Recent Articles

I have been thinking about the ‘right way’ to work over the past couple of years as we recover from a pandemic where offices & company leaders struggle to come to terms with an employee relationship scenario they didn’t foresee. The forced WFH for most office workers during the pandemic, the varied and disastrous return to office protocols — the emergence of strong remote hiring — and the randomness of hybrid roles.

For every argument against one type, there’s an argument in favor. So rather than try to look at why you should not do one or the other type of work, I want to look at best practices for each type of work setup. These are things that you must do if the method is to be successful for any one company.

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End of this week marked my last day going into that office, so I thought it would be a good point in time to capture what my daily carry gear had been going back and forth from my house to the office. And more than a few people have been requesting updates on this kit.

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I recently picked up Hardgraft’s Palm Key Fold to solve a particular problem: the key fob for my car constantly gets triggered in my pockets, resulting in all sorts of random noises from my car. It’s been driving me crazy and not something I have experienced with other key fobs. Even if I carry the fob in a jacket pocket, this was an issue. Adding to this button pressing is the issue that the fob itself tends to slip out of areas easily, or otherwise be annoying to carry in my pocket due to size.

The real solution here is that car manufacturers are forced to carry these key fobs 24/7 — there’s no reason they should be this large and this shitty. Since that won’t help me now, this leather wrap for a key fob seemed like a good solution.

In practice, it’s a mixed bag.

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Defining something as ‘the best’ is a tactic I’ve been using for a long time. It’s an odd definition, as it’s almost certainly a lie, caged with the caveat of “what I think is the best”. Though, we all intuitively know this.

Even sites with rigorous testing: Consumer Reports, or Project Farm on YouTube — these all can label things as scientifically the best, but when you dive down further, you begin to see the subjectivity. After all, at some point, some human, decided what and how things are tested, rated, and graded, to become the best. Which makes the entire thing easy to bias.

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A little over a year ago, my kids both switched their school backpacks over to Topo Designs backpacks — and since then they have fallen in love with those backpacks while at the same time those backpacks have held up nearly perfectly for them. And that data point has impressed me enough that I’ve been wanting to pick up a Topo Designs bag to test and review for myself.

I decided to grab the Global Briefcase in Olive — and I’ve been testing it for a bit now. It’s a very good bag, but not really my cup of tea, so my testing is abbreviated on this one.

Here are my impressions after using it for two-ish weeks.

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It’s been over a year now since I declared that I was going all in on the 24hr Briefcase as the primary bag I take into the office. This change has actually held true over that stretch to my own amazement. The only time I deviate is for testing other bags or when I needed a larger bag to tote some extras to or from the office.

I am not sure I’ve stuck with a bag this long for office use, and that alone is a testament to how great the 24hr is.

It’s almost perfect in every scenario I need it to be used for. And it’s so good that I regularly consider bringing it as a personal item over other travel shoulder bags I have on trips. (My original review is here.)

I wanted to revisit this bag now that I’ve had a lot of use and time with it. Combining it with all the other variants/colors of this bag, I am coming on nearly two years of using a 24hr Briefcase. I am more confident now than ever that this is the best bag you can choose for office carry.

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I picked this particular item up to serve a very specific purpose, to carry very non-specific gear. I often run into a situation where I have some smaller things I need to stow somewhere in a bag. I need to easily pull them back out of the bag, or to get at them while they remain in the bag. Sometimes this is for travel on a plane or by car. Other times it’s heading out with the kids for the day.

The items vary widely and I wasted a lot of time trying to dig through my pouch pile to find something suitable. So I set out to find a pouch which would work well enough across all my uses. I’ve kind of found it in the Hardgraft Notebook Wool Wrap.

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Note: Meermin provided these loafers for review.

I am a boot guy, or at least I was pretty sure that I was a boot guy. But, my pal, kept telling me that I needed to up my loafer game and that they are vastly better than I think they will be. I dipped my toes in a while back with some suede tassel loafers, but had been longing for a classic penny loafer.

When I saw that Meermin was releasing this unlined, soft calf leather loafer, I couldn’t wait to give them ago. In the world of loafers, pricing is all over the place, and climbs rather quickly. Meermin, by contrast, offers a really nice looking loafer at an extremely competitive price.

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