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 impossible to be even close to an expert in all of them. Things are changing too fast. The best that I can hope for is to have an idea of what’s going on, of what’s possible if we need to improve something in one of those areas. I need to do this in a relatively short amount of time. And so I skim. I skim my Google Reader, I skim magazines, I skim Twitter. Most of the time I just read a headline plus maybe a few sentences, and then move on to the next piece of news. My goal isn’t full comprehension, it’s getting a gist of what the article was about in 15 or 30 seconds, and then to move on to the next.

When I do this, I’m creating a “mental database” of what’s going on in the world. Often times when we encounter a problem, the first thing I do is think “I remember hearing about xyz company that had the same problem” or “there’s this cool new website/software/technology that might solve our problem”. From there, I usually only remember a small part of where I saw the article. Maybe I remember how I read it (say Twitter) or where I read it (say Wired.com) or who shared it with me, but I’ll start to dig backwards and usually find what I’m looking for in a matter of minutes.

Only then do I start reading more traditionally, aiming for full comprehension. I’ll send an article to my Kindle, buy a book, find other online resources, or whatever makes the most sense for the particular situation. So, to me, skimming is a great enabler. It’s a highly efficient path to more knowledge. I can consume vast amounts of incredibly resourceful material in extremely short periods of time, and then circle back and dig deeper if and when I find it necessary.

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 with a midnight to 8 AM sleep schedule, which is similar to what I was on previously, there are really only four hours of my day that are different: 6 AM – 8 AM and 10 PM – midnight. I’m essentially trading a two hour block at night for a two hour block in the morning.

Occasional I slip back in to a later schedule, whether it’s because of work or social life or I’m just being lazy and sleeping later. When this happens I notice that I don’t like how I spend those hours in question and inevitably force myself back on to the early riser schedule.

Similar to @DHH, I tend to spend those additional two hours in the morning reading, working out, or getting ahead on work for the day. I also enjoy the peacefulness associated with knowing that everyone else is sleeping (and therefore won’t be interrupting me). Comparatively I seem to spend those two hours at night watching TV or playing Xbox. Not that I don’t enjoy those things, but ultimately I’m a much happier person when I’m doing more of the former and less of the latter.

My standing desk set up. You can tell I haven't done any cable management lately.

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 most of my working day at my desk, using my keyboard, mouse, and dual monitors. After hurting my back though, I needed a way to stay standing up for the majority of the working day to keep my back loose and pain free. After some looking online, I decided to just pick up a small, lightweight coffee table at Target for $24 and placed it on top of my existing desk. It just so happened that it had the perfect dimensions for me: everything fit on the tabletop and the height was perfect typing height. You can see what it looks like in the picture above. Nothing really special about it. I also picked up an anti-fatigue mat for $20 on Amazon after seeing Gina Trapani recommend it when she switched to a standing desk. It was well worth every penny, and then some. The difference it makes on my feet is huge.

Let me tell you: I was exhausted those first few days. It’s just standing right? How tiring can it be? As someone who stays in pretty good shape, I don’t think I’ve been that tired and sore since double sessions when I played football in high school. Ironman triathlete Ben Greenfield considers his standing desk to be a form of cross-training!

At first that sounds crazy, but when you think about it, it’s not so crazy. Let’s say I sleep an average of 8 hours a night. Previously I probably spent the majority of those remaining 16 hours sitting. Even with a workout in there and some walks and cooking and whatnot, I was probably spending…2, 3, maybe 4 hours standing max on an average day. Now that’s flip-flopped – I’m probably only sitting for a few hours a day and standing maybe 10 hours a day (on the days I work from home). It’s no wonder that it was such a shock to my body.

That said, I feel great. My body acclimated pretty quickly to standing so much. Just as if I was running a lot or biking a lot, I make sure to spend a lot of time stretching and using my foam roller. While it’s impossible to quantify, I feel more productive when I’m standing. I’m that guy who has to stand up and move around when he talks on the phone because I’m antsy/excited, so maybe this is just a natural extension of that. It’s also kind of fun to turn web development into an endurance activity. I feel like I’m using both my mind and my body to get my work done! Then when the day is over, it feels really good to sit down and relax mentally and physically.

