One of the vertiginous features of modernity is that most manufactured products don’t cost much more than a few meals. The steak in a steak dinner costs much more than the plate it sits on, as does the cocktail cost more than its glass. The constraint on material wealth in manufactured goods slowly shifts to space to keep them, and information to find them. This makes sharing information as important as production.
Each of these products has made a material difference to the overall quality of my life, but rather than just a list of generally good things, these are also all things that took me a long time to figure out. I suffered for some number of years, and then finally relieved that suffering with an insight. The insight was just that one of these products would solve my problem.
Office
Vertical Mouse
Since the mouse was invented, people have tried to invent various kinds of pads and protectors to keep your wrist from getting damaged by the pressure of the edge of your desk. None of these work, but that isn’t the only problem. Turning your palm face down is an unnatural position for your arm bones. It keeps your forearm muscles in a constant state of engagement, and narrows the space in your wrist. If you narrow the space in your wrist, your tendons are under pressure, and are more likely to become inflamed.
A vertical mouse solves all these issues. Your arm bones are straight and undisturbed, and the hard edge of your ulna is the only part of your arm that comes in contact with the table, rather than your soft vulnerable tendons. I started getting RSI in my wrist after just a few years of working, and a vertical mouse entirely solved it.
There is a catch, using a vertical mouse has reduced my twitch FPS skill substantially (this is almost certainly just cope.)
Binaural Nature Recordings
I am unable to do serious coding, or deep work of any kind, while listening to music. Whatever part of my brain processes text also processes melody, so listening to anything with a melody interferes. But noise canceling headphones on their own don’t block out enough noise to work anywhere with conversation in the background, so I needed something to play to mask the surrounding sounds.
Binaural nature recordings are perfect for this. The spectrum of the sounds is broad enough to mask background noise, but unlike a pure noise track, it never feels claustrophobic. The sounds are varied and pleasant, but not distracting. With an exceptional recording the sense of space in the audio can make the soundscape seem even more real than the background noise, and make those conversations seem even more unreal and ignorable.
There are many sources of this but Gordon Hempton’s work is a standout. You can also make your own.
Hanayama Puzzles
Compiling code, training models, running pipelines, executing queries, or being in unnecessary remote meetings often involves a lot of waiting. If I don’t have anything to do with my hands, I compulsively crack my knuckles, and if I do this enough they get inflamed and hurt. Fidget spinners or other fidget toys don’t work for me, mainly because they’re boring. What does work for me are Hanayama puzzles. Each state of the puzzle moves in a different way, so the fidgeting doesn’t get repetitive. The puzzles themselves use physical intuition that operates at a nonverbal, almost subconscious level, so I can play with them without it pulling me away from my primary task. They entirely supplanted the bad habit.
The most beautiful of their puzzles that I’ve tried are the Baroq and the Radix. They’re a delight to hold, and to move. The most fiddly I’ve played with is the Infinity so if your main goal is to level-up from a fidget toy, start there.
Kneeling chair
You may or may not like kneeling chairs, they are certainly an acquired taste. I put this on the list as a recommendation not because I think everyone necessarily will benefit from a kneeling chair at their office all the time, but because they are different from other chairs. If you are the kind of person who sits at a computer at work and then sits at a computer at home, it will help you to have substantially different chairs in those two places so that you are sitting in different ways. Ergonomic injuries are injuries from repetition and duration, and the best thing you can do to prevent them, aside from doing things less, is to do them differently.
Kinesis Freestyle Pro
A split keyboard forces better typing habits if you aren’t a great typist. It also allows you to keep your wrists straight while typing. Just like with the vertical mouse, any position that kinks your wrists narrows the area in which your tendons can move, and makes them more likely to become inflamed.
The fact that the two halves of the freestyle can be positioned arbitrarily helps in several ways. Your hands can be spaced far apart, farther apart than a conjoined keyboard would permit. Your hands can be placed in slightly different places every day which reduces the amount of repetitive stress from having an identical setup. If you game, then the right half of the keyboard can be moved out of the way entirely to make more space for your mousing hand.
Cherry M switches are delightful to type on without being too clicky. There is probably little material ergonomic benefit to them, but they just feel nice.
Bluetooth Foldable Split Keyboard
Economy airplane seats are now too small to fit a laptop on the tray table. Fortunately, everyone is walking around with much smaller devices in their pockets that can partially substitute, but a phone can’t easily be used to create instead of consume because of its small size. A foldable bluetooth keyboard fixes this. Just having a real keyboard is enough to make a phone a capable general computing device. I’ve done a lot of writing on planes this way.
