uberc

When I get tired, either at night or in the afternoon, it "feels" like it's my brain getting tired more than my body. It's harder to concentrate, make decisions, and see things clearly.

My core solution is pretty simple: do various things to ensure I get a good night's sleep (which for me is 7.5 hours without waking up) and take a 20-minute nap in the afternoons. If I do these two things, my mind feels stronger for longer, more often at its best. If I don't, it can feel weak and drained and distracted.

I have also found eating less sugary foods tends to help, as does exercise, though I can't see as direct a impact on brain energy as sleeping and napping.

I suspect there's a lot more I could do. The brain consumes a great deal of a person's energy, perhaps even more dramatically for folks like me (and I suspect many on HN) whose minds are always buzzing with thought all day long, and I'd like to find more ways to "feed" it on a day to day basis.

So I ask you fellow hackers: what sleep, food, exercise, or other habits have you found to be most effective in fueling your day-to-day brain power?

Easily distracted by new email messages (or old ones that make you feel guilty for not replying) whenever you go to Gmail to send an email?

Try this: instead of going to Gmail directly and being confronted by your inbox as normal, create a web shortcut for this URL --

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm

-- and click that instead. You'll get a clean, distraction-less Gmail compose new message screen. You can send your email and be on your way as if your inbox never existed.

I need to throw together a simple but elegant and visually well-designed database-driven web app to run the daily operations of a small local business. Workflow tasks include checking in and out customers, making sure the right information is gathered from customers, automating emails to customers, creating daily checklists for staff, that sort of thing.

Does anyone have experience using Force.com, Zoho Creator, or similar cloud platforms for similar applications. I'd love to hear the pros and cons based on your experience. Thanks!