Jen Quinlan

VP, Marketing. Emerging tech, wearables and mobile strategy. Build things that matter. Chicago, IL

[jenquinlan]

Activity Tracking for your Vices

Activity tracking to date has been for those activities you want to publicly disclose. Things you’re proud about. How many times on Facebook have you seen a MapMyRun post of a fair fitter friend boasting how easy their 9 mile jaunt was? Too often I bet. 

Well, have you ever seen a post about Susie just smoked her fifth cigarette of the day thus taking a projected 1 hour off her lifespan? Or Shawn just ate his third cheeseburger of the day pushing him 0.05% closer to a morbidly obese profile? Or Danny has been drinking since 6pm and it is now 2 in the morning?

When it comes to gesture recognition in wearables, what happens when we gain the ability to track our vices too? Can quantifying the habits we loathe help us be more accountable? Or, will it spark unforeseen new championships in chain smoking or power eating?

[jenquinlan]

Are there privacy rights for your face?

The Overdocumentation Generation

People can't even enjoy meaty goodness between two slices of bread without taking a pic of their meal. And no sooner than the image is saved to their iPhone, it is speedily disseminated across a network of friends, 'friends' and strangers for perpetuity. Meet the over documentation generation, spending life's moments from behind and in front of the lens. 

300x / Day 

It's more than just the photos you take. You're in hundreds of photos and video clips each day. 

In the UK, a study was conducted to determine the quantity of times a person was filmed by CCTV in one day while going about her daily routine. It was determined that the average person is filmed 300 times in one day. 

Many cities and municipalities aren't just passively collecting video footage. They're actively leveraging it to accomplish policy objectives. In 2012, U.S. civilians were surprised to learn that the U.S. government was spying on everyday civilians through video footage run through software called Trapwire. 

Enter Facial Recognition

In 2013, Mashable listed over fifty facial recognition platforms or APIs that developers could leverage to build products. Many of which we've become familiar with on sites like Facebook to tag friends or iCloud to organize your albums. 

As civilians and governments tag and track faces, large databases of recognized people are being generated - largely for governments' and corporations' gain. The Guardian reports the U.S. government plans on scanning and storing 50M faces to help track criminals through its Next Generation Identification project that is underway. In a 2012 article, TIME magazine reported major retail chains matching in-store footage with facial recognition software to correlate shopper behaviors and purchases. 

Are there privacy rights for your face - in, or after life? 

A provocative spin on this topic that I hadn't considered before was noted in Dave Eggers' book, The Circle. One of the many projects highlighted at a Google-esque company (The Circle) was digitizing historical photographs and applying facial recognition technology so people can gain better knowledge about their ancestors.

What ensues is a series of less than ideal scenarios. A once pristine executive is chastised for her family's legacy as slave owners. Simultaneously her parents' sex life is made public as security cameras and personal photos from several decades back are digitized and picked up by the project. It begs the question, do you really want to know everything about your family's history? And in doing so, how will it affect your self concept?

Privacy Policy Lags

Your face is a critical element of your identity just like your fingerprints or a social security number, however the latter are protected by government and the former is not. Policy is lagging behind the technology, and civilians should put more heat on government for ways to opt-out of being identified all the time. Will droll civilians sit back happily tagging faces on Facebook while their privacy rights are diminished to that of registered sex offenders?         

[jenquinlan]

Your Life's Ladder

Certain birthdays make you pause for a moment and reflect. Contemplate whether you're focusing on what's most important to you. Determine if you're spending your time well.

I turned thirty a year ago and realized my twenties were gone. Those ten years were packed to the brim with adventure, fun, romance and hustle. I racked up two tattoos, painted about 40 canvases, fell in love and got married, adopted three weird dogs, lived in four states and worked a ton of long, hard hours. 

How you spend your time is a reflection of what is most important to you. When I analyzed my 20's, I learned work, fun and love were at the top of my list. Health, family, friends, spirituality and giving back were very low.

In my 30's, I want to make a concerted effort to align how I spend my time with what is most important to me. I came up with a thought exercise which I call my life ladder. 

Each rung represents a core focus area like family, friends, career or marriage. I ranked core focus areas by how much they contributed towards a full and happy life. For example, I found my marriage is a great source of joy in life for me. In turn, marriage was placed at the top of my ladder. Now a days, going out after work every night and drinking is less of a priority, thus I bumped 'fun' down a few rungs.  

