KACHARAGADLA

To be your most productive self, take a step back from your work. Between working,  exercising  and spending time with family, you may think you’re giving yourself enough  breaks , but what about during work? Taking breaks throughout your work day is vital to maximizing  productivity . Think you don’t have time? Even a 30-second break can account for an increase in productivity. There are different strategies for a work-break balance too, and it’s important to find the one that is best for you. For example, try out a 25/5-minute split -- that means work in 25-minute blocks and take five-minute breaks between. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s also 50/10 minute split. What you do during your breaks is just as important. If you only have five minutes, eat a healthy snack, read an article or even try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. When you have 10 minutes, make a coffee run, tidy up your desk or watch a TED talk. If you’ve got more than 10 minutes -- take a walk outside, call a

The idea of “work-life balance”  is an invention of the mid-19 th   century . The notion of cultivating awareness of one’s work versus one’s pleasure emerged when the word “leisure” caught on in Europe in the Industrial Era. Work became separate from “life” (at least for a certain class of men) and we’ve been struggling to juggle them ever since. Today, when so much work and leisure time involve staring at screens, I see a different struggle arising: a struggle to find a healthy balance between technology and the physical world, or, for short, “tech/body balance.” A   2016 survey from Deloitte  found that Americans  collectively  check their phones 8 billion times per day. The average for individual Americans was 46 checks per day, including during leisure time—watching TV, spending time with friends, eating dinner. So attached are we to our devices that it’s not unusual to have your phone with you  at all times . We carry our phones around everywhere as if they are epi-pen

India’s IT professionals are moving to non-traditional destinations in droves in search of the right work-life balance. It was not a hot destination for an IT start-up when Kevin Eichelberger left Atlanta and moved to Charleston to set up Blue Acorn, a company that offers data-driven optimisation techniques to midlevel e-commerce platforms. The limited space it had for its seven employees seven years ago required someone to leave before it could receive a visitor. The company’s sprawling office today has abundant space not only for its 130 employees, but also their pet dogs that sniff around Mac machines and pizza boxes. “Our primary competitors and peers are all in primary cities like New York, LA and Chicago. Charleston is not known for tech. But things are changing fast,” Mr. Eichelberger said, sipping beer. “In the last seven years things have changed. We have an advantage of being in a smaller city. Quality of life, affordable spaces – for companies and homes, lowe