Tech neck is the hunch you develop from staring at your phone too much. The Australian Chiropractors Association claim that bending your head to use a phone stresses the spine. For example, let’s say you hold your phone at an angle that makes you lower your head by 60 degrees. That adds about 27kg (60lbs) of weight through your spine.

Tech neck is only two years old

Phones have harmed us in a few ways: A pain in the neck, phone thumb (where your thumb can become inflamed from prolonged texting), the blue light that can interfere with melatonin production, and eye strain from prolonged use. However, the posture problem is easy to correct.<ul><li>Use a simple stretch, where you interlock your fingers behind your head and hold your elbows against a wall.</li><li>Or you could try holding your phone at eye level to reduce the pressure on your spine.</li><li>You could always try not using your phone as much.</li></ul>

Correcting the posture problem

Bending your head to use a phone stresses the spine, say chiropractors – and that’s not the only way the devices are injuring and changing us

mindfulness

Mindfulness

health

Health

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Tech neck: what are smartphones doing to our bodies?

Could three seconds a day of resistance exercise really increase muscular strength?That question was at the heart of a small-scale new study of almost comically brief weight training. In the study, men and women who contracted their arm muscles as hard as possible for a total of three seconds a day increased their biceps strength by as much as 12 percent after a month.

Three Seconds of Resistance Exercise Every Day

The findings add to mounting evidence that even tiny amounts of exercise — provided they are intense enough — can aid health. I have written about the unique ways in which our muscles, hearts, lungs and other body parts respond to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/well/move/can-4-seconds-of-exercise-make-a-difference.html">four seconds of strenuous biking</a>, for instance, or <a href="https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/a-way-to-get-fit-and-also-have-fun/">10 seconds of all-out sprinting</a>, and how such super-short workouts can trigger the biological responses that lead to better fitness.

The Little Movements Help

The three-second workout could also be useful as a stopgap to help maintain or even add to our arm strength for those of us who are buried under work or family commitments and are unable to get to the gym.<ol><li>Just find a dumbbell that feels heavy — you might start with a 10-pound version, for instance, if you are new to weight training. </li><li>Lift it with both hands, to start a biceps curl, then lower it with one hand through a count of three seconds to complete a short, sharp and draining eccentric contraction.</li></ol>

Just Do It, It's Only Three Seconds Of Work

Men and women who briefly contracted their arm muscles as hard as possible once daily increased their biceps strength by up to 12 percent in a month.

Stronger Muscles in 3 Seconds a Day

<ul><li>Commitment to lifelong learning. People on a quest to read, explore, and acquire knowledge outside of the office always benefit the team’s execution inside the office.</li><li>Humility. You need to always balance the pride and confidence in all the progress that you’ve made with the reality that you’ve got so far to go.</li><li>An appreciation for process. </li><li>Grit and perseverance. </li><li>Someone who values an “idea meritocracy.” Best idea wins, period. </li></ul>

Skills or competencies for someone working on growth

<ul><li>Growth team lead: ensures morale is strong, the team stays disciplined, and we stick to process.</li><li>Technical marketer: doubles as a growth product manager, measures experiments, and communicates outcomes and learnings to the team (to help us get smarter).</li><li>Full-stack developer: can generally set up 60–70% of tests without help.</li><li>Full-stack designer: can polish experiments or take the lead if more front-end focused.</li><li>QA engineer: we don’t have one, but I’ve seen what it can do. Many of the best wins are just fixing broken stuff, and people obsessed with QA can be a game changer.</li></ul>

What’s the ideal growth team constellation?

<ul><li>If you can’t communicate and convince an engineer a task is worth their time, you’re not on a path to creating an ideal growth team culture.</li><li>It’s not just about finding people who have the skills. They have to appreciate the uniqueness of the work. </li><li>Growth teams need buy-in from the top. If it’s not there, don’t bother. </li><li>Starting and finishing tests on a regular basis is almost everything, especially early on. The formula for growth equals “number of tests run” * “average test impact” * “test success rate.” </li></ul>

Top growth team lessons

Advice for breaking into startups, building high-functioning growth teams, and the only customer acquisition playbook you’ll ever need.

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Personal Development

startup

Startups

Literally Everything I’ve Learned Acquiring 1,617,418 Customers

Do you have an established relationship and complement your co-founder(s)? If so, you’re off to a great start. Being able to get along is only one piece of the pie. There are a few more pieces you’d need to get together as well. To knoow more, answer the next four questions in the following ideas:

Questions to Ask Before Splitting Equity

If they don’t have a resume, you’ll want to vet them by interviewing others who have worked with them.&nbsp;If they don’t have a reputation, you’re going to want to do your own homework. Give them an unrelated project to work on, one that you can get vetted.

