Nostradoofus

The laptop.  That indispensable ergonomic train wreck.  

The heaviest laptop users, like pro football players, suffer chonic pain before the age of 30.  Unlike pro football players, they are usually not paid millions.  How to salve the agony?  One solution is the inelegantly named “Laptop in a Drawer.”

22" Samsung monitor with extra high stand, wireless keyboard/mouse, Aeron chair (craigslist, $300), 30x60 cherry desk (free from previous tenant). Laptop is in the desk drawer, lid closed but turned on, driving the whole setup.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME

1. Docking stations:  cumbersome, unwieldy, expensive, ugly, and tied to one laptop brand.
2. Two computers:  cost more money than one, yet make you less efficient.

WHAT HAS WORKED FOR ME SINCE 2006

1. Laptop in desk drawer, turned on, lid closed.
2. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on desk.
3. Large ergonomic monitor wired through desk to laptop in drawer.

The result is cheap (if bought used), yet optimizes for function, aesthetics and ergonomics simultaneously.  Bring the laptop into the office each day like a wallet (please don’t say purse).  Set it in the drawer, lid closed, connect power and monitor, tap the wireless keyboard, laptop wakes up, and you’re on.  Takes 10 seconds, and gives you all the advantages of both laptops and desktops.

At the end of the day, just pick up the laptop and go.  It’s now charged and backed up (if you use Time Capsule or similar), so you can work elsewhere, yet face zero risk of data loss from theft or damage.  Most importantly, these benefits cost you zero time.

More photos of my setup.

13" MacBook Core 2 Duo in desk drawer. Wakes when in range of paired Bluetooth keyboard. Just start typing. At the end of the day, just grab and go.

View out the window from Aeron chair.

Monitor cables threaded through desktop. So that's what those little inserts are for.

I don’t claim this will work for everyone.  For example, I have no idea if Windows supports the auto-wake part of this, as Mac does.  What I can say is this is cheap — especially if you value your time — and appears to solve all tradeoffs of high-intensity laptop use, with no compromises.

Cooling issue:  keep the drawer open a few inches, so you don’t cook your laptop.  I have run this way for 2.5 years with no breakdowns, so this may be excessive caution, but in an area that costs me nothing.

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A key function of a head of state is to articulate national goals, reflecting what the populace already wants, but in a focused, actionable way.

Citizens follow that lead. Deng Xiaoping’s famous quote, “To get rich is glorious,” may be apocryphally attributed, but undoubtedly refocused China on capitalism, with results that speak for themselves.

Americans want to advance economically, but don’t know how.  The government is not helping. Unknown to nearly all Americans, there is a vanishingly simple formula:  maximize your net income per work hour.

What?  you may say.  It is not that simple.  What about controlling spending?  Education?  Savings and investment?  Retirement and vacations?  Yes, those matter, but all are contained within the above formula, if you define net income as any business does:  revenue minus expenses.

Controlling spending:  if you earn $100k this year and spend it all, your net income is zero.  To increase net income quickly, spend less.

Saving:  identical to controlling spending.  If you spend 20% less than you make, you have saved 20% of income.  

Investment:  identical to saving.  Bank accounts are an investment, but there are many other, better investments.  More importantly, investment income doesn’t consume your time:  conservative investments yield very high income per work hour.  Thus, spending less than you earn may not quickly increase your total gross income, but the increase per marginal work hour is incredibly high.

Education:  identical to investment.  It is a way of spending time or money to increase net income per work hour.

Retirement and vacations:  the fewer hours you work for a given income, the higher your income per work hour.  Thus, vacations and retirement go hand in hand with maximizing net income per work hour.  Again, all contained within the simple definition above.

In short, everything comes down to net income per work hour.  Economists would call this a measure of productivity.

The ultimate economically empowering statement from an American president would be “To increase productivity is glorious.”

The hardest part of going paperless is getting everyone to stop mailing you stuff.  Even when you tell American Express Merchant Services that you want everything by email, they still send a paper annual report.  There are still a few service providers that don’t even offer e-billing.  And you still have to fax signed contracts, right?

Wrong.

Take a snapshot of a document, upload it to Evernote.  They store it forever, for cheap, and they scan images for text, which you can then search from your computer or iPhone.

This is the end of physical files.  After 3 months of use, I have found Evernote’s text recognition to be almost perfect.  I type in “American Express,” it finds all the related images I’ve uploaded, and I can look at images of original documents.

Contracts?  Counterparties email them to me, I print, sign, photograph, and email back.  Evernote keeps a permanent searchable archive of the original signed document.  Again, no physical files.

At first, I used a Canon Digital Elph camera to capture the documents.  Would have preferred to use the camera on my iPhone — Evernote offers iPhone software — but the iPhone cam cannot focus closer than 3 feet or so, so it seemed useless.

Until today.  I put ordinary reading glasses in front of the iPhone camera.  Physics is physics:  reading glasses correct farsighted cameras just as well as farsighted humans.  I tried it, and it worked beyond expectations.  Now it’s a one-step process:  photograph a document with iPhone, and it’s stored and searchable at Evernote, forever.  Done.

Of course, it is cumbersome and un-hip to hold grandpa’s reading glasses in front of my phone.  Turns out that accessories maker Griffin has solved this problem with the Clarifi — an iPhone shell with built-in macro lens.

This, together with more obvious things like e-billing and Skype, permit true total business mobility.  For all you know, I’m writing this from Barcelona…

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