How to Prevent Unauthorized Sharing Of Your PDF Content

One of the biggest problems creators face when monetizing their PDF content is preventing end-users from unauthorized sharing of the files.

Solutions such as having an expiration date or setting PDF permissions are not always applicable.

This post will explore how All-About-PDF's DRM can help protect your PDF content and give you the peace of mind that end-users cannot share the PDF without your authorization. 

If you haven't already, make sure you have downloaded and installed the latest version of All-About-PDF.

1. Open All-About-PDF from the Windows Start Menu

2. From the main window, click on the Apply DRM button.

3. Select the PDF file you would like to protect. To protect multiple files, you can use wild cards.

4. Click on the Prevent Document Sharing segment to expand it and specify the maximum number of devices that can open the document.

5. You can optionally add other protection mechanisms such as document expiration and region locks.

6. Click on the Appy DRM button to protect the document.

When the end-user opens the protected document for the first time, they will be alerted that the PDF will be registered to their device and that no other device will be able to open it. The end-user can also unregister a device from the protected PDF by clicking the De-Authorize button in PDFe Reader.

Please note that this feature requires that the end-user have an active internet connection to open the protected PDF file.

To start preventing unauthorized sharing of your PDF files, download All-About-PDF today.

Limit How Many Times a PDF File Can Be Printed

When you protect a PDF document with our DRM technology, printing is also disabled by default. There are, however, some instances when you would like to allow the document end-user to print some copies of the file.

Follow the steps below to achieve this using All-About-PDF's (digital rights management) DRM technology.

If you haven't already, make sure you are using the latest version of All-About-PDF from our website as well as the latest PDFe Reader (at least build 1072).

Open All-About-PDF from the Windows Start menu and then hit the "Apply DRM" button.

On the screen that opens, select the PDF document that you would like to protect with DRM and then, If desired, set the document's expiry date by expanding the "Set your PDF to expire" section.

Under the "Allow Printing of PDF files" section, you can check the "Allow printing of protected file" checkbox and then specify how many times your end-user is allowed to print the file.

Hit the "Apply DRM" button to protect your file; the resulting DRM protected file is saved in the same location as the PDF file with a ".pdfe" extension.

All-About-PDF’s DRM technology automatically prevents the documents from being printed to PDF and document printers as well as prevents screen capture of the document.

The Secret PDF Feature in iOS and iPadOS 15

As you may know, Apple has always made the PDF format a first-class citizen in its operating systems going back to the original Mac OS X. In fact, OS X was the first operating system that used PDF technology within the operating system itself. Apple called this technology ‘Quartz’. Quartz is a layer of software that runs on top of Darwin, the core (or kernel) of the Mac OS X operating system, and is responsible for the rendering of all 2D objects.

As is now customary, Apple held their World Wide Developer (WWDC) conference in June where they announced iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. These software updates come with a plethora of new features however, one that is not mentioned in any highlight reel, is some new functionality when it comes to processing PDF files. Using the built-in Files app, you can now handle the following PDF functions:

- Rotate PDF pages

- Insert blank pages into a PDF document

- Insert a PDF from file

- Scan Pages into an existing PDF

- Delete pages from a PDF

Here is how this works in iOS and iPadOS 15:

- Start by opening a PDF document in the Files app

- From the left edge of your iPhone or iPad, swipe to the right to expose the page thumbnails

- Press and hold on a page or double-tap a page to open its edit menu

- You can now select the PDF function you would like to invoke from the menu. Handy right?

Have you found any other PDF function hidden in iOS or iPadOS 15? Let us know on Twitter @allaboutpdf

Top 5 Productivity Features in iOS and iPadOS 15

Just like clockwork, Apple offered us a glimpse of whats coming to iOS and iPadOS at it annual WWDC conference. We took the bullet for you and installed the beta versions on our iPad and iPhone to see whats new. Even though there are a lot of new features coming in the next iteration of the operating systems, here are our top 5 productvity features that we are looking forward to.

Quick Notes (iPadOS)

This feature will change the way you use your iPad. By simply swiping up from the bottom-right corner of the device, you summon a new note that floats above whatever app you are currently using. You can then quickly note or type in whatever comes to mind and then swipe it away when you are done. You can also swipe between quick notes (like paging) and also move the quick note "window" anywhere on the screen.

