I’ve been up to the wee hours designing, coding, and writing. The result? Two weeks of terrible, awful sleep. So if you’re in the same boat, this week’s roundup for you. Here’s 10 tips to help you sleep like a baby:

1. Take a power a nap

“So what makes a power nap effective? Think of it as an investment with the greatest return in the least amount of time, a kind of super-efficient sleep that fits nicely in a high-pressure schedule: say, between business meetings or in the minutes before a game.”
Getting The Perfect Nap

2. Mama was right: Drink warm milk

“If your mother used to give you a cup of warm milk before sending you off to bed, she had the right idea. Dairy foods are a good source of tryptophan, an amino acid that your body converts to melatonin and serotonin ” both of which are thought to induce sleep.”
Foods that help you sleep

3. Say no to drugs

“Certain medications can interfere with normal sleep patterns. Following is a list of drugs that can cause insomnia.”
If You Are Having Trouble Sleeping–¦

4. Keep the socks on

“Instead of counting sheep, the next time you have trouble sleeping, try putting socks on your feet. A researcher says people with chronically cold feet might drift off faster if they warm their feet with socks or a hot water bottle.”
Warm socks may help some people fall asleep

5. Become an early riser

“It’s hard to become an early riser using the wrong strategy. But with the right strategy, it’s relatively easy.”
How to become an early riser

6. Get better bedding

“We tested a truckload of mattresses, sheets, blankets, and pillows to identify the ultimate combination for catching serious shut-eye. And for those occasional stare-at-the-ceiling emergencies, we also picked the best over-the-counter sleep supplement and prescription sleeping pill.”
Sleep Better Tonight

7. Ditch your alarm clock

“Fingernails screeching down a blackboard, the shrill tones of the Emergency Alert System: few things are as obnoxious as an alarm clock. Human beings have survived for most of our history without these confounded noisemakers”why would you need one now?”
How to Wake Up without an Alarm Clock

8. Makeover your bedroom

“It seems the bedroom is often neglected in lieu of updating more “public” areas of the home. However, the bedroom environment has a major impact on the quality and quantity of sleep. Improving it should be a top priority.”
Bedroom Makover

9. Work out regularly

“Findings from a recent Stanford University Medical School study may come as no surprise: older and middle-age people reported sleeping better when they added regular exercise to their routine. After 16 weeks in a moderate intensity exercise program, subjects were able to fall asleep about 15 minutes earlier and sleep about 45 minutes longer at night.”
Exercise Improves Sleep

10. Wear an eye bra

This super-advanced eye mask blocks out all light to help you sleep in any environment. But it looks like a bra for your eye.
Lights Out Sleep Mask via Lifehacker

How do you get a good night’s sleep? Please share your tips in the comments.

Photo by tamakisono

I was just browsing iTunes for poignant Morrissey covers when I discovered nearly a thousand free language courses on iTunes. 926 courses to be exact. Holy Moleskine, Batman!

The extensive library of courses span over 35 languages, from Arabic to Yiddish. Each course comes as a convenient podcast which you can subscribe and put on your iPod or iPhone.

To get the entire list of language learning podcasts, hit the browse button on the lower-right corner of your iTunes window—it’s the icon that looks like an eye. Then browse to the Podcasts/Education/Language Courses directory.

Or you can simply do a search for the language you’re interested in.

Here’s a sample list of available languages (with links to iTunes):

• Arabic
• Bible Greek
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Cantonese
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Esperanto
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hawaiian
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Lakota
• Lithuanian
• Luxembourgish
• Mandarin
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Shanghainese
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Tagalog
• Thai
• Uyghur
• Uzbek
• Vietnamese
• Welsh
• Yiddish

Don’t forget to check out some of the more unusual podcasts such as:

• Sexy Spanish
• Extreme Chinese for Kids
• Love Lingo
• ESL and Archie Comics

I’ve been teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese with Rosetta Stone, so having access to a free supplemental iTunes podcast is nice. Oh, and emphasis on the free, because I’m broke after buying that big yellow box.

If you liked this post, please share it on del.icio.us. Thank you.

What language have you been itching to learn?

