Often preparation time exceeds the actual cooking time when preparing a dish. As such, many of us tend to look for easy hacks that can help save time and effort in the kitchen. One such prep activity that we dread is peeling garlic. If you agree with us, then we have the perfect solutions for you!
Recently, chef Saransh Goila shared some super effective hacks for garlic peeling.
“Garlic peeling is always a debate! A lot depends on the size of garlic and how many do you want to peel,” he said.
With the coming of a new year, most of us have once again resolved to make ourselves into better people — the people we were meant to be. Last year’s resolutions may be only a fading memory, but this year, we’re sure, will be different.
Sadly, that’s probably not true. Eighty percent of New Year’s resolutions are broken by the second week of February, according to an article in U.S. News & World Report by clinical psychologist Joseph J. Luciani.
If you’re an entrepreneur, maybe you’ve vowed that this year you’ll be more productive. Are you doomed to be disappointed like everyone else?
Not necessarily. According to some psychologists, if you experiment with small potential solutions to your problem, big changes are possible. You may need, in other words, some handy hacks.
The wise words my aunt shared with me more than a decade ago still resonate today and guide how I structure my daily routine and schedule: Time is your most valuable
currency. It’s the one finite resource we work with daily where we can’t simply create more should we come up short in a given day. This can be especially true for entrepreneurs, who are consistently challenged to do more with fewer resources.
So, to get more out of your day and ensure you’re maximizing your most valuable currency, here are five small changes to experiment with.
Research at Stanford University showed that people who are media multitaskers are less productive. Those who can juggle many tasks at once certainly appear to be productive. But, this study showed that that is an illusion. It was assumed that these people had some sort of ability — perhaps a better memory — that enabled them to accomplish what others could not. But, it turns out that they may just be more easily distracted.
It’s counterintuitive, but research has shown that people who take short breaks during the day are more productive. One study demonstrated that the most productive 10 percent of workers, worked on average for just 52 minutes before taking a break. And the perfect break was 17 minutes long. The idea that breaks can make you more productive is not new. Back in the 1920s, Henry Ford realized that his company could get just as much work done by limiting the work week to five days and the work day to eight hours.
If there is a task that hinders your productivity, see if there is some technology that will help you do it better. For example, if you’ve lost business because you’ve repeatedly missed customer calls, think about forwarding your office phone to your mobile device via voice-over-IP, or VOIP. It’s technology that has been around for a while and can keep you in touch with your customers no matter where you are.
If you’re a person who believes if you want it done right, do it yourself, you could be wrong. Smart entrepreneurs know what they’re good at, and they know that delegating the rest may be more efficient than doing it themselves. It may take some time to determine which responsibilities you should hand off to others, but that time could pay off by freeing you up for more productive tasks.
Meetings can be an enormous waste of time, so attend only those that are absolutely necessary. Is that luncheon with the local chamber of commerce likely to generate some leads or not? If not, find a better way to drum up business. If you can’t eliminate meetings, try to make them more productive. One way is to keep them short, 30 minutes or less. Another is to create an agenda and send it out a day ahead of time.
If none of these experiments work, maybe the problem isn’t you. According to a Harvard Business Review article, some people just aren’t comfortable with techniques designed to make them more productive. They feel these techniques impose a regimentation on them that interrupts the flow of work, damages the quality of their work experience and even hampers their productivity.
So, if you’ve tried techniques to make you more productive and they haven’t worked, don’t sweat it. Just focus on other resolutions instead. Didn’t you sign up for a new
gym membership?
Being an entrepreneur is challenging. Every day is a constant battle with uncertainty and doubt. But it can be a lot harder if you don’t actively make yourself a bigger priority than your business.
The thing that many entrepreneurs fail to realize is that you are your business. If you don’t take care of yourself and do things every day that put a little extra gas in the tank, then you’re dooming yourself and your business to burnout and failure.
Here are just a few things that you can do every day to ensure that you are able to succeed at the highest level in your business and in life.
