Maximize Productivity with These Home Office Hacks

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Most of 2020 was a dumpster fire that we will not speak of, but it led to a notable trend in the workforce we will acknowledge, specifically the growing popularity of remote jobs and the increasing availability of remote positions. Recent studies have shown working from home to be more productive, especially if employees use strategies to maximize productivity. One of these is to ensure you have a good home office space. Perhaps you recently got a new remote position, or you have been remote for a while and are looking for ways of improving. Whatever the case, here are some life hacks on how to design a home office space that will maximize productivity.

1. Have a Separate Workspace

Our brains come to associate different places with different things, depending on what we use them for. When you’re working from home, blurring the lines can be tempting and problematic. You may find yourself thinking it would be more comfortable to work on your bed, but this area is associated with sleep rather than work, so you will be more inclined to get tired or have trouble concentrating. On the flip side, if you train yourself to work sitting on your bed, you may find yourself having a harder time sleeping at night since your brain will think it’s time to be awake and working.

What about curling up on the couch with your laptop, then? Well… That also might not be the best idea. Since couches are generally used for watching movies and other relaxing activities, your brain will think it’s time to relax and won’t want to focus on work. The kitchen table or counter? That could work, but you’ll likely find yourself wanting to snack throughout the day since you’re where you go when it’s time to eat.

So where can you work to maximize productivity? You will want to set up an area designated for work, but if you have limited space and don’t have an entire room to turn into a home office, you can use a room for multiple purposes. Just make sure there’s a separate space for each. Pick a corner in your bedroom, kitchen, or living room and set up a desk. If you’re very limited on space, folding tables are a great way of conserving space while still giving yourself a separate workspace.

2. Get Comfortable

You don’t have to be on a cozy couch to be comfortable during your workday. Invest in a good chair, and keep ergonomics in mind. You may even want to look into a standing desk if you see yourself doing better when you aren’t sitting as much. If needed, get a taller computer monitor or a stand for your existing one. Your neck will thank you if the screen is at eye level.

After you have your basic setup, consider lighting. You will want your space to be well-lit and to maximize natural lighting. Not only will this help you better stay alert throughout the day, but it will also help you sleep better at night.

You will also want to ensure you are working in a comfortable temperature. Most studies agree that temperature affects productivity, but few agree on what the ideal temperature for productivity should be, so determine what works best for you. If you find yourself needing to change the temperature during the day and you have a smart thermostat, you won’t need to step away from your work to adjust it. You can quickly do so from the app on your phone and then get back to what you were doing.

3. Minimize Distractions

Another smart home hack to maximize productivity would be to get a video doorbell as a way of minimizing distractions. Without a video doorbell, when you hear the door ring on a day you’re expecting a food delivery, you will be inclined to step away from your work to answer the door. Then, when you find out it’s not the DoorDash driver but a solicitor, you have to politely get them to go away before you can go back to your workspace and resume what you were doing. It’s a hassle and takes up time you could be using more productively. With a video doorbell, when the doorbell rings, you can quickly check to see if it’s something you need to take a brief break for or if you can ignore it and resume.

You may find yourself contending with other external distractions if you live in a loud area or aren’t the only person home during the day. Unwanted noise can make it difficult for you to concentrate on your work, but it can often be decreased or eliminated using sound-reducing panels or noise-canceling headphones.

You don’t have to work in a bland, quiet area to maximize productivity, though. Get some tunes going if you’ve found that helps you and it works for your job, and feel free to add some decorations to personalize your workspace. However, you will want to avoid clutter, which can draw your attention and distract you from your work. Consider getting a few plants. These are great decorations that will improve productivity in addition to air quality.

After you’ve designed a home office space to improve the quality of your workday, don’t be afraid to add or change things down the road. It’s your workspace, so make it yours.