Can’t get enough lifehacks? Head on over Alltop, a new site by Guy Kawasaki and friends. The Popurls-inspired site brings you the latest stories from popular lifehacks sites such as 43 Folders, Lifehacker, and Zen Habits. Oh, and LifeClever too ;-)

You’ll also find pages for a wide range of other topics including design, mac, food, politics, and even “cute”. Each page presents stories in a simple side-by-side arrangement, so you can see the stories at-a-glance.

Check out Alltop Lifehacks and Alltop’s main page for more topics.

If you read productivity blogs and self-help books regularly, you’ve probably gotten something useful out of them.

Maybe you’ve gotten rid of some bad habits, or organized your desk (and kept it that way).

Maybe you lost weight, or quit smoking, or developed a better relationship with your spouse.

On the other hand, you’ve almost certainly failed many times more than you’ve succeeded. Implemented systems only to drop them, tried diet techniques and failed, struggled to shift your sleep schedule around and snoozed all three alarms.

If you’re teaching a rat a behavior, like pushing a lever or completing a maze, giving it a piece of cheese each time will help. But if you really want that rat to learn something cold, you’ll give it cheese once, then no cheese a couple of times, then another cheese, then maybe a three-cheese break before a third cheese.

Intermittent reward is the most powerful form of behavior modification. That’s why gambling is so popular. By making rewards unpredictable, they become far more satisfying to the subject when they are given, making the behavior in question much more ingrained.

See the parallel? This is why we become productivity junkies. When a few systems and techniques are helpful here and there, we are inexorably drawn to try each new one as it appears whether we need it or not.

Five More Minutes, Honey

“Maybe this one will work,” we think as we scroll through another list of the top ten ways to speed up Firefox or take notes online, our eyes red and bleary as the clock ticks past one in the morning. “Hey, neat pen.” Like any addiction, there are diminishing returns. As we struggle to optimize a setup that’s already pretty darn optimized, we get smaller and smaller gains in exchange for all that time spent browsing and reading and thinking about productivity.

Does that mean you should hit unsubscribe right now? Close your Google Reader account forever and run madly into the woods with a bottle of water and a hunting spear? No. But put in some basic limitations on your consumption of productivity materials and your adoption of new systems and techniques:

• The Furniture Test. Treat any new system, technique, or belief like a piece of furniture. It could be something that you’ll live with for years, if not a lifetime. And just because something looks good at first, and works well for a few months, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for life. Test it out with friends. Ask non-productivity geeks what they think of your new diet/organizational setup/motivational technique. They may have the perspective to point out obvious flaws or long-term drawbacks you’ve missed.
• Know your source. We’re always following links off the big sites like Lifehacker and gathering tips without taking a close look at who’s offering them. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found what sounded like an interesting piece of advice, only to click around the author’s site to discover that he’s a bearded anarchist in the desert who trains hawks for eccentric Texas oilmen. Which may be fine for him, but what works for him when it comes to, let’s say, personal hygiene, is unlikely to work for me.
• Be mindful of your time. This is an obvious one. Keep your productivity blogs in a single folder in your RSS reader and force yourself to check that folder only once a day and not to go down the lifehack rabbit hole for more than half an hour. You can do that, right?

In summary, keep your thirst for new systems under control, take advice from strangers with a grain of a salt, and realize that your life works pretty well as it is and that you’re pretty good as you are. It’s fun to tweak, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re doing OK from day to day and that it’s worth putting most of your attention toward living your life instead of analyzing it.

Photo by rodluvan

It happens all the time. You start with the best of intentions. You’ve implemented your new productivity system or habit, you have a clear, manageable set of tasks, a strong goal, all the motivation in the world.

Then, the lightning bolt. Suddenly, your energy and willpower drains out of your body. You slump forward, a limp, unmotivated mess. It isn’t a physical exhaustion, although you certainly feel tired, but rather an emotional and mental exhaustion, a fog that feels too heavy to lift.

“Damn it,” you think to yourself. “Here I am with a solid hour to write that book chapter and I all-of-a-sudden don’t want to do anything but watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer until one in the morning. I was jazzed on the commute home. What happened?”

You Are Not in Control

This is hard to swallow for us productivity types. We like to think that, one day, with the right system, we will be able to keep ourselves happily productive (or enjoying guilt-free play) from our 4:30 am rise until our 10:30 pm slumber.