Improved Multitasking (iPadOS)

Multitasking on the iPad has always been hit and miss and this has been mostly due to how undiscoverable the system is. In iPadOS 15, Apple has added a tiny three-dot menu at the top of every app which when invoked, offers the option to move the current app to fullscreen, side-by-side or slide-over. As the current app slides out of the way, you are now able to search and launch any other app either via Spotlight or from the App Library (also new to iPadOS).

Improved File Management

The Files app has grown up a little in iPadOS 15. While it still lack the power and flexibility of a full file manager like Finder in macOS or Explorer in Windows, its update addresses some of the biggest pain points. First, there is now a progress indicator when copying large files to show how much time it will take. Second, when using an external mouse or trackpad, you can select multiple files by simply dragging the pointer over them in the same manner as in macOS or Windows.

Live Text OCR

This handy new feature allows you to quickly recognize and select, copy, lookup, search for text from any photo. A useful example of this is being able to copy a phone number or name of a restaurant directly from a photo in the camera roll.

Focus Modes

Aimed at improving work-life balance, this new feature will help ward off time-wasting notifications while at work or keep business matters from interrupting you when spending quality time with family. Focus Modes in iOS/iPadOS 15 lets you set up different segments of your life that relate to specific contacts, apps or even Home screens. The differents modes can then be triggered by location or time of day.

Which features are you looking forward to most in iPadOS and iOS 15? Hit us up on Twitter and let us know.

All-About-PDF Scores an NPS of +63

One thing we value above all else at All-About-PDF is the satisfaction of our users and customers. We are always requesting and listening to feedback to make sure that our product continues to provide the best user experience and value.

To track this, we put the independent metric - Net Promoter Score (NPS) - in place. Our customers are asked

"How likely are you to recommend All-About-PDF to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0 to 10?"

High scoring respondents (a score of 9 or 10) are our Promoters, those scoring us 7 or 8 are Passive, and the lower scoring ones (0 to 6) are our Detractors. Our goal is to make all our users Promoters!

As Net Promoter Score is a customer satisfaction metric, it measures the propensity of customers to recommend All-About-PDF to others. An NPS score higher than zero is said to be good, a score 30 or over is excellent, and anything over 50 as world-class. Given that the average score for companies in the technology/software sector is +32, we are proud that All-About-PDF scored +63!

We could not have achieved this rating without our amazing team here at All-About-PDF and we are extremely proud of the work that everyone puts in and the dedication we show to our customers.

So, a big thank you to the team but an even bigger thank you to our customers who have given us such wonderful feedback like:

“You are already doing a fantastic job with the software and the fast support and the most important of all : You are always open to suggestions . You are the first software developer that implements features that I needed . Hope your service for this tool will stay open for many years from now on.”

“It just works perfectly and the support from the All-About-PDF team is excellent.”

“Amazing support team, specially the agent on Facebook is doing great job and fully cooperative and friendly.”

If you haven’t yet tried out All-About-PDF, we would love to win you over as one of our Promoters. Get started by downloading All-About-PDF today!

How To Digitize Your COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card

When you receive your COVID-19 vaccination, you are given a Vaccination Record card that records your name, birthday, the brand of vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J etc) and also the date(s) when you received your shots.

In the months ahead, some employers could start requesting proof of vaccination as workers return to the office. International travelers may also be required to prove that they have been inoculated prior to being allowed entry into their destinations.

Consequently, a lost Vaccination Record card could be a real headache and creating a digital backup by scanning it to a PDF file may be worthwhile.

Luckily there are many apps that can assist you to do just that. In this post, we are going to use the Notes app for iOS as this is available for free for all iOS users. Android users may use apps such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Scanbot.

To get started, place your Vaccination Record card on flat (preferably dark) surface and position your phone directly above it. Open the Notes app, create a new note and then tap the Camera button. From the pop-up menu, select "Scan Document". The app will automatically detect the edges of the card and will take a photo of the card without any user input. Hit the Save button and the card will be saved inside the note.

If you are signed into iCloud, the note will automatically be backed up to the iCloud service. To save the card to another cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, tap the card that is saved inside the note to open it and then hit the Share button to open the iOS Share Sheet. From here you can choose which app to send the card to.

You can now rest easy knowing that your Vaccination Record card is backed up and safe.

Automating PDF Find & Replace Using All-About-PDF Command Line

Imagine you arrive at work and your manager calls you into their office and tells you that they have a special task for you. You see, the law firm you work for has just landed a new client and inherited a bunch of cases; consequently they now have over 80,000 PDF documents that need to be searched for certain words and each one needs to be replaced with random words. This is going to be an ongoing task for your role going forward. 

