Getting Things Done: 7 WFH Tech Essentials

The right technology can really elevate your home office set up and boost productivity.

I’ve picked out seven of my favorite work from home tech essentials that have helped me stay connected and do more, especially as I’m working from home most of the time with occasional visits to the office.

Whether you want to improve your workspace, or find gift ideas, these tech essentials have worked for me, so maybe they can also enhance your workspace and productivity.

MacBook Air M2

The center of my home office has long been an iMac. I had a first-gen Intel 27” model and it worked like a champ for more than a decade! It was hard to part with it, but needless to say, it was time for an upgrade.

Although I considered a new iMac, I couldn’t wait for Apple to introduce another large screen version of its latest generation all-in-one. Plus, I kind of wanted something I could take with me when I’m traveling. So, I picked up a 32” monitor and paired it with the new MacBook Air M2.

This laptop is thin, lightweight, and gorgeous. But thanks to the M2 processor, it’s practically Pro.

I had considered a MacBook Pro 13” with the M2, but discovered the MacBook Air M2 offered a better webcam, nicer speakers, more modern looking display, fast-charging support, all in a lighter package. It was a no-brainer to go with the Air M2 and I couldn’t be happier, especially since I felt it was a better value over the Pro model.

CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Element Hub

Naturally, there are multiple devices in my home office and I needed a way to tether everything together. One challenge was that I also had two laptops – one personal and one for work – that I needed to toggle between seamlessly.

The solution: CalDigit’s Thunderbolt 4 Element Hub. Harnessing the power of Thunderbolt 4, this simple dock provides an incredible amount of flexibility for my home office set up.

I use the dock to connect my 4K monitor, laptops, a couple external SSD drives, a keyboard and mouse, plus charge devices like headphones and my mobile phone.

As mentioned, I togged between work and personal laptops, and this dock makes the process simple. I just unplug the one Thunderbolt cable between them, and I’m good to go.

Audio Technica ATH-M20xBT

One of my newest tech additions are these over-ear headphones. I had been in the market for premium headphones for a while and was so close to pulling the trigger on a pair of $299 cans that offered premium design and sound.

But then Audio Technica introduced these bad boys…

They’ve got a no frills design and don't have fancy features like companion apps or carrying cases. But in terms of sound, they really deliver.

While they may not look like $299 headphones, they’re super lightweight. I usually wear glasses while I’m working at the computer, and still the lightweight design of the ATH-M20xBT headphones make them comfortable to wear for long periods.

The 40MM drivers crank out Audio Technica’s unique sound signature that’s tuned for clarity. Everything is clear, and you’ll never hear anything too crazy. These deliver deep bass, excellent mids, and bright highs without harshness.

For just $80, these hit well above their weight class. I’ve also been using them for all of my calls and the mic does a great job of picking up dialogue while reducing ambient room noise, even without ANC support. Plus, they have a crazy battery life of 60 hours so I don’t have to worry about plugging them in constantly. You can even listen to music wired or via Bluetooth, so they’re super flexible.

eero Mesh Wi-Fi Routers

The key to productivity is good Wi-Fi. So for me, eero’s mesh Wi-Fi routers are essential.

Mesh Wi-Fi routers like eero help to eliminate dead zones by using multiple pods that work in unison to blanket your home with fast, stable coverage.

Unlike traditional routers, eero is super easy to set up and is controlled by a powerful, yet easy to use app. I also subscribe to eero Secure which adds an extra level of security to my network.

In addition to supporting my WFH activities, eero supports all my smart home’s needs. From my TCL TV, to my Nest doorbell, Sonos speakers, or smart lights in my backyard, having Wi-Fi that’s fast, stable, and keeping everything connected in every corner of the house (inside and outside) is pretty awesome.

I’ve also upgraded to eero’s latest generation of routers that support Wi-Fi 6. So, as I add more devices around my house supporting Wi-Fi 6, I know that my WFH set up — and my smart home in general — is future proofed.

