Category: Here & There

10 Ways to Achieve Work-Life Balance

One of the problems a lot of people face, especially those who freelance, work from home and have their own businesses, is that the line between their professional and personal lives becomes so blurred, and almost non-existent.

This affects both their lives, how much they’re able to enjoy them and even how much they’re able to give in them.

An interesting post that I found on Web Worker Daily gives a list of 10 ways to achieve a better work-life balance, that I think applies to everyone.

1. Don’t always be connected.
2. Limit work; Set working hours.
3. Make life a priority. What do you want to do besides work?
4. Batch small tasks together and do them all at once.
5. Define what you want to do today.
6. Limit meetings & communication.
7. Do the hard stuff first.
8. Slow down. Do less, but focus on the important stuff.
9. Schedule your day in blocks.
10. Be firm. Set clear boundaries.

Read the full post here: 10 Ways for a Web Worker to Achieve Work-Life Balance.

Indian Doctor Develops HIV Destroying Enzyme

Great health news from India…

Dr Indrani Sarkar has has every reason to be excited. Her PhD thesis, which started in 2002 at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany, has thrown open the doors for developing enzymes that can destroy the dreaded Human Immuno-deficiency Virus or HIV within infected cells permanently.

Indrani and a team of scientists have developed an enzyme called Tre. Tre is a custom enzyme capable of detecting, recognising and destroying HIV, much like a pair of molecular scissors.

[Source: IBN]

This is really great news…

It’s a shame though that it might take from 5 to even 20 years for this cure to make it to the clinics and actually be used to cure people suffering from HIV.

Hopefully, things will move on faster than that and rid humanity of HIV/AIDS for good.

Google Offers $10M To Boost Green Transportation Technology

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has announced that it will offer $10M to start-ups offering the best ideas for advancing “sustainable transportation.”

The company has issued a request for proposals (RFP) from entrepreneurs and for-profit companies for ideas to support the technologies, products and services needed to accelerate plug-in hybrid electric vehicle commercialization while promoting societal and environmental change.

“The severity of global warming requires solutions from NGOs, governments, individuals and (very importantly) the private sector,” the company said in a statement. “While $10 million is a fraction of the total investment needed to transform our transportation sector, we hope this RFP will help catalyze a broader response.”

Google.org has already given away $1 million in grants to a number of nonprofit organizations and now wants to expand its reach into the private sector.

This round of grants is part of Google.org’s RechargeIT initiative, launched in June, to help stop global warming.

[More: RechargeIT RFP, RechargeIT]
[Source: ComputerWorld]

10 Ways To Lose A Job

For the fun of it, I thought I’d compile a list of 10 things that a person could do to lose their job.
At some point or another in my career I’ve met people who have done one or more of these things; some of them eventually lost their jobs, others didn’t. Anyway, personally, I think these ten reasons should be a sure way out for anyone.

1. Go to work late; put your stuff on your desk and directly go out for a long coffee break; daily. Bonus points if you go out for long lunches too, have another afternoon coffee break, then leave early.

2. Don’t go to work for a few days and then go back with no convincing or provable reason; bonus points if you can manage to get the HR manager run into you while you’re out having fun with your friends.

3. Download a bunch of porn onto your work computer; bonus points for sending it around to your colleagues.

4. Spend a lot of your time working on your CV and surfing job sites; for a bonus: ask one of the managers to help you translate your CV into another language or for some tips.

5. Have a shitty attitude towards everyone, act bitchy, shout and make a big fuss out of everything no matter how small it is; bonus: especially if it’s a manager.

Continue reading 10 Ways To Lose A Job