Smartlife

The conference room is an instant oil-check for any company: if it’s where things get done, well done…but if it’s a pit of endless PowerPoint despair, there may be room for improvement. By shooting anyone who goes over time, for instance. Unfortunately, we can’t advise such violent courses of action (unless we disclaim it immediately afterwards), but we can offer some entertaining options to upgrade the battlefield. And that doesn’t mean installing better games on your Blackberry — that’s hiding from the problem instead of dealing with it, and Enron…

Many go-getters neglect their kitchen, proving that modern society has evolved past its own reasons for existing. The whole point of work has always been to feed yourself, and even money was only invented so that some people could take time off to do other useful things for the tribe without starving to death. Neglecting food to fit in more time to work is like keeping your car on blocks to better maintain the engine.

Food is a fundamental joy of life, and the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” applies…

Moving is one of the most stressful experiences you can go through, whether you’re packing up your house or your office. Not only do you have to get everything into boxes, you have to organize the unpacking when you get to your final destination. There’s a saying that three moves are as a good as a fire: things get misplaced or broken, you get stressed out and eventually, you may even wish that some of the items you are moving would catch fire.

1. Finding movers: It’s important to work

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For those of you who own cats, you’re well aware that litter-box maintenance is by far the most difficult, disgusting, and time-consuming dimension of cat ownership. Just how time-consuming? Well, my peculiar editor estimated somewhere around 15 hours per year (see the math below). This is obviously an unacceptable use of our time. So what is one to do? Well, this post explains how I reduced the time it takes to maintain my feline’s litter box from 15 hours to 5 hours per year (again, see my peculiar editor’s calculations below). I think you’ll find that my hard-learned methods will help optimize your time, reduce costs, and make you appreciate your little kitty just a bit more.

Next time you see a low-hovering spacecraft over your neighbor’s lawn, don’t panic. It’s not a UFO here to abduct and perform ungodly experiments on you. Rather, it’s a robotic lawn mower manufactured by Earth-based companies here to take the painstaking labor out of cutting and mulching your grass by doing it for you — automatically.

Inspired by the Roomba, robotic lawn mowers function just like their carpet counterparts. They self-charge at a docking station, run during programmable schedules and self-navigate within virtual boundaries set up along the perimeter of your lawn and garden.

Is your floor dirty, sticky, and downright disgusting? No time to vacuum? Then you’ll be elated to know that the new Roomba 500 series (510, 530, 560, 570, 580) actually sucks more (and supposedly scares pets less) than its predecessors. Its new and improved features offer greater time- and energy-saving benefits. Though the Roomba does require some maintenance, in my estimation, its dramatic improvements make the world’s most popular brand in vacuum robot cleaners a smart-life purchase.