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With the hot days upon us, backyard summer parties are ramping up! While you may have already prepared for that with all the rear addition features that impress your guests, you’ve also got to find a way to keep them feeling refreshed and cool for the party to last:

Landscape for shade

One of the first and natural ways you can provide some cooling shade in the rear addition is by planting one or more trees in strategic locations. You’ll want to choose spots where you get maximum shade over the area you’ll most often hang out in during the day. At the same time, you should balance that choice with ensuring the tree(s) don’t pose a hazard risk by being too close to your house.

As for what kind of tree to get, you can never go wrong with trees that are native to your region. That’s an easier and more environmentally friendly way that chooses for you!

Shelter from the sun

Of course you want to spend as much time as you can outside to take advantage of the short summer season. Just make sure you provide a roof cover over your deck or patio so you can stay outside longer. That can take the form of either a permanent roof or a retractable awning. If you have the space, a gazebo is the perfect covered party structure to have because they can also serve as cool places of solitude on quiet days.

Refresh with mist

At one point in your life, you’ve probably desperately tried to cool off by spraying your face with a spritz of water. Well, you can upgrade your backyard with an automatic misting system that does that for you! And since you’d be installing a roof cover overhead anyway, that makes it easy to hide all the piping involved.

Reflect solar heat

The rear addition should always be finished in light colours if you don’t want it to become an oven at the peak of summer seasons. Light colours reflect sunlight which then reflect solar heat. That goes for everything from the pavement or flooring of your backyard structures to the overall paint job.

Now you can crack open that brewski and enjoy the party outside.

The success of a co-working space can often be gauged by the people and talent who stay there for the long run and make positive contributions to its atmosphere. So to attract the best, you have to build the best.

Do your research

It doesn’t matter how great a co-working space you build if it’s not a good fit for the types of businesses that gravitate to your area. Although co-working spaces are usually most attractive to freelancers, there’s a growing trend of large companies also moving into co-working spaces.

Start with studying the competition from other co-working spaces around you. What business types are they catering to and how can you do better? Another excellent source of information is from commercial real estate agents. Is there a consistent demand for leased office spaces from certain kinds of businesses? It’ll probably be in their best interest to give you their professional opinion on the best businesses to design your office space for.

Next, you should also shortlist the businesses that can co-exist and synergize in a shared work environment.

Plan for flexibility

A co-working space needs flexible layouts for different work types in its target markets. So once you have a list of complementary businesses to focus on, it’s time to optimize your space layout for them. For example, magazine publishers and marketing professionals work best in semi-divider layouts. Team zones grouped by job functions are ideal for developers in software, app, or video game industries.

Of course, don’t forget about the freelancers like freelance writers, graphic designers, or web business owners. They’re more used to a nomadic office arrangement.

Include all personalities

You have to make sure your co-working space appeals to both extroverts and introverts. Wide open areas with high ceilings are a good design theme that offers the ultimate flexibility to balance these two personality types.

An essential goal of designing co-working spaces is to create opportunities for spontaneous interactions. Sprinkle small arrangements of sofas and armchairs throughout the space for impromptu discussions to happen anywhere. A refreshment station complete with a juice bar and snacks can replace the cliché water cooler for break conversations to happen. You can even build your very own café with standing tables to facilitate quick stand-up meetings.

It’s also important to mix it up with quiet deep work corners or alcoves and relaxation lounges for those who need solitary breaks.

Finally, remember to make your co-working space fun as well by playing with colours, textures, and furniture choices!

Office renovations are investments that bring your business a lot of dividends. Like any investment though, you have some tough decisions to make. A big one is what you will do with your business while the office renovations are ongoing. Will you have to shut things down until the renovations are completed?

It may come as a surprise that it is possible carry on business as usual during office renovations. Many contractors will do their best to accommodate their clients so that disruptions to day-to-day work are kept at a minimum. These are three creative solutions to help keep your business going while renovations are under way:

Business by day, renovation by night

The best case scenario is if you can keep your regular business hours and schedule renovation work when you’re closed. First, check with your contractor on how renovations can be carried out outside of your office business hours.

If it all works out, communicate clearly and regularly to employees on how the ongoing renovation will affect operations. Even when renovations are done after hours, there’s bound to be some changes they’ll have to get used to in the next little while.

Desk-hopping

Another option is asking your contractor if it’s possible to localize renovation work from one area to the next and shift employees around accordingly. No doubt, this requires lots of coordination between the contractor and your staff. Make sure your employees report any issues stemming from renovations only to you or someone assigned as the official point of contact. Everything will be a lot smoother if the contractor only has to deal with one person in charge throughout the whole project.