Bedroom
Air filter
A third of the air you breathe in your life you breathe while you’re sleeping. During most of the day, you don’t have much control over the air you breathe, but at night you do.
Having an air filter on high all night during allergy season made my seasonal allergies almost entirely disappear. They went from being debilitating and needing medication (which, regardless of the class of antihistamine, always made me feel like a zombie) to a minor annoyance. Beyond allergies there’s a growing body of literature that air pollution may be a major cause of dementia as well as a variety of other health effects, like premature birth. Air filters also might make you less likely to get sick from your family.
As side benefits, an air filter serves all the same functions as a fan. It increases air circulation, which reduces CO2 concentration in your bedroom, a common cause of poor sleep and morning grogginess. It also functions as a white noise machine. The best white noise machines are themselves just fans in a box.
I have had enough trouble with the electronics of these conking out over the years that I don’t want to recommend any particular brand or model, but wirecutter has a regularly updated list.
Laser Projection Clock
Most of us are in the habit of checking the time on our phones instead of a dedicated clock. This is fine during the day, but it’s a terrible idea in the middle of the night, where your phone is not only very bright, but also very distracting. The ideal case, if you wake up in the middle of the night, is that you fall back to sleep without ever becoming fully conscious. To do this, you need some way of knowing that it is still the middle of the night with as little conscious action as possible.
A bedside clock that projects the time with a red laser on the ceiling accomplishes this. It emits a very small amount of light (and red light, so supposedly doesn’t interfere with your circadian rhythm) but just by cracking your eyes you can immediately see what time it is and can decide to go back to sleep without fully waking up.
This was especially helpful for me to triage nighttime wakeups with a baby and toddler. I could immediately decide whether I was preparing for the morning, putting the baby back to sleep, or ignoring them for a bit in the hopes that they’ll go back to sleep on their own. It is even more helpful if you’re trying to take care of the situation before your spouse wakes up too.
0.3 mg Melatonin
When you’re out camping, going to bed right after the sun goes down feels like the most natural thing in the world. There’s no light. The word disappears. It’s bed time. You feel it instinctively.
At home, all manner of things intrude. Phone, TV, lights, etc. Melatonin reproduces the sleepy feeling you get when you are out in nature. If your sleep schedule is going out of whack, or there’s a night where you absolutely need to sleep, 0.3mg of melatonin a half an hour before bed makes a huge difference. Usually I only need to take it for a few days to get back on schedule. I do find I am groggier in the morning after I have taken it than when I don’t. So I usually only use it as a temporary fix. That grogginess is almost always worth it if I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep.
It is also extremely useful for getting over jet lag. Staying up late to undo jetlag is much easier than going to bed early, but sometimes the time shift requires going to bed early. This is the gap that melatonin can fill.
It is no substitute for good sleep hygiene. Don’t scroll your phone in bed. Read non-fiction instead.
(Note: most melatonin in drug stores has way too large of a dosage, 3mg or even 10mg. Try to find the smallest dosage you can. Even 0.5mg feels like too much.)
Kitchen
Get Two of Things
This is not a product, but rather an insight that you should apply to whichever objects you use most. I often found myself waiting around unnecessarily while cooking because the throughput of my tool was too low. If making crepes, I could only make one crepe at a time. If making pancakes, I could only fit three on the skillet. The waffle maker only makes one waffle. If you find yourself in this situation, just get another one. Get another skillet. Get a double sided waffle maker. This took me embarrassingly long to realize. They aren’t that expensive relative to your time, and they don’t take up that much space. Making pancakes became something I wouldn’t hesitate to do on a school day, just because it became so much faster.
Whatever you use most, consider whether you could do things faster with two of them.
Magnetic Double-ended Measuring Spoons
As part of the general principle of “get two of things” the two ends of these measuring spoons, combined with the compactness with which they fit in a drawer makes them a standout among my kitchen tools. There is no need to root around anymore for the right size. They organize nicely, stay organized, take up a tiny amount of space, and function as well as having two sets. They’re just perfect.
Chef’s Turner and Carbon Steel Skillet
I’ve gone through many varieties of non-stick skillet over the years, and many varieties of spatula. At long last, I think I’ve found the set of tools that I don’t think can be improved upon.
Plastic spatulas melt. Rubber spatulas break and tear. Neither can apply much pressure to something stuck on a surface. Metal ones are the only kind that last and function properly, but if you use them on Teflon you’ll destroy it. This alone makes it worth switching to cast iron or carbon steel.