You are probably about to have a very bad week. Or is that months?

Unless of course you download All-About-PDF and use the new Find-Replace Command Line feature. This feature allows to create a special file that contains the entire Find-Replace definition including the find-replace pairs, the location of the PDF files etc. Once defined and saved, you can then run All-About-PDF with a special command to this file and it will process all the documents in the background while you get more important things done! 

Hey the week isn’t looking so bad after all? Let’s see how this works.

First create the special (JSON) file to hold the Find-Replace definition. Have a look at the sample below for all the fields available. This file should be saved on the same PC that All-About-PDF is installed on.

{
    "fileName":"C:\\My Documents\\Reports\\*.pdf”,
    “findReplacePairs":{"Binky":"Pacifier","Trash":"Garbage","Sidewalk":"Pavement"},
    “useRegex":true,
    “pageRange":"1-3, 5-7",
    “underline":false,
    “strikethrough":false,
    “outputFolder":"C:\\My Documents\\Reports\\Processed",
    “findReplacePairsFile":"C:\\My Documents\\Automation\\FindReplaceValues.txt",
    “showResult":false,
    “fileNameSuffix":"_processed"
}

The available fields are as follows:

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You may also store your Find-Replace pairs in a separate text file by using the simple format below. This file can then be referenced in the JSON file above for the findReplacePairsFile field e.g.

Trash=>Garbage
Binky=>Pacifier
Sidewalk=>Pavement
Blinker=>Indicator

To put it all together, you can use the command below to run All-About-PDF to process your files.

%programfiles%\All-About\PDF\all-about-pdf.exe /findreplacewjsonfile {the path to the json file}

A real world usage of the above:

%programfiles%\All-About\PDF\all-about-pdf.exe /findreplacewjsonfile {C:\My Documents\Automation\findreplace.json}

As you can see, this advanced feature of All-About-PDF is a great time saver in carrying out a task that would otherwise be impossible to get done manually.

To get started with processing your PDF documents, download All-About-PDF today!

Top 5 Ways All-About-PDF Can Help Organize Your Tax Documents

If you are in the United States, then you probably know that tax season is just around the corner if not already underway. Its that time of year where we have to show and prove to Uncle Sam how much money we made (or lost as the case may be) last year.

Depending on your situation, this process can mean downloading mortgage statements from your bank, W2s from your employer, 1099s from wherever they usually live and more.

These documents are of course all in the ubiquitous PDF format and also contain varying levels of personal and confidential information.

I am yet to meet a person that enjoys the process of preparing taxes so here are 5 ways All-About-PDF can help organize your documents prior to sending them to your accountant.

1. Merge The PDF Documents: instead of sending or uploading all these files to your accountant in a piecemeal fashion, merge them all together into a single PDF document with a table of contents using All-About-PDF so that your accountant knows exactly where what is located.

2. Split Out or Delete The Unnecessary Pages: In some cases, you don't need to send your entire document to your accountant as all the information they require is on a single page. Use All-About-PDF to split your PDF to keep only the pages you would like to send to them.

3. Redact/Find-Replace Information: If there is information in the documents that you would rather not send to your accountant, use All-About-PDF's Redact or Find-Replace feature to remove or obscure specific words from your documents.

4. Compress PDF Documents: Once you have organized and merged your PDF files together, you will likely find that the file size is on the larger side. All-About-PDF's compress PDF feature can help you reduce the size of the document back to a more manageable size so that you can easily email it to your accountant.

5. Password Protect Documents: Last but definitely not least, protect your private information by adding a password to your PDF(s) so that only your accountant has access (be sure to send the password in a separate email from the document(s))

6. (Bonus) Set PDF Expiry: whilst not applicable in most tax situations, you can still use All-About-PDF to not only set your PDF documents to expire after a certain date but also to ensure that the documents can only be viewed in a certain country or domain.

What other ways has All-About-PDF helped you process your PDF files? Drop us a mention on Twitter @allaboutpdf.

If you haven’t tried All-About-PDF yet, there is no time like the present. Hit the button below to download it now!

