Wes Chyrchel

I love to see this kind of attention from the top. Wednesday, the White House hosted a forum on Workplace Flexibility. This is really good news. I have long been an advocate of providing flexible schedules for workers. Besides, taking care of children, the workforce of today needs to be able to care for ailing family members, save gas and as the article points out, avoid bad weather. The east coast got hammered this year by bad weather and if became obvious that for the companies that had teleworking systems in order, they were the ones that prospered.

You can read the full article here, American companies need to embrace teleworking

Also, a new report by the Council of Economic Advisors, illustrating the importance of work-life balance in our workforce

There are many videos on YouTube about Edible Landscaping. This family in Pasadena makes a living off of their organic produce that they grow right at their home. Their “urban homestead” called Path to Freedom was started by the father to support their family with good produce. It has now grown into a business where it can feed their family and create revenue for their family all at the same time.

Check out the video!

Something is going on. You can see it in peoples faces. People are struggling. A few times a week I get told by clients, friends and neighbors that their lives are harder than they’ve ever been. Their relationships are suffering, significant others are complaining that they never see each other anymore and their chidren are acting out. If you were one of the lucky ones to not get laid off, your personal hell is wondering if tomorrow is your last day. Throw on top of that the loss of a home, car and the stress of relocating and you have the perfect emotional disaster.

The Hard Reset

When I was young, most of our vacations were camping. We celebrated birthdays with relatives and someone would make a cake. Dinners were always at home and occasionally we would get pizza. We almost never went out and life seemed pretty good.

As I got older things started to change. Mom’s started driving nicer cars, eating out for most meals seemed normal and multiple vacations per year were standard. The bar got raised. Weekends now consisted of shuttling kids from one event to the next, while planning the adult get together that evening. Life was busy, over committed and unsustainable. Something had to give.

As we are all living through now, the economy is in a recession. The money that we had previously relied upon is gone. How we lived before is slowly eroding away and we are experiencing how to live with less. This isn’t fun, but maybe just what we needed.

Get Excited About Something New

The most common theme amongst most people that I speak with is that they want more control. Several times a week I speak to people that don’t necessarilly want to work less, but they want more flexibility. They are ready for something different. Some of the symptoms I hear that people are experiencing include anxiety, depression and even anger. Again, this is unsustainable and will rot the foundation of any relationship or employment.

Recently I listened to a great podcast where an author was interviewed about a book he wrote about depression. He made some interesting points about depression and they can be applied here. He said, time and again that peoples symptoms of depression were due to the perception that their life was in flux. They felt they lacked control, were powerless and victims of their life. They were stuck.

There is a way out. The following explanation is hard, not because it’s a lot of work, but you have to really dig deep down and decide what you want your life to be. It’s a tough decision, but has a huge payoff. What I am talking about here is “The Plan.”

Time To Plan Your Future

There is no better comfort than knowing what is going to happen tomorrow. Humans love routine. It actually helps us get things done. There is a reason why our learning institutions are set up the way they are. You get a schedule of courses, you go to them on the prescribed days, then redo it again the next semester or quarter, until you’re done. It just works. Following a plan works.

Planning is really fun, because it can be whatever you want it to be. When my wife and I were moving down to San Diego, we planned when it was going to happen, where we would live and where we wanted to work. It was like a checklist and everytime we completed an item and were able to check it off our list, it was a huge accomplishment. Even better, is that we felt WE were in control, not our employer, not other family members, but us only. It was an incredible and empowering time.

Many of my clients are planning. They are starting their own business, reinvigorating their existing business or planning to start something in the future while still at their current job. The energy is high. New business ventures are exciting, because the possibilities are endless. Having hope and control over your future is better than money. Knowing that you only have to stay at your terrible job for just a little longer, makes it almost bearable.

So, now is the time to plan your future. It’s not going to be easy, but you are in control. You can start today and plan to be done two years from now. If other things happen along the way, that’s okay, just adjust the plan. You can be as conservative or aggressive as you want to be. Make sure your plan includes what YOU want to do, not what everyone else wants you to do. Make sure to set your goals high and create smaller goals in between, they are stepping stones to the larger goal. When those goals get completed, it’s an amazing feeling. Remember, it really is about the journey, but knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow is the best feeling of all.

