Managing Work-Life Balance–Nigel Marsh at TEDTalks

 

Work Life Balance

Nigel Marsh is the bestselling author of "Fat, Forty and Fired" and "Overworked and Underlaid" and the Regional Group CEO of Young and Rubicam Brands for Australia & New Zealand. Finding the balance between work and life is an ongoing battle.

Lakshmi Mittal, Carlos Slim lose $10 billion in a week

LONDON: The world's richest man and the richest Indian lost, between
them, over $10 billion (around Rs 45,000 crore) in net worth due to
the global stock market crash. While steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal lost
$3.5 billion (around Rs 13,700 crore) due to the fall in his company's
share price, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's wealth is reckoned to
have been depleted by $6.7 billion (over Rs 30,000 crore).

Mittal, a non-resident Indian who owns nearly 41% of ArcelorMittal, is
now estimated to be worth $16 billion though his fortune was eroded by
close to a fifth of its value last Sunday. Nonetheless, he remains the
UK's richest individual. ArcelorMittal employs 320,000 people in 60
countries.

A Bloomberg report said Slim's stock portfolio, measured in US
dollars, has dropped about 9.5% since July 29 and is valued at about
$64.4 billion. That compares with a 7.2% slide in the Standard &
Poor's 500 Index.

It was also a miserable week for the world's second richest and third
richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Before the Dow Jones made
a small recovery on Friday, Gates's Microsoft Corp slid a significant
5% while Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway dropped 4.3%.

The catastrophic six days for stocks on both sides of the Atlantic
increased fears that this meltdown will lead to a dreaded double-dip
recession. The fall meant that a mind-boggling £2.75 trillion had been
erased off the world markets in 10 days.

Mittal was not the only loser in this market mayhem in Britain.
Commodities trader Ivan Glasenberg, head of Glencore International
also suffered reverses. He lost £788 million as his share price fell
sharply by 13.2%. Others whose fortunes plummeted in Britain included
Mike Ashley, owner of Sports Direct International and Newcastle
Football Club. His worth was reduced by £203.4 million.

Former British finance minister, Alistair Darling, who dealt with the
2008-09 crisis, said: "I have always thought that we won't get a
double-dip recession here in the UK. If you asked me now, well it's on
the cards." The impact of this on emerging economies like China, India
and Brazil will not be favourable either, affecting exports and
growth.

Prime Minister David Cameron, holidaying in Italy, and his finance
minister, George Osborne, vacationing in California, interrupted their
breaks to demand action from European Union leaders. They urged them
to prop up the euro as a currency to prevent a worrying situation from
becoming worse. Britain blames the current calamity on the eurozone
nations' failure to initiate the bailout of Greece, which was agreed
upon two weeks ago.

(With inputs from agencies)

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work-life balance of Matt Mullenweg

The article below explains the work-life balance of Matt Mullenweg (Man behind Wordpress)

This article is an excerpt from Inc.com and I would like my readers to go through it so that they can easily manage their work life balance.

As a high school student, Matt Mullenwegworked on open-source software projects in his bedroom. Seven years later, he still does most of his work from home. Mullenweg, 25, is the founder of Automattic, the company behind the open-source blogging toolWordPress and a handful of other software projects. WordPress.com powers 12 million blogs, including those of The New York Times, which invested in Mullenweg's company last year. Although Automattic's headquarters is within walking distance of Mullenweg's San Francisco apartment, he rarely visits the place. Instead, he spends his days either traveling the world to meet WordPress fanatics or holed up in his home office, where he often blasts Jay-Zand writes software code into the wee hours.

In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it's just nice to wake up without one. I leave my shades up a bit, so I usually wake up about an hour after the sun rises. I usually don't eat breakfast, and I avoid caffeine. I've got enough stimulating things in my life already. I also avoid morning meetings: The earliest meeting I'll do is 11 a.m.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months. Reading is my break. Otherwise, I go to sleep and wake up thinking about WordPress.

I travel a lot, but when I'm in San Francisco, I usually work from home. Everyone else works from home, too. We're a virtual company. We recently got an office on Pier 38, a five-minute walk from my apartment. I'll go to there once a week, usually Thursdays, and for board meetings, which happen about once every two months. We leased it so we wouldn't have to keep borrowing conference rooms from our VC partners. It's kind of sad; we have this great space right on the water -- and six days a week, it's empty. Of the 40 people working for the company, eight are in the Bay Area, but that's just a coincidence. They could be anywhere in the world.

We all communicate using P2, something we launched that allows users to publish group blogs in WordPress. It's a bit like Twitter, but the updates come in real time. With P2, we can share code and ideas instantly. There is a dedicated channel for each part of the company, and when there's a new message, it shows up in red. It may be someone talking about development or what he or she had for breakfast. I also useSkype for one-on-one and mini group chats.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors -- a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC. I also have a laptop, which I have with me all the time, whether I'm going overseas or to the doctor's office. I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year. I keep a server for my home network in the closet. I really enjoy computer networking. I sometimes do tech support for our employees who live in the Bay Area.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I'm trying to reduce that. I have a WordPress plug-in that filters all my messages based on the sender's e-mail address -- so high-priority e-mails go into one folder and the rest go into others. Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates checking e-mail twice a week, but that is too severe for me. Instead, I'm trying to implement Leo Babauta's approach from The Power of Less. He suggests small steps, like checking e-mail five times a day instead of 10. It's like dieting: People who binge diet gain it all back. That happens to me with e-mail.

I listen to music every day, a lot of jazz -- Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins. I also like Jay-Z and Beyoncé. I have an analog stereo that was hand built in Japan by a guy who makes a few systems a year. The aural experience is mind-blowing. Music helps me when I'm coding, which is still my priority. When you're coding, you really have to be in the zone. I'll listen to a single song, over and over on repeat, like a hundred times. And I turn off instant message and e-mail. If you are taken out of the flow, if that little toaster pops up that says you've got mail -- and you look at it, you've lost it. You're juggling variables and functions and layouts. The moment you look away, it all falls to the ground, and you spend 10 minutes getting it all back in the air again.

I also manage the support, usability, and product development people who are scattered all over the globe, from Alabama to Ireland to Bulgaria. My management strategy is to find extremely self-motivated and talented people and then let them go. There's no manager looking over your shoulder every day, so you need to be able to completely direct yourself. For every person we hire, we might get 800 applications. We always start people on a contract basis. And many of the people we've hired are contributors to the open-source project. It's what they were doing for fun at night after they'd already worked for eight hours a day, only now they'll get paid for it.

I'm also the primary person on Akismet, Automattic's anti-spam software for websites, which we created from scratch. We just added the first engineer six months ago, but for the past four years, it's been just me. I decided to do it because I was worried about my mom. She hadn't started a blog yet, but I had this crazy fear that when she did, she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and think that had something to do with what I did all day. 

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/the-way-i-work-matt-mullenweg.html

Courtesy : inc.com

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