【推荐1】It's 4:35 p．m. You feel like the bottom of a marathoner's shoe. Flat and sore. It's been a day of fighting anxiety, racing to meetings, staying awake, endless work, and trying to get stuff done．    1    It causes you unwilling to stay for one more minute at the office. But how to improve your productivity of your entire work on the end of the day？

The biggest step in this end-of-day process is to respond to as many emails as possible in thirty minutes of time. The majority of emails hit your inbox during workday hours. By responding to 80% of these or so, you can effectively reduce tomorrow's workload．    2    If you can get this done before tomorrow begins, you'll be ahead of the game．

If you use your computer or mobile phone for scheduling your day or taking notes, you'll want to keep them on. But please close whatever programs are allowing email or chat messages to ruin your end-of-the-day productivity. Before turning off your computer, you should also exit your Internet browser, and close the web pages you had opened. If you start your new day by seeing that articles you were reading, you are starting in the wrong frame of mind．    3    

It's important to plan your day before it starts．    4    A day that starts without a plan is like an engine that needs to warm up before it's safe to drive. Perform your planning the day before, because a day planned in advance allows you to jump in fully prepared, fully planned, and fully ready to get stuff done．

Your office space is known as an "environmental factor．"    5    As Inc．com reported, dirty office can actually ruin your job performance. Then tiding up your office, you will become more productive. It's just that simple. By doing so, you feel good with a peaceful slate of mind, a sense of refreshment and energy, which will be enough for the following day．

【推荐2】Many managers believe that overworking is an evidence of devotion from their employees’ side. Still few others regard this custom as a threat to the workers’ work-life balance, which may negatively influence the level of productivity and efficiency.

Employees at Amsterdam design studio Heldergroen won’t be putting in much overtime. Not in the office, at any rate. That’s because every day at 6:00 pm, their desks, tables and other work surfaces, with their computers attached, are lifted to the ceiling by steel cables （绳索）normally used to move heavy props（道具）in theatrical productions. If you leave a half-eaten sandwich on your desk, you’re out of luck.

“Once the chairs and other workplace paraphernalia are cleared away, the space is free for evening and weekend use as a dance floor, yoga studio ... or anything else you can think of – the floor is actually yours, ” doctor Sander Veenendaal said.

In a way, the office space itself is working overtime for Heldergroen, bringing about lots of publicity and carrying an enlightened（有启发的）message of career-life balance far and wide.”We think that doing activities like this makes it easier for people to work here,” says Veenendaal. “You know when it is time to relax or do something else that inspires you.”

That sounds awesome. There’s just one catch. In the morning, the desks reappear and everybody has to go back to work.

【推荐1】While a female politician or first lady can use her clothing to create a favorable image, male politicians don't have as many fashion choices to play with, But Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have discovered a goldmine - his socks.

He's been seen wearing"statement socks".at many public events. For example, during a NATO(北大西洋公约组织) meeting in Brussels in May, Trudeau wore one blue sock and one pink, both with the NATO symbol printed on them. And in June, he wore a pair of socks with the pattern of maple leaves a national symbol of Canada --- when he appeared on a TV show.

The New York Times editor Vanessa Friedman praised Trudeau's play on his socks as"clever

"Socks are subtle enough not to be distracting, but visible enough that you can't miss the point, she wrote, "Rarely have a man's ankles said so much."

One example is a pair he wore during a meeting with Enda Kenny, then the prime minister of Ireland, in Montreal on May 4. During their meeting, Trudeau wore Star Wars socks-simply because that day happened to be Intemational Star Wars Day. If this pair of socks sent out any message, according to Vogue magazine reporter Emily Farra, that message was just that he has a quirky side and loves George Lucas films, " she wrote.

However, some say that 45-year-old Trudeau's unusual sock choices show a childish side of the prime minister that proves he isn't mature enough to be the leader of a country.

But Friedman doesn't see it that way. "The socks have been a source of pride and applause on an international scale-a symbolboth of Mr Trudeau's ability to embrace multiculturalism and of his position as a next-generation leader not bound by old traditions. "she wrote. They have opened up possibilities for the future.

【推荐3】Fashion and Identity

For hundreds of years people have put some message in the type of clothing they wore. Long ago people started wanting to stand out from the “crowd” and be different from other people by means of changing their clothing. Some examples of these “standing out” became very popular and were followed by more people.    1    Nowadays, fashion has become a necessary part of one’s self-realization and clothing is basically a covering designed to be worn on a person’s body. This covering is a “necessity”, which brings a lot of variety into the lives of people and makes their image more complete.

