How to live life in lockdowns

Some people take out the rubbish dressed as dinosaurs amid a shortage of facemasks, others play music or sing from their balconies to cheer up their neighbours; and zoo or aquarium employees have allowed some animals to have a field day by letting them roam around empty buildings.

Another side effect of countries around the world imposing complete lockdowns is that air pollution levels are now considerably lower.

Wild animals have returned to the much clearer waters of Venice’s canals, usually packed with tourists, after Italy closed the country to foreign tourists and imposed a lockdown.

One thing that I think has been sorely underestimated is how serious a mental strain the virus puts on each and every one of us.  The uncertainty is relentless. Attempting to protect yourself and your loved ones when the science is changing and while you're worrying about your work, your children's schooling, and your day-to-day life is exhausting. You will find yourself at home trying to read a spreadsheet when your kids are fighting in the living room day after day after day. In my own residential complex, I have seen people break out into shouting matches with security guards. Couples quarreling. A woman wandering aimlessly in her pajamas carrying a vacuum cleaner.  Everyone is on edge. Everyone is trying to manage their own situation.  And there is no respite.

So find ways to nourish your mental health and not feel overly confined. If you have a backyard, sit outside. Take a walk if you can.  Call your family and friends. Know that your patience will be tested. 

How to earn income online

Earning money has always been associated with traditional 'offline' ways found in the real world.

With the Internet taking over a large part of our lives, more people are looking to ways to earn money online to increase their financial inflows.

However, you have to be careful of the platform that you opt for. While there are numerous ways can help you earn money online, some of these could end up being scams, hence you have to be careful. Also, do not expect to earn a huge amount quickly when using online avenues to earn money.

Here are few such online platforms, websites, and resources that can help you earn money online.

1. Freelancing
Freelancing has always been a popular way to earn money online and the Internet has a plethora of options. There are several websites offering freelance tasks for people with varying skills. All you need to do is to create your account, browse through the listings, and apply for the task that suits you. Some websites may even require you to create a personal listing with the details of your skillset, so that interested clients can contact you directly. Outfiverr.com, upwork.com, freelancer.com, and worknhire.com are some websites that provide freelance jobs. You can earn anywhere between $5 and $100 through these websites.

But remember, you will only be paid once you complete your task and it has been approved by your client. This may even mean revising the work several times unless the requirements of your clients are not met. Some sites may ask you to set up a PayPal account, as most clients prefer to make payments through it.

2. Start your own website
There is enough material available online to help create your own website. This includes choosing the domain, templates, and the design for your website. Once ready to service the visitors with the relevant content, sign up for Google Adsense, which when appear on your website and clicked by visitors help you make money. The more the traffic you get on your website, the more will be the potential for higher earnings.

3. Affiliate marketing
Once your website is up and running, opt for affiliate marketing by allowing companies to insert web links on to your site. When visitors to your site buy products or services by clicking on such links, you earn out from it.

 4. Surveys and searches and reviews
There are several websites offering money to undergo online surveys, carry out online searches, and write reviews on products. To get the credit, one needs to disclose certain information to them including one's banking details. This is why you should use this route with utmost care. Some of them may even ask you to register with them before working on projects. The most important watch out in such projects is to stay away from websites offering money that appears too good to be true. Be careful while evaluating the reputation of the website as many of them could be a scam. Most sites promote businesses showing copies of cheque payments which may have been given to the middlemen only.

5. Virtual assistantship
Doing all the corporate stuff from one's home is what a virtual assistant (VA) does. VAs basically work remotely with their clients and manage the aspects of their business that they are too busy to handle themselves. When you work as a virtual assistant, you can choose to work as an employee or you can set up your own business.

VAs are skilled, home-based professionals that offer companies, businesses, and entrepreneurs administrative support. Some of the major areas of work includes making phone calls, email correspondence, Internet research, data entry, scheduling appointments, editing, writing, bookkeeping, marketing, blog management, proofreading, project management, graphic design, tech support, customer service, event planning, and social media management.

How to overcome bad habits

Habits become hard to break because they are deeply wired, by constant repetition, into our brains. And when you add pleasure to them — like you have with drugs or porn, for example — the pleasure centers of the midbrain get fired up as well.

But habits are also patterns of behavior and it is the breaking of patterns that is the key to breaking the habits themselves. Usually there is a clear trigger to start the pattern. Sometimes the triggers are emotional — the wanting a drink or cigarette or nail-biting driven by stress. Other times the trigger is more simply situational and environmental: You see the TV and couch as soon as you hit the front door, and now your brain connects the dots, and eating dinner in front of the TV on the couch is not far behind. More often it is a combination of both — the mix of social anxiety and the party environment leads to your heavier drinking.

But these patterns are also usually wrapped in larger ones: This is where routines come to run our lives. Here is where, as soon as you hit the front door after work, the dumping the shoes, the grabbing a beer, the sitting in front of the TV with dinner flow together without much thought, just as your morning work-break automatically leads to you and your friend Kate going outside and chatting while you each have your mid-morning cigarette.