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Things You Shouldn’t Use Smart Plugs For

Smart plugs are a great way of adding automation to your home. The possibilities of what you can do with them are limited only by the capabilities of the smart plug you’ve selected, the devices you use around your home, and your imagination. You can find hundreds of lists with suggestions on what you can do with your smart plugs. Some are more practical than others, some make a task less efficient for the sake of doing it in a “smart” way, and some are hazardous. Here are a few of the often-recommended suggestions that are things you shouldn’t use smart plugs for.

1. Slow Cookers

There has been a rise in the popularity of slow cookers and multi-cookers in society’s search for faster and easier ways of doing things. Because of this, companies developed and released cookers with delayed start settings. Then, you can put your food in the pot before you leave in the morning and come home to a cooked dinner. All multi-cookers come with a delayed start setting, but older slow cookers don’t. People have found that if their slow cooker doesn’t have delayed start capabilities, they can use smart plugs to achieve the same thing.

Rather than programming the cooker to start at a set time, they program the plug to turn on at that time. Then, if they have a recipe that only needs to cook for six hours but they will be gone nine, they can wait three hours before they have the plug turn on. By the time they get home, their food will be cooked and not three hours overcooked. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but if not executed properly, it’s a safety hazard.

The Danger Zone

One of the top rules of food safety is to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. Anything between 40° and 140° F is what food safety experts have termed the danger zone. Bacteria grow the most rapidly in this zone, leaving food susceptible to contamination that could result in food born illnesses. You should never leave perishable foods unrefrigerated for more than two hours. If the temperature is 90° degrees or higher, you should not leave it unrefrigerated for more than one hour.

What does this mean for your slow cooker? All slow cooker recipes take a different amount of time to cook, generally ranging between four to eight hours. If it takes you a half-hour to get to work, you work for eight hours with a half-hour lunch, and it takes you another half-hour to get home, you’ll be gone a total of nine and a half hours. Even if you scratch all the shorter-length recipes from your cookbook, a delayed start still might put your food at risk. When it’s a hot summer day and you don’t leave your AC on when you’re not home since you’re trying to be energy efficient, if you delay-start an eight-hour recipe, that will put it in the danger zone too long.

Many find a way around this by saying they’ll put the food in the crockpot while it’s still frozen. This way, it will stay cold longer However, you should never leave frozen food out to dethaw. The outside will thaw faster, putting it in the danger zone before the inside has thawed. Often, this will put the outside in the danger zone too long.

A Safer Alternative

As a safer alternative, you could get a slow cooker with a keep warm setting. Then, you can cook it immediately to keep it out of the danger zone. When it’s done, it will switch to a temperature that will keep your food safe and warm without overcooking it. If you really want to use your smart plug to program an appliance, you can hook it to your kettle or coffee maker and schedule it to align with your morning routine.

2. Preheating Hair Styling Tools

Another common smart plug recommendation is to program it to preheat your curling or straightening iron so that it’s ready by the time you need it. Most styling tools heat up in a matter of minutes, so unless you’re using it the exact same time every day, you’re just wasting power. Even if you think your schedule is that consistent, things happen. Maybe your alarm didn’t go off, so you’re running late. Perhaps one of your kids requires your attention, and it pulls you off routine. It could be a holiday, so you’re sleeping in, but you forgot to change the timer on the smart plug.

Avoid Fire Hazards

Even if you are always as prompt as the Count of Monte Cristo—on time to the second with no deviations—you might not waste any power by preheating, but you are creating a fire hazard. What is on your bathroom counter in addition to your styling tool? Plastic makeup bottles? Hair products? Hairspray? These may not currently be touching your curling iron, but someone you live with might move something. If your curling iron turns on and it’s touching or close enough to something, it would melt it, possibly start a fire. A sure way to ruin your morning is to walk into the bathroom and find a fire with a melted hairspray bottle at the center of it.

Avoid Electrical Hazards

What if you’re a conscientious person and you use safe practices? You put your styling tool on a heat-resistant pad or stand whenever you’re not using it, and you always clean everything off your counter when you’re finished. The first step is to give yourself a gold medal for being way more organized than most people. Then, consider that heat isn’t the only thing that can start a fire. Various electrical problems could also lead to a fire. It may seem unlikely if you’ve never had problems before. However, the probability is high enough that experts say you should never leave your hair styling tools unattended. Ever.

