Work is an important part of everyone’s life and the right job can offer a lot of rewards. However, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is vital to your long-term personal and professional success.

When you work becomes too much of a central feature in your life, it can affect your physical health, emotional well-being, and social relationships. By balancing your work with other areas of your life, however, you can ensure that it becomes a positive element.

Balancing your responsibilities can be difficult but even the most demanding of careers can facilitate a happy home life too. To find out how you can create a better work-life balance in your own life, take a look at these top tips now:

1. Identify Your Goals

The vast majority of people need to work in order to achieve financial stability but, in reality, we’re compelled to work for other reasons too. Perhaps you want to have a positive impact on society? Maybe you want to push the boundaries and develop new tech breakthroughs? Or you may be compelled to promote equality and redress injustices via your career?

Whatever your motivations and aspirations, take time to identify your goals. A glittering career does require more sacrifices, so you’ll need to consider whether this is something you’re willing to commit to in the long term.

Instead of climbing the corporate ladder or aspiring to targets because other people seem to want this,consider your own aspirations and set goals that are meaningful to you. By doing so, you can ensure that your career is a source of joy and something that forms part of a contented life, rather than detracting from it.

2. Advance Your Career Online

Achieving the right qualifications and studying for professional certifications can be an essential way of starting or advancing your career. Understandably, it can take years to become qualified in some areas, such as medicine or law, which means you might be earning a low income while you’re studying or you need to live in a specific location to attend classes.

However, you don’t have to rely on traditional study options to help you achieve professional success. Now that online learning is widely accessible, you can advance your career from any location and with increased flexibility. Studying an accredited, accelerated online BSN online with Baylor University could kick-start your nursing career at a rapid pace, for example.

Similarly, completing a postgraduate course or certifications online can be a great way to expand your skillset and achieve professional success, without sacrificing too much of your free time. If you’re working full-time and studying, for example, you’ll need a flexible study option that facilities personalized learning, and online courses provide just that.

3. Build a Support Network

If you’re juggling professional and personal responsibilities, you’ll need a reliable support network to fall back on. For working parents, access to childcare is essential. Even if you’re able to fit your working hours around your child’s school schedule, there will be times when the two conflict. Having childcare arrangements in place will ensure that you’re not under constant pressure and will also give you peace of mind.

In many cases, people rely on a support network made up of family members and friends. A grandparent or aunt or uncle may be able to provide regular or emergency childcare when it’s required, for example.

However, accessing commercial services, such as a house cleaner or gardener, can also be a good way of creating a healthy work-life balance. When you have fewer chores to do at home, for example, you can ensure that you can use your free time to do the things you love and spend time with the people you care about.

4. Understand the Concept of Wellness

When you’re building your career or working in a demanding role, it’s easy to overlook self-care. Working parents may strive to fulfill their duties at work and at home, without making any time for relaxation, for example. In the long-term, however, neglecting your own needs can increase the risk of executive burnout and have a significant impact on your well-being.

The concept of wellness is multi-faceted and includes many different elements that affect your general well-being and happiness. From finances and work to social relationships and physical health, there are many areas that are relevant when you incorporate wellness into your life.

By making wellness a top priority, you’ll ensure that every one of these areas is represented in your life, which can enhance your well-being and help you to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

5. Find a Caring Employer

If your employer doesn’t acknowledge the importance of a work-life balance, then you’re probably looking for a new job already! As you might expect, employers who place too much pressure on their staff rarely provide a healthy or happy working environment.

By finding an employer who recognizes your holistic value and encourages you to embrace pursuits outside of work, you’ll find it far easier to maintain an appropriate work-life balance. Similarly, it’s these employers who are usually most willing to provide flexible working options or to go the extra mile to ensure their staff are supported at work.

Discovering Your Dream Career

Between the ages of 24 and 50, adults in the U.S. spend an average of 40.5 hours every week. When more than 2,100 hours a year are spent at work, it’s important to have a job you enjoy. Although it can take time to discover what your dream career really is, it’s well worth researching potential options in detail before you decide what role to go after.

When you genuinely enjoy your job, it becomes a positive aspect of your life, rather than something you ‘have’ to do it. Furthermore, the happiness you find in your dream career can have a constructive and beneficial impact on other areas of your life too.

While finding a career you love is undoubtedly important, it’s vital to remember the importance of other parts of your life too. By doing so, you can ensure that you enjoy a well-rounded life and a healthy work-life balance.

