About – EveryFiveDays

How five people who write about different things ended up in the same place

Theo and Priya met in a café. Not dramatically — they both went there to write, read, research, or get away from everything for a few hours, and eventually started talking. Then kept talking.

Mostly about the things they were interested in, which were not the same things. One was preoccupied with how the space around a person changes the way they think; the other with what the body is actually doing while all that thinking happens. Different questions, same rabbit hole.

That turned out to be the important part. We were not looking at the same subject. We were all looking at why things work.

The other two met on Reddit, which sounds like the beginning of a terrible idea and nearly was. Both were talking about starting blogs. Both were making the classic mistake of thinking: how hard can it be? Write some articles, put them online, done.

Then you discover there is a website. And hosting. And maintenance. And SEO. And images. And editing. And suddenly you are spending more time running a blog than writing the thing you actually wanted to write.

Eventually they admitted they did not want to become full-time bloggers. They wanted to write. That is roughly when working with other people started to make sense.

The fifth of us arrived almost by accident, and understood the publishing side better than the rest of us did. Which surfaced the question none of us had a good answer to: why start a whole publication around one subject? If you are genuinely interested in one thing, you eventually find ten other things connected to it.

So the conversations moved off Reddit, and then to video calls. Some of those calls were scheduled for thirty minutes. One ran to nearly three hours, mostly because two of us would not stop arguing.

Somewhere in all of that we realised our interests were not random. They were five different ways of looking at the same problem.

Why these five areas

Sleep affects focus. Focus affects how you work. How you work affects your body. Your body affects your dog’s routine. It is all one system — we just happen to be looking at it from five different rooms in the same house.

Sleep & Recovery — the part everyone agrees is important and somehow keeps putting at the bottom of the list.
Cognitive Performance — focus, memory, and the long list of things claimed to sharpen them.
Fitness Technology — what actually works, what does not, and the point where optimisation turns into marketing.
Productive Workspaces — how the space you spend your day in shapes the way you think and work.
Smart Pet Care — pets, and the technology that promises to improve how we care for them.

These are not five unrelated subjects. They are five parts of a better life — not a perfect one, and not the “optimise every second of your existence” version either. Just better information, better tools, better habits, and a willingness to ask whether the things we are being told are actually true.

That is also why one publication made more sense than five small ones. We could share the work, the research, the costs, and what we each learned — and build something bigger than any one of us would have managed alone.

The five who write it

Each of us owns one area. We do not co-write, and we do not pretend to be experts on each other’s subjects — though a Sleep piece will happily admit that the lighting at your desk matters, because it does.

Naomi Alvarez

Sleep & Recovery Editor

Naomi writes about sleep and recovery — the part of a better life everyone agrees matters and almost everyone puts last. She is interested in what is genuinely within your control versus what is not, and she will not use shame as a motivator or treat a tracker's number as a diagnosis.

Read Naomi

Devon Cho

Cognitive Performance Editor

Devon covers focus, memory, and the long list of things claimed to sharpen them. He reads the primary literature for fun and holds a nootropic to the same standard as any other health claim — genuinely curious, not a cynic, and not a believer either.

Read Devon

Priya Anand

Fitness Technology Editor

Priya writes about fitness technology and the point where optimisation turns into marketing. She trains regularly and is unsentimental about gear that measures a great deal while changing nothing about how you actually train.

Read Priya

Theo Lindqvist

Productive Workspaces Editor

Theo covers the spaces people work in and how those spaces shape the way they think. He has redone his own setup more times than he would like to admit, and he writes for real constraints — small rooms, shared space, an actual budget — rather than photogenic dream desks.

Read Theo

Mara Kessler

Smart Pet Care Editor

Mara spent seven years as a veterinary technician before writing for owners instead of treating patients, on the grounds that most of what goes wrong is decided long beforehand, at home, by someone doing their best with bad information. She writes about feeding, weight, dental care and behaviour for both dogs and cats, and assesses the devices sold alongside them without assuming any of them are necessary.

Read Mara

What we agreed on

We are interested in truth more than hype. That sounds obvious until you spend five minutes on the internet.

If something works, we explain why it works.
If the evidence is weak, we say the evidence is weak.
If a product is good but overpriced, that is worth saying too.
If something does not live up to its marketing, we would rather point that out than pretend otherwise.
And if we do not know, we say we do not know.

There are things none of us will do, and they are not house style — they are the reason each of us writes the way we do:

No shame. Naomi will not use guilt as a motivator about sleep, and will not treat a number on a tracker as a diagnosis.
No special pleading. Devon holds a nootropic to exactly the same standard as any other health claim.
No gadget worship. Priya is unsentimental about hardware that measures a great deal and changes nothing about how you train.
No dream setups. Theo writes for real constraints — small rooms, shared space, an actual budget.
No overselling. Mara knows how much “smart pet” marketing promises that the hardware cannot deliver.

Across all five areas, the same rules apply: we do not fabricate testing, we do not claim first-hand experience we have not had, we do not make claims the evidence will not carry, and we keep evidence and opinion clearly separated. Where a subject needs a professional — a doctor, a physio, a vet — we say so rather than writing around it.

How it happened

A café. Two people who kept turning up to the same place to work, and eventually started comparing notes on completely different subjects.
A Reddit thread. Two more, both about to start blogs, both underestimating everything that is not writing.
The fifth. Someone who actually understood the publishing side, and asked the question that changed the shape of it: why build this around only one subject?
The long call. Thirty minutes scheduled. Nearly three hours spent. Most of it arguing, some of it useful.
The realisation. Five interests, one underlying question — five rooms in the same house.
EveryFiveDays. One publication instead of five, and a first article rather than a five-year plan.

How this is paid for

Honestly: affiliate commissions. We like our principles, but principles do not pay hosting bills. The reason we would rather earn a commission than take sponsorship is that it leaves us free to choose products because they are genuinely useful, rather than because somebody paid us to say so — and free to say when something is not worth buying at all.

Right now that is primarily the Amazon Associates programme, and we intend to broaden it as our coverage grows. The full detail — how links are marked, what commissions never influence, and what this costs you (nothing) — is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.

Where this goes next

We have no idea exactly where it goes. Maybe it becomes something much bigger. Maybe it stays relatively small. Maybe in six months we look back at this page and laugh at how naïve we were. Probably that one.

What we would like, if it works, is for the five to eventually become more than five — not hundreds of writers, quite the opposite. Anyone we bring in would need the same basic instinct: be curious, question things, do the work, share what you learn. Different interests are fine. Different opinions are fine. Arguments appear to be unavoidable. The curiosity is the part that is not optional.

Beyond that: more areas as they earn their place, affiliate relationships past Amazon, and individual accounts for each of the five rather than the one we share today.

That is us. Five writers, five obsessions, one slightly chaotic experiment. Start reading, or find the area you came for: Sleep & Recovery, Cognitive Performance, Fitness Technology, Productive Workspaces or Smart Pet Care.

Five people, five obsessions, one experiment