More and more jobs require the use of computers. With the information age being available on the computer, more and more people are spending endless hours in front of the screen.  After a long day in front of the computer, it is common to start feeling tired, irritable, or pain in the eyes or head. Staring at computers and forgetting to relax and give the eyes a break can cause permanent damage and eye problems.
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No one is expected to live a life without computers; we all need them and are use to them being a part of our daily lives. However, it is important to listen to our bodies and relax or take a break when necessary.
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Listen to your body; it knows better than you do when it’s time for a break. Do not work until your eyes burn; you missed all the previous signs. Take short breaks every hour of work. This means get at least once every hour and walk around. However, taking breaks isn’t enough. Look away from the screen every 15-20 minutes for a minute or two. Look at things close and far away to allow the eyes to adjust and move around. The goal is to avoid the strain in the first place.
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Blink as often as you can to keep the eyes lubricated. Take a few minutes to roll the eyeballs around; you can do this with your eyes open or closed to avoid looking silly. Open and close your eyes often to give them a short break. Yawn if you have too. Yawning stretches out the jaw muscles and keeps them from becoming tense causing headaches and eyes strain.
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Move around as much as possible. You should always be in a comfortable position so adjust your body or chair as often as needed. Move the keyboard or monitor so you aren’t stretching your neck or looking at things at a strange angle. Try to avoid glare on the monitor, move it around as the sun moves or get a screen protector.
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Keep the work area bright and well lit. Bright lights lighten up the mood and keep you feeling positive. Dim lights only bring down your mood and cause you to feel sluggish. Making minor changes in the work space and taking breaks often can keep long hours in front of the computer from permanently damaging the eyes.

Courtesy of danrobey@thepowerofpositivehabits.com

Woman jailed for failure to pay child support – Sequoyah County Times – The Oklahoma legislature and the US Congress have enacted laws to allow Child Support Services to collect child support owed from non-custodial parents who …

The past few months have been filled with dilemmas both big and small, and I’ve found myself struggling to find solutions to them on several occasions. While the process of figuring out how to move forward with something can be frustrating, discouraging, and even exhausting, there are a few strategies I’ve stumbled on recently to help me get unstuck and get back on track quickly.

#1 Be persistent.

Fortunately, in every one of the situations I’ve had to resolve recently, not finding a solution was not an option. Although I would have loved to give up and declare a stalemate, I knew that wasn’t possible without accepting consequences I wasn’t willing to take, so I had to stick with them until I figured out a way to move forward.

Whatever problem you’re facing, trust that there must be a way to work through it and get to the other side.

#2 Stop avoiding it.

Although I’m pretty good at not procrastinating most of the time, when it comes to solving tricky problems, I’m one of the worst procrastinators. I want to take breaks, surf the Web, and call anyone and everyone I think might be available to chat. I’ll delay and avoid until I’ve wasted the majority of the day.

With one particular issue I had to figure out recently (which I had already postponed for nearly two months), I finally decided that I simply would not allow myself off the hook until I worked it out. I paced a path through my house and thought I’d never get through it, but eventually, the strategy worked, and I was very satisfied with the outcome.

Allow yourself breaks when you absolutely need them, but if you’re anything like me, you probably know when you really need a rest and when you’re just procrastinating. It won’t work 100 percent of the time, but there are occasions when not allowing yourself off the hook can really pay off.

#3 Work in reverse.

In the recent month or so, I decided to hire a couple of interns, in the hope of finding motivated and talented people I could add to my team permanently. I started the process of locating prospects through several university job posting boards, as well as a few privately-owned sites, but the pool of potential new hires was slim.

At first, I was a little discouraged, and in an effort to fine-tune my job postings, I started searching for terms like “what interns do” and “how to be a good intern” and began stumbling on blogs of actual interns who were exactly the type of candidates I wanted: aggressive, enthusiastic, eager, etc. Of course, these interns were already more than busy, but I started paying attention to the people who were commenting on their blogs, and it turns out, many of them were considering doing internships. As I followed the links back to their owners’ sites, I started finding unique, highly talented and motivated students who were perfect candidates for the job.

Instead of going more traditional routes for solving particular problems, try to think of other ways you might connect with the solutions you need.

#4 Pay attention to what’s right in front of you.

My latest dilemma was figuring out what to write for today’s post. I had been so busy with solving the other issues, I hadn’t backlogged ideas for this week’s article. After thinking on possibilities for nearly two hours, I finally said to myself, “I’m stuck,” and then it hit me: that’s it! I could have saved myself two hours, if I had only paid attention to what was right in front of me.

When you feel like you’ve searched high and low to find a solution, ask yourself if you’re missing the obvious. Turn to the resources immediately available to you, like pulling from past experiences or relying on your network of business contacts, family, and friends. Many times, the answer is not that far away.

What tricks do you use for getting unstuck and solving challenging problems in your business?

