I run a healthcare-focused consulting and professional services company, and we look at a lot of healthcare data in my line of work. We had already decided that the pandemic was going to be bad by late February of 2020. Like many people, it didn’t take my wife and I long to decide that we would rather ride out a pandemic in a rural location instead of in our tiny apartment in the Philadelphia suburbs, so we packed up two vehicles and headed to our place on the island, up in Maine.
Truth be told, we had been growing increasingly miserable in the suburbs for years. In fact, I had grown to despise them. So, despite having all the pandemic worries we all experienced back in early 2020, we found that getting out of the suburbs and up to rural Maine made us feel like we had a new lease on life. Even with the pandemic we were making friends here, and we quickly grew to love our small community “on the mainland”, as we joke (town is about two miles away). So, by April we had a conversation with our employees, who graciously gave us their blessing to move to Maine full time. Our clients are all over the U.S., and we didn’t want to be hypocrites, so we changed our company policy to allow employees to work anywhere they wish as long as they stay in the U.S. We’re a small firm, but it’s amazing that not one member of our team now lives full-time in the home they had before the pandemic started and we all “gained our freedom”, as we joke.
Moving to the island involved only two big problems for us, work wise. The first was that our internet connection was terrible, so we had to cobble together a system that would allow for remote meetings. That’s now solved by Starlink, but it took us a solid year to get there. I’m now on the board of directors for a “broadband utility district” our town formed along with four other small communities, as we try mightily to figure out a way to bring broadband to our communities. I’ll write about those struggles, I’m sure. The other problem, though, was that my office was, for several months, a bedroom in the house on the property. We actually live in the large apartment over the three-bay garage, because it’s more appropriately sized for a couple than the three bedroom house. But that meant I had a three-bedroom office complete with kitchen, living room, and a full basement. That’s a bit much, so the boss (as I affectionately call Kate) told me I needed to figure out an alternative arrangement. And the Little Room was born.
The Little Room is a 5′ x 8′ “tiny house” built on a utility trailer, and I work from it every business day. I built it out of a necessity to get out of the guest house during a pandemic, but I love it. I had long had tiny house fantasies, thinking that it might be a nice way to simplify our lives back when we lived in the burbs. But I never acted on those fantasies, until I was forced to do so. Life’s often like that.
The Little Room sits just far enough back from the edge of the pond to comply with the town’s rules about such things, but close enough that I can see the water and hear the eagles as they hunt and play. Several red squirrels have decided its roof makes a nice playground most days, but they’re my noisiest neighbors, and still much quieter than the people from the floor below me, in our old office building. It’s exactly 19 steps from our front door to the office door. I can move the Little Room with a side-by-side utility vehicle or my tractor if I need to do so, but I never do. Given its location, why would I?
The Little Room helps me focus (a perpetual problem) and more than that, it’s slowly helping me regain some of the creativity I lost as the business grew and I was forced to focus more on running it than on the things that helped me get it off the ground in the first place (writing and speaking and making connections with people in the industry). That’s a big part of what this blog is about: Rediscovering what matters, and how I might be able to blend that with the need to earn a living and prepare for retirement.
This “About” page wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t give proper credit to The White Stripes song, “Little Room“, written by Eric Clapton and Will Jennings, and recorded on the album White Blood Cells in 2001. The song helped to inspire me in my quest to focus on simplicity and getting back to what matters as a way to live a happy but productive life. It’s only 50 seconds long, but the lyrics are pure genius. You can hear it for yourself and read the lyrics by clicking on the song title, above. Jack White says he thinks of Little Room as one of his “statements to live by”. I think he’s right about that.