Twenty Five.

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Holy hell. Twenty five. This is my 10th annual birthday post. TEN.

That seems to be the big realization of my life lately: things aren’t being counted so much in years as in decades. My best friend and I have been friends for TWO decades now. I started high school a decade ago, which is when I met one of my other closest friends. Everything is in decades. 2.5 of them so far.

I was just reading my 24th birthday post as a point of reference and it’s really crazy to think back on how much has changed since I wrote it.

For starters, I moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. I left Flickr behind for Etsy. It was a really tough decision but one I am still SO happy I made. I LOVE living back on the east coast. It’s brought me closer to all of my friends and family and I’m just enjoying life so much more here. It’s odd because I never even considered New York as a place to move after college. It was San Francisco all the way. I think living there for those 18 months really pointed out to me how much of a New Yorker I really am (…despite growing up in NJ).
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Waiting for Irene

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It’s weird how most weekends I’m THRILLED to get to stay in all day and watch movies or mess around online, but now that I don’t have a choice but to stay in and wait out the storm, being inside is driving me nuts! When the rain let up for a bit this afternoon I went for a walk around the ‘hood. I haven’t used my dSLR since the trip to Maine so it was good to dust it off again.

For the last few days I’ve really been missing the whole buzz of working in a newsroom and being able to sort of channel my energy around events like this into something productive. I’ve had all sorts of radars, streams, feeds, etc. running on my laptop non-stop, mostly because I’m a bit of a weather nerd (have I mentioned my love of snow and storms before?), but also because I miss the thrill of reporting that news. Ah the good ole days of being at The Cornell Daily Sun. But then I remember that most days in a newsroom are pretty standard and events like this are more the exception than the rule. Maybe when I retire I’ll become a freelance photojournalist.

In the meantime, here are some of my shots from roaming around Park Slope this afternoon:
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An Experiment

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Just over a month ago now I wrote about returning from a vacation that served as a seriously-needed internet detox. It was exactly what I needed. As time has gone by (and it’s only been just over a month!), I find myself slowly slipping back into my old ways. Spending way too many needless hours sitting in front of the computer or the TV, reading fewer books, spending less time outside. Not QUITE right back where I started, but pretty close to it. And I’m not happy about it.
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light bulb terrarium

Aside

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I think living in Brooklyn is slowly turning me into a hipster because I’ve been coveting a light bulb terrarium for some time now. Perhaps a weekend project is in my future.

light bulb terrarium on Etsy

Internet Reset

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our dock

Over 4th of July weekend, my friend Jimelle and I took off on a bit of an adventure. Or maybe it was more of anti-adventure. We hopped in her car and drove 10 hours up to the tippy top of Maine on a mission: to detox our internet/phone addictions. A real vacation.

We had 3 criteria for our vacation and set 2 rules for once we got there:

  • It had to be a cabin
  • It had to be on a lake
  • It had to be in Maine (we still don’t know how we ended up making Maine a requirement, but it worked out!)
  • No computers, phones, or any electronic devices that would connect us to the outside world
  • Hide any forms of time-keeping (clocks, watches, iPad clocks, etc)

For anyone who knows me, the idea of going for any period of time without my phone within arm’s reach and without any sort of internet connection is basically laughable. But I was determined. I knew I needed a bit of a detox. And detox I did.
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Guest Blog on Women 2.0

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The following is an article of mine that was posted on Women 2.0, a blog/community that encourages female entrepreneurs. It’s a bit of a redux of my Relinquishing Stubbornness post, but nevertheless I want to cross-post it here for posterity. You can read the post in its original context at women2.org.

I’m about 18 months into the journey of taking Accompl.sh (formerly 101in365) from a little weekend project to automate my own annual goal tracking to a living, breathing web application.

Taking the “long way” of being a solo founder, I found working on Accompl.sh as a side project has been a crash course in time management, community building, product development, design, coding, you name it. But the most difficult part of all has been making the big decisions about the direction of the project itself.

Without a co-founder to help rationalize my own thoughts about the future of the product, I was stuck in a bit of a quandary — Do I stay on the path I originally set out on, potentially limiting the growth of the site, but staying true to my original design? Or should I compromise a bit and open the doors for even more people to use the tool that I built and believe in? The answer may seem obvious, but when you’re up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on your pet project in virtual isolation for over a year, it’s not as clear.

Decisions, decisions. Over the last few weeks I’ve made a few major decisions about the future of Accompl.sh — decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that I finally took the leap and acted on. I’ll share a bit of the process with you all in hopes that it’ll help you avoid the traps that I fell into.
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relinquishing stubbornness

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I’ve been working on 101in365 accompl.sh for about 18 months now and it’s been an endless crash course in time management, building a community, product development, design, coding, you name it. My feelings about it have run the gamut from “yay! cool! people are using something I built!” to “holy crap! people are USING this thing! I really can’t screw it up now!” to “hey this is just a side project and it’s MINE so why can’t I just do whatever the heck I want?” to “But the PEOPLE! They have demands!”

It’s been a constant struggle for me – determining that line between “this is mine” and “actually it’s not MINE anymore.” I had a very specific vision for the site when I first pieced it together over a holiday weekend, but at the time I was really just building it for myself. For my very specific use case. And as a Product Manager I know better than anyone that that’s just NOT the way to build things to be used by the People of the Internets.
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workflow

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I’ve wanted to do a quick write-up of the apps I use and the various bits of my workflow that some people find intriguing, but since I’ve been a total slacker in the writing department lately, I’ll let this interview I did with the Evernote Blog fill in in the meantime! Go on, give it a read!

unadventure

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(admittedly, the following is totally a white whine. this being my personal blog and all I’m ok with that. but you’ve been warned)

I’ve been struggling with an annoying sense of unrest lately. I feel like I’m stuck for some reason. I’ve been dying to travel, but keep coming up with a million and one excuses not to. Some are more legitimate than others, but for the most part they’re just excuses.

The other day I was sitting on my couch just kind of staring and trying to suss out why I’ve been so out of sorts lately. I was absentmindedly glancing at the photos I have hanging on the wall over the couch – mostly pictures from my senior year of college and a few months after – and it hit me. I AM stuck. Every one of those photos was taken in a 6-8 month span of time that I would very easily call the best time of my life thus far. So I dug into that…

That period of my life was defined by one thing: growth. I traveled, I made friends, I learned a LOT. I took risks. I did things that weren’t necessarily characteristic (like paragliding in the Swiss Alps) but that pushed the limits of what I knew and caused me to grow and have new experiences that have informed who I am now.

I’d even argue that this was true for the time I lived in SF. Mostly because I had friends who introduced me to whole new worlds of things (even things as simple as good vs. bad beer (I can thank Tilly for that one)).

Now that I’m back East, everything has been about reacquainting myself with my comfort zone – I grew up around here. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being back here. In fact I haven’t been this happy in a long time, but on the flip side of that I haven’t felt this restless in just as long.

I guess it comes down to that: I need adventure. I need to stop making excuses and start taking risks again. I need to not over-analyze everything (see above) and just start DOING things. I need to remember that packing up and going somewhere for the weekend is as simple as that: throw some stuff in a backpack and go. And I also have to remember that I had a perfectly amazing time traveling by myself for 6 weeks, so relying on other people for travel plans isn’t an excuse either. I’m too settled and I’m too young to be this settled. Time to change that.

So what’s my first adventure? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m open to suggestions. I’ve been religiously following airfare deals lately so maybe I’ll go somewhere that way. Or maybe I’ll just rent a car and drive. Who knows. But I have to make this happen before I drive myself nuts.