All-About-PDF for iPhone and iPad, Available Now

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We are so stocked to announce the immediate availability of All-About-PDF for iPhone and iPad in the Apple App Store. With All-About-PDF for iPhone and iPad, you can:

• Merge multiple PDF documents into a single file

• Split a single PDF document into multiple files

• Delete pages from a PDF

• Rotate PDF pages

• Set a PDF to expire on a given date

• Convert a PDF document to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and JPG formats

• Add password protection to a PDF

• Remove password protection from a PDF

• Redact sensitive information from PDF

• Find and replace words in a PDF

• Add a text stamp/watermark to PDF

• Reduce the size of PDF files

All-About-PDF for iOS and iPadOS is available for FREE to process up to 5 documents a month. You can unlock unlimited PDF processing for only $4.99.

You can download All-About-PDF today from the Apple App Store for FREE.

Direct link here

p/s don’t forget to leave us a review!

What Is The Value of Your PDF?

Have you ever considered the financial value of your PDF documents?

This may seem like a strange question on its face however take a few moments to really think about it.

Once you have answered that question, ask yourself how much your business is losing because your PDF documents are not properly protected.

If any of your business's intellectual property (IP) is held in PDF documents, it is imperative, now more than ever, to make sure that they are protected and that they cannot be easily copied and shared.

Let’s look at an example.

A lot of businesses that offer training courses have to make sure that their IP, the training materials, are protected in order to continue successfully recruit students.

Prior to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, this was easily achieved with in person classes where the learning materials were handed out at the beginning of the course and then collected at the end.

The world has now changed to where a lot of training is forced to occur online and training institutions have to send the training material to students as PDF documents. If these materials are not protected from printing, copying and sharing, some students will easily make copies of the material and share with their friends, or even publicly (using Dropbox, Google Drive etc) across the world.

Other professionals such as architects, designers, copywriters, artists and more have been similarly affected.

The obvious solution to this problem is to encrypt the PDF document with an owner password to prevent printing and content copying. This unfortunately is not enough as some PDF readers do not obey these restrictions. This also doesn't resolve the problem of limiting access to the PDF to a period of time or geographic location(s).

Using All-About-PDF DRM to restrict a PDF to a list of allowed countries

This is where All-About-PDF's robust digital rights management (DRM*) platforms becomes invaluable. By using the software in your business you can do the following to control access to your intellectual property:

• Add a static expiry date to your PDF: you can use All-About-PDF to specify when your PDF document is valid until. In the above example of a training institution, this can be at the end of the training course

• Add a relative expiry date to your PDF: sometimes a static expiry date may not be practical as training courses may be started on different dates for different students. For this scenario, All-About-PDF allows you to set a PDF to expire so many days after it is first opened.

• Restrict your PDF to certain countries: it is no secret that some countries treat IP and copyright laws with more respect than others. If you know that your PDF should only be accessible in certain countries, you can use All-About-PDF to restrict the countries from which the PDF can be opened.

• Restrict your PDF to a list of allowed IP Addresses: similar to the above concept, you can also restrict the IP addresses from which a PDF can be viewed. If you need to keep information in your PDF documents inside your organization, you can add just your IP address to the allowed list.

• Remotely kill a PDF: this useful feature allows to invalidate all copies of your PDF document remotely. Once invoked, the PDF documents become invalid and can no longer be opened or viewed.

As you can see, All-About-PDF’s DRM platform puts the control and security of your PDF documents, and more importantly, the value of your intellectual property back in your hands where it belongs! To get started, download All-About-PDF today!

How To Set a PDF To Expire Days After Being Opened

As useful as setting an expiry date on a PDF is, sometimes you just don’t know if the person you are sending the PDF to will have a chance to review the document in time. This is especially true for course materials where it is useful to protect the documents with an expiry date but the actual courses may have multiple student intakes with varying starting dates. It can be useful to set the PDF to expire so many days after the student opens the course material; the course duration for example.

In All-About-PDF, you can set a PDF’s expiry date to be relative to when the document is first opened. This is achieved using our ground-breaking digital rights management (DRM) technology.

Let’s look at an example of how to set a PDF file to expire 365 days after being opened. Follow the steps below:

1. Download and open All-About-PDF

2. Click on the SET EXPIRY button

3. Click the “…” button and select the PDF file you would like to process

4. Select the Use All-About-PDF DRM option

5. Select the Expire X days after first viewing and set the number of days to 365

6. Check the box for Use internet time… so that the document expiry cannot be bypassed by changing the user’s system date

7. Provide a custom message for when the PDF expires.

8. Hit the GO button and apply the settings to the PDF. The document will be saved with a PDFE extension in the same folder as the original file.