Litepro Laptop Stand

I’ve got a hybrid schedule where I bounce between my home office and work office. However, I’m at home most of the week and discovered that a laptop stand is essential.

Litepro’s laptop stand is pretty basic, but it raises your laptop about five or six inches to improve ergonomics if you’re using your laptop’s screen as a second monitor, like I do.

It's lightweight and sturdy, plus it’s super easy to move around your desk. The forward tilt and open design also allows for improved airflow to keep your laptop cooler.

Since there are two laptops on my desk, what’s great about the design is that I’m also able to tuck my personal laptop underneath my work laptop to keep my workspace organized and tidy.

TCL 20 Pro 5G

TCL is known for creating products that punch above their respective weight classes, with a level of performance that usually belies their price tags. That can certainly be said for the TCL 20 Pro 5G which is why it’s still my daily phone of choice.

Although specs alone won't suggest a major leap forward, I can attest to the TCL 20 Pro’s reliable software, incredible build quality, and gorgeous design.

First and foremost, TCL’s expertise in display technology is evident in the 20 Pro. The display is bright, colorful, and is easy on the eyes, no matter what I'm watching or reading. The processing also makes it buttery smooth while jumping between apps or scrolling through long pages.

One of my favorite features is the SmartKey. It's an extra button on the side that can be programmed to do quick tasks. Unlike other manufacturers, TCL makes it easy to quickly launch just about anything with SmartKey. I personally use it to close background apps in a pinch.

The phone is fast, smooth, and shows no signs of sluggishness moving between apps or while browsing the web. Even the camera processing for modes like Portrait and Super Night photos feels fast.

Something that might get lost in reviews, but that I really appreciate as a former Pixel user, is the lack of bloatware. Beyond some basic software like TCL's excellent NXTVISION technology, or theme improvements, the phone isn't too far off from stock Android.

Sonos One

There are many multi-room speakers available these days, but in my opinion you still can’t go wrong with the Sonos One.

I’ve got one in just about every room of the house because they make multi-room listening so easy. For work, it’s satisfying to quickly cue up some ambient music on Spotify and play over the One.

Sound quality is excellent. Every time I listen I can’t believe how much detail and rich bass can be achieved in such a small package.

With both Alexa and Google Assistant built in, not to mention AirPlay support, Sonos has also made it easy to control music and incorporate the One into any smart home ecosystem.

On Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is an important topic in this always-on, digital world we all live in. The last couple of years has also given new meaning to the idea of balance as we’ve all adapted to “new normal” conditions. 

Heavily focused on how people structure and manage their days is Balance the Grind, which hosts conversations about work, life, and balancing the two. The editors talk to people from all over the world, in different careers and backgrounds, to give readers insight into what work-life balance means and how it can be achieved. 

There are always some incredible conversations at Balance the Grind, plus explorations of daily habits, schedules, rituals and routines of successful world leaders, artists, startup founders, business executives, writers and world class athletes. I was honored to be featured to give my two cents on an important topic for young professionals.

Shout out to Hao Nguyen and the editorial team for taking the time to chat, and for building an amazing community.

SEO and its Role in Your Business

According to SmallBizGenius, 93% of all online activities start with a search engine. Moreover, 75% of searchers never click past the first page of results.

Those are impressive stats that indicate how important Search is in a consumer’s path to purchase. It also shows how SEO continues to be essential to any brand’s marketing strategy, just as much as traditional ad campaigns. 

These new stats shouldn’t be too surprising. In the omnichannel world that we live in, Search continues to be at the center of how we research a product before we buy.  

At the very least, these trends also should reveal how important SEO is within the marketing mix. And what’s more, many companies still diminish the impact that SEO brings. 

These stats are only the latest in a slew of data that says any marketer should be utilizing SEO as a powerful tool within your marketing toolbox. Here’s why:

Search Experience Optimization

At its core, SEO is about optimizing all aspects of the searcher’s experience, aiding their journey to find answers.

While some will consider SEO a temporary solution (or at worst snake oil), it's really the process in which a website’s health, performance, and visibility are improved. 