Unfortunately, however well-implemented our plans, the lightning bolt has a way of zapping our best intentions. The human body is a messy, complex machine with many different physical and mental needs, and it has its ways of getting what it wants regardless of your conscious mind’s preferences.

What causes the lightning bolt? It’s different for everybody. Having a drink with dinner. Not enough sleep the night before. A rude comment from a co-worker. Too much sugar. Sometimes the most trivial disturbance can throw our energy into a tailspin.

Avoid It

So, the first question we have to ask ourselves as “fixers”“because that’s what we love to do, isn’t it?”is, how do we avoid the lightning bolt altogether?

First, we need to identify and avoid our triggers. It isn’t enough to know that having pizza for lunch zaps your energy in the afternoon. Write it down on a lightning bolt list and look at it frequently.

Before you eat pizza for lunch, you’ll have that dialogue with yourself: “Come on, I don’t always get tired after pizza. I can have this one slice.” Every time you break your own rule, and then find yourself in a puddle on your task chair, muster the energy to add an asterisk next to “pizza” on your list.

Once you’ve got three or four stars next to a trigger, you’ll have that much more motivation to avoid it the next time.

Discovering your own triggers will take a little experimentation. To get you started, here’s a list of potential triggers:

• Particular foods, like wheat, sugar, or greasy junk food
• Too much coffee
• Too little sleep
• Too much sleep
• Toxic remarks from friends or co-workers
• Too much television
• Aimless Web browsing
• Skipping the gym
• Too hot or too cold in the room
• Sitting on the couch when you get home (the couch vortex!)
• Being alone
• Too much anxiety for too long
• Messy desk

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about dieting. If sugar knocks you out and hamburgers don’t, cut out sugar with lunch and chow down on that Big Mac. The point is to keep your energy levels on an even keel, not to shape up for bikini season.

Also, some of these items will require more than a change to procedure. For difficulties coping with loneliness, for instance, a good self-help book or even therapy may be called for. But the first step is to solidly identify the causes of those sudden attacks of blah.

Accept It

Yes, we love to fix things, but an important step for dealing with lightning bolts is accepting them.

Insomniacs often complain about the anxiety they feel as soon as they hit the sheets. They start worrying that they won’t get to sleep soon enough. That anxiety keeps them awake. So they’re advised to just to lie there and forget about going to sleep altogether. Just lie there. That change in attitude alone can help people get to sleep faster.

In the same way, when a productivity nut gets hit by the lightning bolt, his or her first instinct is to think of the right mantra or system to get themselves motivated again. They reach for a timer, or a task list, or a motivational phrase (WWMMD: What Would Merlin Mann Do?), and try really, really hard to get motivated, before giving up and logging into World of Warcraft.

Enjoy It

Once it’s struck, accept the lightning bolt. It may be your brain’s way of telling you it needs to shut down for a while. Certainly make a note of possible triggers to avoid, but don’t harangue yourself about it.

You may be coming down with a cold, or you may just be at the end of your rope. A day of writing, for instance, doesn’t feel too exhausting in the moment, but the mental exhaustion can hit you in the evening like nobody’s business.

Once the lightning bolt’s hit, you might as well kick back and enjoy, because you’re not going to be doing anything useful for at least an hour (or five). At least do something fun and truly satisfying.

Whatever you do, don’t groggily surf the Web or do other “semi-work” because it makes you feel less guilty than going for a walk or playing a video game. You’ll still feel guilty, and you won’t even be recharging with some good honest fun.

Plan Around It

The fact is, with all these neat productivity tools at our fingertips, it’s easy to overschedule and overtask ourselves without realizing it. Forget 3 Most Important Tasks. If the lightning bolt gets you a lot, why not cut down to 1 MIT? Sure, you’ll probably do more than one thing in a day, but if you start by making very small promises to yourself and keeping them, you’ll build your willpower muscle gradually.

Do you have any other lightning bolt triggers or ways to avoid them? Share them in the comments.

Photo by colinedwards.

In his excellent book, Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger quotes Socrates, who suggested we “carve nature at its joints.” In other words, when categorizing, we should look for natural distinctions to make before inventing our own.

