It’s the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, which is the perfect time to peruse Facebook – err, finish those important reports!!

A new website, aptly called Hardlywork.in, lets you disguise your Facebook posts as an Excel spreadsheet.

It’s a lot like those good old boss buttons, which have been used for ages to help sports fanatics hide their secret obsession with March Madness and the like.

The difference is that this particularly faux spreadsheet is pretty useful, allowing you to actually see what your Facebook friends are writing and click on the links they've posted, etc.

Yale computer science major Bay Gross, 20, came up with the idea after a friend said she couldn't read Facebook during her internship, according to the Huffington Post.

The site launched on Sunday and is already keeping an estimated 10,000 unique users a day from doing their work, Gross said in an e-mail to msnbc.com.

Nearly four years into a tough economic climate, chances are you know someone – or have yourself – dealt with a bout of unemployment.

A June Life Inc. post on how people without work are paying the bills touched a nerve – and sparked a lot of sympathy  – in many readers.

But while we may feel for our unemployed friends and acquaintances, we’d apparently be hesitant to walk down the aisle for them. Only 20 percent of readers said they’d marry someone who was unemployed, according to our unscientific poll; the rest would either wait or just say no.

The vast majority of us who do have jobs feel like we’re working harder than ever, according to another poll accompanying this popular post on how productivity, but not necessarily wages, have gone up over the past few decades.

Sounds like we’ve all earned a three-day weekend. The Fourth of July weekend is often a barbecue bonanza, but don’t let your nose fool you: Some of that BBQ smell may not be coming from the grill.

A post earlier this month about a barbecue sauce-scented cologne had many of our Life Inc. readers excited … and a little grossed out.

Also in June, David Bach reminded us that it’s never too late to save for retirement, and Sharon Epperson gave tips on where to stash your emergency fund.

We hear a lot these days about how we’re working harder than ever and struggling with work/life balance. So we were surprised by a new survey finding that most vacation goers actually plan to leave work at the office this summer.

The survey - conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of jobs website Glassdoor - found that around 65 percent of workers who are taking a vacation this summer expect to check out of work completely.

Only 13 percent of the vacationing employees said they are expected to work while on vacation, and another 18 percent said they’d only have to work in an emergency.

The figures excluded people who said they were self-employed. The survey of around 2,000 people was conducted online in June.

Council on Foreign Relations

The old recession norm went like this: Economy dips, jobs get lost; economy gains, jobs get added.

 In other words, a V shape.

The new normal looks like a U – and an increasingly elongated one at that.

A new graphic from the Council on Foreign Relations shows what many jobseekers are already painfully aware of: Since the 1990s, the U.S. job market has hobbled slowly back to health, struggling along even when the economy was on the mend.

The situation was even worse in the Great Recession. Although the biggest recession since the Depression has officially been over for around two years, millions of Americans remain jobless. The unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in May; the June jobless report is due out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics next Friday.

This CFR’s outlook is not heartening for jobseekers: If the current trends continue, job levels will not be back to where they were prior to the recession until 2016, according to their calculations.