• 📖 My Story

  Who is this person?

• 🕰 What I’m Doing Right Now

  Monthly update on my focus

• 🛠️ The Tools I Use

  Explore my tech choices

• 🪣 What’s on My Bucket List

  Lifetime goals and achievements

• 🇪🇺 My EU Marathon Project

  All 28 EU capital city marathons

• 🚭 I Quit Smoking

  These stats are staggering

• 🏃 Run Stats

  From the beginning to today

• 🧮 Marathons & Books Counter

  Track my year’s challenges

What I’m up to Now

This /now page is inspired by Derek Sivers’ idea. See nownownow.com.

Last updated on 2nd of April.

🪨 Basics

• Living in Hamburg, Germany. Amazing wife, four wonderful daughters aged between 5 and 12.
• Sold my web design and development company because I want to spend more time with my kids as they grow up.
• Blogging about sports and other things at teesche.com 😉
• Pursuing various fun side projects, such as developing speechbox.chat.

👨👩‍🦰👧👧👧👧 Family

• Raising four daughters is never finished, new challenges arise every day. Lots of coordination between school, friends, and hobbies. Currently they are all fairly stable and the tasks and problems are manageable for my wife and me.
• Spending deliberate time with all of them, mostly in the mornings and evenings. Many afternoons, too.
• Looking forward to the next one on one trips which I do with each of my daughters to show them the world and broaden their horizons. The 2024 planning isn’t finished yet, but I’m trying to do at least two trip with one daughter, with a bit of luck three. Last year I went to Paris, Amsterdam, and Madrid.

💻 Business

• After 12 years of building up my web design company, I have been busy during 2023 to first apply some structural changes and making one of our SaaS products a new stand-alone company. Then I sold half of the company and installed a new Co-CEO. Starting in September of 2023, I have implemented my decision to step back from day-to-day and give all CEO tasks to my new partner, and finally sold the rest of the company to him at the end of November. Starting January 1st of 2024, my time at the company is over and a new chapter in my life and that of the company is officially beginning.
• A new direction for me was necessary because I didn’t feel I had much more to give to the company.
• While I like the newly freed time to do more housework and spend more time with my kids, a different commercial activity isn’t out of the question for me. I’m doing more writing and writing-related stuff, as well as coding of fun side projects which could maybe be developed into something bigger later. Enjoying the freedom from stress and company responsibilities very much for now. 

💪 Health & Exercise

• I’m streak running since January 1st of 2022, which today are 847 consecutive days. At least one mile (1.6 km) per day, ’cause those are the rules! The rough goal is to make it to 1,000 days, which will happen on 27th of September, 2024. In the meantime, I was accepted into the Streak Runners International, Inc. and am currently ranked #68 of the active Germans.
• Aiming to do a core strength workout every day, I have gone through many different routines and apps and recently settled on the great Fitbod app. In 2023 this has happened on 60 percent of the days (222 workouts).
• A breathing exercise like the Wim Hof Method or an Othership app routine still helps me to refocus and catch a breath every other day (2023: 192 sessions, 52%)
• Eating fully vegan as often as possible (60% of days in 2023), but if not, defaulting back to vegetarian. Super rarely some fish, never meat.
• Since April 1st, 2023, I have reduced alcohol consumption to zero in order to give this One Year No Beer movement a try. Every day without alcohol or animal products is a win.
• I used to be a smoker, which was one of the stupidest things I ever did. But I managed to quit without any relapses at all, now more than 8 years ago. Here are stats about that. In case you’re wondering: The trick was hypnosis!
• Bed time and screen time: aiming to be in bed by 21:30 every night so I regain enough energy for the next day, as well as to keep my mobile screen time below 60 minutes per day – just for staying sane and being more in touch with what’s actually happening instead of what’s happening on the screen. In 2023, I reached that bed time goal on 69% of the days and had an average phone screen time of 56.8 minutes per day. Close one, but did it.

⌨️ Writing & Coding

• I’ve been enjoying writing since I started this blog in 2011, but lately that enjoyment has even increased. Which is why I’m doing more of it. In addition to the blog, You can subscribe to the newsletter, which I use to provide enriched notifications about new posts on the blog.
• A few blog post and even book ideas, some of them nearly finished, are always lying around in the drawer, just waiting for me to find the time to make them happen. Those are constantly on my mind, giving me a feeling of unfinished work, but in a positive way.
• Tinkering on teesche.com with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL has been more fun lately, too. I’m avoiding using any frameworks or libraries, if I can, so building everything from the ground up is sometimes challenging, but also very rewarding. Check out the Quantified Teesche section.
• In recent months I’ve enjoyed working with the Strava API and have built the functionality to sync all my tracked running and cycling workouts to my own database. That way I’m free to do whatever I like with the data and it also allows me to easily integrate some stats into my website. Some new tiles were added to the Quantified section this way, I added a run streak day counter which automatically updates the descriptions of my Strava activities with the current run streak day number, and I created a separate running stats site here, too.
• Starting in 2024, I have taken up another fulfilling web project which I initially coded on a weekend back in 2007. It’s been going ever since and even earning a bit of money, but I haven’t paid it the attention it deserves. I have set the goal to do a full rewrite within the first three months of 2024, and that has succeeded to the day. Check out my project, which is a free shoutbox chat widget for your own website, here at www.speechbox.chat.
• There are more side projects which lie around half-finished on my server. Some are nearly done waiting for me to pick them up again, fix the last remaining bugs, and release them into the wild. 

🎸 Music & Hobbies

• Daily guitar practice, although sometimes for just a few minutes. Still trying to get the major parts from some of Polyphia’s songs perfect which is challenging and fun as well. I recently upgraded my guitars with Tim Henson’s (of Polyphia) signature semi-acoustic, the Ibanez TOD10N, because it sounds and looks so cool. That led me to playing some J.S. Bach on it for fun, which requires lots of concentration from me. And since my kids took part in a week-long band practice workshop and came out of it wanting to play the electric bass at home, I got one immediately. Playing bass is awesome, too, and daughter #3 has recently taken up formal lessons on it.
• My drums are also used often. Pounding the electronic pads of the Roland TD-17KVX as hard as I can to rather simple songs, mostly those by the Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, or Taking Back Sunday. Not going for improvement of my chops here, it’s mostly because the drumming itself is so satisfactory.
• Since 2016, I have decidedly made reading books a new hobby and part of my life. Over the years since then, the amount of books I read has gone up and the fun and knowledge I’ve been collecting, too. Every couple of weeks, I usually finish another book and publish my notes on it here in the /bookshelf section.
• Podcasting. Recording sound has been of some interest ever since my time as guitar player in a funk band back in the day, so this year I had the idea that I could just record reading my own new blog posts for those people who want to save time. The result: a Podcast! I enjoy those few hours spending on it every few weeks.

More about my story and history is on the /about page.