When I first became interested in productivity, I tried simplifying my life with a better system. I tried to build every possibility into the system so that it became a sort of artificial intelligence, figuring out what I needed to do and handing me one discretely packaged 20-minute-or-less-task at a time. Every task had a duration, a start date, an end date, a priority, tags, notes, an associated project…insanity!

Today, I simplify my system for a better life. The fewer steps (and the fewer arbitrary distinctions), the better.

I’m Being Productive, Right?

Unfortunately, I’ve always enjoyed playing office. I used to play with my grandfather’s leather-bound ledgers like some kids play with G.I. Joes. So Obstacle #1, for me, is that I kind of enjoy fiddling with calendars and task lists and systems. It’s calming.

But part of the appeal to a workaholic like me is that such fiddling is, on some level, work. Because, all things being equal, even I’d rather go for a walk or play a video game. Productivity isn’t that fun.

To-Do Lists Aren’t a Game

Productivity sites and software are so nifty nowadays that we often enjoy trying them out and playing around with them. Some developers have even tried to make productivity into a game outright, letting you assign points to tasks and “level up” as if filing TPS reports were just another quest in World of Warcraft. (“Not enough mana.”)

Obviously, the creators want us to enjoy their products, but on a deeper level their approach is oriented toward adding a teaspoon of sugar to an unpalatable thing: work.

But we use our systems for life, not just work, so I would argue that a little less sugar is called for. Many of our tasks our quite pleasurable. We don’t want to end up with our noses buried in the manual when we’re supposed to be playing. (“It says here I’m supposed to get romantic-like with my wife…”)

Invisible Productivity

With that in mind, I’ve been using a very, very simple system for tasks. And not simple in the sense of, how can I tweak my system to make this particular task take fewer steps today? Rather, I try to stick to basics and if the system doesn’t absolutely need optimizing, I don’t optimize. My goal for 2008 is to make my system invisible. To stop thinking about it.

Getting rid of contexts was a huge help. I’ve since realized that I never really took advantage of contexts. They only added complexity (and anxiety). I’ve been much more productive just thanks to that step. But where do regular, repeating tasks fit in?

Time to Make the Donuts…

Yes, there are some Web 2.0 task managers that will adequately track regular, repeating tasks (like watering plants, washing the dog, or just plain flossing). The problem with letting your traditional task manager handle these, even if it has the necessary features, is that they tend to clog things up.

That’s one of the appeal of contexts: being able to move that stuff into a separate bucket. But it really doesn’t belong on your task list at all. I don’t want to check off all that more trivial stuff, I just want to do it without even thinking about it.

If something happens once a month or less frequently, I’m happy to throw it on my “tickler” calendar as a repeating event, but more frequently than that and it becomes a hassle to manage all those recurring events.

So in the interests of simplicity, I’ve created a “procedures” tab in Netvibes. (Your own Web dashboard of choice should serve.) On that tab, I’ve created a bunch of sticky notes, one for each “joint” of my day.

Carve Those Joints

The joints of my day are Morning, Beginning of Work Day, End of Work Day, Arriving Home, and 10pm. Those are turning points when I usually have a bunch of recurring tasks to do. In the morning, I want to make sure to pack my iPod, my gym clothes, and so on. At 10pm, I want to remember to wash the dishes and walk the dog.

Often this stuff all gets done naturally, but sometimes I’m feeling foggy and, without a clear list of tasks, I’m liable to just brush my teeth and fall into bed or skip the gym clothes.

For stuff that happens once a week, I enter the appropriate day of the week with the task at the bottom of the right note. At the bottom of the Arriving Home note, I’ve written “Wednesday: Clean kitchen countertops.”

As an added bonus, I added a note to the page with a typical grocery list. When it’s time to shop, I quickly scan the list for what we’re missing, write it down, and head out.

Photo by scottfeldstein.

First of all, a very Happy New Year to all of you LifeClever readers.

I’ve been a pretty faithful GTD adherent for several years now. Barring project lists, which have never seemed worth the effort to maintain, I’ve stuck to David Allen’s guidelines no matter what combination of calendar, task list, and capture system I was playing with at any particular moment. Until now.

A Moment of Clarity

Last week, I was reading Neil Fiore’s excellent book on avoiding procrastination, The Now Habit. (I love his psychological approach to creating a happy work environment so that you actually look forwarding to work instead of resisting it, but I’ll do a more complete review after a few weeks of use.)