Here’s where a smart plug really can be helpful with styling tools. Are you often not sure if you remembered to unplug your styling tool? You can put a smart plug in the outlet you use for it. Then, when you’re questioning if you remembered to unplug it, you can remotely turn off the smart plug. Then, you will have peace of mind knowing that your styling tool will be safe until you get home.

3. Everything

Techies get excited about their tech, and many have suggested that smart plugs are so useful that people should use them for everything. There may come a day when smart plugs are the industry standard installed into all home. Right now, it’s not practical to use them for everything. The average US home has 75 electrical outlets. Smart plugs start around $10 each but get more expensive with better quality and more features. If you use smart plugs for everything in your house, it’s going to add up. If you can and want to spend $750+ to put in smart plugs for all of them, go for it. Otherwise, you will want to prioritize. What do you do the most, and what do you find the most inconvenient?

If you’re tired of forgetting to make sure your kid turned off their night light in the morning and finding out it’s been on all day when night comes again, you might be more inclined to use one of your smart plugs for scheduling when it’s on. If you don’t have a problem with over-charging devices, a smart plug you can set to turn off after so many hours of charging might not be at the top of your list. It could be nice having a smart plug on the Wi-Fi router so you can remotely reset it, but you don’t have to do this often enough for an occasional trip downstairs to be worth it. If you were still enforcing an internet curfew like you were before all the kids have moved out, then you’d be using a router smart plug every day. And so forth.

Determine your budget and how many smart plugs you need and go from there. It’s your home. You can customize it to whatever works best for you, your family, your budget, and your safety.

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Do You Have a Ring Camera? You Need a Ring Solar Panel to Go With It

Not only do wireless exterior cameras give you protection and peace of mind, but they also come with the added convenience of easy installation wherever you need to place them. You won’t get as much simplicity or flexibility with a wired system. There’s only one downside to wireless: they’re battery-powered, and batteries need to be charged.

If you have a Ring Spotlight Cam or a 2nd on 3rd generation Ring Stickup Cam, there’s a solution. Ring offers a solar panel you can use to keep your cameras charged all the time, no extra work necessary. But is it worth the cost since Ring advertises you only need to charge your cameras once every six months to a year per camera, depending on usage? Let’s take a look at a scenario that may have familiar elements, and you can decide.

Without a Ring Solar Panel

Say you’re busy during the holiday season. You’re juggling work, parties, presents, and your kids’ schedules. One night while you’re waiting for your kid’s dance performance to start, you get the notification from your Ring camera.

Low Battery.

You still have some time to charge the battery before it will die, but if you don’t get it done soon, your camera could stop working. Looking over your schedule, you decide you should be able to fit it in Wednesday before you have to drive your other kid to hockey practice.

But when Wednesday comes, there’s a blizzard. There’s no way you’re pulling out a ladder in this weather to take out the battery and charge it, so you put it off another day. On Thursday, you forget, but on Friday, you finally haul the ladder out into the cold and take out the battery. Retreating to the warm indoors, you plug it in to charge and wait. It can take 5-10 hours for the battery to charge, hours during which the area that camera watches is vulnerable. If anything happens, you won’t have any footage from that camera to help with catching the culprit. This time, you get lucky, though.

When the time comes, you yet again pull out the ladder and trudge outside to put the battery back in. At last, it’s done and taken care of. Until the next time one of your cameras reaches low power.

The Easier Way

You purchase a Ring Solar Panel and follow the easy install instructions to set it up in a position so it will get the several hours of sunlight it needs per day. Thanks to the solar panel being compact but powerful, it doesn’t take up very much space on your roof. Now, not only will you be able to charge your cameras in a more energy-efficient way, you will never have to worry about your cameras’ batteries again. Instead, you’ll save time and effort and without needing to leave areas vulnerable during changing, you’ll know your home is always protected.

