Life-Work Balance. It Matters.

Akins IT • April 19, 2016

Its 5 pm on a Thursday and you’re beat from the week and still have laundry to do, dinner to make, bills that are coming due, and kids to pick up. We spend roughly 47 of the 168 hours in a week working. Sadly, only 13% of people enjoy their jobs.

If you’re lucky enough to fall in the 13% of people who like their job, working can improve your life because those 47 hours are spent on something enjoyable. You don’t dread going to work in the morning and overall, are more content. For the less fortunate who have high-stress jobs and dislike their work, working can make them more stressed overall. Many people are unable to separate personal from work life and added stress in one area of their life quickly begins to affect all the other areas.

How to Gain more Life-Work Balance:

Plan out your downtime.

Setting aside time to go out with friends to a movie or happy hour or planning quality family time helps preserve precious time and incentivizes you to manage your time well during the rest of the week. Another great example is gym time. You will never have time if you’re not intentional about reserving time for this. Overall, people who work out regularly have lower stress levels and are healthier than those who don’t.

2. Get smart about errands and chores.

No one enjoys chores and errands. Think about how you can improve how these get done. For example, you can order your groceries online and save your grocery list so that the next time you order, it populates your cart in seconds. Other companies offer meal prepping services where the meals are already made for you which saves time on grocery shopping and cooking. Most bills can be paid online quickly. Also, think about what chores you can outsource, like gardening or yardwork.

3. Remember that a little goes a long way

Small changes like leaving the office early one night a week or taking 10-15 minutes a day to recharge will help. You don't have to change how you do everything.

4. Set Limits

If you find that work is beginning to consume all of your time, begin tracking your time and managing it. Find activities that can be delegated and get them off of your plate. Make a to-do list and prioritize it so that you make the most of your time.

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)