I do try to take regular breaks to sit still (even when I’m standing I’m always moving, which is good because using a standing desk without movement can be bad too). Some days, especially if my legs are tired/sore from a workout, I would like to have the option of sitting to work while still using my full setup. For now, I just unplug my laptop and go sit at the kitchen table for a few hours. Eventually I’d like a GeekDesk – you can preset it to multiple heights and it uses a motor to adjust the desk to one of your presets. I could go from standing to sitting instantly

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 I’m not sure the Googlers realized.

At that moment, we were faced with three options:

1. Tell them thanks but no thanks since we didn’t have college coverage
2. Send them the graphics but realize that when people visited the site as part of a March Madness promotion that they’d promptly click away
3. Bust ass and get NCAA sports on the site before the tournament started

Of course, we chose #3. I emailed them back with the graphics and got to work.

We were planning on adding college sports soon, we just didn’t have a hard deadline. It was a large project and Detailed Image is in the middle of it’s busy season, so we previously figured it could wait. Now, with an opportunity like this, it seemed like a no brainer to make it happen. We’re going to be putting a lot of time and money into marketing LockerPulse at some point in the near future, but when presented with an opportunity to make some of that happen now, for free, we’d be crazy not to jump on it.

This morning we launched with coverage for 73 college teams. For the most part, they fit perfectly into the existing structure of the site. I didn’t have a ton of time to research sources, so I’ll have to spend a few nights in the next week populating the database with some more quality news sources for each school.

Just like with the Meguiar’s product launch last month, this was a great example of everyone working together on a tight deadline. Mike covered a day for me in the warehouse and got me all the graphics I needed quickly. My good friend Tim, who has guest blogged on here before and is a frequent commenter, has been managing our social media presence for both DI and LP and has become an even bigger part of our marketing in the past few months. He handled setting up associating Twitter and Feedburner accounts for all of the teams. Which freed me up to get the teams and sources in the database, do all of the development work, and test test test.

I’m not really sure what Google’s promotion efforts will result in (still waiting to find out more info). Hopefully it will bring a bunch of attention to LockerPulse during a really popular time for college sports, which will result in more passionate long term users. Regardless of what happens, just getting this done was a big accomplishment in and of itself.

In five days we probably accomplished what would normally take three weeks at our normal pace. Aside from eating and going to the gym, I was working every waking hour these past few days. It’s not something I want to do all the time, but every once in a while I like it. I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy the singular focus. I enjoy the feeling of seeing it all go from paper to reality in such a short time. And I enjoy the team work that’s involved in making it happen.

Here’s the list I put together on 8/20:

• Implement new warehouse pulling system
• Do LP Redesign w/Mike
• Add LP Sources, review all existing sources for quality
• Revamp DI Checkout process
• Create and launch DI Mobile Site
• Create DI Holiday shipping system
• Add Wish List/Save Cart feature to DI
• Improve DI/SL MySQL query optimization
• Complete cart Admin functionality

We also hired our first full-time employee during that time period too.

Now, some of that stuff I can’t/won’t/shouldn’t delve into exactly what it involved, but all of it was important and it all wrapped up nicely heading into the Holidays. When I get back, I can focus on 1) the extra day-to-day work involved in making things run smoothly during a busy season, and 2) finally devoting the majority of my “project time” to growing LockerPulse.

I realize that my posts have dropped off a bit. I’ll probably end up posting a bit more once I get back. The past few months I chose getting an extra hour or two of work done over writing a post. It’s always a balancing act – if business and/or my personal life are super busy, the first thing that I’ll trim back on is the blog posts.

At the end of any given day, I always feel better when I put in a hard days work. It’s always very satisfying to set aggressive goals and then nail all of them.

I’m not sure whether or not I’ll post when I’m gone. I’ll definitely be back in early November when the fun begins!

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 bundled with your OS.

Our analytics show this too – our sites tend to mimic the browser reports on w3Schools – Firefox is our users the primary browser, IE8 is #2 and losing market share fast to Chrome, IE6 and IE7 are (thankfully) dying off, and of course there has been a noticeable influx of mobile browsers.  I remember a time not that long ago when it was IE6 on Windows XP and then everyone else. Certainly not the case any more!