I also learned this excise could help me make major life decisions with more confidence. We recently struggled with some difficult decisions having to do with taking a new job and moving. We realized making the decision was much easier once we looked through the lens of what's most important to us right now - each other, family, friends and health. Deciding to move was a clear winner based upon our priorities.

I hope this thought exercise may be helpful to others, as it has helped me in my early 30's regain a sense of happiness, purpose and control. 

Image Source

[jenquinlan]

Coworkers. They're People Too.

It is easy to get caught up in your own world. Worrying about getting work done. What is left undone. What will hit tomorrow. And that's not even taking into account personal life stresses and woes.

Amidst the frenzy of a workday, don't forget you're working with people. People that are equally stressed, stretched thin and worrying. People with unmet hopes and dreams. 

I've seen a coworker with breast cancer conduct radiation treatments before the workday and still show up on time with a smile. I've had a teammate endure a divorce while juggling a 9-5 and staying strong in front of her kids. Or had a peer with a loved one in hospice care halfway across the country.

Life can be tough. You never know what another person has on her plate. When in doubt, assume she has good intent until she proves otherwise. Remember you're working with people - not machines.

Image Source

[jenquinlan]

Prescription for Tech Detox, Please

As I sit at my MacBook Air with my iPhone at arm's length, I am reminded that I've lost the ability to do nothing. Fidgeting, thumbing a smartphone screen, patting pockets to make sure I haven't left my technology behind. What happened to unplugging? It's an art, isn't it? Clearing your head and being mindful for a moment.

Pro Tech Since 1989

My name is Jen, and I'm addicted to tech. It started at the age of five in 1989 when my dad purchased two items: our first PC and NES.

How I loved looking at the computer's tall tower dotted with green flickering lights coupled with the sound of modem chirps. And the hours of entertainment I would spend in PrintShop, Carmen Sandiego and Cartooners.

And NES. The hours spent glued to the TV, thumbs aching from handling the controller too long, desperate to win Zelda. I remember closing my eyes and trying to go to sleep, and still seeing magic potions and burnings bushes in my head, gloriously pixelated behind my eyelids.

As I aged, my zeal for tech remained the same. When I was sixteen I obtained what would be later referenced as the 'Zach Morris' phone. It was about the size of a football cleat, and I was delighted to tote it in my backpack. In late high school I was into burning CDs of Nirvana to Eminem to give to friends between class. This contraband music interest evolved into Napster in college, quickly followed by interest in other startup websites including being an early user on Facebook and regrettably hotortnot.com.

Pushing Pixels

Even my career has been built upon tech obsession. Half planned, half by luck, I've stayed current by chasing the next platform or trend. I fell into a search engine marketing job in Chicago in '05 at a then startup, now global digital agency. I jumped markets to New Mexico and leveraged SEM experience to work my way into a small agency where picked up social and web development experience. When I moved to Austin, I first landed at a digital agency and was able to work on bigger brand, digital campaign work. And my latest chapter, at Mutual Mobile, has afforded me the opportunity to focus on mobile products and software leading to wearable technology.

Selling, managing and marketing all those pixels over the past ten years makes me feel like the Avon Barksdale of tech. And looking into the future, I don't see the market slowing down. In fact, it'll get much worse with technology embedded in meaningful and not so meaningful ways in everything - your house, car, pet, glass, glasses, hearing aid, employee badge, headphones, smoke detector, clothing, watch, ring, contact lenses, toys, shoes and even teeth.

We're Drowning in Digital

150: Quantity of times a day a person reaches for her smartphone (Mary Meeker)

1/3 of Americans prefer texting over talking (Digital Trends)

63% of people check their phone for messages or calls once an hour (Business Insider)

9% check their phone every five minutes. (Business Insider)

1-in-10 people check their phone during sex (Psychology Today)

5 hours 46 minutes: the average amount of time a person spends in front of screens (Business Insider)

The average child looks at screens for around 9 hours a day, or about 75% of their life (while awake). (Inhabitots)

21% of children under the age of 2 have a television in their bedroom. (Inhabitots)

American teens send or receive 3,339 texts a month. That’s 6+ texts per every hour they're awake. (Inhabitots)

Tech Detox 

There is hope. Lately I've come across several initiatives that suggest at least some of the population is saying, "enough is enough." These projects or businesses inspire me, as they represent a focus on helping people be more mindful and make active decisions as to how they'd like to spend their time.