Photo by Flickr user Mariano Kamp, licensed under CC 2.0

For Jones – Tulsa World – If elected he has pledged to maintain the successes of the child support office and to aggressively prosecute drug crimes. Drug activity has become the …

The Career Tools cast for 28 October 2010 will be delayed until Saturday 30th, due to a podcast equipment failure.

We apologize for the delay and we’ll get the cast up as soon as we can.

Pasteboard‘s one of those simple little Windows utility apps that’s so useful you wonder why you’ve never installed it before. Effectively, it just provides a tabbed notepad that you can use to store snippets of plain text on, and helps you to get around the limitation of only being able to store a single item on the clipboard. It’s good for gathering information when doing research, or when you’re copying and pasting various bits of text around and want somewhere to store them.

The interface is pretty basic: a text field for storing your text on, and 10 tabs across the top. The tabs are named 1 through 10 by default, though you can rename them, and you can also change the font and colors used. All text and settings are automatically saved on exit. It’s really useful little utility, though I’d like to see some keyboard shortcuts available.

Pasteboard is freeware and can be downloaded from the developer’s site. It’s a portable app, so you can just unzip and run it on any Windows system (it’s compatible with Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and 7)

Found a useful little utility like Pasteboard? Share it in the comments!

(Via Freewaregenius)

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Recently, I stumbled across a new service called Alice that lets you buy all of your household essentials online, things like toilet paper, toothpaste, trash bags and so on. Alice is awesome, and as soon as I figured out just exactly how awesome Alice was, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew about the service.

Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

I hate grocery shopping, especially for household items. I can be out of aluminum foil or coffee creamer for weeks before finally convincing myself to go to the store. There are many reasons why I dislike it so much, but here are the main two:

1. I hate making grocery lists. It takes too long. I have to think of everything I’ve been running low on or out of for the past month or so, and I inevitably forget something, which means I either have to go without out the item until the next time I convince myself to do this chore, usually two or three months later, or I have to go back to get the item. Plus, the list must be organized, or else I’ll end up running from one end of a 20,000 sq.ft. store to the other (which, let’s face it, ends up happening at least once per shopping trip anyway, because of some big conspiracy going on at the big box stores).
2. I hate the experience. I have to get ready and drive out to no less than two stores, because it’s impossible to get everything at one place, unless I go to one of the really unpleasant big box stores, which is a nightmare. Once I get there, I have to deal with parking, rude people, frustrated employees, long lines, price checks, loading the cart with the groceries, unloading the cart to check out, reloading the cart after checkout, and finally unloading the cart into my car, and then I get to go home, unload my car, and put all the groceries away, only to realize that I’ve forgotten something and to be discouraged, because I spent more money than I had planned, and a week later, I’ll need to do the entire process all over again.

Remove the Pain and Make Them Love You

Enter Alice (cue sound of choir). Alice solves my problems:

1. Alice knows me very well. When I signed up for my account, I got to go through and pick out all of my favorite and commonly-used household items and put them into my own custom, always-there product shelf. When I’m ready to shop, all my favorite items and brands are waiting for me, and all I have to do is load them into my cart and check out (if I haven’t scheduled them to be delivered automatically).
2. Alice will shop for me — automatically. I can set up my products to be delivered at specific times (say, toothpaste every two months and coffee filters every three). Alice will send me my items at preset times so that I no longer run out of things. Even if I do forget something, it only takes two or three business days for delivery, which is usually how long it takes me to convince myself to go to the store anyway.
3. The price is right. Manufacturers can sell directly to me through Alice and as there are no inventory costs as with regular retailers, the savings are passed on to me. However, even if the items were priced the same, I still don’t have to take time out to worry about restocking the toothpaste. Plus, there are no shipping fees, so I save on gas, not to mention the aggravation.
4. Alice looks after me. Just before checkout, Alice offers me some custom deals and coupons that I wouldn’t have otherwise found. Even if I don’t need the items just yet, Alice will save the discounts for me for a set time so that I can use them later.

But is It Real Love?

I could go on and on about Alice, and that’s really the point: I love this service and plan to tell everyone I know about it. Rarely do I get so excited about a company that I can’t wait to rave about them. That rarity is something that, if we’re smart, we can capitalize on within our own companies.

Make sure your customers love you, and I mean really love you:

• To the point that they literally have trouble listing all of the ways,
• To the point that they can’t wait to tell friends and family about you at every available opportunity, and
• To the point that they would hate to have to live without you.

Find your customers’ pain points and solve them. More than that, turn something they once dreaded into something they actually enjoy.

What companies do you love and rave about at every opportunity, and why?

Photo by Flickr user aussiegall, licensed under CC 2.0

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The SMB Group studies small businesses. It recently published a new report titled “Moving Beyond Email — The Era of SMB Online Collaboration Suites.” The report covers Google Apps for Business, HyperOffice, IBM LotusLive, Microsoft BPOS, OnePlace, Salesforce Chatter, VMware Zimbra and Zoho Business, breaking the topic down into ten different sections. But although there is a lot of depth to the report that should help businesses compare collaboration tools, it suffers from taking too narrow a focus.

