll randomly draw the winner. The Winner will be contacted shortly after the deadline and will be announced in next month’s newsletter. Deadline: August 21, 2017 -- 4 of 4 -