Overall these routine behaviors are evolutionary wise and practically good. They keep us from having to reinvent the wheel of our daily lives by making an infinite number of decisions all day long, which in turn provides us with more brain-space to think about other things. The downside of these routinized patterns comes when those patterns land more in the bad column than the good one.

Customer success stories

In many ways, customer success stories are a marketer’s dream form of content. When used effectively, they merge the qualitative power of storytelling with the evidence-based pillar of hard data. They allow you to present real-world use cases and results that shift your product from abstraction to physicality in the minds of the readers.

However, in order to accomplish these goals, a customer success story must be well composed and positioned to provide the most value for the intended audience. Unlike some marketing and sales collateral, which can be assembled with a few hours of graphic design work, customer success stories generally involve several days or weeks of research and composition, making it paramount that they are optimally used to service your organizational goals.

Creating customer success stories has been a time-honoured tradition in marketing for decades, but the digital revolution has created opportunities for companies to take their case study materials to a new level. Currently, nearly two-thirds of B2B marketers indicate that customer case studies are effective tools in their content marketing toolbox.

The main source of their efficacy is their position as a powerful form of social proof, taking a prospect through a journey that features a real-world problem and presenting a concrete solution. When these compelling narratives are backed by reliable data points and finished with a strong pitch and call-to-action, they provide the client with a compelling list of reasons to move to the next stage in the buying funnel.

Broadly speaking, there are a few different types of customer stories that you can use depending upon the specific business realities of your situation. You may choose to employ only one type of success story, or you may incorporate multiple categories. You may reserve one type for certain product lines or even mix and match for a single product to present a range of stories.

Text-based stories
The most traditional form of customer success story is the text-based narrative. These accounts generally read like normal case studies by laying out a problem, describing the solution that the customer implemented, and detailing the results to frame the narrative. In most situations, it’s preferable to include graphical representations of data at strategic intervals throughout the piece, as they draw the reader’s eyes to relevant information and provide memorable touch points through the course of the story. Text-based customer success stories are typically (but not always) written as third-person accounts.

Share yout secrets

You keep secrets from each other; you keep secrets from yourselves. Secrets bond you; secrets drive you apart. Keeping a secret can be a burden, or it can delight you. Sharing secrets can be a relief, whether it’s with your old friend or new therapist.

For children, learning to keep secrets is a vital developmental milestone. In one study, researchers asked kids who were three, four, and five to play hide-and-seek and to keep a secret about a surprise. Abilities to do the two tasks correlated strongly with each other, and with the kids’ social cognition. At three, the kids were fairly hopeless at these tasks; by five, most of them could keep a secret, and had the cognitive development to match.

Which secrets should you not be entirely alone with? Secrets motivated by shame. The research is clear: shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression and violence. The first step away from shame can be as close as a shared secret and the words “me too.” As explained so eloquently in 2012, “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.”

If no trusted confidante comes to mind, then it may be appropriate to share that “shameful” secret with someone new. Just being listened to by a kind and empathetic stranger can sometimes provide relief, says suicide prevention counselor Kevin Brigg. And if you’re not yet ready to share your secret out loud, the act of writing it down and turning it into shared art can sometimes be transformative.

Infographics

When a complex piece of information needs to be described quickly, precisely and clearly, a graphic is suitable. Infographics are used for signs, maps and data presentations. Scientists, technical writers, mathematicians, educators and statisticians ease the process of developing, organizing, recording and communicating conceptual information by using infographics.

Infographics are used for the following reasons:

To communicate a message,
To present a lot of data or information in a way that is compact and easy to comprehend,
To analyze data in order to discover cause-and-effect relationships,
To periodically monitor the route of certain parameters.

Infographics are used in many fields: government, the corporate sector, medicine, engineering, research and development and so on. Certain types of infographics are targeted to people with specialized knowledge or expertise. It is possible to classify infographics according to five categories.

Infographics need to convey information clearly, but they can still be creative. Likewise, infographics that capture the imagination of readers can also be comprehensible.

Infographics surround us: we see them on TV, in books, in newspapers, on road signs and in manuals. The Internet is flooded with infographics related to a range of fields—from science and technology to society and culture.

Gift ideas

A gift or a present is an item given to someone without the expectation of payment or anything in return. An item is not a gift if that item is already owned by the one to whom it is given. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity, a gift is meant to be free. In many countries, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods, etc. may sustain social relations and contribute to social cohesion. Economists have elaborated the economics of gift-giving into the notion of a gift economy. By extension the term gift can refer to any item or act of service that makes the other happier or less sad, especially as a favor, including forgiveness and kindness. Gifts are also first and foremost presented on occasions such as birthdays and holidays.

For couples, gifting can be especially enjoyable. You know what your partner loves, what small daily annoyances of theirs that you can solve with a thoughtful gift, and how much they'll appreciate knowing the gesture came from you.

Odds are you want to give them something wonderful — whatever your price range is. All you need is a little direction, and a few great options to choose from.

The top 5 best gifts for your girlfriend:
A beautiful candle from Otherland, a cool startup
A personalized gourmet coffee subscription from Driftaway Coffee
An Aquis towel that makes her hair dry faster
A gourmet Cozymeal cooking class with a renowned chef
A pair of Apple AirPods wireless earbuds