Making business less stressful

Odds are, you’re doing at least a few things in your business with less than optimal efficiency. As the old mantra goes, “time is money.” Since money doesn’t grow on trees, maybe these tips can serve as the fruits of knowledge amongst this tree of a helpful article. These are relatively broad application use-cases that are applicable to most businesses, but rest assured: even for niche use-cases, there’s an app for that. 

Doing things knowingly inefficiently is foolish and bad for business. Gabe Alves, Founder of TrackMySubs knows this all to well. He built his app to fight one of businesses’ hidden flaws: subscription management. Your business has tons of recurring costs. Tracking due dates for those costs is important. Many businesses will often intend to utilize a service for a short period of time for a short-term project, with the intention to cancel afterwards. A sizable portion of businesses have attempted a free trial of a paid service, only to forget about the trial’s expiration date and incur needless cost. Applications such as TrackMySubs completely eliminate the possibility of this kind of epic business faux pas, sparing your business critical time and money, and you embarrassment.

But it doesn’t stop at subscription management. Here’s 4 more ways to make running a company less stressful:

  1. Social Media Management: Are you manually updating your social media channels? Odds are, the overwhelming majority of your social media posts are not time-sensitive live-updates. Take the brunt out of this task by scheduling and automating the posting of your social media content. This will significantly slice the time you invest into your social media channels every week, and simultaneously keep you on-track for an appropriate content saturation level.
  2. Task Management: If you’re pinging emails back and forth for all of your business operations, or, worse yet, utilizing calls, emails, or hunting down colleagues in person, you’re doing it wrong. Task management applications enable those working on specific tasks to update those tasks in real-time, enabling anyone collaborating on, or curious about the status, of a task to simultaneously view the updated and most recent details regarding any task. The time saved in terms of simply not needing to request the status or details of any task, on both ends, yields dividends in time for a business.
  3. Time Management: Anyone in a managerial position is extremely well-versed in the importance of properly tracking employee’s times. Ensuring employee times are accurate ensures they are compensated properly, as well as provides extremely important data for operational oversight, including future hiring decisions. Many businesses conduct this process like dinosaurs; some are even still using paper timesheets. Modern time tracking tools provide a much more time-effective (pun mildly intended) solution.
  4. Calendar Management: Anyone utilizing a pen-and-paper calendar will scare off business partners and prospects via appearance of being a technophobic dinosaur, with the reputation of inefficiency attached, with extremely rare exceptions. Put simply, utilizing a web-based calendar enables others (often with varying levels of permission of visibility) to see when you’re available and/or even what you’re up to. Gone are the days of asking ‘when are you free’ or ‘when are you working on this?’ Best yet, these calendar applications often plug into other neat applications and gadgets.
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Why is programming the vital language of the future?

Rapid growth in big data and application of analytical algorithms has created massive opportunities for data scientists. Large data persistently continues to gain popularity; the field of Big Data analytics is a secure and stable choice for an expert in any field who may be seeking a satisfying, well-paid career.

If you want to stay ahead of the ‘curve’ or are looking to strengthen your career in the data science field, R is a popular programming language that you can learn to enhance your career.

What makes R so important?

R is a programming language made specifically for data visualizations and statistical analysis. The R language is a very valuable in the statistical computation and data science field. The R language is extremely adaptable and extensible and supports various graphical techniques. It offers several techniques like clustering, time-series analysis and classification technique, nonlinear/linear modelling and classical statistical tests. R allows the user to conduct a wide range of statistical analyses using pre-defined packages and libraries. R is sought after by many of the major big names, such as Google, Facebook, New York Times and etc.

R is an open-source program, which is readily available for everyone to install, use, modify and redistribute which makes it very easy to integrate with other applications.

R is cross-platform compatible, which can be run on various operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS and Windows of course. It has the capability of importing data from Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Oracle, MySQL and other programs.

R is extremely flexible and advanced; many new developments in stats first appear as R packages. R packages are collections of functions and data sets developed by the community. They increase the power of R by improving existing base R functionalities, or by adding new ones.

R is one of the most powerful scripting languages; it has the capability of handling large, complex sets of data. R is the ideal language to use for complex reproductions and it can be used on complex high performance computer bundles.

R has the community support of leading statisticians, data scientists from all over the globe. In addition R offers several thousand free libraries for limitless use.

Where can you download and set up R?

R can be downloaded from the following links below:

Where can you learn R programming language?

If you aren’t certain that R is for you, and you are trying to figure out which language is best for you – take an introductory course. Many prefer a structured learning environment, so you can attend courses such as Machine Learning Using R Training, which will definitely help you as a future analyst. The aim of this course is to familiarize you with statistical models for supervised and unsupervised learning using R programming language and how the R language environment supports predictive modelling with machine learning.

