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Achieving a Better Family and Work Balance Makes for Better Job Performance Are you constantly working after hours and weekends at the office? Are beginning to forget what your family even looks like? Many people find themselves in this predicament. Work seems to get more and more demanding with every passing day, and to stay on top of your game at work, you feel like you need to put in long hours. The flipside to this is that of course when you are at the office, you are away from home – away from family dinners, play time and your kids’ sporting events or school plays. You may feel like your hands are tied – that no matter how much you want to be more involved with your family life, you have to keep working as hard as ever to make sure your family is provided for in the long run. The truth is, however, that you may be doing yourself a disservice on both fronts. Studies have shown time and again that well rested workers with well balanced lives are more productive in the time they do spend working. In the end, the best way to be a stand out worker at the office is to be fully involved and present in your family live. But wait, you say, “I’m working practically around the clock now, and everything still isn’t getting done.” However, maybe the problem isn’t that you aren’t working hard enough. Maybe the problem instead is that you aren’t working smart enough. Think about the way you spend you working day. Are you taking on more responsibility than you need to, instead of delegating tasks to others? Are you spending a lot of time chatting in the break room when you run for a cup of coffee? Are you procrastinating so that big projects require you to work all-nighters instead of spreading out the work? Keep a journal of all of your activities at work for a few days. You might be surprised to see how you are really spending your time and in what areas you could make improvements. Simply staying on task and delegating effectively could get you home in time for dinner. When you have done everything you can to make your work habits as productive as possible, it is time to turn to other ways to balance your work life and your family life. Rule number one is the hardest one for most people to follow you – draw clear lines of distinction between work time and family time. Family time isn’t really family time if you are constantly on your cell phone making and receiving work calls or if you are on your laptop for the entire family vacation. When you’re working – work. When you’re with your family – concentrate on them. The time you spend actually taking a breather from work will recharge your batteries and make you a better worker when work time rolls around again. Next, you have to evaluate your priorities. Maybe working around the clock will help you make partner faster, but at what cost? Decide if seeing your daughter’s soccer game every week is more important to you than moving up the corporate ladder quickly, and make adjustments in your schedule appropriately. There is no right or wrong answer, but deciding where you priorities lie will make scheduling easier for you. With your priorities in mind, see what work options are available to you to help you meet them. If you want more time with the kids, see if your office offers flex time or part time hours to help you meet your family commitments. Last but not least, don’t feel guilty about taking time with your family. Not only is this time important to your family, you can rest assured that the time out from the office stress will make you more productive when you return to work.

Got an Offer? How to Evaluate the Company to Ensure It’s the Right Move Being offered a new job is always a great feeling. No matter what type of job it is, the fact that the employer wants you is very satisfying. The inclination to put in your two-week notice and start packing up your desk can be exhilarating. However, be sure that you know what you are getting into before you plunge into a new job. The terms of a job offer should be written out in black and white, literally. Whenever a company offers a job to someone, there should be literature about the position to read. When the offer is made, be sure to spend some time reading over the literature and finding out exactly what the terms and conditions of the job are. Salary, benefits and the terms of employment should all be very clear before you accept the offer. Be sure that you read the fine print. This is especially true from sales jobs. That advertised rate of pay might be what you make with commission. Without the commission you may not have a salary at all. This could be a major issue if your sales do not go well. Salary is one of the most important things to find out about before you take a job. Make sure that what they are offering as base pay is enough for you to live comfortably on. Bonuses can sound really great when employers discuss them with you. However, what you have to do to earn the bonuses may be very difficult. Thus making the bonuses obsolete the majority of the time. Restaurant management is a career path where many times your bonuses are based on the success of your particular restaurant. Not you yourself. That means that when the restaurant is not doing well, there will be no bonuses. The hours you will be working is another issue you will want to tackle before you take the job. Find out exactly what you are expected to work. This could be tricky with salaried positions. Find out what the average amount of hours is that employees spend on the job. Will there be travel? Many jobs post this in their advertisements but others are not so forthcoming with this information. Living out of a suitcase can be ideal for some but if you are not looking forward to having a relationship with your spouse strictly through cell phones and e-mails, you better inquire. If you are not open to travel be sure to find out if travel could be included in your position. The environment at the office could be hard to gauge. However, if you go to an interview and are not greeted in the lobby or see a few scowling employees, chances are, the office environment is a bit hostile. This is a major thing to consider when taking a job. Is the management hiring new personnel in order to replace the existing personnel? If they are, why does the existing personnel need to be replaced? Try to feel out the environment of the office when you are waiting for your interviews to take place. What will your job entail? Will there be times that you are expected to do things that go against your better judgment? Will you be surrounded by a corporate mentality that is concerned only with numbers? Are you going to be able to put your reservations aside and carry out the job that needs to be done? If a job offer is made immediately, you may want to be leery of this position. Try to find out about the turnover rate of this position. There may be a reason why the employer is so ready to offer you the job.

Web Hosting - Why Backups Are Essential One thing most web site owners have little time for is... anything! Anything other than focusing on their site content and the business or service it supports and the information it provides, that is. That means that administration often suffers, as it frequently must. There's only so much time in the day. But the one thing that you should never let slide are backups. They are like insurance. You rarely need it (you hope), but when you do you need it very badly. Performing regular backups - and testing them - doesn't have to be a nightmare. A little bit of forethought and effort and they can be automated to a high degree. And, they should be tested from time to time. Even when a backup appears to have gone without a hitch, the only way to know whether it's of any value is to attempt to restore the information. If it can't be restored, the backup is worthless. Even when the web hosting company provides the service, there is still some planning involved for the site owner. Hosting companies often rely on one or both of two methods. They backup everything (called a full backup), then backup anything which has changed since the last full backup (called an incremental backup). Of special interest are any configuration files that have been tailored. If you've modified the default installation of a software package, you want to be able to recapture or reproduce those changes without starting from scratch. Network configuration files, modifications to basic HTML files, CSS style sheets and others fall into the same category. If you have XML files, databases, spreadsheets or other files that carry product or subscriber information - about items purchased, for example, or people who signed up for a newsletter - those should get special attention, too. That's the lifeblood of your business or service. Lose them and you must start over. That can break your site permanently. It should go without saying that all HTML and related web site files that comprise visible pages should be backed up regularly. It isn't necessary to record every trivial change, but you can tailor backup software to exclude files or folders. Usually they're so small it isn't worth the trouble. But in some cases those small changes can add up in scenarios where there are many thousands of them. Here again, the backups are worthless if they can't be used. Even if the hosting company charges for doing so, it's worthwhile to test once or twice a year at least to ensure the data can be restored. That's especially true of database backups, which often involve special software and routines. Database files have a special structure and the information is related in certain ways that require backups be done differently. Developing a backup strategy can be straightforward. Start simply and review your plan from time to time, modifying it as your site changes and grows. But don't neglect the subject entirely. The day will come when a hard drive fails, or you get hacked or attacked by a virus, or you accidentally delete something important. When that day comes, the few minutes or hours you spent developing and executing a backup plan will have saved you days or weeks of effort.