If you would like to learn more about how a Ring Solar Panel can help you, contact us at 844-904-9473 or request info online.

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Have More Fun This Season with These Four Winter Activities

Light is a common tradition among winter holidays and festivals—the lights on a Christmas tree, the candles on a menorah or kinara, Bodhi Day string lights, and Yule logs, to name a few. Perhaps this is in part because, in the darkest months of the year, people have wanted to add light. As we enter what are also the coldest months, you can make them warmer by adding some fun. Here’s a list of four winter activities to get you started.

1. Snow Siege

If you live in a place that gets snow, you’ve probably participated in a snowball fight. If you want to take it a step further, you could have a snow siege. Like capture the flag, both teams have a base—in this case, a snow fort—and an item the players need to defend. You could use a flag, or you could find something wintery like a scarf or double holiday decoration.
Instead of tagging players like in capture the flag, they throw snowballs at each other (you will want to establish rules about how hard and where players can throw snowballs so that no one gets pelted in the face by the little league baseball pitcher). If a player gets hit, they need to return to their fort and make a snow angel before reentering the game. Whoever takes the opposite team’s flag and brings it back to their snow fort wins.

It could be a fun activity for the whole family, or it’s something the kids would enjoy but you’d rather not. In that case, you could stay inside and do something warmer. If you have outdoor cameras, you can keep an eye on the kids without needing to leave your project. They should know this is a friendly competition, but if it turns into a fight, you can intervene.

2. Gingerbread Cookies

For those who are against going out in the cold and want winter activities that don’t involve freezing, here’s one for date night, a family activity, or a baking project you can do on your own. Making gingerbread houses is a common tradition, but it’s often tricky to construct the house without it falling apart. They can also be wasteful. You bake the cookie for the house and buy the candy needed to decorate it. Then, you use it as a decoration, only to throw it away at the end of the season. Some people eat them, but when cookies and candy sit out for days, they tend to get hard and nasty. If there are pets in the home, eating the gingerbread house is an even more questionable decision. It could have fur on it, and the pet might have licked it to sample this offering from its humans.

As a yummier, less wasteful option, you could decorate gingerbread cookies. You could go with the traditional gingerbread men or get creative with the cookie cutters you have around. A basic circle could become a snowman’s head, and why not pull out those animal cookie cutters while you’re at it? Just don’t eat the cat and dog-shaped cookies in front of your pets if you think it will make them nervous.

3. Share the Joy

If you make more cookies than you know what to do with, you could turn it into a family outing and deliver some to friends and neighbors. If someone isn’t home but they have a video doorbell, you can leave the cookies on the porch and give a quick greeting to their camera so they know who the cookies are from when they get home later.

4. Movie Night

After you’ve had a snow siege or delivered cookies, you might decide it’s time for something warmer. Make some hot chocolate and curl up with some blankets for a movie night (blankets are optional but recommended for maximum coziness). You could watch a Christmas classic or have a Lord of the Rings marathon in commemoration of the first movie’s 20th anniversary this month.

However you decide to enjoy the winter, we at WISE Home solutions wish you the happiest of holidays.

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Your Small Business Needs a Business Security System

If you have a small business, you want to do everything you can to make it successful. While you’re juggling finances, marketing, employment, and the dozens of other aspects that go into entrepreneurship, some are easier to overlook but just as important to remember, such as a business security system. You will need to look at your business to determine what fits your needs, but here are some suggestions to help you get started.

Smart Locks

If you’re a small business, you probably don’t need a state-of-the-art access control system with access badges and James Bond-proofing. You may have areas around the office with sensitive information that not every employee needs access to, though. You could put locks on these doors and closets and distribute keys, or for a solution that doesn’t add another key to keep track of, you could install a smart lock. This way, you just need to punch in a code, no key necessary. Depending on the smart lock, you may even be able to check from an app on your phone to see if people locked up behind them after they finished what they needed to do inside. If they forgot, you can secure the lock for them without leaving your desk.