Detox Camps

Take Camp Grounded, an adults-only three-day camp in California that treats adults plagued with 'phantom buzzing' (90% of college students in a 2012 study experienced this) and other tech-sourced social plagues. The experience is created by Digital Detox, an organization "dedicated to bringing about balance in a digital age."

Image: New York Times

Tech Shabbat

Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards, implements a tech shabbat starting on Friday evenings through Saturday evening. Her family unplugs, literally, and stows away their technology devices. They use their time to be present with each other - playing board games, cooking, gardening, doing art projects, writing letters.

Tech Detox Resorts & Spas

For folks with a little more money to go around, technology detox spas and resorts are an experience to explore. From tropical getaways to lake house retreats where you check your smartphone at the front desk, absence of tech travel experiences are on the rise.

Balance

While most people aren't able to fly halfway around the world to unplug, we could all benefit from setting boundaries for technology within our own life and being more mindful and present. What are tech usage or screentime guidelines that you've applied to your life? Have you seen differences in how you feel and engage with others?

[jenquinlan]

You can only become truly accomplished at something you love.

Maya Angelou

[jenquinlan]

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Steve Jobs

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Wearable Tech for the Differently-Abled

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Thin Mints Please. Cash or Credit?

It's Sunday morning. Coffee in-hand, dogs leaning in close on the couch, browsing tech blogs. Life is good. 

This routine is typically followed by an urge to do something non-digital, like gardening. It is a relentless cycle of being filled with such hope after buying new plants and consequently killing them weeks later through misguided attempts to grow a green thumb. 

At the plant store register, I eyed her - cute, freckle-faced girl with her mom selling Girl Scout cookie. She eyed me and was already sizing me up to be her next sales target. Sweet relief. I realized I only had cash, and therefore could with a clean conscience say no. 

Moments later, she intercepted me. "Do you want to buy any Girl Scout cookies?" With exaggerated enthusiasm I responded how I would have loved to buy some from her, however I unfortunately don't have any cash (showing her my wallet). She grinned and whipped out a credit card reader that was hanging from a lanyard around her neck. "I take Visa and Mastercard." 

Scouts Go Mobile, Sales Spike

Let's go back a few years to when the mPayments test pilot program first started. In 2011, the Girl Scouts of America introduced 38 Girl Scout Councils in 26 states to mobile payments. The cookie sales via mPayments program proved sweet. 

Across the markets that participated in the test, sales soared. According to Barrons, Girl Scouts in North Carolina posted a 13% increase in cookie sales. The average transaction size grew 4X to $80 in regions like Central California. How does this break down to boxes? When a mobile payment system was available, on average the girl scout sold an additional 18 boxes of cookies in 2012. When a mobile payment system was not available, the girl scout on average only sold two additional boxes.

Sage Systems

The technology behind the test pilot was primarily powered by Sage Payment Solutions. The solution allows Girl Scouts to get credit card authorization in moments, view the customer receipt for verification, email receipts and ensure security as no personal data is actually stored on the smartphone. Requirements to use the Sage mobile payments program include having a compatible device, a Sage Mobile Account, a data plan on your device, and a card swipe reader device that is provided by Sage Mobile and the Girl Scouts. Troops register for the solution in January of each year.

Intuit GoPayment

Other regional groups like the Girl Scouts of North East Ohio leveraged solutions via GoPayment, an Inuit solution.  GoPayment works with iPad, iPhone and Android devices. It is not compatible at this time with Windows or Blackberry devices. 

The Card Reader

So who foots the bill for the card readers? Some troops like Texas Oklahoma Plains charge each scout that wants to obtain the card reader a $20 fee. Per troop agreement forms I was able to locate, cost to participate included a free initial reader and a $10 fee to obtain a second one. 

Future Looks Mobile

Annual cookie sale revenue is a whopping $700M for the Girl Scouts (175M cookies sold at $4 a box). 70% of cookie sale revenue directly benefits Girl Scout programming like community service projects, troop activities and to pay for girls who otherwise couldn’t afford to join a troop. If we look to initial mPayment pilot programs as any indication of how much this will influence sales, mPayments can drive a 13% life in sales thus driving an additional $91M in annual revenue (22.8M additional cookies sold) and add about $63M to annual Girl Scout programming. 

[jenquinlan]

The Wearables Boom[ers] - Unlocking The Aging Market Opportunity

The Boom

According to the World Health Organization, the 60+ population worldwide will double from 11% to 22% between 2000 to the year 2050. The total quantity of people 60+ will increase from 605M to 2B over the same period.

