What’s happening at www.ramsayhome.com

This is not a green related article – but many people stopping by here are probably interested in building a home office. I am always looking for tips and suggestions on how to work from home while having a family and a life.

The drawbacks? It’s easy to get distracted, especially by household tasks or needy children or even relatives who don’t understand the “home office” concept and don’t get you’re truly working.

And for entrepreneurs who don’t have employees (or children or pets), working out of the home can be a lonely endeavor. Jeff Louderback, a home-based publicist in Orlando, says he gets up every morning, shaves and dresses professionally, and then heads to the office, which is the spare bedroom in his two-bedroom condo. While he’s happy to be free from office politics, he misses the camaraderie of co-workers. So he often takes his laptop to a local café “just to be around people,” he says. “I might not even talk to anyone, but just to hear the stir of human interaction, I just feel better.”

From Smart Money – link

[tags]work from home, small business, work life balance, office, home office[/tags]

Calgary recently decided to distribute blue boxes for curb-side recycling. As a City that is tightly focused on oil and entrepreneurship, the idea was hotly contested in City hall. Those that wanted it felt that the cost should be spread equally around while those that opposed it didn’t see the benefit of charging everyone for a service that they felt would be used by a minority of people.

In the United States, some clever thinking people called RecycleBank have come up with a solution that may satisfy the bottom-line (and perhaps short-term) focused people as well as those who care about leaving an environment and legacy for their offspring.

Creative Economist, Steven Levitt, states that an incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing, and that the world has not yet invented a situation that cannot be forced given the right incentive scheme. Philadelphia-based company RecycleBank has come up with an innovative recycling incentive that rewards households for the amount of recyclables they collect each week.

Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips embedded in bins, garbage trucks scan and weight the bins, automatically recording each household’s contribution. This amount is translated into RecycleBank Dollars that can be spent at participating stores, such as Starbucks, Home Depot, HP, Coca Cola, etc. Some of these companies have also established community funds for local non-profit groups, community projects, charities, and environmental organizations.

Read a detailed write-up of the RecycleBank idea. We should try and get this idea across the border!

[tags]banking, money, economy, green, recycle, re-use, waste, recyclebank[/tags]