#1: Are they able to deliver quality work?

You'll want to make sure the person you’re looking to partner with is able to stay focused and on track for your project.Some people feel obligated to say yes when you offer them a partnership, but they don’t really want to do it.

#2: Are their priorities in order?

Make sure your partner is able to take care of themselves financially.&nbsp;Put them on a vesting schedule in case your judgment was wrong. If you aren’t able to attract partners, then you have to look at all these issues for yourself.

#3: How long will they stick around?

Ensure that your co-founder is capable of providing long-term value to the company.You should want to work alongside a co-founder in the same situation as you, in terms of experience and commitment. Meaning, you both will follow the same learning curve and will be on the same page as you enter each new stage of your company.

#4: What role will they play in the long term?

Splitting equity equally is a controversial subject.&nbsp;Ultimately, there is no right or wrong decision, but you should fully understand both sides of the argument to make the best choice for yourself. Check the following ideas to understand both sides:

Should You Split 50/50?

The right way to think about equity is to think about a startup as a gamble.&nbsp;When participants contribute to a startup and are not paid for their contributions they are essentially betting on the future of the company.&nbsp;The value of each person’s bet is always equal to the unpaid fair market value of his or her contribution. A person’s share of the equity should be based on that person’s share of the bets.

NO: Mike Moyer, Investor and Entrepreneur

If you work hard good things happen. You should just try to be as fair as possible for the stage of the company you’re at, and the work people have put in before and after, and treat your employees well.&nbsp;Be generous because those are the people who are gonna be with you until 4 am.&nbsp;

BE FAIR: Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram

Vesting, in which each founder has to earn his or her equity stake by remaining involved in the startup or by achieving pre-defined milestones, is one way to achieve the dynamic approach.Setting up an agreement up front that outlines negative scenarios that might occur in the future, with corresponding actions to help avoid them, could help founders avoid headaches and increase startups’ chances of success.

Founder Vesting:  Robin Chase, CEO Zipcar

Equity often dictates who makes the decisions within your company. Decide who’s in charge first, and then develop contracts that make it clear who is responsible for what aspects of the business.&nbsp;You can easily justify a higher equity stake if you are also responsible, as CEO, for the difficult work of growing your company.&nbsp;

Contracts: Nicole Munoz, CEO Start Ranking Now

These trusted tools objectively assess your industry, business, and co-founders, to calculate equity splits for you:&nbsp;<ul><li>Slicing Pie&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Gust: Co-founder Equity Split&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>eShares&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Founder: Co-Founder Equity Calculator&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>

Tools to use for objectively calculating equity splits:

These are the people you are going to war with. These are the people who will help you decide the most important questions in your company. Finally, these are the people you will celebrate with when you succeed.Equal or close to equal equity splits among founding teams should become standard. If you aren’t willing to give your partner an equal share, then perhaps you are choosing the wrong partner

YES: Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator

Splitting equity is difficult if you haven’t done it before. The tricky part being, there’s no right or wrong way to divide equity. Some startups split equity equally, others wait to get to know each…

Splitting equity with your co-founder? Here’s what you need to know

Any prior business experience a founder has in building a company should be given more weight when dividing equity.
For most First-Time founders this is a tough sell. Other Non-Business or Non-Technical founders will see this as unfair. 
If a startup fails because the business didn’t grow and execute on the idea, 50% of nothing is zero. If a startup fails because the business didn’t grow and execute on the idea, the business founder should be allocated more equity.

Who has experience running a business?

Depending on the founder team, each of these contributions will have a different weight.
Issue convertible debt or a series seed preferred stock for any initial capital contributions, treating it the same way you would a seed investor.

What value is everyone bringing to the table?

Helpful questions to ask about commitment:
<ul>
<li>Is everyone in it for the long-haul?</li>
<li>Will we all work on this full-time or is this a side gig?</li>
<li>What happens to our equity if our commitment level increases, decreases, or one of us leaves?</li>
</ul>
Make sure the founder’s shares vest over a period of time (usually four years) and include clear guidelines within the partnership agreement for what happens to a founder’s share should they quit, are forced out, or leave voluntarily.

What is everyone’s commitment?

