Farnoosh Torabi's Blog, page 25
October 30, 2013
Does Eating Healthy Really Cost More?
The results of a report that compares the cost of junk food to healthy food might surprise you. Read more here.
3 Financial #Fails
October 28, 2013
Sam’s Club vs. Costco: Store brand match-up
October 24, 2013
4 New Ways to Use Dryer Sheets
In addition to helping you with your laundry, dryer sheets have several practical uses around the house. The chemicals formulated in each sheet pack a lot of potential to put this relatively inexpensive product to work. Check out these alternative uses for used and new dryer sheets. Read more here.
What are some other doubly-duty tricks of dryer sheets? Connect with me on Twitter @Farnooshand use the hashtag #FinFit.
October 23, 2013
The New Way to Organize: Don’t
Is the notion of “getting organized” a thing of the past? Are we spending too much time shuffling paper, digging for information and filing it away for easy-retrieval, when these acts alone may be the true cause of our inefficiency?
Michael Schrage from the Harvard Business Review thinks so. He says the way people interact with their technology has effectively eliminated the need for basic practices like filing, researching and other anal-retentive systems. He says “It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.” In other words, if we gave less time and thought to organizing our world and more attention to our daily habits and desired outcomes, we can all save ourselves – both personally and institutionally – a lot of time.
For example, gone is the need to create and manage complex email filing systems. IBM researchers found that among workers who “searched” for keywords, they found the correspondence they were looking for faster and with fewer issues over those who spent time digging through organized folders. Careful categories and archive systems didn’t improve retrieval success; a simple “search” paired with email threading did.
A few years ago, I myself ditched a meticulously sub-foldered inbox for one of total chaos and abandonment. People may be shocked to learn that I no longer archive, I barely use filters and I never, ever delete. My inbox is a monstrosity of a mess with over 20,000 emails (explained by several group lists and an above-average amount of spam) yet I almost always find what I’m looking for with only a few keystrokes. I use Gmail, and though this email client has has far more tools than I actually use, if my relative level of functionality is any indication, we can all probably stop trying so hard.
Because technology is headed in the “on-the-go” direction anyway. Siri is like a personal assistant who’s job description is to spare her boss (you) the time and hassle of having to organize at all. That’s because we don’t use Siri to remind ourselves to put an event into our calendar or keep track of a task; we simply have her do the task itself.
As irritatingly smug as it sounds, with today’s technology we don’t have to organize the world — we can demand that the world organizes itself around us. Soon all meeting invitations will instantly sync with events on our calendars, our documents and music will be seamlessly accessible from anywhere at all times, and we’ll be able to interact with the world on our phones exactly like we do on the web (prompting some business insiders to claim apps will soon be a thing of the past). And remember when the thought of not printing out an email for the record books or paper-filing every copy of every bank statement was sacrilege — even foolish? Yet increasingly, electronic options are making paper obsolete.
So until the logistics of our world are perfectly effortless, here are a few tips to help streamline the chaos instead of trying to wrangle it:
Use Filters
Filters and tags are the new folders. Instead of tediously filing emails yourself, tell your mail client what parameters you prefer and it should be able to do most of the work for you. Set up a filter to tag your correspondence as relating to “work”, “personal”, “travel”, and “promotions”, which all can be hidden — or not — from your inbox. And if you spend a few extra seconds to teach your computer which emails are spam and which should be flagged as important, it will do this for you and reducing inbox clutter.
Invest in a Scanner
This is a tool that can take boxes of tax records, binders full of paper and piles of receipts — and make them all disappear. Important documents can be scanned and filed in organized way either in the Cloud or on a tiny portable hard drive. Just make sure to back up in at least two places.
Get a Shredder
Now that you’ve scanned and saved all your electronic documents, what do you do with all that paper you’re eliminating? The safest thing is to shred it, and then recycle it. And then stop further paper clutter by opting for “paperless” statements from your bank, utilities etc.
Back it Up
Matter of fact, back-up in a few places. In addition to cloud synching, invest in another form of duplication, whether a professional back-up service, or with a a good old fashioned hard-drive.
