Today was my first full work day with the new sit/stand desk. I needed a benchmark to gauge how much I should stand and how much I should sit. I decided that, for today, I would stand while working and sit when I wasn’t working. Since I consider my writing work, and since I write…
During Amazon’s Prime days, I finally bit the bullet and decided to order a new desk for my office. I had my old desk for more than seven years. It was a glass-topped desk that I thought was great at the time, but I grew to hate it, mainly because I could never seem to…
Evernote has made some significant improvements lately. They have completely reengineered the backend. They have refreshed and improved the user interface. And they recently introduced integrated task management–something users have been requesting for a long time. There is one feature that I would find incredibly useful that Evernote still needs: a Last Viewed date for…
We had perfect weather for Independence Day, after a weekend filled mostly with rain. So we piled all of the kids into our cars yesterday and drove to a state park north of New York City in order to spend some time outdoors. There are certain landscape scenes that I find calming, and I managed…
The family and I spent this holiday weekend in New York. We had the true holiday weekend experience, which included barbecues, fireworks, and a hefty helping of holiday traffic. Driving up Friday morning, the normally 4 hour 10 minute drive took us just about 6 hours. It was not a wasted six hours. It gave…
With my recent plan to focus on my writing and improve my overall well-being (a.k.a. Project Sunrise), I have been hunting for small efficiencies in workflow that can have an outsized impact on my day. My morning routine takes about two and a half hours to complete. While developing the routine, I teased out actions…
Introduction: Playbooks are Practices Welcome to the inaugural post of my new column, “The Weekly Playbook.” Each week I plan to feature a playbook that I use to help make my life a little easier. What is a playbook? A playbook is like an enhanced checklist that provides steps or outlines for a specific task…
Today is the first day of my creative new year. It is also the first official day of an effort that I have calling “Project Sunrise” for short. Project Sunrise is a plan to transition to a full-time writer ten years from now when I retire. It involves three key elements: Improving my writing. Seriously…