The five different elements in the Founder’s Pie Calculator are:
<ul>
<li>Idea</li>
<li>Business Knowledge</li>
<li>Domain Expertise</li>
<li>Commitment and Risk</li>
<li>Responsibilities</li>
</ul>

Is there a formula to follow?

A lot of the equity conversation comes down to "control" of the business. 
Will everyone get an equal say?
How will decisions be made amongst us?
Will you get the resources you need to execute on your ideas?
There are more than one ways to make someone feel valued beyond equity. Give everyone an equal ability to contribute, making sure that the final equity decision you come up with makes everyone feel valued for what they rbing to the table.

Making sure that everyone is happy with the end result

Lastly, other things you’ll want to consider include: 
<ul>
<li>Equity for board members and advisors </li>
<li>What should happen should an additional co-founder be added </li>
<li>Creating a partnership agreement that also includes rights of first refusal. Founders can buy back equity shares should a founder leave.</li>
</ul>

Other recommendations

A go-to guide, for entrepreneurs for building a company from the ground up.

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Books

teamwork

Teamwork

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

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Money & Investments

How To Build A Company

Follow this formula and make the equity conversation about each founder’s value, contribution, and commitment level. Nearly 40 percent of startup teams spend a day or less agreeing on their equity…

How to Split Co-Founder Equity Fairly

When on a call with a client and they're asking that you work on something for them whether it takes 10 minutes or over an hour, it's something that you should track and add it to your invoice and the end of the billing period.For flat-rate projects, you can either try to estimate how much time you'll spend in meetings and include that in your total quote, or take an hourly charge.

1. Meetings

Research makes up just as much time, if not even more, spent on a project as the actual writing does. Even when writing an opinion piece takes much time and effort to provide proper insight on something.

2. Research

Revisions take time. Any creative service requires revisions even if its adding a couple of sentences to a blog post or completely redesigning an entire page of a website.If possible, try to place a limit on possible revisions, clients try to take advantage of "unlimited revisions" or add a fee for every revision.

3. Revisions

Scope creep is when a client requests more work than what is allowed in the original contract. It starts as a couple of tweets but eventually it will snowball out of control and will lead you to doing free work all over again.To mitigate this, have a set rate for scope creep or charge an hourly rate for extra work and add it to the cost of your quote. However you decide to handle this, be sure to include an allowance for it in your contract and remind your clients of the fee when they request extra work.

4. Scope Creep

If you offer a service that might require ongoing support, charge a fee for it. Clearly state in your contract how many hours of technical support your project includes, and if a client needs more, charge them a fee for the extra work.

5. Technical Support

It’s perfectly reasonable to charge clients for the tools and software needed to complete their project, provided it’s something they’re asking or requiring you to use. Social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer or photo editors like Photoshop or Canva are all fair game.However, if it’s a tool or software that you would reasonably use with other clients, don’t charge a specific client for it directly.

6. Tools and Software

If you work in the freelance industry, there will come a time that late payments will happen, thus, the late payment fee. Of course, it's necessary to mention this fee to your clients when signing the paperwork so that both parties are on the same page about expectations and consequences.

7. Late Payments

Cancellation fees don't solve the problem of clients cancelling out of the blue but they do help. Include a clause in your contract specifying how many days’ notice your client must give before cancelling, and charge a fee if they cancel within that time frame.This will give you a little bit of cushion time to find a relacement client without having to worry as much about your projected income.

8. Cancellations

Almost every online payment platform takes a cut from what you earn therefore with every transaction you still end up with a minus.To fix this, add a small percentage to your quote to cover these fees.

9. Processing Fees

If a client asks you to complete work faster than your standard turnaround time or over a weekend or holiday, you’re well within your rights to charge them a rush fee.They’re asking you to do something that’s more than your standard, and to do so, you’ll have to make sacrifices — whether that means staying home from the lake on Labor Day, or re-prioritizing your other work.

10. Rush Fee

Here are the top 10 things freelancers forget to charge clients for, plus how to add them to your quotes the diplomatic way.

10 Things You Don’t Charge Freelance Clients For But Definitely Should

Write lots of tests, especially unit tests.The quote in the title will prove true again and again unless you are able to build a culture of testing. Make sure that you have a significant number in place to cover your core business functionality, should there be a lack in this area, something will break in the future or worse, your customer discovers the bug.

1. “If it isn’t tested, it’s broken” 

There are two hard problems in computer science and those are: cache invalidation and naming things.It will become an unmaintainable nightmare if you and your team don't know how to name things for your codes. Create names that are short but precise so that it will strongly optimize developer efficienty and make it easy to find files. Enforce good naming stringently with code reviews.

