The average normal human attention span is 10-12 minutes. That’s basically how long a person can stay really focused to the task at hand. Surely, this figure varies from person to person but it is the general opinion that a person’s productivity will decrease after this time frame.
Have you ever taken a minute to just close your eyes and take a deep breath after an hour of work? Ever stopped to just stretch your legs and walk around? That’s your mind telling you that you have to rest. Ideally, we should take short breaks every 15 minutes and a long one after every hour. But most of the time, it doesn’t happen. We’re usually too drowned with work to bother about resting - that’s how certain diseases occur, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for example. It can be easily prevented by taking frequent short breaks and stretching.
This is truly a good piece of software if you are concerned about the gamut of occupational diseases that abound in all who use the computer. From spondylitis to carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic occupational ailments are the bane of those who sit staring at electronic screens.
Workrave is a handy free software application that can be used to prevent those intentional bad habits. The program alerts the user at certain intervals to take momentary pauses, rest breaks and restricts the user to a daily computer usage limit.
Working at night is great. The streets are quieter, I’m not drowned by disturbances and there is rarely anyone around to bother me. As it is so peaceful, I can normally go on working in front my computer endlessly, until I realize that the sun has risen and I’ve missed my night’s sleep. Has that ever happened to you?
You sit in front of your monitor and the light from the screen shines directly at you. Due to that, your brain doesn’t recognize that it is currently night-time so your sleep cycle is disrupted. One night’s work turns into a nightmare the following day - your energy level is low and your attention span is shortened.
Don’t let the fact that you don’t exercise often discourage you from joining this free workout community. Walking is exercise too! Gyminee is composed of a broad member base, ranging from professional athletes and people who just want to stay fit. With its wide variety of tools, Gyminee allows even the industrial working man (or woman) to stay fit and live healthy.
One way Gyminee does this is through user-created workouts. Create your own workouts by specifying exercises, activities and selecting the total time you should perform each exercise, the target heart rate and details such as altitude (for running) and weight (for lifting); If you can’t really think of a great workout, browse through the millions of user-shared workouts for one that fits you and your lifestyle.
Five highly-automated online services to help you out with your daily life and new year resolutions. Nothing complicated or time-consuming, only apps that truly deliver.
FINANCES
Mint - Get control of your budget and finances with minimal effort. Mint is a fully-automated, all-in-one online personal finance tracker.
Here are some of the things that Mint can do without your intervention:
Microsoft as a company is not usually associated with cool and free products. In that sense, Google is way ahead, it has Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, Google Docs and dozens of other useful services. Nonetheless, there are a bunch of FREE Microsoft tools that are definitely worth a look. While some of them are yet to be released, others have been around for a a while.
(1) HealthVault
Service that many US families should find really useful. In simple terms, HealthVault is an online safebox for all your medical records. It’s not just a storage place to keep medical history but also to share records with doctors, place to where medical documents can be faxed and auto-archived, and lots more.
As the title says what we got here are a couple of tools to share and track your well-being. While each of them are slightly different from the other, they share a common purpose and more or less work in a similar way. Basically, the idea is to allocate 1-2 min. at the end of each day in order to quickly rate it and if necessary comment on it. By doing so for a couple of months you can get a pretty good insight into your overall well-being (or happiness) and the reasons behind it.
Bunch of fun sense tests, cool exercises for your eyes, interesting demos (i.e. being deaf) and a couple of office time-wasters.
Visual
(1) Color Vision - check whether you’re colorblind
(2) Spot It - cool 2-min exercise for your eyes: spot O among hundreds of Q’s, 6 among 9’s and so on.
(3) Framing Game - test whether both of your eyes TURN ON at the same time.
Hearing
(4) FreeHearing - 1. simple hearing test, 2. simulated hearing loss, and 3. bunch of environmental sounds (jet plane, crowd, rain storm, etc.)
Need an instant medical advice? Healthline is the fastest way to get it. It’s a medical search engine and a very good one combining collective knowledge of over 1,100 doctors with advanced search technology. Once you are on the Healthline it is highly probable that one relevant search will be enough to locate information you need contrary to the traditional engines which don’t seem to work well for this purpose. Healthline can identify regular language non-medical words and connect them with either relevant or equivalent medical terms. In other words, searching for “brittle bone disease” will also return results for “Osteogenesis Imperfecta” its medical equivalent. What I like most about it is the way it lets you refine search results, for instance when I search for diarrhea, in addition to my search results I am provided with following filtering options
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