Security Cameras and Alarms

If you don’t have a business in retail or are online-only with an office closed to customers, your initial thought might be that you don’t need security cameras or an alarm system because there are never any customers on-site who might try stealing merchandise. However, there are other reasons you would want to have cameras and an alarm system. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first. When you hire an employee, you are looking for someone honest who can do the job well. Sometimes, despite your efforts, it doesn’t always work out this way.

75% of employees have admitted to stealing from their employer at least once. This isn’t a reason to get worried and never trust your employees, but you can take measures to protect your business and positively motivate anyone who might be tempted to join the 75%. If you install cameras and your employees can see they’re there, any who might be in the 75% will be less inclined to steal company supplies or products when they know someone could see.

You probably have better things to do than watch hours of footage—if you don’t, you may want to consider starting a new hobby—but you can skim through it, especially if you have reason to believe things are going missing when they shouldn’t or being used faster than they should.

Cameras are also good for deterring external culprits who might vandalize or burglarize your business. Even if you don’t have any onsite products, there are still plenty of items to catch their attention. Computers and electronics are among the most stolen items, and offices have an abundance of these. Burglars are less likely to break into a building if they see it has cameras, and an alarm serves as an extra defense to scare them away.

Protection While You’re Away

Even if you do have an alarm and cameras installed, they aren’t an invincible burglar deterrent. Some thieves will just ignore the alarm and proceed. Because of this, it’s important to have monitoring services for your business security system. In the event someone breaks into the office after hours, the monitoring company will be able to catch it and dispatch help.

Then, there’s the scenario that could be far more expensive than a burglary. It’s the middle of the night, there’s no one at the office, and the smoke alarm goes off to announce a fire. The fire would have to reach a high intensity before a well-meaning bystander outside would notice and call for help on your behalf. If you had a monitoring company, they would receive notice when the smoke alarm goes off, and they would be able to dispatch help much sooner, mitigating your overall loss.

As you’re reviewing your options for what security features you would like to add to your business, WISE is here to help. Call us at 844-904-9473 or request info online, and we’ll help you customize a plan that best fits the needs of you and your business.

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Taking the Humbug out of Home Security

In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, when a ghost first confronted Scrooge, the old miser refused to believe it was real. In his mind, Marley’s ghost was more likely to be the effects of a bad potato he had eaten than an actual ghost. As the night went on and Scrooge encountered more ghosts, he continued to question, but by the end, he determined the ghosts weren’t just a bunch of humbug. In home security, some “humbug” myths have surfaced that have deterred people from installing security systems. Here are a few of the home security myths and why they may not be as true as one might think.

1. Home Security Systems Are Not Effective

Some people believe there’s no point in getting a home security system because they believe home security systems don’t work. Whether an alarm goes off or not, the burglar is going to finish the job they came to do. However, a study by UNC Charlotte indicates this is not always the case. The researchers gathered survey responses from people who had been convicted of home burglary. 83% reported they would look for signs of a home security system beforehand. Of these, the majority responded that if they had reason to believe there was a home security system, they would move on and look for an easier target. True, this does not mean installing a home security system will guarantee no one ever burglarizes your home, but it decreases the probability significantly.

2. I Don’t Need a Home Security System

Another common home security myth is that if one lives in what is considered to be a nice area, it makes it so you don’t need a home security system. Unfortunately, living in a nice area doesn’t mean it’s immune. Draper is generally perceived to be a nice area in Utah, but its crime index (ranked on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being the safest) is only 28, and there are approximately 906 property crimes per year. If you live in an area with an even lower crime index, that is all the more reason to get a home security system. If you are unsure of your city’s crime index, you can find information here.

Others may say they don’t need a home security system because their dog is their home security system. However, even well-trained dogs can become engrossed in a good enough distraction, and having a dog as your primary defense could be dangerous for your dog if the burglar has intentions of inflicting harm if anything gets in their way. This isn’t to say that having a guard dog is a bad idea. Home security is best when you are using multiple strategies, and a guard dog could be one of them.

