Walk into any studio and you will meet the same six people. Not by job title: by what they do to their computers. We are fond of all of them. We have also been called out to all of them.
In short
Everyone is at least one of these. Most of us are two.
None of the habits is a disaster on its own, and each has a five-minute fix.
If you recognise your whole team, that is normal. It is also fixable in an afternoon.
1. The Tab Collector
Has 214 tabs open "for reference". The laptop fan sounds like a hairdryer and the battery is flat by half past ten. Closing a tab feels like throwing away a thought.
The fix: bookmark the whole window into one folder called "Tabs, November", then close it. Nothing is lost, and the Mac gets its memory back.
2. The 47,000 Unread
The red badge on Mail stopped meaning anything years ago. Important things are found by searching, or by someone walking over to ask. The mess is not the risk. The risk is that the one real invoice and the one fake invoice look identical in a pile that size.
The fix: select everything older than a month, mark it read and archive it. Then turn off every notification that does not come from a person.
3. The Remind Me Tomorrow
Has clicked "Remind Me Tomorrow" on the same update every day since spring. Fair enough: updates always turn up mid-deadline. But most of what an update does is close a hole that somebody has already found.
The fix: restart on Friday on the way out. The update installs while you are on the train home, and Monday starts clean.
4. The Post-it Password
The Wi-Fi password is on the wall, the Adobe login is under the keyboard and the banking one is "somewhere safe". Usually one good password is doing the work of thirty, so one leak opens everything.
The fix: a password manager. You remember one long password and it remembers the rest. We wrote about the spreadsheet version of this habit here.
5. The Desktop Filer
Every file they have ever touched is on the desktop, in layers, like geology. They know exactly where everything is. Then the laptop is left in a taxi, and it turns out the desktop was never backed up and nobody else had a copy.
The fix: live work goes in the shared drive, where it is backed up and the rest of the team can find it. The desktop is for today only.
6. The One Who Unplugs Things
Needed a socket for a phone charger. Chose the one with the small blinking box in it. The small blinking box was the internet.
The fix: label the plugs that matter ("DO NOT UNPLUG: this is the Wi-Fi") and put a spare socket strip where people can reach it.
Recognise your whole team?
That is every studio we have ever walked into. We sort out the updates, passwords, backups and labels quietly in the background, so the six of you can get on with the work. Talk to us, or see what managed IT services covers.