I know, I know, Benjamin Franklin said: “You can sleep when you’re dead.”
Well, that’s fantastic, but if you aren’t getting enough sleep, you will be living each day like you are already dead. There have been a number of studies in recent years showing just how detrimental prolonged sleep deprivation is.
Related: 8 Steps to Building Your Business According to the Lifestyle You Want
Just a few of the effects include lower memory capacity, slower decision making, inability to solve problems, a weakened body and immune system (making you more susceptible to injury and illness) and even an increased risk of obesity.
The message here is clear. Get enough sleep. And make sure it’s quality sleep, too.
Like getting sufficient sleep, exercising on a regular basis should be a higher priority than even your business.
Exercise releases endorphins and all sorts of other wonderful chemicals into your body that increase your happiness levels and improve your ability to perform daily tasks.
Not to mention, exercise has also been proven to help you live a longer healthier life.
Not a bad tradeoff for something that takes about 20 minutes a day, is it?
Entrepreneurs are notorious for working seven days a week without ever taking a break. I have been guilty of this myself on more occasions than I care to admit.
Taking one day off every week from all work (that includes email) will allow your body and your mind to recharge and refuel, allowing you to come back to your business with a fresh perspective and more energy than you have had in a long time.
Be sure that when you take this day off, you take full advantage of your time.
Spend the day hanging out with friends and family who energize you, reading an interesting book, playing with your kids, or getting out in nature. Don’t waste it sleeping 12 hours (too much of a good thing) or sitting in front of the TV.
Sitting in a chair for 20 minutes and doing nothing. Sounds like a waste of time, right?
Not so. The science is clearly in on this one: meditation has tremendous benefits for you and your business.
Related: How Positivity Makes You Healthy and Successful
It has been proven to help improve your ability to focus, your creativity and your overall happiness levels.
The best part is that you don’t have to get fancy.
Just 10 minutes with a guided meditation on YouTube, Headspace or just a relaxing piece of music will work wonders for your mind and body.
Whenever you own a business, it can be hard to reward yourself whenever you aren’t doing as well as you would like to. I understand, and I’ve been there.
But if you can shift your focus to everything that you are doing right, all of the things that you have accomplished, all of the progress you are making, you will be happier, more productive, and as a result more successful. Keep a pen and pad near your desk and celebrate all of your small wins at the end of the day.
Maybe it was a client that you landed, a landing page you finally wrote, an employee that you gave a second chance, or maybe it was just hauling yourself out of bed to work on your business when you could have slept in.
It doesn’t have to be big; it just has to be something.
Life is short. Why would you want to spend even one second more than necessary surrounded by negative or pessimistic people? One of the quickest ways to skyrocket your success and happiness is to start intentionally cutting out negative relationships and cultivating positive ones.
There is no way around it, you become like the people you surround yourself with, and if you are surrounded with unambitious, lazy, and negative people, it will rub off on you no matter how hard you fight it. So get around people who lift you up and encourage you. It may be the most important decision you ever make.
There is a reason that they say laughter is the best medicine. Stop taking yourself so seriously and learn to laugh a little. Don’t make life any harder by going through every day with a permanent scowl on your face.
One of the biggest and most underrated factors that affects your mood, thinking, focus, productivity, and health is the nutrition you ingest. This is especially true for entrepreneurs. According to the study by the International Labor Organization (ILO), our nutrition habits directly affects our productivity.
Best way to keep a healthy diet is to do following:
Here is the a list of foods you should avoid in order to keep your mental edge.
If you want to succeed in business, you first have to succeed in life.
You have to take care of and prioritize yourself so that you can properly serve your company, your employees, and your clients.
Never forget what Jim Rohn said: “Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development.”
So take some time each day to invest in yourself and you will see a bigger return than you thought possible.
We all have lemons at home, but most of us only ever use it for cooking. Some people, who are aware of its hair and skin benefits use it appositely, but largely everybody else remains oblivious to the many advantages of the essential fruit. Here, we discuss some unique hacks, with which the fruit can help make your life easier. Read on.