This is awesome.  Google just announced this week a new way to look up bike routes on Google Maps.  For awhile now you were able to get routes for public transit, car and walking, but now with bicycling, it’s getting to the point where you feel there really is no excuse to bike somewhere every once in awhile. Check out the video!

(Note: the picture is of my new dog Kona on my chemical free lawn!)  A couple years ago I really started thinking about all of the chemicals we use around the house.  From the multiple bottles in the shower, on the bathroom counter and under the sink.  Couple that with what you have in the garage and any seasonally professional bug spraying and you have quite the chemistry experiment going on.

What really hit home for me was that the second dog I have ever owned, “Bud” was diagnosed with the one of the same ailments that my first dog “Tanner” died from the year before, it was a tumor on his spleen.  It’s not a very fun way to die.  Typically, you bleed internally off and on until you die.  Tanner and Bud would have good days and bad days, sometimes not eating or drinking for days.  When that became more frequent, we put them down.  It was sad, but they lived long and great lives and we took them everywhere.  They were both almost 12 when they passed. Tanner was our ring-bearer in our wedding.  Yes, he was that good!

When Bud passed it really disturbed me that he died of some of the same things Tanner did.  I kept wondering if we had something to do with it.  Were their chemicals around the house that when mixed contributed to it?  I don’t know and I am definitely one of those people that scream conspiracy and shut myself from the outside world.  We did however have a 2 year old at the time and I thought we could do better.

We have been stepping into this new idea over the past year and the first thing we did was stop the professional bug spraying and moved to a more organic approach to the backyard.  I have been putting coffee grounds on my yard for a few months and it seems to be really helping to green the lawn.   I just go get the coffee grounds from the local Starbucks and dump them on the ground.  The idea here is to bring as much nitrogen to your lawn and improve your soil.  It turns out that worms love coffee too!  Worms help your lawn tremendously because their “castings” are excellent food for your lawn.  Look for a follow up article about how I am going organic in my backyard.

In my current campaign to use less chemicals and save in “twenty-ten” I ran across this article today that shows you How to Make Your Own Cleaning Products.  I have been looking for a complete list like this for awhile.  It pretty much covers all the bases, except I would like to know a few more things to do outside.  I really like the dishwasher liquid and disinfectant spray,

“To make your own dishwasher liquid use water with lemon juice. All you need is ¼ cup of lemon juice and ¾ cup of warm water.”

“To make a disinfectant spray mix a ½ cup of borax with 1 gallon of hot water”

I am definitely going to try these out and see how they work.  Let me know if you guys try this out, how they work.  Here is the link again, How to Make Your Own Cleaning Products

I thought this was really cool.  We are already “greening” our site in different ways, but this is a great article about 10 Easy Ways to Green Your Web Site.  Here is what we have done in response to each one of those 10 items.

1.  Environmentally Friendly Web Hosting

We use Dreamhost.  They offset their carbon they use in their building and even the gas they use to get to their office by purchasing carbon credits from Green-e,   For many businesses, depending on the kind of building they are in, carbon credits are one of the few options.  Dreamhost has been offseting their carbon long before it was popular.

2.  Offset Your Carbon Usage

Carbon credits are controversial and everyone is still trying to figure out if they work and how they are tracked.  There are some great organizations out their offering this service, Green-e, TerraPass and Carbonfund are the most popular.  Right now most of these efforts by us are community based.  We have something brewing that is going to help this process along greatly.  Stay tuned!

3.  The 350 lbs. Project

I like this.  I think this is a great way to get companies to commit and sponsor green projects and be green at the same time.  We are going to see a lot more of this in 2010.  A new business model is emerging surrounding this called, “Donation by Action” and we posted a story about it called, Great story about cancer, follow Drew Carey on Twitter and he will donate 1 Million to LIVESTRONG! By the way, we joined and you should too!