2. Choose meaningful names

Your codes should have no bugs before going online and it's important to test the function regardless of the challenges in all the dependencies.

4. Functions should have no side effects

SRP stands for Single Responsibility Principle. This principle states that every module, class or function in a computer program should have responsibility over a single part of that program's functionality, and it should encapsulate that part.

3. Classes and functions should be small and obey the SRP

<ol><li>Initialize base url and options</li><li>Add the path (if any)</li><li>Add the query parameters (if any)</li><li>Add the hash (if any)</li></ol>

How to write smaller independent functions

A few years ago at VideoBlocks we had a major code quality problem: “spaghetti” logic in most files, tons of duplication, no tests and more. Writing new features and even minor bug fixes required a…

These four “clean code” tips will dramatically improve your engineering team’s productivity

A broken experience could scare users away forever. We need to make sure that our product works on every device. But how do we test in production without the risk of endangering our entire user base with the threat of Malfunctions and crashes? A staged Rollout is a way of ensuring that our product works on every device.

The art of staging a rollout

In general, a staged rollout follows the following rules: <ul><li>From your perspective, users who take part in the staged rollout are chosen randomly; there is no way for you to target users based on some property </li><li>From a user’s perspective, there is no way of telling if they received a regular update or an update from a staged rollout </li><li>Every new staged rollout uses a potentially different user group </li><li>Staged rollouts can only be used in production </li><li>Staged rollouts can only be used when updating an existing app </li><li>There is almost no minimum percentage, you can target as low as 0.01% </li></ul>

What is a staged rollout

A staged Rollout is a way for your update to reach only a small percentage of your users, which you can increase over time. If everything goes well, you will start a staged Rollout, monitor the Metrics and keep increasing the percentage until you reach 100%.

Little By Little

If one of the Metrics you’re monitoring is off, or you check the user reviews and you see some complaints on a specific topic, you can halt (as in, pause) the Rollout. You might find out that the metric wasn’t that off, or that those crashes were related to a third party, so you can decide to resume the Rollout and even increase the percentage. You will then start all over again with another Rollout and see from there.

Halting a staged rollout

A couple of weeks ago, the Google play Console wouldn't allow you to update a staged Rollout with a percentage lower than the current one. However, when you halt and then resume the Rollout of your release, you'll be affecting the same set of users as the previous release. It is unclear what happens if you try to reduce the percentage even further.

Playing with percentages

The Console is extremely well organized and gives you a lot of information and context around present and past staged rollouts.Staged rollouts are incredibly powerful and beneficial. I can’t think of a valid reason why you wouldn’t be using them almost every single time, given the fact that they come with a lot of advantages and literally zero disadvantages

Bottom line

No matter if you’re an independent developer, if you work for a startup or if you are employed in a huge international company: every user counts.

When asked what is the most important thing a person looks for in other people, the answer is often character traits like honesty, humour, confidence, and charisma, But these answers are probably not correct.  There are three components, when combined, that creates a spellbinding supernova of a person - that of humility, curiosity, and empathy. When you stack humility, curiosity and empathy, you can easily see how they amplify each other. If you take any two without the third, you’re missing a crucial component.

The most important thing we look for in other people

Humility is the root of all growth, learning and kindness. It is the idea that you are not so great that you can't learn more, and it is the belief that we are all interconnected equals.People who exhibit humility let their work speak for itself. They remain stoic in the face of their own suffering. Humility quells ignorance and cultivates grace.

Humility is the soil of knowledge

Curiosity drives an insatiable quest for knowledge, culture, novelty, experience, beauty, art and connection.  People who exhibit curiosity have an open mind. They can become masters, polymaths, or auteurs. They first seek to listen, to absorb, to Immerse, to traverse.

Curiosity is how you value yourself and others

Empathy is the ability to see the world through other's eyes.  Empathetic people genuinely care, but they also remind us that it's okay to be still with someone else and not overstep their boundaries. Empathy produces compassion, connection and love.

Empathy is how you value the bonds between yourself and others

There’s a routine question asked in job interviews, first dates, table games and so on: What is the most important thing you look for in other people? There’s variations on this format (i.e. “What’s…

Tech neck: what are smartphones doing to our bodies?

Stronger Muscles in 3 Seconds a Day

Literally Everything I’ve Learned Acquiring 1,617,418 Customers

Splitting equity with your co-founder? Here’s what you need to know

How to Split Co-Founder Equity Fairly

Crystal West