Smartlife

The secret to a smart life is never wasting time in work or in play. Which is a pity, because the modern office is a psychological experiment designed to make you waste both simultaneously: you have to stay in place for a certain amount of time (not a certain amount of work), you can do what you like as long as it looks like work, and you have a computer. It couldn’t be better built to force you into the Internet if it was that machine from TRON.

The Internet…

Advertisements are the worst drain on your intelligence since that Star Trek brain parasite thing. At least that could be cured by a solid dose of antibiotics or, failing that, being shot by a Klingon. But before they’ve even beamed up your corpse for space jettison, there’ll be another ad break — and you’ll lose five more minutes of your life (or death) to people trying to sell you things.

Obviously the simplest and most productive way to avoid commercials is just to stop watching TV. And while you’re at…

A Smartlife means never wasting a second, because while you have access to ever-improving electronics, your time is the ultimate finite resource. Every hour you sit surfing aimlessly is a battle against waste that you just lost, and every moment you learn anything about Lady GaGa is proof that your life is going downhill. Towards a septic tank.

We’re not saying you have to work 24/7, but that you should entertain yourself properly — play isn’t the absence of work, it’s what the work is for. Even in the middle…

This is the “Smartlife” blog, not just the “Smartwork” one, which is why we’re improving your leisure time as well. There’s no point in using the latest and greatest in Internet-enabled everything to turbocharge your spreadsheets only to revert to a caveman in your actual life. What sort of cyber-priorities are those? Especially when things like alcohol are involved, and you might need electronically-enabled assistance just to make back up to “not stupid.”

That’s why we’re looking at four ways the Internet can upgrade your alcoholic entertainment in an excellent…

Music may soothe the savage beast, but in these more comfortable times, it also eases the hours of coding or graphic design. Be it at the office, working from home, or in your earbuds as you commute from client to client, music is one of the few entertainments that you can enjoy on the clock without impairing your productivity.

The problem is finding new tracks. Even in this era of electronic enlightenment, you still have to listen to track after track in real-time just to find something you kinda like…

You might wonder why Smartlife is covering entertainment, but let’s be honest: your leisure time is valuable. And, by our standards, watching bad movies isn’t a valued use of anyone’s time (unless you get paid to forewarn others). Our advice: if you’re going to spend 100-plus minutes of your life screen gazing (again and again), pick out flicks actually worth viewing and steer clear of those that aren’t. Good movies can do more than just entertain you — they can actually improve your mental health and, by…