3. It Costs too Much

Historically, if you wanted to get a home security system, you had to install a permanent system into the home. It was messy and expensive. Then, you had to pay the monthly fees for monitoring on top of that. This has contributed to the current belief some have that a home security system is too expensive. Though the initial installation can be pricy depending on what company you go through and what products you install, monitoring plans are becoming more affordable.

At WISE Home Solutions, we offer plans with no up-front cost for your devices and the installation. If you need to move during your contract, since modern home security systems are minimally invasive compared to those of the past, your system and monitoring agreement can move with you. If you decide it is important for you to have a home security system and would like more information on how WISE can customize a plan for you that is affordable and effective, call us at 844-904-9473 or request info online.

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The Mites of Electric Lightbulbs

Davy. Swan. Woodward. Evans. Edison. You’ve probably heard one or more of these names used in reference to the inventing of the lightbulb and the various debates about who the real inventor was and who stole ideas to get the credit. Even before electric lights became the standard means of lighting, Mark Twain settled the debate when he said, “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did.”

Though this was not specifically about the lightbulb, the same applies.

Early Days

In ancient times, people contributed the first mites when they discovered fire as a means of light. As centuries passed and technology evolved, people turned to torches, various oil lamps, candles, and other means. Perhaps it was the growing interest scientists had in electricity in the late 1700s and 1800s and the gas lighting of the day that inspired so many to look for a way of creating electric lights.

Gas lighting was a means of lighting homes with gas. It started with a pipe system that connected to the lamps in a home. The pipes connected to various light fixtures as a means of delivering the gas. To turn on the light, one needed to open the valve on the fixture to release a small stream of gas, which one would then light with a flame. The flame in the fixture, fed by the gas, would remain active until one shut the valve on the fixture. This became a common means of lighting homes, and many cities were quick to get onboard and install gas-lit streetlamps, but many remained wary of gas lighting due to safety concerns. If used improperly, gas could be toxic and explosive.

Early Experiments

Whatever the motive behind the scientists’ electrical pursuits, many scientists became involved in the early experiments. One such experiment was Humphrey Davy’s arc lamp. He connected two wires to a battery and placed charcoal strips between the wires. Upon introducing electricity to the contraption, the electric current from the wires created an arch of light across the strips. This lamp improved on similar lamps made by other inventors, but the battery was too large and depleted too quickly for Davy’s arc lamp to be practical.

Another notable mite was Joseph Swan’s incandescent lightbulb. Between the choice of filament and the poor vacuum quality, the bulb only glowed for thirteen and a half hours, but Thomas Edison would later improve upon the design to create a 1200-hour bulb—and get sued by Swan for patent infringement (Edison had to make Swan a partner of his electrical company as restitution).

Now

The incandescent lightbulb saw many more improvements over the years, and florescent lightbulb eventually joined them as an electrical option. Though both are still available for purchase, LED lights have become what many recognize as the superior light source. Still, engineers continue adding their mites to technological development, and smart lightbulbs are making a name for themselves in the electrical industry.

Not only do many smart lightbulbs use less power to create a brighter light, reducing the cost of energy bills, they also offer additional features to give users more control over their homes. With the ability to control your lights from your phone, you can make sure the lights got turned off when you left the house and do so if you find you forgot. You can also use the app at home to turn off the lights upstairs without needing to step away from your family movie night. If you’re having a candle-lit dinner at home for date night, many smart lightbulbs offer an option of changing the brightness of the bulb, so you can dim the lights to create the perfect mood lighting. While you’re on vacation, you can set your lights on a schedule so people will think there is activity in the home.

Many currently regard smart lightbulbs as the future of lighting, and these lights would certainly blow away the historic inventors whose accomplishments led to making them possible. Perhaps as others add their mites, we will see smart lightbulbs become even smarter, but don’t let waiting for the next best thing hold you back from switching out your lights for the improved ones available now.

