Disqus - Latest Comments for graham_alton

Re: 3 Simple Ways to Keep up-to-date with Social Media Changes

Graham White — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 10:49:52 -0000

Google Alerts seems to be going down the pan, there are a multitude of users complaining they don't receive alerts to the extent that other services such as TalkWalker are starting to gain prominence. I wouldn't be surprised if Alerts was the next useful service Google assign to the trash heap.

RSS is great! Combined with a reader (I use Feedly) it's still a powerful way to get a lot of information of interest in a short period of time. It can be efficient too if the feed uses Pubsubhubbub. Other similar pub/sub apps are starting to gain some ground such as msgboy (still in relatively closed beta).

Re: Work-life balance – A debate

Graham White — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 07:35:06 -0000

An interesting post Al. It's an issue facing professionals, business owners like yourself and I'm sure a lot of other people too. I notice the lines have blurred the more senior I've become. Seniority is not a hard and fast concept where I work though so perhaps I mean something more akin to "as my responsibilities have increased".

Personally, I've always made time to switch off from work as I think it's healthy and important to do so. Weekends are my own (one of the reasons I left a previous role) and I like to make sure I'm always home on time and pick up where I left off the previous day. I think some of that has been instilled by having parents in jobs during the clock-in / clock-out generation. However, if it were my business and my employees on the line every day I think the balance would shift, even for me.

BYOD is having an impact here too. Work and home life are becoming harder to separate when employees are using their own compute power for work and more of them are taking devices home too. The idea of 9-to-5 went a long time ago in a lot of places and took with it the idea of a permanent desk location as we became more mobile. Those things are a double-edged sword, they make a good work-life balance a lot easier to achieve but come at the cost of always being connected.

Re: Paying off that mortgage

Graham White — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:50:43 -0000

Correct. If you're prepared to do it manually, however, you benefit from a lower mortgage interest rate and a higher savings rate. Overpay on your mortgage each month, saving the remainder. Once the amount of savings you accrue is equal to the remaining balance pay the balance off in full. I'd be interested to do a Braines-style spreadsheet to work out which approach is more beneficial. I suspect it would depend on just how quickly you're capable of paying off the balance though, I would expect there to be a cross-over at some point as to which is most efficient.

Re: Paying off that mortgage

Graham White — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:59:46 -0000

Nice idea! We do a similar thing, but manually offsetting our savings against our mortgage so effectively our savings ear the interest charged by our mortgage so we're able to concentrate on paying it off. It's much more manual doing it that way though, these properly off-set mortgages are a great idea if you can get one at a decent rate!