Mike Arnesen

Optimize the Planet!

Nerd Life

Silent Retreat

Nerd Life

Silent meditation retreats have appealed to me for years (I’ve only ever been on one, but it was great), but this week I went on a different type of silent retreat.

After working exclusively from home for the two years, I’ve definitely noticed that I get sick a lot less. I get to avoid other humans and their germs and I’m not subjected to being crammed into an office each day and just praying that Patient 0 isn’t hidden somewhere waiting to infect me. Even so, I’m by no means immune to sickness. I still have to go outside of the house on occasion. [Read more…] about Silent Retreat

Switching to Dvorak, Cold Tofurky

Nerd Life

On October 23rd, I ditched typing the QWERTY layout for Dvorak. Cold tofurky.

dvorak-keyboard

If “Dvorak simplified keyboard” doesn’t ring a bell, you can read all about it on dvorak-keyboard.com. I’m not going to get into a history lesson here (at least not in this post) and I won’t go that deep into the reasons why I switched.

The short version is that I found sufficient evidence to suggest that switching to Dvorak would be a significant optimization to how I work. I dove into it and never looked back. [Read more…] about Switching to Dvorak, Cold Tofurky

On Inbox Zero

Nerd Life

Inbox Zero is that special time of day when I can rest in the knowledge that I’ve taken care of everything critical and I can focus on one of two things.

  1. What’s really important to my business – the 20% of effort that creates 80% of the results.
  2. What makes me happy outside of “work”.

On a good day, I’ll achieve Inbox Zero twice. Yet, somedays, I won’t hit it at all.

My happy place
My happy place

There are plenty of schools of thought on Inbox Zero and I’m by no means an IB purist. For me, it’s not about answering every email; it’s about acting on every email. [Read more…] about On Inbox Zero

Challenging Myself: Blogging Every Week

Nerd Life

The title says it all. I’m challenging myself to blog at least once a week, every week. Until when? I don’t know. Maybe FOREVER!

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliedwards/
Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliedwards/

I’ve struggled with being a perfectionist for my whole professional career and my blogging has absolutely been handicapped by that. It takes me an inordinate amount of time before a blog post is good enough, has been reviewed enough times, has been researched or validated enough, or is original enough. By holding myself accountable for writing something on here each week, I hope to start working through some of that obsession.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts last week (This Week In Startups) and famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson was talking about why he values blogging daily (yeah, not weekly, daily). He said that he’s found it super valuable because it forces him to put his thoughts into a coherent format.

I can see a lot of value in that personally. My mind is typically all over the place and I have hundreds of random, strange, useful, useless, innovative, derivative ideas every day. But when it’s in my head, I don’t really need to flesh the idea out or make it coherent. I think this will be a great exercise for that. Putting my thoughts down on paper, as it were, might help me get more value out of them.

Also, did you know the term “Freemium” originated from an random question that ended up as a blog post and a commenter suggested the term “Freemium” to describe a business that had a basic free model but then paid features on top of that? Blogging your ideas allows you to get feedback and help from other brains, too!

I’m stoked about this.