If you would like more information on how smart light bulbs can benefit you and how to upgrade, contact us at 844-904-9473 or request info online.

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Expecting Holiday Packages? You Need a Video Doorbell!

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Even with the holiday rush, delivery companies have processes in place to keep packages safe from the moment the shipping label is created to when they drop the packages on a porch, but after that, things are out of their hands. If you are expecting any holiday packages, you will want to make sure the package stays safe between when the driver leaves it on your porch and when you bring it inside. Using a video doorbell is a simple but effective way of doing this. If you don’t already have a video doorbell, here are five reasons why you need to add one to your shopping cart today.

1. Porch Pirate Prevention

Package theft is on the rise. In one survey, 43 % of respondents reported a stolen package in 2020, a 7% increase from 2019. Most porch pirates look for quick, easy targets. If they see you have a video doorbell—a way of getting filmed and caught—they are more likely to walk past and look for an easier target.

If seeing that your home has a video doorbell doesn’t deter them, you can take matters into your own hands. Upon receiving a notification that your video doorbell has detected someone at the door and you see someone stealing your package, you can try scaring them with the video doorbell’s two-way audio feature like the Ring Doorbell users featured here. If that fails, having video footage will increase the chances of identifying the culprit and getting your package back.

2. Be in the Know

Better yet, a video doorbell can help you prevent porch pirates from having a chance to consider your holiday packages as targets.

Not all delivery companies require their drivers to knock or ring the doorbell. Some even discourage it based on a history of customers complaining or even yelling at drivers for disturbing dogs or waking babies. (Calm down, Karen. Yelling at the driver isn’t helping your baby get back to sleep.) Without a knock or ring, you won’t know if the package has been delivered until you check outside or refresh the tracking web page after delivery. Some delivery services offer text updates, but these sometimes come well after the delivery already happened, making them not the most reliable source. They also can’t help you if the package is a surprise gift you don’t have any tracking information for.

A video doorbell, on the other hand, doesn’t require any page refreshing, and notifications are always real-time. You’ll receive a notification to your phone when the delivery driver comes to your door, and if you have a video doorbell that can detect packages, you can specifically get a notification that a package was delivered. This enables you to bring the package inside faster. Plus, if it’s an early delivery from the North Pole, you can get it inside and tucked away without the kids finding it first on their way home from a friend’s house or school.

3. Be in the Game

If you’re not home when you receive a notification that there’s someone at the door and you find it’s the delivery driver, you won’t be able to quickly bring the package inside, but there are still things you can do to protect it. Using the two-way audio feature, you could ask the driver to hide the package behind one of your yard decorations to help keep it safe until you get back. If you have smart locks with remote locking capabilities, you could even unlock your door from your phone, ask the driver to put it directly inside your house, and lock the door again when they’re done.

4. Food Deliveries

Video doorbells aren’t just useful for package deliveries. If you use food delivery services, you can have all the same benefits as with package deliveries with the added peace of mind that no one will be able to sneak a few fries without you knowing.

5. Help Your Neighbors

If your neighbor across the street is out of town, you can watch for when their holiday packages are delivered. Their porch won’t be in range for you to get notifications, but you might be able to see packages lying on the steps with your video doorbell’s live stream. Then, if you’ve made arrangements with your neighbor, you can bring the packages into the safety of your home and give them to your neighbor upon their return.

Bonus: Make Someone’s Day

Even with the recent push for contactless delivery and the rise of drivers not knocking upon delivery, it’s not a line of work with no customer contact. Sometimes, the driver will need to wait for a signature, or they could cross paths with someone leaving home, coming home, or working in the yard. Where there is customer service, there will inevitably be rude customers, but you can use your video doorbell to give your delivery driver a good customer interaction. When they are delivering the package, you could chime in over the two-way audio and give them a simple thank you. It doesn’t seem like much, but a few kind words can go a long way, especially this holiday season when they are under more pressure than any other time of year.

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