SEO, when done well, is focused on establishing a foundation that includes designing an effective user experience, writing great content, and providing a clear path to conversion. From there, more technical SEO tactics can help improve performance and provide a faster, more responsive experience for the user.

E-A-T for Results

Today, SEO is a blend of art and science. It’s also more about the quality of content and UX  than anything else. But it can be summed up by one acronym—EAT. 

E-A-T stands for: Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

Google's algorithm is ultimately searching for content with these attributes. It shows preference for and ranks sites that achieve it. 

Sites that rank well for competitive keywords are those that show expertise in a related field, prove themselves to be an authoritative source of information, and demonstrate they could be trustworthy. 

For many websites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, organic search quickly becomes one of their top performing channels for traffic. The bonus is that it’s free traffic; you don’t have to pay for each visitor!

Sure, there’s also the ability to run ads in search, and paid results can be easy wins that are also important to an overall marketing strategy. But it’s an organic search strategy that leads to a brand’s ability to really saturate the first page of results for a query in Google. 

Your Brand and SEO

SEO takes time, which isn’t always a luxury that all brands have. 

Perhaps you have a new content content management system (CMS) that isn’t SEO-friendly. Or worse, you have a homegrown or proprietary CMS that doesn’t allow certain SEO elements. 

This is a common challenge, as many brands have a CMS that isn’t built with canonical tags, no-index tags, or schema. Moreover, some e-commerce CMS options help brands sell directly to consumers, but won’t necessarily have the URL structure to accommodate custom queries, or navigation to support natural SEO queries. 

If this sounds familiar at all, it is worth looking into how to upgrade your CMS. Finding workarounds to basic SEO challenges are essential, but also finding helpful SEO professionals to fine tune the content you have already might be worth investing in as well.

Help Customers Find You

As mentioned, SEO takes time. It isn’t a flash in the pan, or guaranteed quick fix. But it is part of a long-term strategy that certainly drives return. And more than likely, it’s something your competitors are already employing. 

SEO principles won’t just help you keep pace with your competitors, it will help you build stronger relationships with new customers actively looking for your product. The key is remembering the EAT concept, and to consistently create pages that are credible sources of information about a specific topic that provide real value for users.

I Rediscovered Feedly and Can't Believe What I've Been Missing

There's no shortage of apps to help aggregate and serve up news and information on important topics. A decade or so ago, this might have been more of a challenge. But today, it’s easily done through a host of services, and even some features baked right into our smartphones.

One of my favorite places to catch up on news and articles related to my interests is Google Discover. It’s only a swipe away from the homescreen on my TCL 20 Pro 5G. Discover gives me all the important stories that are relevant to me.

Discover is amazing. It’s a highly personalized feed of articles based on topics I care about, which Google determines from the sites I’m visiting and the queries I’m searching for. In most cases, my Discover feed is pretty spot on. Plus, I can easily control what I’m seeing just by tapping on the icons that can show me more or less content on any topic.

What I love most about Discover is it’s simplicity:

• It’s just a swipe away on my Android phone. No extra app or login is needed.

• It’s always up-to-date, surfacing content that’s related to what I’m interested in that week or that same day.

My other source for quick access to news on the go is Twitter. I don’t have time to visit individual publications I’m a fan of, so I subscribe to these outlets’ Twitter feeds to keep a pulse on their latest stories.

Essentially, I’m using Twitter as a modern RSS reader to get the latest posts from the publishers I love.

Relying mostly on these two services have served me well. However, on a recent vacation this summer I experienced something unusual. I had something that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while—downtime.

It was bliss, thanks to limited TV, cutting off work notifications, and having time to catch up on everything that’s important to me.

What I found was that the two primary sources I’ve come to rely on for keeping a pulse on the world around me just didn’t cut it.

Google Discover didn’t provide the volume of content that would help me feel caught up on all the things I’m passionate about. Rather it was really good at providing me with a somewhat limited window into recent info or what I had only recently researched online.