In the United States, 77.3M boomers makeup our 60+ population today. This equates to about 24% of our country's population is over the age of 60 (see CNN). And our seniors are living longer. In 2010, the CDC found the average lifespan of a person is 78.7. 

Aging Segments

Now that we've established that the aging market is huge, let's now break down some sub-segments. According to Transgenerational.org, it is important to not lump all 60+ individuals into one bucket. There are nuances of looking at them in the following age brackets: 

The Young Old (65-74)

The Old Old (74-84)

The Oldest Old (84+) The fastest-growing segment of the total population.

Boomers as well will be retiring at rapid rates over the next 10-20 years to fall within these three segments. Nielsen Research contends it is critical to analyze key Boomer audience segments not only by age brackets, but also by with kids versus without kids at home to get a feel for their lifestyle. 

Boomer Trends, Wearable Trends

As Boomers age, they will demand products and services that will help them maintain their active lifestyle, health and wellness, and independence. As relevant to wearable tech, we can anticipate the following trends to spark increased products and services to address the Boomers' needs. 

More Active: Americans 55+ are the fastest-growing age group among gym members, up more than 266% since 1987 (IBISWorld). A survey by Del Web showed that 50% of Boomers expect to  work at least part-time once they retire. Even gyms targeting Boomers like Nifty after Fifty are popping up targeting low-impact cardio machines and 'oldies' music playing over the speakers.  INSIGHT: don't assume activity trackers should only be targeted to the under 60 years of age crowd. The image of a senior being weak and sedentary is not an accurate portrayal of the younger portion of the 60+ crowd. 

Desire to Age at Home: 80% of Boomers (vs. 69%of the general population) own a home according to the National Association of Realtors. Additionally, they intend to stay in their home as they age. Per the AARP's 'Fixing to Stay' study, upon retirement, 9 out of 10 seniors already stay where they are.  INSIGHT: Boomers have a strong desire to live independently within their own homes. Products and services to help them update their home to make it fit their needs as they age will grow. For wearables, solutions that help monitor their activities of daily living (ADLs) and provide alerts to loved ones in emergency situations can help them achieve this independence goal. 

Interested in Tech: Boomers have a 50% higher spending rate on cellular phones and pagers. 81% of younger Boomers (born between 1955 and 1964) go online; 76% of older boomers (Pew Research). 38% - 42% of Boomers use social networking, and one in five use social media sites as a source of health-care information. Boomers are 5 times as likely as the general population to own an iPad or other tablet. INSIGHT: Grandma is no longer afraid of technology - she has gained confidence and sophistication over the past decade and has now gone digital, social, mobile and tablet. 

Companies to Watch

GE / Intel - Care Innovations: Two mega companies joined forces to create a technology division to serve the aging population's needs. Product suite ranges from healthcare monitoring to at home alert systems. I will note that I heard from a previous employee of Care Innovations that there was a large lay off round suggesting perhaps GE and Intel were too early in serving this market.  

Care Predict: Care Predict offers for $160 a bundle of a wrist wearable (leaves much to be desired from a product design prospective) coupled with 4 Beacons to be placed in designated zones of the user's home. The solution gathers "tempos" or a baseline readings for what the user does on an average day of the week or time of day. When there is an outlier, like "Mom has been in the kitchen for 12 hours after 9PM", an alert is sent to loved ones to check-in. I will note that while this solution can do the trick for at-home monitoring, it appears worthless once the user leaves the home. In turn, I don't see this product being a solution for more active seniors or those suffering from dementia. 

Lively: Lively's solution involves sensors for designated areas of the home, yet in this case the user does not need to wear a wearable technology product. It appears that each sensor has two halves, for example placed on the door and inside of a refrigerator, to detect when the sensors are near or afar form each other (the user has opened the refrigerator door that day). Data generated is captured in a hub that aggregates info and presents it in dashboards available to the user and her family. One advantage of this system is they have a sensor that is placed on the user's key ring - an object they are bound to keep with them when they are out-and-about. 

  Remote Health Monitoring: BodyTel or Scandu are two examples of products or services that can read biometric feedback and provide a "check up" from home. When coupled with a wearable that gathers health metrics like heart rate (Mio for example), these at home health check up systems can help seniors monitor their health and make proactive decisions. 

