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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Productivity
A Post About Not Posting
My posts have come to a screeching halt lately. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a month without a post since I started blogging back in 2005 so I didn’t want to start now! Mike and I have been pushing really hard to release the aforementioned new version of Detailed Image. As a company we’re probably devoting close to 40% of our time right now working on new site related tasks. Things are busy for me personally right now as well, so I’m pretty much ripping through my day-to-day work tasks as fast as possible and then spending every remaining … Continue reading
Standing Desk: 1 Year Later
It’s been just over a year since I switched to a standing desk (see: Standing Desks are Awesome (and exhausting) and My Efforts to Sit Less). Some thoughts after sticking with it for over a year: Like any new habit, it was hard at first but now has become such a part of my daily life that I barely notice it. Standing is how I do my work when I’m home. After a few months my endurance got to the point where a 10-12 hour work day standing was no big deal as long as I took a ~15 minute … Continue reading
What a Difference a Monitor Makes
It’s funny how big of a difference little changes can make. Earlier this year we started noticing that our employees were doing a lot of tasks that would benefit from more screen space. Laptop screens are more than adequate for plenty, but when you’re doing accounting, customer service, social media, research projects, and the like, it can be incredibly beneficial to snap two windows side-by-side. Not to mention the programming I’m doing or the graphic design that Mike’s doing. It’s not just more convenient, it saves time and cuts down on errors. It wasn’t too hard of a decision to … Continue reading
Five Lasting Impressions of “The 4-Hour Workweek” as it’s Five-Year Anniversary Approaches
A quick Google search will reveal that Tim Ferriss is quite the controversial character. He’s generally either loved or hated. I personally am in the minority in that I’m square in the middle. Tim has lots of interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, and experiences. A lot of his ideas are also ridiculously embellished or downright implausible, and he is an endless self promoter. For this post though, we’re going to focus on the positive. It’s crazy to think, but it’s been almost five years since The 4-Hour Workweek was released in April of 2007. I remember seeing it promoted on some … Continue reading
The Advantage of Skimming
Sometimes I think skimming gets a bad rap. We’re worried that people in the future won’t be able to focus long enough to comprehend anything of real value. While there’s likely some truth to that, I also see huge opportunity and huge value in skimming…especially for business owners. Half of the battle when it comes to making business decisions in our current landscape is knowing what’s possible. Whether we’re talking specifically web development (HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, etc), or any other aspect of running a business – marketing, customer service, human resources, legal, accounting, strategy, and the like – it’s … Continue reading
Trading Hours
@DHH wrote a really interesting blog post yesterday about what he calls “flipping the day“: Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates to 6am to 2pm Chicago time. That gives me all the time before lunch to enjoy the light of day and all the activities that encourages. I find myself more interested in working out, more eager to read books, and generally infused with more energy for both physical and mental activities. Over the past few years my average sleep schedule has been roughly 10 PM – 6 AM. When you compare that … Continue reading
Standing Desks are Awesome (and exhausting)
In August I pulled a muscle in my back. It was bad enough that sitting for long periods of time became uncomfortable. This was a big problem because, well, I sit all day long while I work. About a year ago I wrote about my efforts to sit less, which included using a standing station for my laptop sometimes. In that post I outlined all of the mounting research that suggests that sitting all day long can be bad for you. After that I continued to make a conscious effort to stand and move more in general. Still, I spent … Continue reading
College News on LockerPulse: Start to Finish in 5 Days
On Tuesday morning I received an email from two people at Google asking for some vector graphics for LockerPulse. They said that they were going to be featuring it in an upcoming March Madness promotion, presumably for the Chrome Web App Store, although they didn’t specifically say so (“March Madness” refers to the NCAA basketball tournament that starts this Sunday night with the selection show, with play beginning Tuesday). This would be an awesome opportunity to promote LockerPulse, especially because we haven’t really started our full-fledged marketing campaign. There was just one problem: LockerPulse didn’t cover college sports, something that … Continue reading
My Productive Fall
Towards the end of Summer I decided to sit down and make a list of things that I wanted to accomplish this Fall before the Holiday Season started. It was a lot – more than I thought I could get to – but I like to challenge myself. We consider our “Holiday Season” to start on November 1. I like to have every new cart feature in place by mid-October so we have some time to work any kinks out before the big rush. I’m taking some time off this week and next week to head back to James Madison … Continue reading
Browsers of Choice
It’s always interesting to me to see what browsers people use. Increasingly I’m surprised by how many non-tech savvy people I notice not using Internet Explorer, something that was rare even a few years ago. First Firefox and now Chrome have done a great job of pushing the idea that not every browser is the same. Just the simple fact that Google hits you with Chrome ads every time you visit Google to do a search or YouTube to watch a video has led to widespread awareness of the fact that there are other options out there than what came … Continue reading