As I read the book, I started to think about the things that gave me anxiety about my own system, the things that soured me on tasks. And it suddenly dawned on me how much time I spent fussing around with them. Every time I finished even the smallest milestone, I’d click into my task manager and slowly work through my contexts, reading and evaluating each and every task. Not to pick the next task, but rather to just sort of “check in” with them. Yes, it’s crazy.

And yes, technically, contexts are intended to limit the tasks you have to see at any one moment. But beyond the @waiting list, my contexts are mostly flexible. Some tasks can be done at home or at work. I’d created a @weekend list for projects that required uninterrupted blocks of an hour or more, like building an IKEA desk. I’d created an @agenda list for items that required particular people. An @phone list. An @errand list. An @vacation list. And tasks were constantly shuffling between each context, often with nothing actually getting done.

Stop the madness!

Yes, I’m sure some of the GTD purists out there are clucking their tongues at this point. “Well,” they’re thinking, “you obviously weren’t following GTD orthodoxy. If only you’d picked four or five broad contexts and stuck with them and resisted the temptation to ‘manage your tasks,’ contexts would have worked for you.”

Maybe so. But I realized that by dividing up my tasks at all, I was creating additional psychic load, both in creating new tasks and sorting through existing ones. Instead of one finite list of 74 tasks, I had an amorphous group of changing contexts with dozens of tasks constantly shuffling between them. And try as I might, I couldn’t stabilize them.

Now there are a lot of GTD variants floating around, but I’ve never anyone suggest getting rid of contexts altogether. But that’s exactly what I did. Now, my tasks are all together in one place, with a separate @waiting list because that’s such a clear, either/or category even I couldn’t see getting rid of it.

One Bucket to Rule Them All

As soon as I dumped all my tasks into one bucket, I felt a sense of peace. There, before me, were my tasks. A mountain, perhaps, but mountains can be climbed.

Now, creating a new task has one less step, and I have no excuse for paging through my task list any more unless I’m there to pick the next to-do off the pile. Having separate contexts never actually reduced my anxiety, and I’ve gotten a definite morale boost from having a finite and concrete list of tasks that doesn’t float around, so to speak.

The coming months will determine whether a task list without contexts will work for me, but in the meantime, I encourage you to give it a try.

Photo by davidw

Productivity bloggers place a lot of emphasis on granularity. According to accepted wisdom, if a task squats on your list for a while, you probably haven’t sliced and diced it enough. Solution: Start carving until you’re left with a “next action” that you can effortlessly knock off in 10 minutes flat.

But some tasks simply don’t lend themselves to the GTD slice-and-dice. They demand time, focus, and sustained concentration for half an hour or more. Some typical examples:

• Planning
• Designing
• Outlining
• Writing
• Brainstorming
• Polishing

When I need to do manuscript editing, I can’t slice things up much smaller than a chapter, and even a pass on a single chapter in some books can take a couple hours or more of sustained, uninterrupted concentration.

There are two obstacles to achieving this level of sustained flow: the constant barrage of information and distractions and “need it now” problems we all face, and the fluctuating levels of mental energy we can bring to bear throughout the day. How do we find the time and mental energy for the big stuff while juggling all the tiny-but-still-important stuff?

When Are You Smartest?

Face it. There comes a point in every day that you simply aren’t at your best. No one stays sharp 24/7. My wife is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5 am for her morning jog; when she’s nodding off around 11pm, I’m buzzing to edit some podcasts.

So the first step in regaining sustained flow is to map out a typical day’s mental performance: Print out a blank day calendar and leave it next to your desk. Schedule a reminder to go off every hour. For one entire day, mark off your energy level on a scale from 1 to 3 every time your reminder goes off.

At the end of the day, plug the results into Google Spreadsheets and graph it. The result will give you a basic sense of how your energy fluctuates from hour to hour. These fluctuations are partly based on what you eat, partly based on how much sleep you get, and so on, but all things being equal, you usually follow a pattern, and by determining that pattern, you can learn to work with it instead of against it.

Night owls will probably always be night owls, and the sooner you learn to love your owly nature, the sooner you’ll start maximizing that productive time and easing up on yourself when you’re brain is in hibernate mode.