* Lemon is effective on any tough stain that comes up on your favourite fabric. Instead of panicking, squeeze a little bit of lemon juice on the fabric, and also add a pinch of salt. Let it stay on the stubborn stain for a few hours before you wash it off normally using a detergent powder. It is highly effective against curry stains, coffee and ketchup, to name a few.
Is your fridge smelling? Use lemons to fight the odour. The juice is highly helpful in getting rid of any fowl smell, so just soak a cotton ball in lemon juice and place it in the fridge. Alternatively, you can also place half-cut lemons to get rid of the smell.
* Lemons can also keep apples and other such cut fruit slices from turning brown. Just remember to squeeze a few drops of lemon in water, and then soak the apple slices in the solution to keep them fresh for long, so that when you finally sit down to eat them, you enjoy the taste.
* Lemon juice can also be used to whiten nails naturally. It often happens that any dark nail paint that you wear, leaves behind a dark hue that you struggle to get rid of. Just squeeze half a lemon into a bowl of lukewarm water, and then soak your nails in it for at least five minutes. Rub the peel of lemon on your nails before washing it off. In no time, you will see your nails becoming whiter.
* This should not come as a surprise to many, but using lemon juice can help you fight your dandruff naturally. Whenever you wash your hair, applying lemon juice on the scalp and allowing it to stay for 10 minutes before washing it off with an anti-dandruff shampoo can give you much relief over a period of time. Lemon juice is said to contain citric acid that can help chase away the dandruff from the roots of the follicles.
Most people think that the conditioner is only effective for the hair. That you must apply it on the strands and then keep it away for your next hair-wash session. But, the conditioner can serve more purposes than just that. In fact, there are some easy hacks which you need to know about, which are believed to make your life easier. Here are some interesting uses of your regular hair conditioner that you ought to know about.
* You can use the conditioner as a bath moisturiser. Especially if you have used a body scrub, or a bathing lather which created a lot of foam. In order to get back the natural moisture of the body, you can add a little bit of conditioner to your bath, just as you are getting done. In no time you will get a moisturised skin.
* The next thing you need to keep in mind is that since conditioners smell really nice, people like to use it to enhance the fragrance of their hair. But, the conditioner can also make your clothes smell great. You can make your own fabric softener and refresher. For this, you need to mix a little bit of conditioner with some water and put it in a spray bottle. Just shake the bottle so that the contents inside mix thoroughly, and then spritz it on the clothes from a distance. This works when you do not feel like washing your clothes but want them to smell fresh.
* Conditioners can also be used as shaving cream. The goal is to moisturise your skin and we have already explained how conditioners can make that happen.
* You can get soft cuticles for both your manicure and your pedicure session, if you apply just a little bit of the conditioner on the nails using a cotton swab. Massage the cuticles gently and they will get soft in no time.
* If your shower drain gets clogged for some reason, just pour a little amount of conditioner down it, to loosen the clog. You must follow it up by pouring a little bit of hot water down the drain to clear whatever has been clogging it.
* It is believed that you can even do your laundry using conditioners, especially if you have run out of laundry soap. Just put your clothes in a clean sink. Soak them in hot water and then pour a teaspoon of conditioner. Let the clothes stay like that in a foamy mix for half an hour, because you take them out, rinse and then dry.
Memory. Some of us claim to have poor ones, while others seem to remember everything. But is a strong memory really something innate? Or something we can work at?
Despite what many of us think, studies suggest the latter.
What’s more, there are proven ways to improve your memory skills and one of the most effective is by using a technique known as creating a “memory palace.”
The concept works as follows: When trying to remember, say, a shopping list, you need to visualise each item vividly in a place you know well, such as your living room.
So, if you need to buy eggs, you might imagine a hen laying eggs on your coffee table. Or if you’re out of orange juice, you might picture it splattered up the wall.
Most commented