Cloud Computing, Work-Life Balance and You
While the U.S. economy sluggishly climbs back up (fingers crossed), many or most of America’s small business operators are toiling harder than ever. In fact, business owners typically spend so much time managing their companies, there’s scant time left to grow their companies, let alone achieve an optimal work-life balance.
The Challenge of Growth
Growing a small enterprise is a hefty challenge and, sadly speaking, other elements of life often take a backseat; recreation, relationships, even family are left with less attention as the company takes on a most demanding life of its own.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is U.S. females managing small businesses who will create 1/3rd of the 16 million new employment jobs projected by 2018. Yet, women also carry the bulk of weight on their home front. Locating the right balance between work and life can feel overwhelming, even unbearable.
Take heart, there’s good news. Today’s technologies can streamline many aspects of our daily lives, and businesses are not different. Technology can simplify the functions of a business and provide owners the opportunity to recover a big chunk of their private lives by decreasing hours spent on core time-depleting responsibilities, while gaining increased business insight and oversight.
The Cloud Computing Paradigm
With private virtual servers, software as a service, and other custom cloud computing solutions, business owners garner admission to a slew of new tools that enable them to be more competitive while achieving increased latitude in how and where work is to be performed. It can also increase the services an enterprise can offer its customers.
And the best part? These newer cloud technologies cost less than the historic 20th century computer systems and software.
“Using the cloud to synchronize our demanding work and play schedules and huge ever-growing contact lists, streamlines efforts and conserves enormous time,” states Robert J. Chandler, Founder/CEO of Cloud9 Real Time and author of Together in the Cloud. “I continue to be amazed for the fact that we can now be anywhere and add contacts and engage important work-tasks anytime, without having to jot down notes or dash to the office for deadline work.”
A unique marketplace for cloud services and solutions, such as Chandler’s Cloud9 provides professional practices and business owners, has helped to usher in a veritable paradigm shift for how work and life mesh more harmoniously. Cloud providers like Cloud9 address the three primary hurdles of doing business in the cloud: choosing the right service, managing it effectively, and getting immediate professional IT support when needed.
By embracing the cloud, entrepreneurial-minded business and practice managers are freed up to better focus on the components of their businesses that require the most critical attention, while having the peace of mind that they are receiving the best possible value from computer capital investments. Most importantly, they can enjoy more free time with that which matters most: life apart from work.
Realizing true work-life balance is no longer just a dream, it’s a cloud-based reality.
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Lynnea Bylund, managing director of Gandhi Legacy Tours, is the president and founder of Catalyst House, an accounting and marketing firm, and has nearly three decades of experience in administration, marketing and business development. She was a nationally recognized spokeswoman for the emerging alternative video and information delivery industries. She has a degree in holistic health-nutrition from the controversial health educator Dr. Kurt Donsbach and is the founder of two small business-based wireless trade associations and has lobbied on Capitol Hill and at the FCC where she has spoken out strongly against the cable TV monopoly, illegal spectrum warehousing and ill-conceived congressional schemes to auction our nation’s precious airwaves to the highest bidder.