The type of clothing completely depends on the person wearing it and becomes a reflection of personal identity. Lately, a lot is being heard about its meaning in the life of every single person on the planet. The choice of clothing is as important as identification through the color of hair, skin and gender. As every piece of clothing carries a strong message about its owner, every owner “nests” a certain value in it depending on his mindset or today’s mood. Therefore, the clothing of a person is a means of communication with the outside world.    2    

Clothes have a significant impact on the understanding of the people nearby as well as the person wearing them. For instance, a suit can make a person feel more confident and organized, which would eventually change even the gestures of the person.     3     Sometimes, fashion may play a vital role in a person’s life, especially when the person is applying for the job he wants. Fashion also creates a message that is required by a situation the person finds himself in. This can be simply proved by analyzing one’s reaction on people wearing different types of clothing.    4     Thus, even the smallest companies make wearing a suit one of the requirements for their employees.

    5     Fashion, with all its symbolism and features, form an outstanding base for personal and cultural identification. It is a part of the self-realization that is required for finding a place in life and has become a tool for achieving harmony with the inner world. The more diverse the society around us, the more fashion-trend will appear and surprise us.

【推荐2】A new study from MIT has found that piano lessons have a very specific effect on kindergartners’ ability to distinguish different pitches (音高), which translates into an improvement in distinguishing between spoken words. However, piano lessons did not appear to provide any benefit for overall intelligence, as measured by IQ, attention span (注意力集中时间), and working memory.

The 74 children participating in the study were divided into three groups: one that received 45-minute piano lessons three times a week; one that received extra reading instruction for the same period of time; and one that received neither of these. All children were 4 or 5 years old and spoke Mandarin as their native language.

After six months, the researchers tested the children on their ability to distinguish words based on differences in vowels (元音), consonants (辅音), or tone (音调). Better word distinguishing usually comes with better phonological awareness – the awareness of the sound structure of words, which is a key part of learning to read.

Children who had piano lessons showed a significant advantage over children in the extra reading group in distinguishing between words that differ by one consonant. Children in both the piano group and extra reading group performed better than the third group when it came to distinguishing words based on vowel differences.

The researchers also used electroencephalography to measure brain activity and found that children in the piano group had stronger responses than the other children when they listened to a series of tones of different pitch. This suggested that a greater sensitivity to pitch differences is what helped the children who took piano lessons to better distinguish different words, Desimone says.

“That’s a big thing for kids in learning language: being able to hear the differences between words,” he says. “They really did benefit from that.”

In tests of IQ, attention, and working memory, the researchers did not find any significant differences among the three groups of children.

Desimone says he hopes the findings will help to convince education officials who are considering abandoning music classes in schools not to do so.

【推荐3】You can’t walk into the office without Rihanna’s voice singing “work work work work work work” in your head. And that one line from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” still makes you want to scream. These are commonly known as earworm songs—those sticky tunes that continue to play in your head. A recent study finds that more than 90% of adults report hearing earworm songs on a weekly basis.

Fortunately, most people report earworm songs as pleasant. But others find them annoying or even maddening. “Some people are troubled by them to the point that it disturbs life,” says Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, a professor at the University of Arkansas who has studied earworm songs.

Margulis says earworm songs tend to have some predictable characteristics. For one thing, they tend to small parts of a song—not the whole track. And “the songs you’ve heard recently also have the most possibility to get stuck in your memory,” she says.

But sometimes something strange and unpredictable can also start a track paying in your head. “Once I was at the doctor’s office and saw a poster of a man who I thought looked like Gaston—a character from Beauty and the Beast,” Margulis recalls. A couple minutes passed, and she realized she couldn’t get “Be Our Guest”, the song in the movie, out of her head, even though she hadn’t thought of the tune in years. In that instance, she was able to identify her earworm’s trigger: the Gaston-looking man in the poster. “But the connections can be really unclear,” she says.

Margulis points out that, in all of human history, recorded music is a very new phenomenon. She says some have inferred that earworm songs are also new—the unintended consequence of being able to hear the same song played everywhere in the same way over and over again. So far, the convincing explanation for why human beings experience earworm songs remains a mystery. But there are some well-established ways to cast off the earworm songs.

“Finding a mentally demanding task and putting your mind on it usually shifts attention away from internal music. People tend to get earworms when performing tasks that don’t require their full attention—stuff like doing the dishes,” Margulis says.

Chewing gum can also help. When a song is stuck in our heads, it’s almost like we’re singing along with it. If you make your mouth do something else—chewing gum, eating a meal or talking with a friend—that can kick out the earworm.

You could also face your enemy. By listening to the full track that includes the passage stuck in your head, you may find “closure” and relief.