As more states continue to legalize cannabis, its cultivation has grown in popularity in recent years. Many people prefer to grow their own quality buds, whether for personal use or commercial purposes. With a good cultivation guide, it is possible to produce recreational or medical cannabis at home with only a few resources. When it comes to growing cannabis, seeds play a key role. It is where the decision-making process begins, and feminized cannabis seeds are the most popular.

Feminized seeds are specially bred in that the male chromosomes are absent such that the seeds produce only the desired female buds. The seeds are produced through natural pollination, making them natural, and unlike the male plant, female cannabis plants produce high amounts of THC and CBD. Many people still wonder why feminized cannabis seeds are popular. Even though different cannabis seeds grow differently and serve various purposes, this post informs you of all the benefits of feminized cannabis seeds to help you make a good choice.

They guarantee you quality yields.

The reason many growers choose feminized cannabis seeds is that they are a guarantee. When you grow feminized seeds, no plant will turn out to be a male plant, so you don’t have to sex the plants when they flower. Plus, no male plants will take up your growing space, so you end up with a garden full of the desired female cannabis plants, not to mention that male plants ruin the female plants by pollinating them if you do not detect and eliminate them early.

Even though extreme conditions such as over-pruning, insufficient nutrients, and unreliable lighting may affect the quality of yields, growing feminized cannabis is the guarantee to obtain higher value from the seeds, lose less crop, save work and increase your yields.

You don’t have to sex the plants.

Cultivating cannabis can be complicated for beginners, and a small mistake can affect the quality of yields. A beginner grower can panic and become anxious at the thought of a male plant appearing in the grow room unexpectedly and ruining the female flowers by pollinating them. That thought is enough to kill a grower’s dream. Again the idea of staying set and patiently waiting to identify the male plants during the transition stage can be overwhelming, especially if you are the kind of grower who forgets to check on the plants. Although sexing plants is not complicated, growing feminized cannabis seeds from i49 eliminates that concern and allows you as a grower to relax. With that, you can be assured that even with a little maintenance, your plants will turn out female.

Less work with the plants

Some growers argue that using non-feminized seeds allows you to select the best plants and eliminate the poor ones. However, many growers cannot afford to cultivate 100% plants, then in the process eliminate 50% of which are the male plants after the flowering period. Such a process is more likely to stunt the growth of the remaining female plants, and in the end, you get fewer yields.

On the other hand, feminized cannabis seeds give you a 100% guarantee that as long as you cultivate the plants correctly, every seed you plant will provide you with maximum yield. Again, you don’t have to check each plant every other time to identify the male pollen forming structures which saves you a lot of work and time. When growing non-feminized seeds, missing one male crop can fertilize the entire female crop, resulting in losses. Growing feminized seeds means that your garden is yielding more if growing at or below plant count restrictions.

Avoid over-pruning in high-stress training.

At times, when growers are pruning an otherwise female plant, it suddenly turns out male. A grower suddenly realizes that a once triumphant plant that was almost becoming a massive ball of buds has tiny sacks of pollen all over it. Growers can minimize such risks by growing feminized cannabis seeds and implementing a lower stress training technique.

Moreover, feminized seeds provide the ideal solution to growing personal crops. If you live in a state where growing cannabis for non-retail purposes is legal, you can grow feminized seeds that guarantee flowers out of every plant. For instance, when you grow six plants in a grow room, it means that all the six plants will be flowering when you switch lighting to a 12hours cycle. Better yet, if you grow feminized auto-flower seeds, they flower automatically regardless of the lighting.

You can do plant training early on.

When growing non-feminized cannabis seeds, growers are often reluctant to train plants as they typically would because some plants may be male and not what they are after. On the other hand, when growing feminized cannabis seeds, you have the freedom to apply any plant training early on to boost the overall canopy and increase your yields. Since you are assured that all your plants produce the desired female bud, you don’t suffer any bad feelings of wasted nutrients, labor, and time. At no time will you need to remove a certain percentage of your plants after flowering due to the undesired male plants.

Quality genetics

Many strains usually sold as feminized seeds have good genetics because the breeder has carefully controlled them to bring out each strain’s defining characteristics. That gives the consumer more choices, such as various aromas, flavors, and cannabinoids, which opens up the plant’s potential in terms of its genetic diversity. In the modern industry of marijuana, there is competition among growers to produce the most aromatic, productive, and potent strains of cannabis. Every year, new strains come up, which means that for a grower to grow quality marijuana, they need to use quality feminized seeds.

