Your eyes are the products of millions of years of evolution. Unfortunately, this means that they’re optimized for spotting prey across the savanna, not for peering at letters built up of little dots on tiny screens. In recent years, optometrists have come to recognize a complex of eye and vision problems they call Computer Vision Syndrome, or CVS for short.
When you spend your day looking at computer screens (especially poorly-maintained screens, or the tiny ones on mobile devices), your eyes strain, you blink less, and your body gets generally unhappy. The result? Fatigue, headaches, blurry vision, dry eyes, neck and backaches, and even double vision.
The good news is that you don’t have to just tolerate CVS. There are some simple things you can do that can help make your eyes happier with all this close-up work. Here are some suggestions from the American Optometric Association and elsewhere:
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This is either a ridiculously silly idea, or it will revolutionize how we deal with business email.
SecondLife and similar virtual reality worlds have taken our work lives and turned it into a game. But can we take a game and turn it into a new way of managing our email overload? Seriosity says yes. The company maintains that the time that we spend attending to our email costs us our attention, and that attention has value that can be considered currency to spend, trade, collect and measure worth. They are launching an enterprise Outlook plug-in, Attent, which will turn your email client into your communication hub and your bank account to manage this new unit of currency, which they call Serios. They fully admit that they’ve taken the concept from the virtual economies of games like World of Warcraft.
Seriously?
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If you’re thinking of starting a business, virtual or otherwise, what’s the first thing you’ll do? Conventional wisdom says you should write a business plan. But Tom Stemberg, co-founder and former CEO of Staples advises you not get too hung up on them:
“Whatever the plan says, the company will end up looking different,” Stemberg says, explaining that Staples’ original business plan proclaimed the store would never deliver. But competitors began offering delivery and Staples discovered such a service would draw in larger customers. “So we changed course, as all successful companies change course — over and over again.”
However, even though rapid change is a given in business these days, there are still good reasons to write a business plan. Don’t get hung up on them but don’t dismiss the idea of writing one too quickly either.
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Alex King wonders about browser tab usage styles:
My browser tabs are almost completely transient to me. I don’t keep pages open to read for longer than an hour or so, or keep a tab open to a webmail client or feed reader. I even quit my browser and close all the windows on a regular basis.
None of the other guys in the conversation followed this usage pattern. They had 20-200+ tabs open at a time, with session saver and sync extensions. Their browser tabs have a lot of valuable information for them.
How do you use browser tabs? Transiently and judiciously? In a strictly controlled order and window configuration? As reminders of things you need to do? Or wildly and madly and without any limits whatsoever?
So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.
I’m not talking about advertising or affiliate marketing or selling your junk on eBay. Those are so last millennium! I’m talking about the new new economy.
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This morning, Google launched their long-rumored Google Apps Premier. It’s a hosted package aimed at businesses, featuring already-existing Google applications tied up in an ad-free bow, for a fee. While a lot will be said about Google’s frontal attack on Microsoft’s stranglehold on the Enterprise, this package of hosted applications is more interesting for the small business who lacks the infrastructure, time or know-how to set up an Exchange or SharePoint server for email, calendar and document collaboration.
Last year, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Office Live, a collection of tools for small businesses to get online and organized with minimal hassle. Google Apps is positioned as a solid alternative. However, the two products target the same market in very different ways. It’s not only about whether you prefer Google Docs (formerly Writely) to Microsoft Word for editing your documents. It’s is about linking a distributed workforce together through a common suite of tools, without any additional hardware or support investment. Microsoft has taken baby steps to move the focus off the desktop application, while Google has moved in the same direction with a giant leap.
Let’s take a deeper look.
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Stella Commute does:
Now, I can go to Staples any time I want and because I have a reasonable amount of disposable income, I can select the office supplies that make my heart sing. Color coded folders and matching labels? Done! Post-Its in various configurations? Check! Sharpies, Sharpies, Sharpies! And my latest addition: plastic-coated paper clips that make every grouping of papers hum with vibrant togetherness. Yes!
I stopped at OfficeMax today to have new business cards printed and found myself drawn magnetically towards the pen section. I cannot resist trying new pens!
I bought a two-pack of Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm ballpoint retractable gel pens with purple ink. Oooooo, they write so smoothly… with such violet-purpleness… ahhhhh…
Are you addicted to office supplies? Which ones drive you wild? We promise we won’t tell…
For a lot of people, ideas flow throughout the day, and if we don’t snatch them and write them down, we usually end up forgetting them. Then there are the multiple hours spent trying to regain our thoughts. I have found that carrying a simple notebook wherever I go is an easy way to alleviate losing ideas. When it comes to packing light however, my trusty Blackberry MemoPad does the trick. When I get to my computer, I can easily sync and store it in my Outlook. However, it’s not always easy to search using tags to locate a specific note when needed, and sharing is impossible with this route. Enter Acorn.
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