I’ve personally settled into a nice little routine for my browsers. For testing purposes, I’ve got the latest of everything from IE9 Platform Preview right down to Opera. But for everyday use, I use the following:

• Firefox – all work and all web development.  It’s all about the add-ons, particularly Firebug (I have a full list of the add-ons that I use in my Web Design & Development for Business essay, updated today to add a few new ones). Until something comes close to Firebug and the like – and there are a lot of ok products in the other browsers – I’m sticking with Firefox as my main development browser.  I can’t even comprehend how many hours of debugging Firebug has saved me.
• Chrome – all of my personal browsing.  I have it open up with my most used tabs – LockerPulse, Twitter, Google Reader, and my fantasy football page.  It’s just so fast.  I love the minimalist interface. I love the way it auto-updates.  I love the way it uses Webkit and supports the latest and greatest (side note: wouldn’t the internet be a better place if every browser just used Webkit as their rendering engine? Would save us developers so much time, and saved time = better products)
• Internet Explorer – banking sites. Some just don’t work correctly (or at all) in the other browsers.  Kind of lame.  I often wonder what people on Mac or Linux machines do when this happens…

I find that by having completely separate work and personal browsers I’m better able to compartmentalize my online life. When I’m working, Chrome is only open if I need to test something. Similarly, when I’m not working I only open Firefox is I need to jot down a quick work-related note in my task list or a Google Doc. It’s also nice to always be logged in to my personal Google account on Chrome (the one I use for Google Reader and to sync with my Android phone) while our business one (for Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, etc) and our Google Apps one (Gmail, Docs, Sites, etc) are always signed in on Firefox.

What about you – what is your browser of choice and why?  Are you like me in that you use multiple browsers on a daily basis?  If you’re a developer, is there something you like better than Firefox? If you’re not a developer, do you download and try different browsers or do you just stick with what you’ve got?

Author of Never Check Email in the Morning Julie Morgenstern suggests waiting for one hour before you open up your email inbox in the morning. Accomplishing something out of the gate sets the tone for the rest of your day, Morgenstern says, and once you’ve launched your email client, you’re “open for business” and paying attention to incoming requests.

In theory it sounds great. But I’m going to play contrarian to that viewpoint. Working under the assumption that you don’t literally roll out of bed and check your email (I don’t particularly think that’s healthy, I like to hit the gym up first thing in the morning), and working under the assumption that you have good email habits like I’ve outlined in prior posts (filtering non important emails, only checking email at set intervals, keeping your inbox empty, etc), then I think checking email is the absolute smartest thing to do when you first sit down to work in the morning.

Here’s why. As a business owner (or, really anyone with an important job) you’re constantly running into little “emergencies”. It seems crazy to think that whatever little productive task you’re accomplishing at the beginning of the day is more important than putting out a fire. If our server is down, I get a text message alert and I’m on it no matter what time of day. Otherwise, anything important I get notified via email. I auto-filter out the unimportant stuff (like newsletters and notifications of sales that come through DI) so that my inbox generally consists of customer service questions, email alerts of odd things that happen on our sites, emails from my partners, and stuff related to my blog. The blog stuff can wait, and usually does. The rest of it is far more important than anything else I would have been working on.

On any given day my project work typically involves working on programming a feature for DI or LP, or working on some marketing initiative related to one or the other. A routine customer service question for DI might involve someone having trouble checking out or applying a coupon code. An email alert might involve someone who hit refresh during checkout and got charged twice. My partners might have noticed a bug on one of the sites. Which seems more important to you? Taking care of your customers is and always will be more important than establishing positive momentum on my work day. For me, I’m more stressed out working on programming something when I know there could be stuff sitting in my inbox that is holding up someone from getting their order shipped out today. It doesn’t make a difference if the new feature is delayed by a few hours or a few days even, but it does matter if there’s a customer waiting on a reply or something is seriously wrong with one of our sites.

Essentially, for me it boils down to this. Emergencies always supersede project work. And if you are trying to provide great customer service, that too should also supersede project work.

I feel like this translates well to other jobs too. No matter what type of work you do, there’s always unforeseen things that should immediately jump to the top of your priority list. If you have clients that have a major issue with their site, you’re better off all around just knowing about it right away and fixing it ASAP. They’ll be happier and you’ll be happier. And if it isn’t a major issue, you’ll feel better emailing them an ETA on the fix, and they’ll feel better by hearing from you.