Alert Systems: Philips Lifeline Alert has been a market leader in emergency alert wearables since 1974. It also looks as through the product design hasn't improved much since 1974. There are opportunities to provide a more discreet technology that can be an emergency alert, versus having a product that looks like a soap on a rope around your neck. I am interested to see mini wearables that can be worn on top of the user's jewelry or watches emerge to provide a more subtle technology solution, versus trying to convince the user to wear one more thing. 

Conclusion

As Boomers age, technology can represent an effective way to support their active lifestyles and desire for independent living. The challenge will be whether companies can design products that will appeal to their tastes, yet combat Boomers' natural desire to question authority. It will be interesting to see whether activity trackers will be the first category of wearables to appeal to this age group, or if health monitoring solutions will capture their sensibilities first.   

[jenquinlan]

SXSW 2014 - Wearable Tech Helping People with Disabilities

I had the pleasure of speaking at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2014 with J.P. Gownder on the topic of how wearable technology has great potential to help people with disabilities (or different abilities). 

We conducted research from October 2013 through March 2014 and found across startups, academia, individuals and corporations are making progress on how wearables can do more for people than just serve as a fancy pedometer. 

SXSW 2014 | Wearable Tech: Game Changer for People with Disabilities? 

  Key trends we encountered included:

Small Things = Big Deal - While products like Google Glass are mocked from SNL to Tumblr, for people like Tammie Van Sant taking a picture of what her eye can see after 20 years is a big deal. Google Glass for quadriplegics opens up tremendous opportunities to leverage voice commands for hands-free computing while on the go. 

Dual Purpose - Products like Le Chal by Ducere were launched initially has a haptics solution for the blind, but pivoted to additionally serve the general consumer fitness market. Same technology, two different markets. Or consider how a similar idea like clothing that provides haptic feedback can be extended across a high-end fashionista shopping experience to assistive tech for the blind. 

Innovation Through Constraints - People are willing to wear wearables on a variety of locations on their body. Conversely, the disability market demands more constraints to focus on particular areas of the body for the wearable or take into account limitations of the user's senses like sight or hearing. Through constraints, product designers uncovered innovative solutions that could be applied to the broader consumer market. We think their product design approach was uniquely inspired by serving the disabled user first.  

Wearable as a Platform - Thalmic Labs' Myo band are less of a standalone product, and more of a wearable platform. The band is worn around the forearm, however the SDK is built in a way that developers can dream up a myriad of ideas and customize Myo to fit their particular use case. 

And as far as market potential, according to the World Health Organization consider:

285 million people have visual impairments 

360 million people suffer from hearing loss

605 million people were 60+ years of age in 2000. The world's aging population will reach 2 billion by 2050. 

For the technologist that is entrepreneurial and wants to build things that matter, wearables for the disabilities and aging markets represent tremendous upside yet to date has been largely ignored. 

Do you have a wearables project that serves the aging or people with different abilities markets? I'd love to hear from you. 

[jenquinlan]

Meet the Wall of Ears

To see where wearables is going, sometimes you need to look backwards. Plantronics has been in the wearables space for quite sometime producing headsets and ear wearable technology. 

While the last time I put an earpiece on was around 2002, I am intrigued by their Wall of Ears. Their human factors team took casts of peoples' ears to help their product design team create earpieces that fit 80-90% of the market comfortably. 

As the wearable market evolves, we can expect to see a rise in human factors specialists. Additionally we'll need to see technologists that have been cross-trained in human factors to craft seamless user experiences across the product form factor to the accompanying digital software. 

[jenquinlan]

I'll be presenting with J.P. Gownder at SXSW 2014 on the topic of wearable technology helping people with disabilities. Over the past five months, we've come across some interesting companies and prototypes.

Point Locus - Vest for the Blind

One of my favorites is Point Locus, a project led by David Barter and a team of researchers, designers and engineers. They created a vest for blind users that helps them navigate better from Point A to Point B. Haptic feedback in the vest provides reassurance when they're on the right path, buzzes in the right or left arm for navigation, or provides more rapid buzzing to warn the user if they are going off course.

You may think, "Well, can't an iPhone do that with GPS and auditory feedback?" Yes, it can. However, a blind user cannot rely on auditory alone and put earphones on to block out city noises. They would miss out on critical environmental noises like detecting oncoming traffic, the beep of a delivery truck backing up or a loose dog near their feet. 

Or consider if they put their iPhone on speaker, so they can additionally hear the iPhone and environmental noises. This can get tricky to hear critical navigational information from the iPhone while competing with the day-to-day urban background noises. 