The trouble with evaluating small business collaboration is that SMBs differ in their needs. The variation between small businesses and their needs are far more dramatic that those of large companies. Most big corporations are going to have similar needs: they’ll need to be able to handle a range of standard tasks, like human resources. But a small business could be an individual freelancer working out of his house, or a business with 50 employees. This variation means that choosing the right SMB collaboration tools is not straightforward.

The Tools to Consider

There seems to be an impression that the bigger and better-known tools (such as those from Google or Salesforce) should be the first a small business considers when looking for collaboration software. But when a business has specific needs, that’s not the right approach to take. Consider just about any financial professional: no matter how many people they have on the team, they will have reporting requirements that mean that applications with reporting tools built-in should be a better fit than something like Google Apps, which was built for broader business needs.

There is no set list of applications that a smaller business should consider. Rather, the first step should be to take a look at all of the features the business needs and then searching from there.

Looking for Support

One valuable consideration that the SMB Group’s report brings up is the question of service and support. For smaller organizations, the question of support is crucial: there simply may not be enough room in the budget to support any full-time IT staff, making it absolutely necessary to choose applications that include some level of support as a matter of course. Even for a business that works in technology, the time and effort spent supporting certain applications could make them prohibitively expensive to use. Choosing one, instead, that comes with support services — even if the company has to pay a higher price up-front — can be very worthwhile.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Michael Lokner

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An article in Red Magazine talks about the mistakes that people have made in their business. Two stood out to me: an MD whose shyness prevented her from being interviewed and speaking out about the brand and another MD who micro-managed her business.

The interesting thing about these two situations was the effect on the staff. Because she wasn’t seen to be promoting the brand, one MD found passion was stifled. She says: “It’s difficult to inspire staff and pass on enthusiasm if you can’t even summon the courage to talk publicly about the brand they work on”. The other MD lost staff “because I just couldn’t relinquish control and allow other members of my team to flourish”. In a separate article in Fortune a reader is quoted in response to ‘my boss is allergic to new ideas” saying, “Not only do you lose the cost-saving/income producing ideas, but you lose the employees. You keep those who are satisfied with the status quo”

Being a manager isn’t just about getting the work done. It’s also about allowing your directs to grow and develop. To do that they need you to be an example, and to give them space. Are you doing both?

As broadband erases the boundaries between places and time zones, companies can take advantage of remote workers and virtual teams, but two new surveys show that many organizations aren’t. Generally, it’s not because they don’t have the tools, but because they don’t have the mindset. It’s not just technology, but the culture, that needs to change, according to reports issued today by Cisco and Citrix. Both companies hope to make huge sales on collaboration software and gear.

Despite the fact that SMBs are far more likely to have employees working remotely than larger organizations, they haven’t invested in collaboration tools to the extent that enterprises have, according to the Citrix Online report: the company behind tools such as GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting. The study, carried out by Forrester Research, looked at the working habits of employees in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France and Australia, and revealed that while 31 percent of SMB employees work remotely at least some of the time (versus 21 percent of enterprise employees), SMBs are using collaboration tools significantly less than enterprises. Some 35 percent of SMBs use audio conferencing tools, compared to 58 percent of enterprises, while just 14 percent of SMBs use video conferencing tools, versus 40 percent of enterprises.

The results of the Citrix survey might sound somewhat surprising given the availability, usefulness and low cost of many web-based collaboration tools, and illustrates this gap in culture. Perhaps some businesses feel they don’t need such tools, or feel they can’t fit them into their workflows. Some organizations might even be unaware of the benefits that collaboration software can offer to remote workers.

The study also looked into differences in attitude toward flexible working from companies in different countries and found that U.S.-based workers tend to have less flexible work arrangements than those in other countries. Twenty-three percent of workers in the U.S. work from home at some point during the week, vs 34 percent in the UK, for example. And just 11 percent of U.S. employees work while traveling (at a coffee shop or airport, for example), compared to 30 percent in France.

The mindset of U.S-based firms toward flexible working will have to change in the future, however, if companies want to attract and retain the best talent. Data released today in anther report — Cisco’s Connected World survey — revealed that most workers (66 percent) would prefer to have the option of flexible working over a higher salary. The Cisco study (which draws on a survey of end users and IT decision makers in a variety of countries) says that two-thirds of workers would like to have the option of flexible working, with 60 percent of workers feeling that they don’t need to be in the office to be productive.

This begs the question: If flexible working arrangements could help businesses to attract talent and could also mean lower overhead in terms of salaries, why don’t more companies offer it currently? One of the primary reasons is also revealed in the Cisco report: 45 percent of IT professionals are struggling to make their workforces more mobile and distributed, with security, insufficient budget and corporate culture cited as the biggest obstacles.

If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities that broadband, mobility and collaboration tools have created for connecting work and workers, and the challenges that organization face as they move to more distributed working, you should check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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