Now of course, if you took this too far you’d have your inbox open all day long and constantly be interrupted. Which is why I prefaced this by saying that if you’re like me (you have projects and customer service, both of which are important) you’ve got to be relatively strict with when you have your inbox open and when you don’t. The big difference with the morning is that it’s likely been 12+ hours since your last email check. Adding an extra hour, especially when you have shipping windows like us, doesn’t make sense. Not checking email again until noon or 4 PM isn’t a big deal because those people are waiting a few hours at most. I’ve added a quick email check to my day around 1 PM because I know that’s the latest I can contact someone in the warehouse and get something adjusted before FedEx arrives around 2:30. I tend to check around 8:30 AM, 1 PM, and 5:30 PM, and it works out great – prompt replies for customers, especially during business hours, and still plenty of time with my inbox closed so I can get stuff done.

Anyway, in theory the idea of waiting to check your email might make sense, but in practice it just doesn’t work for me.

Name aside, this Café Grumpy is not a cafe. It is, unmistakably, a coffee bar.

“I don’t think I’d ever do a bigger space with tables and chairs again,” Ms. Bell said. “I appreciate the idea of when you go someplace and it feels like a home away from home, but I don’t think it should be a home office away from home.”

Hers is one of a growing number of coffee bars that have opened recently around the country, particularly in New York. Instead of idling at a chair, customers at these establishments stand or perch on a stool to down a cappuccino or an iced coffee at the counter. By doing away with the comfy seats, roomy tables and working outlets that many customers now seem to believe are included in the price of a macchiato, the new coffee bars challenge the archetypal American cafe.

And:

Earlier this summer, the Bluebird Coffee Shop in the East Village replaced half its tables and most of the chairs with two counters and a few stools.

“A coffee shop should be a place to meet your friends and hold conversations and cultivate ideas instead of — I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, so I have to be careful — instead of sticking your head in a laptop,” said Mark Connell (who owns Bluebird with his wife, Jessica), before adding that computers are always welcome at the few remaining LP-size tables.

I’ve noticed this trend myself – about a year ago one of my favorite local coffee shops, Uncommon Grounds, (that also has great salads and sandwiches), decided to ditch wi-fi during lunch hours after the owner noticed that there weren’t enough tables available for patrons coming in for lunch. As much as I love Uncommon Grounds, I haven’t been back there since because I don’t feel completely welcome walking in and working for a few hours, even if it’s not during lunch and I spend $10 or $15 on food and drink.

Interestingly enough, Starbucks is going in the opposite direction. They’re now offering free wi-fi all day long in hopes of encouraging people to sit there all day and buy lots of food and drink.

I’m not sure where I come out on this. On one side, I completely understand where the business owners are coming from and respect their right to mold and shape their business however they want. However, as more and more people work remotely, there’s also clearly a need for somewhere for people to go where they can work, hold small meetings, and get something to drink/eat. I think the problems discussed in the article all come down to expectations – Starbucks has led us to expect that every coffee shop be a secondary office, and that’s not fair. Still, those of us who don’t work from an office sometimes need somewhere other than home to work.

Coffee shops have played a big role in my life the past few years. I can’t even begin to tabulate how much of our productive work as a company has been done while at a coffee shop, particularly our collaborative projects and our meetings. I definitely work remotely less now, but that’s because I’ve got a nice big quiet office in my apartment. When I lived with my parents after I left my job, or at my next apartment where I only had a small bedroom, that wasn’t the case. I probably would have gone insane if I didn’t have coffee shops to escape to and throw my headphones on and zone in to my work. Obviously I’m not alone when it comes to this. There are all sorts of students and professionals who get their best work done remotely. I’d hate to see that taken away from them, especially those in difficult living situations that really rely on the escape to be productive.

With that said, it seems to me like there’s a huge opportunity here. As much as I love Starbucks, they’re all kind of small and over-crowded and there aren’t many outlets available. There needs to be something that’s a blend between co-working spaces, the coffee shop, and the library. My partners and I have discussed over and over again how big of an opportunity this could be, and with the trend of coffee shops going the way it seems to be going, and the ever-increasing number of people telecommuting, the opportunity is just getting bigger.

One study cited in the article that really caught my eye was The Whitehall Study. The study, performed by professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, Michael Marmot, has tracked 28,000+ British civil servants of various positions in the hierarchical government structure. His findings are particularly interesting, and go a long way in explaining why the stresses of some jobs, like those faced by a small business owner or a CEO who work long hours, don’t appear to have adverse health effects of anywhere near the same magnitude of those working more menial jobs. In a nutshell, it all boils down to doing work that you find purposeful, that you have a vested interest in. In other words, work that you can control.