Many choices

The world of feminized cannabis is popular, and that means as a grower, you have many choices from auto-flowering feminized seeds, CBD dominants, and standard photo-period varieties. There are also medicinal CBD feminized varieties to grow medicinal cannabis for personal use with ease.

The bottom line

With feminized cannabis seeds, you have the freedom to utilize 100% of your grow room with efficiency. If you want to get the desired female buds, using feminized seeds means that your grow room will be filled with female crops, which ultimately boosts your yields.

So, you’ve done your research and selected the market niche and the type of your mHealth app. Now it’s time for planning and estimating the project scope, budget, and main features of your product. Healthcare mobile app development can be daunting and time-consuming unless you’re well prepared.

Follow these steps to make sure you don’t miss out on anything important.

1. Understand your audience

   Target audience analysis is a crucial part of your product discovery phase. The target audience represents more than just users of your app. It’s a huge market segmented by various factors, including country, gender, age, education, income level, lifestyle, etc.

   There’s no way to build a successful medical app without understanding users’ needs. Each region has its specifics and regulations, so start by choosing the targeted countries for your platform. In 2020, the global mobile health market revenue share in North America was 38%. Europe and the Asia-Pacific took other parts of the pie with shares of over 25%.

   Your audience research will give you a clue on necessary features and general expectations from a mHealth app.

2. Outline core features for MVP

   Unfortunately, you cannot have all the cool features at once — otherwise, the development time and cost will be outrageous. That’s why you should separate must-have from nice-to-have features for your MVP. If you’re stuck on prioritizing the features, the business analysis will help you better understand your product requirements and business needs.

   The key features of your medical app for doctors will depend on the chosen application type. Here is a brief list of mHealth apps functionality:

   • Patient data monitoring
   • Secure doctor-patient communication
   • File exchange
   • Appointment scheduling
   • Integration with EHR
   • Integration with payment systems
   • Integration with Google Kit and Health Kit
   • AI health assistant
   • Progress tracking and analytics
   • Cloud data storage
   • Cross-platform accessibility
   • Notifications

   Go for essential features that reflect your app’s concept in the first place. You can always add more functionality after the MVP is released.

3. Take care of UX/UI design

   While the fancy design is not a must for a medical application, usability could be the turning point for your app’s success. Paying attention to UX and UI design ensures smooth interaction between the users and your brand.

   Follow these rules to make your healthcare app user-friendly:

   • Optimize user journey. Make all actions as easy as possible.
   • Choose an ergonomic information architecture. Highlight core features with UI design.
   • Make sure your design is responsive. Adapt the app’s interface to various platforms and screen sizes.
   • Empathize with your users. Find out what your audience needs and give it to them.
   • Test your design. Validate your ideas through usability testing and user feedback to upscale your app.

   You can choose a more conservative or modern design depending on your target audience’s preferences. Planning all details and visualizing them with design prototypes will save you costs and shorten time to market.

4. Pick a dedicated development team

   The qualifications and experience of the chosen development team make a big difference in the prosperity of your product. Hiring in-house developers increase the project cost and require additional time while working with freelancers doesn’t guarantee the expected result.

   The best option is to choose a close-knit team with experience in healthcare mobile app development. Entirely focused on your project goals, it takes care of the whole development process from hiring to project management. A dedicated team accelerates the product development lifecycle and provides smooth and effective communication to achieve the best possible result.

5. Consider security compliance

   Since healthcare applications handle a lot of personal information, it’s vital to keep patient data safe by complying with legal and privacy regulations. The following list includes regulations needed for medical apps within the US market:

   • HIPAA. Adherence to HIPAA is mandatory for all apps that process and store Protected Healthcare Information (PHI) such as CT and MRI scans, lab results, and doctor’s notes.
   • CCPA. This law informs patients about the collected data, provides reports, and removes the data at the request.
   • NIST. It’s a cybersecurity framework that offers a wide range of tools and services explicitly for mHealth applications.

   In other words, there is no way of launching a medical app without following cybersecurity standards.

6. Choose app monetization model

   Whether you’re building a medical app or any other app, you can choose from the same list of monetization strategies. Your options include:

   • Freemium. The idea is to give access to basic features while offering advanced functionality for a premium account.
   • Certified content. This strategy involves providing free access to a limited amount of content. After users reach the limit, they need to sign up and pay for a subscription.
   • Relevant advertising. You can bet on targeted mobile ads that use GPS or beacon-based localization.
   • Subscription model. Offer different subscription plans for doctors or patients.

   Whichever monetization strategy you choose, make sure it’s not annoying or disruptive for user performance.