4.  Join 1% For the Planet

I have seen this floating around out there for awhile.  One of our clients, Thinkwear is a member and really explained how and why they are using this organization.  What came through loud and clear is commitment.  Literally, you are putting your money where your mouth is.  You are committing to donating 1% of your sales to any of the environmental organizations listed on their website.  This ensures a clean and honest transaction with your business and the benefitting environmental organization.  Because we believe in this idea so much and we know that no one can do it alone, we currently are in the process of becoming a member.

5.  Offer Eco-Incentives to Subscribers

I think this idea is essential.  We believe this should come in the form of tangibles and intangibles.  Get people to come to an event or give them discounts or free stuff.  At the very essence though, there should be a significant amount of education to go along with it.  Currently we are doing this in the form of contest giveaway’s, We will be doing this more consistently and interactively in 2010.

6.  Encourage Green Lifestyle Changes

Green starts at home.  I really think that you have to immerse yourself in it.  It has to become part of your home life choices if you want to adopt it in other areas of your life, such as work and recreation.  There are so many ways to make your life a lot more interesting and get you and your family to participate in being green.  I definitely think visiting sites like, Treehugger and Mother Nature Network are really good at staying up to date, but I think there are some really good books too.  The Urban Homestead (Amazon Link) is a new favorite of mine that actually gives you step by step instructions on how to become more sustainable at home.  Also, No Impact Man (Amazon Link) is a great book about how a family in New York went extreme and went uber green for one whole year.  Both of these books are entertaining and give insight into how fun and exciting sustainability can be.

7. Simplify Your Design

I am a big advocate of this.  My background is in Web Development and at my company 3GC Interactive one of the big lessons we try to teach is to be obvious.  When presenting information on your website, be short and to the point.  This is not only for your writing, but your graphics.  If you want someone to click somewhere, say “Click Here” if you want someone to buy something, say “Buy Now.”  Eliminating obstacles is really half of what web design is all about.  We are always striving to do this, with our design, information and goals.  We are always striving to be more efficient, refine our goals and improve our site, you should too.

8. Speed Up Your Site

This is true.  Slow loading times take up more energy.  There are many reasons why and a few are indicated in the original article, but for all purposes, it just does.  We use WordPress for WesChyrchel.com, so we use the WP Super Cache plugin.   This reformats how portions of the website our accessed and makes that pathway more efficient.  For example, if a particular page that you are requesting has not changed recently, it will keep it stored in an area that is easier and faster to get to than going the traditional route.  By using this plugin it has increased the speed or our website significantly.

9.  Use Printer-Friendly Versions of Content

Well, I don’t know about this one.  On WesChyrchel.com we don’t like people printing anything.  I mean really, these days you shouldn’t have to print anything unless you need to sign it.  Hopefully, digital signatures will get more commonplace too.  If you really think printing is essential for your site, then, yes please employ the recommendations in the original article, but if you can help it, please use alternatives, like a mobile version of your website!

10.  Consider Your Colors

Yes, black was the new white, back in the big monitor days.  Now almost everyone uses LCD monitors which use 200% less power than older big monitors.  That in and of itself is a huge savings.  Now it appears that LCD’s use more power producing darker colored sites.  At WesChyrchel.com we have a light colored site and that is good, but the more impressive power aspect is that people are almost exclusively using LCD’s instead of CRT’s these days and that power savings is huge.

We think that all business need to go green and become more sustainable.  2010 is the year to do this and making your website green is a great first step in the process.

I ran across this article on today on Planet Green and I thought it did a great job in summing up why we need to care about the big climate change meeting going on in Copenhagen.  The best quote in the article is simply put,

“We can reduce emissions sufficiently with current technologies and ones which are due to reach commercial stage shortly. The costs may seem high but they pale in comparison to inaction and will likely actually spur job growth. The main hurdle to be cleared right now is not technical, it is political.”

