Saliem Talash

Most home offices are assembled rather than designed. A kitchen chair, a laptop on the dining table, a monitor on whatever shelf was free. It works for an afternoon. After a few months it shows up as a stiff neck, sore wrists and tired eyes by mid-afternoon. The good news is that fixing it is mostly a matter of order and a few measurements, not expensive furniture. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has a set of office ergonomics pages that are the clearest I know of. This post walks through them in the order that matters: chair, then desk, then screen, then the habits that hold it together. Start with the chair, not the desk Everything else is set relative to your body in the chair, so adjust it first. CCOHS gives a step-by-step method: Seat height. Stand in front of the chair and set the height so the highest point of the seat is just below your kneecap. Feet. Sit down and keep your feet flat on the floor. Seat depth. Check that the gap between the ...

Open the notes app on your phone and scroll to the bottom. You will probably find hundreds of notes you have never looked at since the day you wrote them: a half-finished list, a phone number with no name, a paragraph from a book, three lines from a call that made perfect sense at the time. The problem is rarely the app. It is that the notes were written for the person taking them, in that moment, and not for the person who would need them later. A system you actually reread fixes that one thing, and it does not need to be complicated. Write for the reader you will be Tiago Forte of Forte Labs puts the goal well. He describes making notes as "designing a product for a demanding customer — Future You," and describes that customer as impatient and skeptical. Future you has not got time to decode shorthand or reread a page to find the one useful line. Every habit below serves that reader. Habit 1: one inbox, captured fast You cannot reread notes you cannot find, and you can...

Fifteen minutes from the foot of Bay Street, the noise of downtown Toronto stops. The Toronto Islands are a chain of small islands in Lake Ontario with beaches, a lighthouse, a boardwalk, an amusement park and no private cars. They are the easiest day trip in the city and the one visitors most often get wrong, usually by arriving at noon on a Saturday and spending an hour in the ferry line. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. This is the plan I give friends for a good island day. Prices and schedules below come from the City of Toronto's pages, checked in September 2026; the ferry timetable changes by season, so check it on the day. The ferry: where, how much, and how to skip the worst of the line All public ferries leave from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal at 9 Queens Quay West, at Queens Quay and Bay Street, behind the Westin Harbour Castle hotel. There is no parking at the terminal, so come by transit, bike or on foot. Ro...

A used phone or laptop can be a very good deal. It can also be a nicely polished object that will never work for you, because it is still tied to someone else's account, has been reported lost, or has a battery that is nearly finished. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. These are the checks worth running every time, in a sensible order. Most take a minute. Together they separate a bargain from a brick. Before you meet: ask three questions Message the seller first and ask for: The exact model and storage size. "iPhone, 128 GB" is not enough. You want the model name so you can check what the device should be worth and which battery rules apply to it. The IMEI, for a phone. This is the phone's 15-digit identity number. The Canadian Telecommunications Association (formerly the CWTA) says you can see it on most phones by dialling *#06# on the phone keypad. It also appears in the settings. A screenshot of the batt...

Every small business eventually has the bad day: the order that did not arrive, the wrong colour, the booking you forgot, the customer who writes in capitals. What you say in the first reply decides whether you keep that customer, and often whether they tell anyone else about it. Scripts help because a bad day is exactly when it is hardest to find good words. Written in advance, calmly, they let you reply quickly without sounding defensive or robotic. Edit them into your own voice, save them where you can paste them, and they will carry you through most of what goes wrong. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. The names in the scripts are placeholders. Know what the customer has been told to expect The Government of Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs publishes a "Complaint Roadmap" that coaches consumers on how to complain. It tells them to stay calm and be clear, to write down who they spoke to and when, to ask for ...

Most small businesses set their first prices by looking at a competitor and going a little lower. It feels safe. It is usually the most expensive decision they make, because it ties the price to someone else's costs, someone else's customers and someone else's mistakes. A better method has three steps: find your floor, find the ceiling, and choose a point between them on purpose. Then present the number honestly, which in Canada is also a rule. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. The examples below are fictional and for illustration only, and none of this is tax or accounting advice. Step 1: find your floor The floor is the lowest price at which a sale does not lose you money. Below it, every sale makes you poorer, and more sales make you poorer faster. To find it, add up three things per unit (per product, per hour, per job): Direct costs. What you spend to make or deliver this one thing: materials, packaging, sup...