As a computer owner, you can use a computer to help you do a great many things. Here’s a shortlist of things to get you leveraging your computer to make your life better.
1. Communicate/Connect with a community
Computers can help you stay in touch with friends, family, and through online communities. Email and online chat make efficient person-to-person communication simple and within reach of anyone. Social media lets people stay up to date with their peers, collaborate, and participate in groups.
Video calls through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Skype make staying close at a distance easier than ever before. Video conferencing software also allows screen sharing and computer control making meetings or computer help easier than ever. So take the time to set up your communication channels and get chatting!
2. Manage your schedule
Most email accounts come with a calendar for scheduling appointments and meetings. Even your smartphone should have a calendar application. You can use this to set reminders for yourself and schedule important activities with reminders. It’s possible to use these tools to schedule your week thoroughly and really maximize productivity.
Another great feature of Google calendar is sharing a calendar with other family members, making it easy to coordinate family events. An extension of this is to create a group calendar for active groups that need to communicate event information to their members.
3. Organize and preserve your photos
Gone are the days of bookcases full of photo albums. While there are still many folks with giant photo collections, it’s more common today to organize them digitally. What’s happened was, storage became cheap, and taking a large number of photos with your smartphone made picture taking easy. Consequently, that means the volume of photos that people take has exploded.
The great news is, if you organize your photos and properly back them up, they can last forever in digital format: no crumbling old albums, no piles of loose photos, and no tattered corners. I wrote an article on digital photo care that you can read here.
As I said, storage is cheap, and these days you can get great online storage making your photos accessible from anywhere!
4. Stay up-to-date with current events
Before computers and the mass expansion of the internet, we used to have to read the paper or catch the evening news to stay up-to-date on what was happening in the world. Then, we all shifted to a collection of news websites or RSS feeds to get our news. These days, most of the current events that people hear about are distributed on social media.
This means that social media has become the hub for all other news outlets and current events. Maybe you aren’t interested in social media. That’s a fair comment. But you can’t deny the influence it has had on the national conversation. If you’re interested in participating in the conversation, being on social media allows for that.
5. Manage your thoughts and notes
There are multiple note-taking programs such as x, y, and z that allow you to take notes and organize them. To leverage them fully, you may need to improve your typing speed, but it may be well worth it. One of the things that we do as people is come up with great ideas, read great books, and have great conversations, but once we’re done, it’s gone.
By taking good notes of all your dealings, you can preserve those experiences and review them in the future. Having those gems for future use is powerful and can really propel you forward in terms of progress and success in your life. So, expand your potential by starting a note-taking regimen.
6. Be more accurate
With the world’s information at your fingertips, it’s a lot easier to be more accurate. You can look up the spelling of words, you can check dates, and you can check facts. And you can do it fast! Online calculators, look-up tables, and web tools allow you the leverage to produce accurate, significant materials in record time.
Almost every application that takes text input has some form of spelling check, vastly reducing the number of spelling mistakes. Did you know your phone camera can also be used as a scanner or note capture tool? Next time you need to record a number or need to find a product that you’ve run out of, take a picture of it, so you have all of the information in your pocket unfettered and clear.
7. Navigate and find places
Google maps and Apple maps are so good now. You can navigate your way anywhere. You can zoom in on a location, search locations, and even view most locations using reasonably recent street view images. Searching by type of location is also useful.
For example, by searching for “restaurant” followed by the city name, all of the restaurants listed on the map application are presented with pins on their locations. You can get directions from your location by touching the restaurant label on the map.
If you’re planning a trip, you can search travel from one location to a second to get the distance, estimated travel time, and possible routes. I find that they estimate the travel time a little on the high side, but your experience may be different.
8. Pass the time
Your computer is a window to a world of entertainment. Streaming services for movies and sitcoms, gaming sites, or just good old YouTube. Watch all your favorite political commentary and even get involved in the conversation. Every year new services become available, and it’s being refined.
Gaming computers have become marvels of their own in terms of capability and squeezing out every drop of power. High definition monitors deliver a clean, crisp experience.
Inexpensive storage makes collecting your titles in a digital format more accessible than ever before but really unless you’re a collector, what’s the point? The improvements in internet speeds and uptime make streaming a better option for most people than purchasing. However you like to consume your entertainment, everything is digital now.
9. Learning and personal development
Interested in learning new skills? Do you want to earn a certificate, diploma, or degree so you can advance your career? Online learning was expanding before the covid-19 pandemic but really got the push it needed because of it. Options continue to expand every day to the point where you can earn a fully accredited degree or diploma online.
These days you can visit several well-known university sites and find online options. It’s in so much flux it isn’t even worth posting a link to them right now. It’s changing that fast! You can also find better and better choices at online learning sites like Coursera or Udemy. All in all, it’s a great time to access learning online.
10. Manage and control other devices
Your computer can become a hub for other devices that provide much utility—valuable products like security systems, home automation systems, or more common items like scanners and printers. The next level of this category is to get into devices you can program and use to control other things.
Getting into this space means you will need to learn a little bit of programming and some basic electricity, but it’s very achievable for the average person and could be a rewarding hobby. As a starting point, you can get going through devices like the Raspberry Pi board, Arduino’s, or inexpensive programmable logic controllers. There are abundant resources for learning about these systems, all geared towards the beginner.