To get started with protecting your PDF documents with a relative expiry date, download All-About-PDF today.

Free PDFe Reader Now Available for iPhone and iPad

We are happy to announce the general availability of our free PDFe Reader for iPhone and iPad. You and your users can now open and read the DRM protected PDF files on the go and on your tablets!

p/s You can add expiry dates to your PDF documents using All-About-PDF for Windows. See this link for more information.

Download from the Apple App Store using the link below

Or simply scan this QR code.

How To Split PDF By Document Contents

Splitting a PDF is a very useful feature for many reasons. For payroll processors, one common scenario is where the payroll software exports all the paystubs as a single PDF document and this PDF then needs to be split into individual pay stubs that can be sent to the respective employees.

One of the challenges when splitting such a PDF is that you don’t always know where to split the PDF as the different paystubs can be of varying lengths for different employees. For example, one employee’s paystub can be 3 pages long where as another employee’s may be just 1 page. The PDF splitting process should know where to split the PDF for all the different employees.

In All-About-PDF, we have added new method of splitting PDFs where you can specify the location for a specific text pattern to be searched and if this is found, the program will know to split the PDF on this page. This could be, in our example, the employee number or identifier.

This video shows how to split a single PDF document into multiple files by locating text that matches a pattern. The split PDFs can then be named after the t...

All-About-PDF uses standard wildcard notation for matching the text to a pattern and below are some examples for common scenarios:

• Any word or number: *

• Any 5 letter word: ?????

• Any 5 number word: #####

• 2 letters followed by 3 numbers: ??###

• Any word starting with A: A*

• Any word containing the letters “AIP”: *AIP*

• Any word ending with X: *X

• Any word starting with a number and ending with X: #*X

• Any word starting with A and ending with a number and the letter G: A*#G

There are many way to create the search pattern and a more detailed explanation can be found here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/language-reference/operators/like-operator

To use this new PDF splitting feature in All-About-PDF, please follow the steps below:

1. Open All-About-PDF and click on the Split PDF card

2. Select the PDF document that you would like to split

3. Select the folder where you would the resulting split files to be saved

4. Specify the file name of the split file - the text from the PDF will be appended to this name

5. Select the “Split by matching text pattern…” option and provide the pattern to search for

6. Click the “SELECT”/”RESET” button to show a preview of the PDF and then specify the location of the text on the page by selecting it with your mouse

7. You can specify to use the text from the PDF as the resulting file name as well as the start and end pages of the split PDF. These are denoted by the special variables {{pdfselection}}, {{pagefrom}} and {{pageto}}

8. Click the SPLIT button to begin the splitting process

To get started with this new feature and more in All-About-PDF, download the free trial today!

PDFS4LIFE Update

We would like to thank everyone that has bought, downloaded or shared All-About-PDF. Because of you, we have been able to provide assistance to the children of St Mary’s Nursery, Nkhotakota over the past year.

Even though the nursery closed for a few months due to the pandemic, our contributions to the PDFS4LIFE fund did not stop. Consequently, the nursery school is now in greater shape than ever and is ready to welcome the children back.

To welcome the new nursery school intake, we recently held a get-together for the children from the nursery school as well as those from the surrounding villages and by end of the event, we had entertained and fed over 500 children!

Here are a few photos that were taken during the event:

From the children of Sani, Nkhotokota, and from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for supporting PDFS4LIFE!

DRM Protected PDFe Files

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM) Protection

Digital Rights Management is a far-reaching term that refers to any scheme that controls access to copyrighted material using technological means. In essence, DRM removes usage control from the person in possession of digital content and puts it in the hands of the copyright owner.

What are PDFe Files?

All-About-PDF’s PDFe files are encrypted PDF documents that have an expiry date. They allow the document author to specify when the PDF document is no longer valid. In the near future, these documents will include more features such as geolocation lock (where a document can only be viewed in specific regions), domain lock (the document can only be viewed by users of a specific Windows domains) and remote kill-switch ability (the document author can remote render the document invalid).

These features are very useful for authors of valuable intellectual property such as online course materials, engineering designs, architecture drawings etc. This allows the authors to share their copyrighted material while maintaining full access control to their intellectual property.

In order to maintain high security, the PDFe file specification is proprietary to All-About-PDF and can only be opened by our special document readers.

How To Open AND VIEW PDFE Files

iOS and iPadOS PDFe Viewer

Once a PDFe file has been created in All-About-PDF, there are three ways of opening and viewing it.

