Smartlife

It’s time for some Smartlife philosophy — if not the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance, at least a Thought of the Day for Scooter Repair — with a simple strategy to make everyone in the world happier and better at everything. You’re welcome.

The problem for millions of employees (currently sighing their way through Solitaire) is that we grew up aiming to be astronauts or elite fashion designers. But since there are so few jobs in industries based on gigantically expensive clothes regular people would never wear, most of us ended…

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…

“One of the secrets of getting more done is to make a TO DO LIST every day, keep it visible, and use it as a guide to action as you go through the day.”

This quote isn’t from some buzz-word business busybody, pushing their latest pack of painfully obvious essays wrapped up in “You Go Officeworker!” patter. Instead, it’s from seventeenth century French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, a.k.a. “someone who succeeded at a career we don’t even have anymore.” (A fabulist is “a maker of fables,” by the way,…

Just as Google has come to own a significant portion of my online life, the same can be also said about many businesses around the world. Continuing with this trend, the Goliath of a search engine recently launched the Google Apps Marketplace, allowing third-party developers to take advantage of the increasingly powerful Google Apps platform.

Conventional wisdom will have businesses running their own internal servers, but Google Apps can put all of that information “in the cloud.” By doing so, employees can access the equivalent of…

It seems as if there are thousands of new tools coming out every day that can help you lead a more productive way of life. The trick is finding them, of course. With the numbers continuing to grow, discovering new tools can be tough. Here are fifty particularly useful tools that can help you be productive in a variety of ways, from managing your finances to getting things done to scheduling conference calls. Tell us which sites make your life more productive!

There’s something about psychology that responds to external motivation. Video games make most use of this kind of change — which is unfortunate because while they’re useful relaxation tools — computer games are the opposite of everything this blog stands for. In World of Warcraft, you adapt your own lifestyle to better serve the machine; here at Smartlife we make the machines work for you. This means that we’ll be first against the electro-wall when the Cylons come, but until then, we’ll help you work smarter with…