The Gen XY Lifestyle

Work from home? Here’s 5 products to make you more productive.

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Whether as a once-a-week habit or your version of the daily grind, here’s a list of tools that can make your work from home routine more productive.

Research by Stanford University with employees from Ctrip found that performance by home workers increased by as much as 13% over the 9 months that the study was conducted.  Workers opined that improvements were due to the ‘increased convenience’ when they did a work from home arrangement and that the home environment was more ‘quiet’ (vs. the office).  

In an opinion editorial, the study’s author shared people who have established social lives – older workers, married workers and parents – tend to be the ones that prefer to work from home.

Given that many of us might find reasons to work from home – whether as part of career development, the decision to further academic goals, semi-retirement, or a family decision – we look at some products that are already available in the market to help make the experience more productive.

For a quiet audio environment: Plantronics Voyager Focus UC (SGD 499)

Work from home

The Voyager Focus FC is a wireless Bluetooth® stereo headset with active noise-cancellation (ANC) technology. Specially designed to eliminate background noise on calls or when workers are ‘in the moment’, this is a good tool to keep noise from the children, the pets and the washing machine at bay when working from home.

The headset provides all day comfort and includes intuitive smart sensor technology, audio alerts, and wideband audio and hi-fi stereo sound for an outstanding calling/music experience.

Working throughout the home, every day: Dell XPS 13 (SGD 1,899)

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Dell’s XPS 13 has a sleek design complemented by the light 1.3kg frame, making moving the laptop from study to dining room an easy feat.

The laptop also offers long battery life and is capable of lasting over 15 hours on a single charge. Naturally, this does not include watching six Star Wars movies back-to-back on its optional high resolution UltraSharp™ Quad HD+ display.

When saving space on a second screen: Canon Rayo R4 Mini Projector (SGD 499)

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The Canon Rayo R4 mini projector is small and light (weighing only 169g) and is perfect for moving around the home environment. Why lug a second screen around? It might be easier to just project onto any wall in the home! Connecting with the laptop or even smartphone is done through a single Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) or HDMI cable.

The mini projector comes with an internal rechargeable battery with a long battery life of 180 minutes. It deliver superior sound quality and projects stable and continuous brightness and colour clarity, making conference calls, sharing presentations, and watching videos an enjoyable experience.

Converting paper to online for storage: Brother PDS-5000 Professional Desktop Scanner (SGD 1,788)

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The Brother PDS-5000 Professional Desktop scanner is the champion tool when it comes to high volume scanning requirements. Scanning can help reduce cost (associated with printing) and improve workflow by using softcopy documents for communication needs.

Some features include:

  • High speed scanning in both colour and black/white (up to 60ppm)
  • Multi-page scanning with a 100-sheet capacity document feeder
  • High-precision scanning up to 600 dpi optical resolution and a range of image optimisation features
  • Scans business and plastic cards

SMBs might want to consider using the PIC grant to acquire this tool to help with the steps involved in the document lifecycle of a company.

Saving, Storing records and extending memory space: Sandisk Ultra Flair USB 3.0 Flash Drive (from SGD 10 for a 16GB drive; with 5 year warranty)

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The SanDisk Ultra Flair USB 3.0 Flash Drive comes in a durable aluminum metal casing that helps to protects against everyday wear and tear. It’s also available in capacities ranging from 16GB – 128GB. The flash drive also features SanDisk SecureAccess™ software to keep private files safe with password protection and 128-bit encryption.

A key selling point for the flash drive is its ultra-fast read speed of 150MB/s. This translates into spending less time waiting to transfer files. For context, a 1.2GB MPEG-4 video transfer with USB 3.0 host device will take less than 30 seconds.  

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