At the bottom [of the hierarchy] are messengers, porters, and security guards. Just above them are the clerical officers, followed by staff scientists and other professionals. This last group implements the policies dictated by powerful administrators who run the governmental agencies. Marmot wanted to investigate how differences in status “in people who are neither very poor nor very rich” might lead to measurable differences in health.

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

What, then, determines our health? Why were people in the lower ranks of Whitehall dying at a younger age? Marmot was forced to conclude that the significant majority of health variation is caused by psychosocial factors, most notably stress. People of lower status in the Whitehall study experienced more negative stress, and this stress was deadly. (To take but one data point: Fully two-thirds of an individual’s risk of stroke was attributable to the person’s socioeconomic status.) In fact, we’re so sensitive to the effects of status that getting promoted from the lowest level in the British civil service reduced the probability of heart disease by up to 13 percentage points. Climbing the social ladder makes us live longer.

However, the Whitehall results aren’t a straightforward analysis of stress, at least not as it’s usually defined. After all, people in leadership positions often describe their jobs as extremely stressful. They work longer hours and have more responsibilities than those at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Consider the self-report of Nigel, a high-status administrator: “There were 2,000 people, and I was responsible for all the personnel aspects, contracts, and all the common services … It had every sort of challenge that you could ever wish to meet. A very active job and a lot of stress, but a very enjoyable job, and you got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from doing a good job.”

Notice the reference to stress; undoubtedly Nigel thought of himself as a person under lots of pressure. In contrast, here’s the self-report of Marjorie, a lowly typist: “I went to the typing pool and sat there typing documents. Which was absolutely soul-destroying … The fact that we could eat sweets and smoke was absolute heaven, but we were not allowed to talk.”

The recurring theme in the self-reports of people like Marjorie isn’t the sheer amount of stress – it’s the total absence of control. Researchers call it the “demand-control” model of stress, in which the damage caused by chronic stress depends not just on the demands of the job but on the extent to which we can control our response to those demands. “The man or woman with all the emails, the city lawyer who works through the night has high demands,” Marmot writes. “But if he or she has a high degree of control over work, it is less stressful and will have less impact on health.” (This helps explain why the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease.) The Whitehall data backs up this model of workplace stress: While a relentlessly intense job like a senior executive position leads to a slightly increased risk of heart disease and death, a job with no control is significantly more dangerous.

The same effect applies even to the rich and famous. A few years ago, Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, led a study of Academy Award-winning actors. His hypothesis was that having an Oscar gave people more control over their stressful careers. Instead of being forced to accept bad roles or work on mediocre movies just for the money, these stars could pick and choose their parts. This creative control, in turn, would lead to improved health outcomes. Redelmeier compared the award winners to two groups: (1) actors who had appeared in the same film as a nominated actor and didn’t get a nomination and (2) actors who had been nominated for an Academy Award but never won. The results were clear: People with Oscars lived, on average, four years longer than their less-successful peers, which represented a 28 percent reduction in death rate. As Redelmeier notes, this longevity boost is roughly equal to the effect that would come from “curing all cancers in all people for all time.”

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list – it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

One thing I’ve come to realize lately is that the vast majority of people who constantly say they’re too busy, really just suck at time management. “I’m too busy to cook” or “I’m too busy to exercise” or “I’m too busy to keep in touch with my friends” and on and on. It’s total BS. None of those things take very much time and effort at all. In particular, I remember seeing this a lot in the corporate world. Guys that would work 6 AM – 6 PM and somehow take pride in not taking a lunch, never going to the gym, and missing their kids Little League games…yet spent half of the work day conversing at the water cooler, managing their fantasy football teams, boning around on YouTube, texting every 30 seconds, and sending chain emails. Then the next day they’d know every single thing about last night’s episode of Lost or Survivor or 24.

It blew my mind. Every day we’re faced with a multitude of choices on how to spend our time. In reality, those guys could have worked 8 AM – 4 PM and taken an hour-long lunch and two 30 minute breaks with the same productive output. They just have to cut out the 2 hour conversations at the water cooler. And the 1 hour spent on ESPN.com. And quit whining and complaining about how “busy” they are.

In reality, they were trading potential time doing things they want with their friends, wife, and kids for time spent complaining, procrastinating, and staring at the TV.