Cast iron or carbon steel skillets are intimidating because caring for them is portrayed as a complicated hobby. They are in fact very easy. They are best thought of as being “self-healing” non-stick. If there’s a teeny bit of oil or grease on it when you heat it up, then everything you cook afterwards remakes the coating. (Just use something else for acidic foods like onion or tomato.)
Because the coating is self-healing you don’t have to worry about scratching it, and so the rigid metal spatulas sold as “chef’s turners” work best. They’re small enough to fit under anything, wide enough to balance things to lift, and both sharp and rigid enough to scrape with.
Instant Pot
I was a late convert to Instant Pots, but they have dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend cooking. I’ve gradually been retooling all of my recipes to use the instant pot as much as possible.
Before my wife made us buy one, I was skeptical. “A pressure cooker on a timer, how much better could it be? We already have pressure cookers, we already have timers.” I was completely and utterly wrong. The key feature is that you set the timer, and then leave. Much of the time spent cooking is actually spent waiting. With an Instant Pot, you can leave the house. We cook a lot of dry legumes, so pressure cooking is essential, and being able to do that while at work frees up a ton of time. Even if you don’t leave the house, the fact that you don’t have to listen for a timer and be available when it goes off means you can fully commit to using that waiting time for something else.
I’m now convinced these are the most substantial addition to kitchen automation since the microwave.
A Cook Book that you Trust Unconditionally
The internet has an unbounded number of recipes, and they’re free. A book has a fixed number of recipes, and you have to pay for it. The internet aggregates the preferences of the entire world. A book is just one person’s opinion. This ought to make a book strictly worse, and yet it doesn’t.
Cooking a meal is an investment. Sifting through a sea of possibilities that you don’t entirely trust makes you doubt that investment and shy away from it. Having a book that you can browse, where you don’t have to second guess which link to click, where you can be confident that the result will be worth it, makes it worth taking a risk to cook new things. You’ll explore more, and branch out more, by giving yourself less choice.
Our current favorite is The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. It hasn’t failed us yet.
Living Room
Foldable Coffee Table
Coffee tables are either too small for board games, or too big to leave enough space for doing anything else with your living room. Foldable coffee tables fix this. You unfold them, they raise to game-playing height, and your most frequent boardgames are stored right underneath. This makes even a small living room adequate for both boardgames and dancing, neither of which I was willing to sacrifice for the other.
Swoop Bags
Building with Lego pieces practically requires spreading them out over the floor. If you keep them in a bin, that bin will be dumped out. This makes cleaning them up a nightmare. Swoop bags elegantly solve this, and have eliminated Lego cleanup as an issue in our house entirely. You spread the bag out on the floor, find the Legos you need, and clean it up instantaneously by pulling on the cord.
Love Letter (card game)
A little out of character for the rest of the list, but I felt I had to include it. This is the one board game I can recommend to any possible disposition. It distills all of the fun of a trick-taking game into as little time as 10 minutes and a package as small as a deck of cards. It’s silly, it’s clever, it’s fast, it’s subtle. You can learn it in minutes. Anyone old enough to read can play it, but experienced jaded board gamers will still enjoy it.
Despite the fact that the theme of the game is about sending a love letter to a princess, the game itself is so good that even 8 year old boys beg to play it. That is the best recommendation I can imagine.
Clothing
Tilly Endurables LTM6 Airflo Hat
If you’re light skinned and live in the US you’re probably a lot farther south than your ancestors evolved and your skin would benefit from sun protection all the time. I hate putting sunscreen on my face, and no amount of fear of skin cancer could make me do it every time I go outside. But if a hat looks nice enough and is comfortable enough I’ll wear it, and Tilly hats work. Their main feature is that they look great and have a broad brim, but in addition their neck and head straps keep the hat on your head in high winds while still hanging comfortably from your neck when you aren’t wearing it. They also float if you ever drop them in water, pack flat in a suitcase, and are generally indestructible.
With the history of skin cancer in my family it’s not an exaggeration to say that getting in the habit of grabbing my hat every time I leave the house has materially improved my life expectancy, even if the benefits of avoiding skin aging and sunburn weren’t enough on their own.
Carhartt Utility Jeans
Carrying phones is one of the major functions of a modern pair of pants but few pants are designed for it. As phone sizes have gotten bigger, ordinary front pockets aren’t enough. The phone digs into your hip when you sit down. If you take it out whenever you sit to prevent this, then it’s much harder to avoid checking it in conversation. It’s no longer out of sight, out of mind.
Most styles of Carhartt pants have phone pockets stitched into the side, and they work perfectly. I won’t buy pants without this feature anymore. The difference in comfort and convenience is just too big.