No matter what our level of comfort with technology, if we concede that it’s there to support us and not slow us down, we can really move forward.
Photo Courtesy of: michaelhyatt.com
Inexpensive and Easy Halloween Party Treats
Inexpensive Halloween treats that you can make in less than 5 minutes for under $5– no oven required. Read more here.
How to Run a Circus
She spends much of her day teaching and performing risky acrobatics high up in the air, yet aerialist Serenity Smith Forchion insists that that the success of her world-renowned nonprofit, New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA), comes from its business grounding.
“The way that we have always run [NECCA] is as a business,” says Serenity. “From our standpoint, we don’t spend money assuming that somebody is just going to give it to us to balance the budget. We work as if we were a business, and things have to be balanced before we send or promise money out.”
From 2003 to 2007, Brattleboro, Vermont-based NECCA was actually a for-profit school called Nimble Arts that Serenity ran along with twin sister, Elsie Smith. “We were still performing regularly and some of the locals who saw us practicing suggested that we teach a class,” says Serenity. “We went by demand. We never started a school and opened our doors and said, ‘hey, we’re here!’ People came to us and asked us to offer things. The whole school has always grown by demand.”
Their decision to go the nonprofit route was also driven, at least in part, by demand. “We were perfectly successful and happy as a business but found ourselves challenged by facility,” she says. “We needed to build a custom circus building. In order to do that, we had to be able to take donations… So that, along with the goal of having an organization that would outlive us, that would belong to the community, informed our decision to incorporate as a non-profit.”
While the center relies on grants and donations for its extensive outreach work serving at-risk youth, a school for the deaf, and cancer survivors, the school’s programs run entirely in the black. “We have 26 people on staff and last year we served over 3000 students from all over the world,” says Serenity. “We had always built the organization around the idea of giving back. When it was for-profit, the model was that we could break even with four people in the class, but we structured our classes based on a 1:6 student-teacher ratio allowing us to scholarship two students in each class and not lose money on it. That’s where we started our outreach work.”
The center competes locally with gymnastics, dance, and other such schools, for recreation-level classes. When it comes to professional-level circus arts classes, NECCA is in a class all its own. “We have a reputation of being one of the best schools to offer what we have, which means that we are only facing competition at the top level from a handful of circus schools around the world. I don’t think that there’s any competition right now in the United States for our professional-level training programs.”
As for the future, the school won a rural grant from the USDA to build a custom-designed trapezium, and the Smiths have started mentoring partner schools throughout the region. “The more the merrier. Plus they funnel higher-level students to us,” says Serenity. ““I truly believe that there should be a little circus school in every town in the way that there’s a soccer school or a gymnastics school. Circus is a fantastic thing for young people and older people to do and it should be available to everyone.”
October 22, 2013
Halloween costumes: DIY vs. retail
To demonstrate ways we can all piece together a homemade Halloween costume, we tapped Meg Allan Cole, a costume consultant with Savers Thrift Stores. We put her to the test and visited a New Jersey mom, Nicole, and her two young kids, Kelsie, 4 and one-year-old Brady. Read more here.
What are you dressing up as this Halloween? Connect with me on Twitter @Farnoosh and use the #FinFit.
How I Saved $6,000 With Coupons
Edward Daniels, 32, a professional actor and D.J. living in Washington, D.C., takes advantage of a habit one might stereotypically associate with suburban, stay-at-home moms: extreme couponing. Read more here.
Got a your own crazy couponing tip to share? Connect with me on Twitter @Farnoosh and use the hashtag #Finfit.
October 18, 2013
How to Save 25% or More on Medical Visits
‘Tis the season for sniffles and sore throats and, while we already know we can count on our local pharmacy for flu shots or cold medicine, we may not realize that drug stores and big box retailers are increasingly offering affordable walk-in medical services, as well. In fact, due to the growing demand of newly insured patients under the recent health care reform, the number of in-store health centers in the U.S. is expected to double to more than 2,800 in the next three years, according to a new report by the consulting firm Accenture. Read more here.
How do you take advantage of retail clinic savings? Connect with me on Twitter @Farnoosh and use the hashtag #finfit.
