How to be an Unhappy Employee

I minimized my keyboard this time. I had a big Matias TactilePro keyboard (which I loved BTW) but I couldn’t fit the mouse and the keyboard in the keyboard drawer built in to my desk. I also wanted bluetooth to eliminate one more cable. Thanks to Apple I got both. Check out the difference between the size of the keyboards. I’m very happy for now, but now I need to get used to the new feel of these key.

Well, I finally arrived at the party. Maybe a little bit late, but fashionably. I finally started reading Zen Habits, specifically for Wednesday’s simplicity day. I’m not sure what turned me on to the Wednesday nugget, but I went back and read all of the simplicity posts and some of the books and other resources recommended, and I was inspired.

Despite the tremendous workload I was facing for the launch of PeerClip, my office had become a cluttered nightmare and it was hard to stay focused on the task at hand. So I immediately got to work on simplifying it. The result…amazing. I gutted the office and made piles of stuff I needed, stuff I could donate or trash, and stuff that needed to be stored. I kept only a few minimalist decorations everything non-essential went away. I have tidied up the cords since these pictures, but here’s the result:

My favorite touch is the picture of my daughter at the beach.

After this room went so well, we went ahead and tackled the pantry in the kitchen. Again it’s amazing. The big surprise is how much space you really have when you don’t let clutter cloud your view.

For the few of you who stick with this blog through the extended droughts, thanks. The past months have been consumed by work on a new product that we built for ConnectivHealth called PeerClip. Peerclip is a social bookmarking platform for doctors and other licensed clinicians.

It’s pretty sweet actually, and we have been using it internally for our own personal bookmarks. It has a recommendation engine that searches the other bookmarks in the system to find the stuff that is of most interest to me. And there’s a head’s-up display that works on any website that will recommend related pages to the page I’m viewing to help me find my way around the interweb. I can also comment and rate any page from the HUD. I discover new things everyday. It’s like stumbleupon, delicious, and digg combined and on steroids (apparently there is no substance abuse policy).

OK, enough product pitch, I know. Regardless of how awesome the product is, it was still a chore to finish on time. We had a very hard deadline, because ConnectivHealth spent a ton of money to market it at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco on September 20th. We worked on it right up until the first demo of the day. It was remarkable timing. The conference was pretty nice, a little too product-demo heavy for me, but it was the first one so I’m sure they’ll find a better balance for future ones.

As for the launch it went well, but we now have a laundry list of requested features to add. Which is good, I guess, because it will give all of us on the product development team some job security :).

So that’s where I’ve been, and (now for the apologies) I’m sorry to those of you who suffer from the blog/rss addiction (you know, the one where you feel compelled to check the same blog over and over again even though the blogger is a total slacker that never updates his blog).