Last summer I had a naughty habit to beat office doldrums… Every day around 1pm, I threw my laptop into my purse, grabbed my coffee mug, and snuck out of the building. Two brisk blocks north there’s a stone bench under a birch tree. The bench is just close enough to the Daley Plaza foundation that you can […]

Simple steps to refresh your motivation and succeed in your goals for the next 90-days.

Weekly planning: How it works and how to master it The clock strikes midnight. You hit send on one final e-mail for the day. Bleary-eyed you set your alarm for 5:00 a.m., already anxious about tomorrow’s deadline. There must be a better way to plan the work day. Most office working Americans describe the workday […]

I don’t want tips for creating new habits, I’d rather have everything snap perfectly into place. Everything organized. Everything works like clock work. My desk is clean. Work is wrapped-up exactly on-time. My body becomes accustomed to working out on schedule – even looking forward to a good sweat session. The trouble is, a consistent routine crumbles […]

Finish the phrase ‘spring’ and you just might be thinking about chickens or flowers (or snow if you live in Chicago!). But earlier today when I called my grandmother, we realized we were both thinking about the same thing: spring cleaning. Either way, there’s something soothing about the quiet, repetitive handiwork of cleaning. The smooth, […]

Six more weeks in quarantine. I’m not going to get through this. The first weekend of Shelter-in-Place felt like a deep, two-day sigh of relief. The normal rhythm of urgency died down to a quiet pulse, and it hit me: I finally have the bandwidth to finish sewing curtains for the living room. I started […]

Gleaming bathroom tile, spotless kitchen counter, shining wood floors, and no stray socks to be found… This was the fruit of working remotely. Frustratingly little work work, as in the work that actually paid for groceries. Keeping track of the day in my head, I had thought that my hours logging into my home office […]

A lamp outside of the towering iron window casts an eerie glow on the white and black checkered marble floor. The balls of my feet tread slowly across the slick tile, that even the slightest hint of a muffled echo wouldn’t disturb the outstretched shadows. Gradually my pupils adjust to the dim half-light. Blocks of […]

Simple actions and shifts in your daily work routine to help you manage energy on long wok days. A few months ago, the spring in my morning routine starting to fall away. Every day I woke-up more sluggish than the day before. Not just sleepy – bone tired. It wasn’t long until every morning I […]