New York has the same effect espoused in this article- to endlessly drive you to ever higher echelons of wealth. But the effect is less-pronounced due to other factors, at least from my experience.

While the very wealthy are always close by in New York, there is still great diversity of income. Sitting in my grungy office in Tribeca I am surrounded by the multi-million dollar lofts of hedge fund managers and the like. But I can’t walk to my office without passing the deathly-thin homeless lady with a cat who spends her days outside of the NY Dolls strip club.

For me this helps to give me perspective of how well off I really am. In Palo Alto you gain perspective by going out kite-boarding, in New York, you just walk down the street.

But lately I’ve been  struggling with finding balance between the various types of work in my life. I’ve been working as an IT consultant for years at various small businesses around the city.  I also have been doing an increasing amount of web consulting, helping companies move from static to more dynamic, interactive web publishing. I enjoy seeing the way other companies in other industries work, it helps me reflect on the company I’m building, what to take away and avoid.

But there is the endless tweaking of how much consulting work to schedule to keep the bills paid, while devoting enough time to 30elm (which usually runs 50 or so hours a week..). I’m starting to build more thoughtful quiet time to my carefully color-coded iCal, and am becoming more and more aware of the value of all the smal pieces of time I have. I’ll keep you updated as I continue to make these time tweaks..

http://nymag.com/guides/summer/

Now I just have resist the siren song of Nyack (where Joanna lives) long enough
to spend a quality weekend here in the city. Luckily these hot days are full of weekday events as well.