You can read the full article as well as many other resources about COP15 here, http://planetgreen.discovery.com/work-connect/cop15-stake-minutes.html

Saying that you want to “go green” is a lot easier than doing it. You have to make new choices every day. There is a big learning curve, what is green, what isn’t green and so on. It could get so frustrating that you may just want to walk away from it all together. Don’t. Let me show you the right way to go green.

Why would you want to go green?

First you have to go green in ways that it makes sense for you and your family. For me I started to realize how much we were throwing away and it just blew my mind. Also, I wanted to save money and eat better. We have achieved those goals and now I am onto new goals. Earlier this year the water company literally doubled our rates.  There really was nothing we could do.  You end up just paying the extra charges.  Our bill went from $75 to $150 per month.  That’s a pretty big jump! It forced me to look at our biggest water wasters.  Here is what the biggest water wasters our and what I have started to do to save money,

• Garden – Uses up to 50% of a households water – I now water every other day. I am adding more rain barrels around my house to catch rain water and I am in the process of changing all the planters around my house to drip systems.
• Showers – After laundry, the biggest water user inside the home – Most fairly new and 10 year old homes have shower heads that put out about 3.5 to 2.5 gallons per minute.  That’s a lot of water.  I am in the process of switching all of my shower heads out to .5 gallons per minute, to possibly the Bricor B100 Ultra Max .55GPM Showerhead
• Removing parts of my lawn – Lawns use 30% of the 50% of garden water usage – I live in California and lets face it, we may have a lot of sun to enable things to grow, but we are a desert and lawns just don’t make it out here without an incredible amount of water. There is a great book that I am reading titled, “food not lawns,” that talks about replacing much of your yard plants with edibles and stop wasting water on your lawn.

I am pretty confident that with some changes and a small investment, I can reduce my water bill back to where it was and recoup my investment, within 6 months.  Saving water is being green and if you can save yourself some money in the process, then why not?

Soon you will realize there are other areas where you can save money. Your gas bill, electric bill, food bill, transportation, entertainment, etc. The trick is to not just go out and buy a bunch of trendy green gadgets.  You hear this often, but there is a reason, first reduce your consumption or use then implement a solution.  The reason you do this first is to figure out how much you really use. For example, the biggest waste of money right now is people putting in massive solar systems on their house. The reason is that until the price comes down, it just isn’t a good investment.  People are thinking they are saving the environment by adding these systems to their homes, but they are not reducing the amount of energy they use. So they are buying larger solar systems than they actually need and that is waste. If they just conserved, changed out lighting, turned off electricity when not in use, etc., they would find that their electricity demand was not that high. That saving right there, might just be enough to wait out the purchase of a solar system altogether.

At the very least “green” is about conserving and that translates into cash.  It’s inevitable, when you take less from the planet, you put out less too.

How to understand your environmental impact: take a breath

When I was young growing up in Southern California we would have days that you couldn’t play outside.  I didn’t understand. The problem was that when you looked out the window, it looked fine.  It wasn’t raining.  The sun was shining. It wasn’t windy. It wasn’t too hot.  What was it?  Those days were called “Smog Alert” days. The air quality was so poor from the pollution that we generated, that it was dangerous to breath.

Schools kept students inside, sports activities were suspended and the elderly were to be watched. It was crazy.  As I got older, it didn’t get much better. When I taught swimming lessons, we had to keep children out of the pool.  Can you imagine dozens of children show up for a swimming lesson, suits and goggles in hand, only to be told to turnaround and go home, because the air has been poisoned? Wikipedia has this to say about smog alerts in Los Angeles, “The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero in the new millennium.” Much of this “improvement” has only occurred within the last 10 years or so and we have only begun to understand the impact of those years on the population.

Believing in “green” is not siding politically with one group or another. You don’t have to change what you wear, what you eat or who you are. What it means is understanding that everything you do has an impact and every little bit makes a difference. Down the road it will become essential that every person and every business implement green practices. At first these will start out as recommendations. Currently they are being drafted into more strict laws. Then the penalties and fines will start for those that don’t conform. You can start now by just thinking about what you do every day and making a choice to conserve. Please don’t wait until the last possible minute.