Four apps to keep your life on track

From simple task scheduling to detailed task management, all these apps offer everything you need for efficient task recording.

Wunderlist

The app lets you create tasks, subtasks and allows you to share with your family, friends and colleagues. The whole app is designed in the most user-friendly way and offers you the ability to add deadlines, additional information and reminders.

Focuster

With Focuster, you just need to add all your tasks and the tool will arrange them immediately in order of importance. After adding all the tasks, just press the Now button and the tool will show the tasks you should be focusing on for the day.

TeuxDeux

This useful app lets you schedule and organize all your tasks for the whole week. Just add the tasks below the day column and you’re done. Want to move a task from one column to another? No worries. Its drag-and-drop interface (界面) lets you rearrange the task and add it to a different day’s column. Additionally, TeuxDeux lets you add repeating tasks for a day.

TickTick

TickTick allows you to add tasks, subtasks, custom reminders as well as deadlines for a day, a week, or a month. In order to provide you with more ease in task scheduling, TickTick offers a nice calendar view, where you can add or edit tasks on a weekly or daily basis. It also has experimental features, which you can turn on if you want to try out beta capabilities (测试功能).

If you’re wondering when you might get the flu, a new study indicates you should keep an eye on your local weather report.

According to a research published in the Journal of Clinical Virology, if you keep your eye on the weather and watch for the first major dip in the temperature, you can essentially mark your calendar in prediction for an outbreak the flu.

To figure out how the weather and flu outbreak may be connected, researchers analyzed statistics of 20,000 people in an area over three seasons. The number of people who caught the flu was then compared with local weather data.

After each season, the team noticed one consistent finding: The first really cold period with low outdoor temperatures and low humidity (湿度) was always followed by a week of a mass influenza outbreak.

The researchers say that aerosol particles (气溶胶粒子) containing virus and liquid are more able to spread in cold and dry weather. So, in theory, if you sneeze or cough and the surrounding air is very dry, the air will absorb the moisture and the particles containing the virus keep spreading through the air for a longer period of time.

Luckily there are ways to keep off the illness regardless of the weather. Washing your hands, coughing into the crook (弯曲) of your arm and getting vaccine (疫苗) are the best ways to prevent the flu from spreading. People over the age of 65, pregnant women and young children are at the highest risk of developing complications (并发症) related to the virus, according to the CDC.

Background music may seem harmless, but it can have a powerful effect on those who hear it. Recorded background music first found its way into factories, shops and restaurants in the US. But it soon spread to other parts of the world. Now it is becoming increasingly difficult to go shopping or eat a meal without listening to music.

To begin with, “muzak” (音乐广播网) was intended simply to create a soothing (安慰) atmosphere. Recently, however，it has become big business—thanks in part to recent research. Dr. Ronald Milliman, an American marketing expert, has shown that music can boost sales or increase factory production by as much as a third.

However, it has to be light music. A fast one has no effect at all on sales. Slow music can increase receipts by 38%. This is probably because shoppers slow down and have more opportunity to spot items they like to buy. Yet, slow music isn't always the answer. Dr. Milliman found, for example, that in restaurants slow music meant customers took longer to eat their meals, which reduced overall sales. So restaurant owners might be well advised to play uptempo_music to keep the customers moving—unless of course, the resulting indigestion (消化不良) leads to complaints!