Twitter presented the opposite problem with way too much information. Constant tweets and that firehose of content means it’s never quite able to serve up the stories I want, when I want them. There are simply too many tweets for Twitter to make sense of and deliver in a focused way. It’s fine for killing time while waiting in line at a coffee house, but less useful when you’re dedicating more time to staying informed.

There are great topics and groups I subscribe to on Twitter. The Marketing topic, for example, is great and introduces me to new marketing folks. But the content of the posts have no real consistency, and they’re rarely enriching. Lately, it seems like there’s more marketing inspiration and quotes rather than anything really actionable.

In that moment of disconnectedness on vacation, I turned to an app on my phone I had not touched in many, many years: Feedly. I had used Feedly in the heyday of Feedburner and other tools that helped manage RSS feeds.

What I found was that Feedly was alive and well, and vastly improved. Still powered by the magic of RSS, Feedly was able to keep me up to date with the topics and trends I really cared about, without the limited or overwhelming presentation I found on Google Discover or Twitter, respectively.

Publications can be easily organized into groups. From there, I was able to see all the latest stories from those groupings and individual topics.

Feedly was perfect for my vacation mindset; it was efficient, it was current, it was actually enjoyable. From Marketing news, to Design & UX inspiration, to ideas on the best meals to cook when I got back home, Feedly allowed me to get easily immersed in all the stuff I love.

The information age is great and all, but sometimes there’s just too much information (or disinformation) to track. Feedly was useful in helping me keep a pulse on the topics that I cared about the most when I first used it back in 2008. I’m glad to see that it’s still around and doing exactly what it does best: making it easy to organize, read, and share information.

If you haven’t tried Feedly, I highly recommend giving it a spin.

5 SEO Myths You Shouldn’t Follow

SEO was really my gateway into digital marketing. Learning SEO in the early days of my career years ago served as my introduction to marketing on the Web. It’s what opened me up to a new world that included analytics, HTML, user experience, and so much more.

It’s an incredible feeling to build a fantastic website, create great content, to see people find it, and ultimately have those visitors convert. In a nutshell, that’s what made me fall in love with digital marketing in the first place. The outcomes, feedback, learning, and constant refinement is addicting.

Today, this practice blends art and science, and being successful is more about the quality of content and UX than anything else. Unfortunately, SEO has gotten a bad wrap and myths continue to be perpetuated.

Here are just a handful of my favorite myths, in no particular order:

1. SEO Myth: Google Only Ranks ‘Fresh’ Content

Google wants to provide users with the most relevant content for any search query. That’s often been interpreted to mean that to have content rank it must be fresh, new and timely. In other words, the most recently published content has the best chance of near-term success, while older content is bound to decline in organic traffic.

‘Freshness’ is indeed an important signal, but it’s also query-dependent. That means that how fresh a piece of content is likely depends on the query. For sites operating in fast-paced news, fresh content may be key. But for the majority of websites, freshness is less of a factor. Consider the topic that you’re targeting. If it’s one that’s constantly evolving, then it could be important to refresh and/or republish that content regularly to ensure Google doesn't consider it stale.

2. SEO Myth: You Don’t Need Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the snippets of content that can be found under a website’s title tag in the search engine results page. They are basically a short summary of the web page that gives users an idea of what they are potentially clicking into. In many cases, Google will develop one automatically based on the page content.

It’s true that meta descriptions by themselves are no longer directly influencing rankings. However, they play a huge role in the searcher’s behavior and in driving engagement with your page’s SERP listing, click-through, and on-site conversion. If users don’t find what they’re looking for in the meta description, or it doesn’t accurately describe the page, they’ll probably move on to a competitor’s listing.

3. SEO Myth: Google Will Penalize a Website for Duplicate Content

It’s widely believed that duplicate content is a website’s kryptonite, paralyzing it from visibility in search engine results. While it can influence what organic results Google shows, duplicate content doesn't necessarily bring ranking doom.