While it doesn't look very wearable per se (resembles a life jacket or something out of Tron), it is an exciting project that focused on serving specific needs of an audience segment with a disability (the blind) and leveraged heavy user research.

Navigate - Fashion & Tech

Speaking of haptic jackets in wearable tech, there are already prototypes coming out of the fashion industry. Billie Whitehouse is the queen of fashion wearables. Popularized by her wearable tech underpants project with Durex aka 'fundawear', Billie is an early mover in fashion tech and now is a partner in Wearable Experiments.

Navigate is a jacket that has embedded technology that helps a user navigate around a city. The jacket provides LED lighting and haptic feedback to inform the user when to turn left or right. The Wearable Experiments team is also exploring integration with products like Foursquare to help 'gamify' the experience of shopping or exploring a city. 

The Navigate jacket struck me as interesting when I watched the demo video for the project. Billie referenced a taxi driver being able to receive haptic feedback when focusing on driving, as opposed to looking down at a screen for directions. I also see great potential in haptic gloves or wristbands for bicyclists. 

[jenquinlan]

User experience lesson: you are not your user.

[jenquinlan]

The other week I hosted a hackathon at Mutual Mobile. We focused on building iBeacon prototypes that weren't for retail. The result? Gyms of the future, car racing experiences, modern solutions for parking meters, and a shark attack... of course. 

[jenquinlan]

Stress - If You Can't Beat It, Manage It

Please Don't Make Me Rescue Someone

My first official job (noted by actually having to complete tax paperwork) was as a lifeguard at Glenn Dale Country Club. Lifeguarding at a country club should be care free, right? Actually, I was stressed out all the time, but I did get one heck of a great tan.

I was 16, balancing sports, school, a boyfriend, my family, SAT prep classes and a looming decision on where to go to college. I also had car bills to address which wasn't easy to do on a minimum wage job. On top of that, I became obsessed with the thought that a small child could die on my watch. Or, what would I do if someone dove into the pool in the wrong area and suffered a neck injury? 

Now fourteen years later, my job today at a successful software company is equally as stressful - although what I do and am capable of doing has changed. In fact, I've been stressed out in every job I've held from high school to adulthood. 

Join The Club

It isn't just me. 20% of Americans feel extremely stressed and 44% feel moderately stressed according to a USA Today survey in 2013. So if everyone is stressed out, what can you do about it? 

Stress Takes Many Shapes And Forms

Maybe start with accepting the stress. It won't go away. It will just take on different shapes and sizes based upon tension between your ability and what you're being asked to do on the job.

The good news is, for most people your baseline for what feels stressful will continue to raise as you gain proficiency and experience. If you can't change that this feeling will exist, then the opportunity is to be okay with stress and find better ways to manage it and channel it.

My Stress Tips

Capitalize - Stress isn't necessarily a bad thing. I work better with a little stress. It gets my mind moving faster and I am more productive. 

Healthy outlets - You need healthy outlets to blow off steam. I lift weights and walk my dogs. Have a few healthy ways to release pent up energy. 

Flow outlets - Identify hobbies that help your mind go blank for awhile. Playing video games, gardening, cooking, making cheese, painting and vintage shopping are all things I can "zone out" and focus on one thing for awhile. 

Clean house -  When work is at its worst, I feel a need to be cleaner and better organized at home. It is too overwhelming to have chaos is multiple facets of your life at once. Take control of what you can - clean out a closet, take clothes to Goodwill, reorganize the garage. It'll feel good to apply order to something you can take control of. 

Tech detox - I firmly believe it is a matter of time until people acknowledge their tech addictions and do something about it. The CMO of our company recently purchased a "dumb phone" (feature phone) several generations old just to avoid habitually checking Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites. Seek less screen time in your free time.

Take PTO - I have never seen someone get an award for not taking their PTO. Don't be a martyr. Take your vacation time and truly unplug. 

Communicate - You aren't canonized as a saint if you take on the most stress at the office. If you're in over your head, ask for help, set boundaries, and come up with an interim plan to help address your situation. If you're a good employee, they'd probably rather have you in your healthiest condition as opposed to a burnt out you. 

What are some stress management tips that work for you? I'd love to hear from you. 

[jenquinlan]

It is a shame that the mass media covers things like how 3-D printing helps people make guns. The Maker Movement is much bigger and more incredible than that. Get inspired by how Robohand and MakerBot started building low-cost prosthetic hands for children that can be quickly modified to grow as they grow.