You can also keep tabs on the R community. Follow blogs and forums to hear about the latest features, packages and workshops. Many communities offer short tutorials about without breaking the bank.

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Technology and recreational swimming

Swimming offers a wide range of benefits that perhaps no other form of exercise offers. It is well known fact that swimming burns calories and helps build stamina. What is not so well known is that it also helps build strength, since water offers resistance. In fact, swimming serves as a form of resistance training, which offers a host of additional benefits. Scientific research has established that resistance training helps improve bone density, sleep, as well as body balance.

Also, swimming is a non-contact activity which does not put the kind of stress on the body muscles, bones and joints that exercises like jogging or cycling would do. From the point of view of parents, the biggest advantage is that it is a fun and sweat-free exercise for the kids. There is perhaps no better way to get your children hooked on to an active lifestyle.

If you are interested in getting your kids to hit the swimming pool, here are five things that can help you achieve the objective.

Arm Bands: Inflatable arm bands are perfectly suited for children who are beginners or still getting used to swimming. The arm bands allow for east arm movement in the water, easing the learning process. There is the added advantage of protecting the arms of the little ones from harmful ultraviolet rays.

Animal floats: Animal style swim floats serve the dual role of play toy and safety device for children. It is important to keep in mind the fact that there is no replacement for parental supervision. These floats only serve as an additional line of defence. Nonetheless, they can complement physical safety features such as safety covers and pool nets.

Bubble blowers: These devices add to the joy of swimming for children by allowing them to blow bubbles in the water. The idea behind using bubble blowers is to encourage kids to immerse their face in the water, enabling them to eventually get used to doing it, quite apart from helping them overcome the initial fear of water. These toys are inexpensive, which means they can also be put to educational use by having bubble blowers of many different colors, encouraging kids to learn and use the color names.

Music Players: Waterproof music players are available, at perfectly affordable prices, on most e-commerce portals these days. You can use these music players in swimming pool- the benefits of using music while exercising are well known, and music is no exception to it. In fact parents can easily attract the little ones to hit the pool by promising to play their favourite piece of music if they go swimming.

Safety Wristbands: Child safety wristbands serve two purpose. Many of them lend themselves to writing on, so that the names and contact details of parents or guardians can be entered, to be used in case a child gets separated from his or her group. Secondly, many wristbands these days come with an in-built alarm that sets off when the device has been submerged for more than a few seconds, thereby reducing the risk of drowning.

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Instantly Accessing a private VPN server

With the rise of identity and data thieves, one might be tempted to invest in extra protection such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN), especially in vulnerable countries like China and Iran. However, it might be daunting to some, due to how technical it seems. Contrary to popular belief, it really isn’t all the hard to set it up or to find one which is legitimate. So if you are sick of restricted websites or videos not available in your country and for added protection, here is a quick how-to guide on connecting to a vpn server with zero hassle.

First of all though, is finding a VPN provider that is legitimate and secure. Over at CNET, they suggest saying away from free providers as they might come with hidden costs. The go on to mention that the best providers do not keep any logs or records of your usage. The number of IP addresses generated and number of servers available ensure for a seamless experience. Furthermore, check their value for money such as how many simultaneous connections do they allow and how much they charge per month or annum.

One way to determine whether the VPN host you’ve chosen is respectable, is to look at whether it is compliant with federal laws. They should be responsive towards copyright infringement and strict towards torrenting and other such illegal behaviours.

Secondly, you’ll want to check where their servers are located as a server half a world away would place a significant strain on your internet speeds. The closer to you they are geographically, the better. However, bear in mind that routing your connection through a third party server will introduce delays but if your internet is running at considerably high speeds, the delay would be unnoticeable.

That’s pretty much it to choosing a provider and whilst there are concerns regarding how customers are able to stay anonymous upon using their credit card during payment. However, these fears are unwarranted unless one is planning to use a VPN for unscrupulous behaviour.

In the event someone wants to remain completely anonymous on the internet, there is only one way to do so and it is also one of the reasons why cryptocurrency is on the rise. There are VPN providers which accept bitcoins as payment. It really depends how far you are willing to go and how much security you are after.

Most internet users opt for free providers to bypass geographical restrictions to get to certain information or to access certain websites or videos on youtube, for example. If that is all you had in mind, there are many free VPN hosts that can be added to your browser as an extension and provide you with a quick fix.

However, if you are after something a little more heavy handed, it does pay to do your research properly in regards to which provider to sign up with. After that, all you need to do is download their app and activate it with just one click. Now you are all set to protect your privacy and ward off any unwanted eyes searching through your data.

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