Find the Quiet Times, or Make Them

Just as your brain and body fluctuates from nimrod to ninja and back again, your work interruptions have their own pace and rhythm. Sometimes the phone calls and emails never stop. Other times, crickets are chirping by the water machine. And while it often feels like these interruptions come in random bursts (“Boy, it’s busy for a Wednesday afternoon!”), there’s usually an overall pattern.

One way to get a quick sense of this is to look at the times of your incoming emails and voicemails. See any clusters? My emails tend to flow in fastest from around 10am to 11am, as people settle in and get rolling. They taper during lunch, pick up around 3pm, and taper again well before 5pm. That’s my pattern, so I know to forget looking for a free hour during those peak interruption times. Your schedule may vary, so pay attention to when things feel craziest during the day and reserve those periods for doing small, easily interruptable tasks. Like calling and emailing everyone else!

(Some productivity gurus argue for checking email twice a day or even less. In my job, emails are often used instead of phone calls to get someone’s attention right away, for a meeting or an urgent issue. I can’t afford to shut it off indefinitely, and I assume that some of you have the same issue.

Trying to do something that requires heavy concentration and just wishing that distractions will magically stop is a recipe for frustration.

Matching Peak Performance to Perfect Stillness

Now you should have two maps: One of your mental energy throughout the day, and one indicating the ebb and flow of external interruptions. Find the spot where your mental energy is usually at its highest and your interruptions are usually at your lowest. That’s Golden Time.

You may not even have any Golden Time in your workday, as it stands. Adding some might be as simple as showing up at the office half an hour earlier than you normally do. Or staying a bit later. Or even moving your lunch hour so that you’re back from lunch just when everyone else leaves.

Either way, once you’ve identified some Golden Time, don’t squander it. Often, when we hit that beautiful lull in the week when our minds are active and our phones are quiet, we find it most appealing to procrastinate. We decide to pick a new WordPress theme or organize our contacts. When we have time and energy, we tend to feel like our time and energy are boundless and inexhaustible. But Golden Time is precious. When you hit that patch, think of Pac-Man when he eats the super pellet: You have a perfect opportunity to knock out the ghosts that have been squatting on your task list for days, but only for a short duration. When Golden Time arrives, try any and all of the following (if possible) to get the most out of it:

• Quit out of email.
• Turn off your phone ringers.
• Close your door. Put up a sign on your door asking for peace.
• Disable Twitter, Facebooks, IM, etc.
• Shut off your Internet connection/WiFi altogether.
• Use an app like WriteRoom to isolate the window you’re working in.
• Set a timer to go off when your next appointment or meeting is almost due to begin.

You’ll get more done in 30 minutes of this than you would in frustrating dribs and drabs across an entire week. And this technique will allow you to stop worrying about big tasks you can’t focus on and devote what energy and concentration you do have to the small but necessary stuff.

Photo by andreapacelli.

Windows users who are jealous of Quicksilver’s might on the Mac now have a glimmer of hope in Skylight.

Like Quicksilver, Skylight is an automation utility that lets you launch applications, find files, and execute actions with a quick series of keystrokes.

Skylight’s off to a good start, but it’s still not as robust as Quicksilver. It has a limited set of actions, no ability to create “triggers” or customized key commands, and no support for complex file manipulations. Despite its “infinite plug-in extensibility,” Skylight also has has very few plug-ins.

Of course, it’s in beta, so the future could very well be bright. But for now, that glimmer of hope for a true Quicksilver clone is just a glimmer.

To try it, download it here:

• Skylight

If you’re itching to try out some more automation apps, check out these other Quicksilver alternatives.

Have you installed and used Skylight? What do you think?

via Lifehacker

Check them out:

Laptops: A blessing or a curse?
“When I got my first laptop, I loved the exhilarating freedom of whipping it out anytime I –”needed– it. No matter where I am, I could work on a project, balance a budget, or play a video game. Years later, despite its –”convenience–, I’m dangerously married to my laptop.”

How to divorce your laptop
“If you’re in a soul-sucking marriage with your laptop, you’re not alone. Last week, I confessed the details of an embarrassingly codependent relationship with my laptop. In desperation, I begged you, fellow 43 Folders readers, to share your experiences and tips for breaking up with a laptop. Many of you empathized, offering very useful suggestions.”