Instead, Google will just ignore the duplicate content altogether. Keep in mind: if you have instances of duplicate content on your website, those pages may be ignored by search engines, which won’t help or hurt your organic rankings. Luckily, there are some tools out there that can help identify duplicate content on a website, such as Copyscape, but know that some duplicate is not completely unusual.

4. SEO Myth: An SEO Agency is the Best Way to Get Fast Rankings

Always be weary of any promise from agencies of rankings or fast results. If you have the budget, there can certainly be good reasons to hire an SEO agency to help with a host of activities, particularly if you’re short on internal resources or want a fresh perspective on how to improve your search traffic. However, SEO needs to be considered an ongoing effort, not a one-time project or something to get a quick win. It’s driven by data and planned, periodic spurts of increased activity scheduled ahead of time.

Google handles over 100 billion searches per month, so no SEO can predict how or what people are going to search tomorrow, or be able to make any guarantee of fast search rankings. SEO is a long-term practice that’s impacted by the age and history of domain names, authority links, and in-depth, high-quality content, among many other factors. There are many websites out there that check these boxes, but still struggle to rank well. Know that playing the long game is what it takes to not only get to the top of results, but to stay there.

5. SEO Myth: SEO is Dead

Last but not least. Google is more sophisticated than ever and makes it more challenging for SEOs to crack the formula to higher rankings. Moreover, search engine results pages look much different now than they did a decade or more ago. Increasingly, Google is serving up its own answers to searchers’ queries, before they reach traditional website listings. Even voice searches are becoming the norm in our smart homes.

However, the truth is that as long as search engines still exist and show organic results for users hungry for answers—answers that can be influenced in some fashion—SEO isn’t dead. At its core, SEO is about finding ways to satisfy user needs, answer their questions, and it’s about tailoring a website’s architecture or content to meet a searcher’s expectations. That’s something that will continue to be an essential practice.

Stay Nimble, Marketers

As 2020 comes to a close, I can’t help but think about how consumer behavior has changed this year and how businesses of all shapes and sizes are still trying to adapt.

The ancient Greek proverb that “the only constant in life is change” has never been more true as we piece together learnings from 2020 and look to apply to our digital marketing efforts in 2021.

The most successful brands and marketers have always been those who could quickly adapt to a changing environment and new technology. But that’s never been as crucial as it is right now, in the midst of a global pandemic, the likes of which may affect our lives forever.

As COVID-19 spread and made its impact felt on individuals and the wider economy alike, it became clear that the single most important trait that marketers can embody is the ability to stay nimble. If your marketing plans, workflows, or infrastructure isn't able to pivot on a dime, you’ll continue to fight an uphill battle and you certainly won’t be able to meet demands in the next catastrophe.

Marketers must be able to guide their teams and respond in a moment, while of course staying consistent with big picture goals. The overarching strategy behind your marketing plan shouldn’t be thrown out in the midst of adversity, but you should be able to make big changes in near-term ideas that won’t completely obliterate long-term objectives.

As important as it is to move quickly, take the time to get a clear, unbiased grasp of the situation. Your competition is likely grappling with the same changes. However, remember that an immediate reaction or shift doesn’t necessarily pay off.

Customers and partners look for leaders in volatile situations, putting pressure on marketers to deliver messaging that’s simple, factual and empathetic. No one wants to see rushed out brand content that’s overly self-serving, void of the brand's own core values, in an attempt to take advantage of an unusual situation.

Staying nimble these days is also about reinforcing your marketing technology. Now is certainly the time for organizations to take a digital-first approach, leveraging technology to be as efficient and agile as possible, while also delivering messaging that can simplify processes, scales easily, and adjusts to individual customer needs.

For most marketers, the last several months have been about figuring things out as they go. However, the time is perfect to experiment more and learn quickly, to find strategies that will help their brand’s growth within a volatile climate. Honing the ability to test, fail, and repeat again until you decipher the right formula is crucial. And of course whenever there’s a crisis, brands that stay nimble are the ones that will emerge stronger when the dust settles.