- Sleep disorders
- When small business stress ruins marriage bliss
- How do you get over insomnia?
Insomnia can lead to depression – A fellow writer, M.G. Hardiman recently wrote about sleep disturbances and the fact that not getting enough sleep can lead to depression. Buying a new bed to help with insomnia: When my husband and I remodeled our home, we decided to splurge and get new beds for my daughter as well as ourselves. We went to Raymore & Flannigan, a Current England Furniture chain, and tested a few mattresses out and found pillow-tops from Stearns and Foster that we thought we would care for. When they were delivered, the delivery guys area them up and removed our old mattresses.
Taking the work home as the stress piles on
The first few nights we slept like babies, but gradually over time, our mattress became worn and started to sag. My husband is a painter who is a pretty big guy. He tosses and turns in his sleep, particularly when he is stressed out about work.
One night, he clocked me with his elbow and I woke up, only to find him moving his arms in his sleep. When I turned on the light, I realized what he was doing. He was painting!
He had one arm up in the air and he was making up and down movements and the other arm was slightly raised as he would be if he were really painting. I tried to get him to put his arms down while he was sleeping, and he would let me put down his right arm that was holding his invisible paint brush, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not earn him to drop his left arm down. He refused to tumble that invisible bucket of paint!
The next morning when he awoke, I asked him how he slept.
He said he slept fine, but he was tired and his shoulders were aching him.
Working the night shift, with the invisible guy
“Of course, you are tired”, I told him. “It isn’t the bed, I watched you sleeping last night, and you were painting in your sleep for at least 4-hours!” “I tried to accept you to put the paint can down and you wouldn’t let me,” I told him as I relayed the story about trying to get his arms down, back to him.
Since then, I’ve caught him painting several times and it is always the same -brush, brush, dip, tap, brush, brush. I have given up trying to get him to drop his bucket.
But no wonder he wakes up tired, he never stops working. Now …that’s depressing!
Does your spouse beat you up while you are sleeping?
My gram says she kicked my gramps out of her room when he knocked her a bit too hard one night, unbenownst to him, while they were sleeping. She said she got tired of waking up with black and blues. My gramps was a “meat man” or a butcher. God knows what he was trying to do in his sleep….saw off her leg or split her breasts? No wonder she started sleeping alone.
Does your stressed out business owner bring their work to bed with them?
Shut Eye.com shares the following: “A Staples National Small-Business Leer of 302 runt business owners found that more than 50% said that they dream about work. And a study that involved 8,770 Japanese men and women, done by the journal Sleep, found that a high level of stress in the work place was linked to insomnia. (Sleep and Stress)
Here are 3 tips to help keep the harmony at home even with small business stress
1. Relax the mind to help overcome temporary insomnia
What helps me the most is making a list of all the things that need to be done so that I know I “won’t forget” them, and then I forget them until the morning. Just like an athlete must limber his body before an event, so must you relax your mind.
Shuteye recommends using soothing music or earth sounds to distract your mind.
2. Relax the body to over come sleep disorders
A therapist taught me this a long time ago, and it really works.
Start with your toes, and tense your muscles, and then relax them, working gradually up your body, next with your feet, then your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, buttocks, hands, arms, shoulders, eyes, nose, and lips; alternating tensing and then relaxing the muscles. Focusing on each body part helps the mind relax too.
3. Relax the spirit; make the room conducive to getting a worthy sleep
Avoid stimulants before bed, including coffee, chocolates or scary movies. Instead allow the hour or two before bed for some relaxing time outside of the bedroom.
As a general rule, when it is time for sleep, is your room easy to sleep in? Is the temperature comfortable; are the bed, bedding and pillows comfortable, is the light blocked, are their pets that will disrupt sleep, is there white noise such as a fan or an air conditioning to keep the level of the noise constant in the room? (What is Insomnia? )
When stress is the cause of short term insomnia, and spousal “abuse”, there is help. For more information, click Shuteye.com.
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Filed under Small Business Phone Lines by on Jun 9th, 2011. 
- Creating a relationship with local media pays huge dividends.
- Target your marketing efforts locally.
- Consistent visibility is better with local media.
While it’s true that national media attention can bring big rewards to any business, it’s the local media that reaps immediate abet and where small business owners should concentrate their efforts. Why? Three simple reasons:
1. Hometown Favorite: Local media outlets look for local success stories. You have a great better chance of getting coverage via the local media than the national media. Why?
Think of your nightly news. What’s covered? Local crime stories, political races, environmental concerns, etc. Likewise, local business owners and heroes are more likely to be given coverage than someone outside the community.
2. Cost: This is a no-brainer. Ads in the local penny saver are more affordable than an ad in a national magazine. For example, did you know that many penny savers are distributed in 10, 15, 25, or more neighborhoods?
