You've probably heard about the popular "tech support" scams making the rounds these days. Someone claiming to be from Microsoft calls you, asks you to accept a remote connection, then they take control of your computer. You may be smart enough to avoid this, but your friends and family might not be—so take this time to educate them.
Scale designed by Cyril S from the Noun Project
What’s the best way to create a positive work-life balance while still maintaining your sanity (and job)? On TIME, Eric Barker dives into how to find your work-life balance by in five steps:
You have to draw a line. You must decide what is important and what isn’t…So how do you determine the most important thing for you to do right now?
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2) What gets you disproportionate results?
Face it: often you start by doing whatever happens to be in front of you. But proximity does not equal priority.
In his book The ONE Thing, Gary Keller applies the “Pareto principle” to the workday: Most of us get 80% of results from 20% of the work we do. So focus on that 20%.
What really creates progress vs treading water? What gives disproportionate results? Do that first and most frequently.
3) What’s the thing only *you* can do well?
If someone else can do the laundry at home, let them do it. If someone else can do the filing at work, let them do it.
But if you’re the parent, you need to be at the parent-teacher conference and if you’re the sales lead you need to be at the sales meeting.
These days it’s normal to want to do everything, but the reality is that we simply don’t have the time or energy for it all. Barker’s questions make prioritizing what really matters almost completely effortless. Explore all five steps (and a few tips on how to maneuver around them) on the TIME website.
Remember that time you walked into a big chain store with a shopping bag full of games, thinking you were going to cash out big time, only to leave with a gift card housing barely enough credit to grab even one new game? Of course you do; we've all been there.
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Android: Our favorite Android automation tool Tasker received a new update that adds support for SMS listening in KitKat, the ability to search through installed Tasker plugins, and more.
Android: Tasks, or more correctly, Tasks: Astrid To-Do List Clone, is essentially what the name implies—a clone based on Astrid's old open source that aims to bring the functionality of our beloved lost to-do app back to anyone who misses it, or wants something better than what's left behind.
If you get a lot of interviews but no job offers or call-backs, it's natural to wonder where you're falling short. The folks at US News Money have a few suggestions to find out, but one is particularly interesting: Use your tech savviness to do a little digging on who actually got the job.
Chrome is the most popular browser around, but even with its large extension library, one size does not fit all. Thankfully, there's a treasure trove of web browser brilliance built on Chrome's solid, open-source foundation—from browsers aimed at the security conscious to the multimedia hobbyists. Here are four Chrome-based alternatives worth checking out.
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has an easy solution for combating procrastination or feeling creatively stuck. He keeps all of his hunches in a single document accessible from anywhere, and he reviews it, in its entirety, at least once a month.
In a funny way, it feels a bit like you are brainstorming with past versions of yourself. You see your past self groping for an idea that now seems completely obvious five years later.
…The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single, chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You’ll be shocked how many useful hunches you’ve forgotten.
Johnson calls this his “Spark File.” The Spark File makes brainstorming easier, since you essentially have a backlog of ideas to rummage through at any given moment. Plus, having a single document for your Spark File (as opposed to maintaining a notebook) forces you to scan over past ideas, potentially sparking new insights as you work.
See exactly how Johnson utilizes his Spark File over on Medium .