You’re asking a lot from your staff with this option so always kindly ask for your staff’s patience. It also helps to keep reminding everyone the positive reasons and end goals for the renovation.

Remote work

This is an excellent solution if your business doesn’t require a physical space for customers or client visits. There are a lot of web applications out there that allows businesses to easily manage remote employees, especially if most of your company documents are stored on the cloud anyway.

If you do have proprietary applications or documents hosted on company servers only, consider setting up virtual private networks (VPNs) for your staff to access company servers remotely.

Above all, keep calm and carry on!

Chaos doesn’t have to be the norm in medical offices. You can transform yours into an efficient one by first identifying where the bottlenecks are in its workflow. Do patients often have to wait for a long time before they get to see someone? Where is the holdup?

After you’ve pinpointed what the greatest causes for delays are, you can re-design your medical office accordingly:

Automation of information

One of the timeless and most efficient investments you can make is changing the way your office handles information. With the advent of so many cloud-based applications and databases, there’s no reason why patient records need to be processed via paper files. Encourage your patients to book their appointments online and fill out any forms you need before their appointments.

When they arrive, all the receptionist has to do is send the up-to-date patient record and appointment reason to the central electronic database queue of the day’s appointments. Nurses and medical practitioners will then have all the patient’s relevant information right on whichever workstation they happen to be at.

Waiting room comfort

A major cause of patient dissatisfaction is, naturally, having to wait in the first place. Even though it may not be possible to eliminate waiting times altogether, you can still make them as painless as possible. The key is to keep patients occupied. If they’re missing any forms or their records haven’t been updated in a while, give them a tablet to fill out electronically so your database gets updated right away with the current information.

Apart from that, the waiting room should be inviting with warm colours and finishes. Above all, put in comfortable furniture that matches your patients’ needs.

Double exam rooms

Instead of allotting one exam room for every doctor or medical practitioner, make sure they each have at least two exam rooms. That way, one patient can go through a pre-appointment checkup with a nurse in one room while the medical practitioner finishes up with the previous patient in the next room. This will decrease the amount of idle time for everyone, including the patients.

One-way loop

Think about the procedures needed as your patients go through a typical appointment in your office. Then, arrange the layout in a logical way that takes the patient on a single path that keeps moving forward until he or she loops back to the other side of the waiting room to check out with reception. No confused patients, no delays from miscommunications.

As you can see, the cure for medical office inefficiency really comes down to one concept: thorough and thoughtful design.

What defines modern design builds is the significant role that technology plays from concept to construction to innovative features. With increased technology though comes greater energy demands and that can add up to huge energy bills in the upkeep.

To save on energy costs and environmental impact in the long run, here are 3 sustainable technologies to consider for your energy needs:

Solar hot water tanks

The sun is the source of life for us and it has an immense amount of energy potential we’ve yet to tap into. Installing solar hot water tanks is one way to do so. Whether you use a flat-plate or an evacuated tube collector, you’re essentially taking advantage of hot sunlight on your roof to heat water for storage in your water tank at home. Some systems like evacuated tubes work efficiently even when the weather is overcast or freezing, which is great for Toronto’s climate.

Geothermal heating

Besides turning up to the sky for energy, we can also draw that from the ground. Geothermal heating is another sustainable technology like solar hot water tanks because no fuel has to be burned to create energy. Both vertical and horizontal closed-loop geothermal systems are really just transferring existing energy from outside your house to its interior or vice versa.

In the winter, geothermal heating brings natural underground heat into the house. During summers, the house is kept cool because the reverse happens where heat is taken out of the interior and into the ground. In short, it works like a giant refrigerator in both directions of heat transfer.

Green roofs

Although green roofs aren’t a technology per se, they’re an ingenious olden-day sustainable concept that’s been refurbished with modern techniques. Nowadays, durable waterproof membranes are laid down over roofs before putting in soil and vegetation. With this setup, green roofs naturally help with thermal insulation so that houses stay cool in the summer. In addition, they help decrease storm water runoff while increasing the longevity of the underlying roof structures.

Of course, all these sustainable technologies would be useless if the energy produced is not used efficiently. For that, you need smart home technology that often not only optimizes electricity use, but also saves you time by automating day-to-day tasks. With all these elements in place, your house would be the perfect platform to launch into the future.