1. Using the free PDFe Viewer for Windows: you can be download this from our downloads page

2. Using the free PDFe Viewer for macOS: you can download this from our downloads page

3. Using the free iOS and iPad app: this can be downloaded from the Apple Apple Store

4. Using our free online PDFe viewer: you may access the online PDFe Viewer using Chrome web browser at this address.

All of the above methods of viewing PDFe documents do not allow saving or printing of the original PDF document.

How To Convert And Save Email Messages To PDF

There are many reasons a person would want to save an email to PDF including archiving purposes or sharing an entire email thread in a more readable form. Lets also not forget the options that become available once the email has been saved to PDF such as password-protecting the PDF for security.

With so many platforms and email applications available to us, what are the best ways to save email messages to PDF?

Windows

If you are using Microsoft Windows, the best way to save email messages to PDF regardless of the email client is to use a PDF Print Driver. The latest versions of Windows come with a PDF Printer so you don't even need to download a third party solution. For older versions, there is a plethora of PDF Print drivers online and once one has been installed, saving the email to PDF is just a matter of going to the print menu and selecting the PDF Printer.

macOS

If you are using the default mail client, Apple Mail, in macOS, you can save an email message to PDF by selecting "Export to PDF" from the File menu.

If you are however using another application that doesn't have a dedicated function to export email messages to PDF, you can use “Save As PDF” from the system print dialog.

Android

Similar to Windows, exporting email to PDF is just a matter of printing the email to PDF and then selecting where you would like it saved.

iOS/iPadOS

Some mail apps in iOS have dedicated functionality to export messages to PDF where as others don’t. For those that don’t, such as the default Mail client, you need to select Print from the Share menu. Once the print preview is displayed, use the 2 finger pinch-out gesture to expand the first page; this action automatically converts the email to a PDF which can then be shared or saved.

How To Work From Home Like A Badass

Working from home is usually awesome and until recently has been seen as a luxury afforded to us by our respective employers. However due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have found ourselves having no choice but to work from home.

As we have learned, there is a huge difference between working from home once in a while and working from home during a pandemic. We now have to contend with getting work done while children need our attention, neighbors mow the lawn during our Zoom meetings, dogs barking etc etc.

How do we make sure that our performance is not too adversely affected by this sudden change in our work paradigm? Below are some suggestions.

Establish A Routine

The most important thing you can do to kick ass while working from home is to establish and stick to a routine. Start with setting an alarm that gets you out of bed at least an hour before you have to start working. Working from home is no excuse to wake up minutes before starting work. Shower, dress and follow almost the same routine as if you are going out to your office that way your mind gets into work mode. 

Just as important, make sure you schedule in breaks and have a stop time when you leave work for the day. It’s easy to unknowingly stay “ON” even after the work day and it is imperative to switch off notifications from work until the next day to avoid fatigue and burn out.

CREATE a FORMAL Workspace

Working from home shouldn’t mean working from your bed or couch. Establish a designated workspace that gets your mind into work mode. Keep the space as clean as possible so that its attractive to return to. Try to keep interruptions and distraction to a minimum by either closing yourself off in your work space or by wearing noise cancelling headphones. 

Setup Daily Targets

A simple to-do list can work wonders for keeping you organized and motivated. Create a list of items that you have to accomplish by the end of the day in the order of importance and urgency. Share the list with your team and then assign a completion time to each item. When you find yourself procrastinating, revisit the list to get back on track.  Checking off those goals lets you know that you are making progress and gives you positive reinforcement throughout the day. 

Exercise In The Morning

There are many known benefits to working out in the morning. You will be more awake and alert as the body will be filled with the Cortisol hormone. 

When you exercise, oxygen and nutrients travel to your heart and lungs which results in a boost in energy to fuel you during the day. It also fills your body with endorphins (happy hormones) that can reduce stress and depression. Science!

Need one more reason to exercise in the morning? A 2019 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that physical activity improves focus and concentration, visual learning and decision-making.

Time-box Your Activities

How do you eat an elephant? One spoonful at a time!

When you are facing a big task to accomplish during your work day, it can be hard to get started as the goal appears unreachable. To overcome this feeling, break it down into smaller tasks and then set time boxes for working on each item. When the time box lapses, reward yourself with a short break and snack before returning to start another time box. Before you know it, the elephant will be completely eaten!

What other methods have you found to improve your productivity during this work from home period? Hit us up on Twitter or Facebook and let us know!