For a simple $40 classified ad, you can saturate a large plot. Further, most hometown newspapers will post your ad on the Internet at no additional charge (or a very nominal one). It’s much more affordable to run this type of ad consistently than to place a one-time ad in a national magazine. Why is this important?
Remember, consistency is the name of the game in advertising. According to most experts, consumers have to see your ad between 7 and 28 times before they will do business with you. So, if you have a choice of placing a one-time national ad or a local one for say, six consecutive months, think hard about the long-term.
3. Consistent Visibility is Better with Local Media: Why? Most consumers are in constant contact with local informational sources (newspapers, nightly news, cable channels, etc.), while many consult national sources on an intermittent basis (eg, watching CNN on the weekends, buying The New York Times on Sundays, etc.).
Creating a relationship with local media pays great dividends, especially if you are perceived as an expert in a definite area. Journalists are always on deadline and need qualified subjects for quotes, interviews, etc. Usually, they contact known sources instead of searching out new ones.
For example, to promote my website, InkwellEditorial.com, I write and distribute articles about small business. Consequently, I am considered a small business expert and have been interviewed on radio, in newspapers, magazines and e-zines around the country, not to mention speaking engagements.
Closing Tip: Be professional and always be willing to lend a quote, give an interview or appear live on a tight schedule and journalists will call on you again and again. This builds your media portfolio and gives you FREE advertising at the same time.
So, target your marketing efforts locally. Once you build up enough steam, maybe the national media will be contacting you, not the other blueprint around!
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Filed under Small Business Phone Lines by on Feb 20th, 2011.
- Interview with Raz Choudhury, President and Co-Founder of Office Interactive, Inc,
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for the Small Business Office
- Online Data Security
If you are a small business owner who is looking for a CRM tool, you’ll want to demo Office Interactive.
In the past, I’ve configured and trained sales teams to employ salesforce.com. I thought it was a fine tool. As a tech person, it was easy to configure. And, management could run the reports they needed with no problem. Now, as a petite business owner, I don’t have an international sales staff nor an office in Bel-Air, yet. So, for me it doesn’t make excellent business sense to go the salesforce.com route. I want something that is inexpensive, but at the same time meets my demanding business needs.
When I interviewed the Raz Choudhury, President and Co-Founder of Office Interactive, Inc, he warned me that Office Interactive could be distinguished more than just a CRM tool, yet much less expensive than what Fortune 500 companies use. He said that it is ideal for the small business owner.
“Traditional software vendors have neglected the small business segment,” explained Raz Choudhury, President and Co-Founder of Office Interactive, Inc. ” Most products were either too expensive or were inadequate for itsy-bitsy business. Office Interactive was built from the ground up on the belief that individuals and limited businesses should have access to a free and easy-to-use platform that will grow with their needs.
He was suitable. At a base price of $9.99 per month per user, the small business owner has access to the following features:
Productivity Collaboration: Collaboration & Productivity Suite
Sales: Sales Management & Sales Force Automation
Customers: Customer Service & Customer Data Central
Marketing: Ad Campaign Tracking & Management
Billing & Expense: Invoice & Expense Management
HR: Resource & Recruitment Management
Project Management: Project Tracking & Management
Security
Being the control freak that I am, I wasn’t too thrilled with the thought of having all of my company’s customer related information on the net. Web apps are useful and I loved being able to access my data at anytime in any position, but what about server downtime? What about set-up support? What if someone hacks into my data while it is on Office Interactive’s servers? I was pleased to find that Office Interactive has world class data center with redundant connectivity and power backup, and 24/7 security monitoring. Heck, my small business data is safer on their systems than it is on my own!
Office Interactive has a great dashboard that I can personalize to present my email, appointments, individual and shared tasks. It also has a bulletin board and blog. And, the mail feature can be configured to back Outlook.
I can Instant Message my team members, store and track my sales efforts and even project my earnings. Office Interactive makes it easy to support track of paid and unpaid invoices, top 5 clients and top 5 expenses.
It even has an HR component that allows me to assess and gain the skills of current employees as well as candidates.
The only thing I didn’t like was the “session time out feature”. That is, for security purposes, Office Interactive would log me out if my session was idle for a certain period of time (Don’t worry. I am fully aware of the contradiction between being a security conscious control freak and denouncing the session time out feature). Of course I could manage the time out feature by changing my settings, but recently they have added a layer of security that allows the user to lock/unlock the session so there is no need to go through the entire log in process again.
Perhaps my current part about Office Interactive is that unlike many sites, I can use whatever browser I choose to access my data.
You can really sigh that the developers know what a small business owner’s pain points are. They’ve addressed every conceivable issue. What’s more it that you don’t have to use what you don’t need. You can choose if you want to use the Billing & Expense feature and/or the HR feature and/or the Project Management feature.
But, you really have to try it for yourself to understand how it might help you and your small business.
Sources
Office Interactive Website
May 19, 2007, Technically Speaking Radio interview
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Filed under Small Business Phone Lines by on Aug 27th, 2010.