Hmm... bad work habits. I think watching online videos while at work should be pretty close to the top of the list. It's expressly forbidden from many work facilities.

@ChrisC1234: Yeah that list was more like 3 successful work habits and 5 pieces of general pieces of advice on how to not be an inconsiderate prick or smelly.

"Putting personal life before work. Everyone has emergencies from time to time. But it's annoying to have to repeatedly fill in for the colleague who is late every morning because he's checking on his home remodeling project, or who misses an entire afternoon because she scheduled a routine dentist appointment for 1:30 p.m."

So... When are you supposed to schedule your dentist appointment for? Most doctor and dental offices are only open 8am-5pm Monday-Friday... guess when most people work? I'm sorry, but allowing someone time off for doctor and dental appointments is kind of necessary, and I don't see why there should be a problem with it as long as their scheduled with enough notice.

In the Times article, they mention treasuries; In the next year, it is going to be possible to LOSE money in treasuries.

They are selling at a premium, and will drop.....stay away, or short them with an ETF called the TBT.

[finance.google.com]

Hmmm, sitting here in my office and reading this blog is probably a bad work habit...

The state sales tax deduction also works for you to itemize your sales tax or at least it did the last time I filed. We payed way more in state sales tax than we ever paid in income tax in other states. But they tax food and clothes here. Yuk.

@samurailynn: I ran into this. Getting a dental appointment took about 3 months to get in due to a local shortage of dental offices. I had to cancel the appointment a few days before when work decided that medical appointments during work hours were frivilous. The HR statement was that if you tried hard enough there is a provider somewhere in the universe who will see you at night or on a weekend. They went so far as to tell people to go use after hours urgent care rather than going to their regular doc no matter what the issue is. I am sure their health insurance would have loved to hear that one.

@bohemian: Wow... hopefully you've found a company with a little more relaxed policy on medical appointments. Although, you could always just call in sick on the day of your appointment.

I've also always wondered why some companies don't allow you to use sick time for doctor appointments. If you have something you need to see a doctor about, but you aren't necessarily contagious, so you can be at work during the rest of the day, shouldn't you be able to use sick time since you are going to the doctor to cure your illness? One company I worked at allowed people to use sick time to cover appointments but the next company I worked at said people were "taking advantage" of the sick time by using it for this purpose.

@ElizabethD: Depending on where you work, you can consider it reputation management for your company. :)

@ElizabethD: Or you can work in the media.

@ElizabethD: You need to take up software engineering: [xkcd.com]

Heh heh...

In the tax deduction article, he fails to mention that the income cap for deducting your student loan interest is ridiculously low... like $60k.

Even entry level IT in California pays more than that. Just because I make more doesn't mean I'm not getting bent over on cost of living... I wish I could take that deduction.

@samurailynn: Scheduled dr. appointments should be considered 'sick time.' They are at my current employer and were at my last one - which was a large university. As far as I understood, sick time = taking care of yourself or a child's illness, or preventive care such as a dr. appointment.

There's a way to stretch that to a ridiculous extreme (i need to go to my 2-hour yoga class - it's preventive care!) but most employees probably wouldn't do that. Shouldn't employers have an interest in their employees being physically well (and hopefully more productive as a result?)