The Marginal team after picking up trash. In the front you see the trash bags and our tools that we used to pick trash. In the background there are green trees showing its springtime in Odense Denmark.

On #EarthDay, I teamed up with people from Marginal in Odense to clean up one of the city’s green areas.

It turned out to be a really nice day. We collected some trash and left the place better than we found it.

The team that picked up the most got organic chocolate from a local business.

Ten years ago my goal was a Rolex and a beach where I did nothing.

Today? If I could retire tomorrow I’d say no.

I’d scale down to only the work I care about, on my own terms.

That’s the real goal — not wealth. Freedom. Time. Work that feels worth doing.

Nobody can buy more time.

Billionaires and broke students both get 24 hours. What separates them isn’t money — it’s what they do with those hours.

Every decision I make now: is this worth MY time, or should I pay someone else so I can spend it better?

#TimeManagement

There’s a difference between working a lot because it’s expected of you — and working a lot because what you do has become part of who you are.

I’ve lived both sides.

They feel absolutely nothing alike.

#Entrepreneurship

When I started Sustainable WWW, the clock stopped being my enemy.

I wake up at 5:30am to write. I work after my kids go to sleep. No Netflix. No scrolling.

Not because I’m disciplined. Because I finally have something worth spending my time on.

#SustainableWeb

Page weight budgets are one of the simplest and most effective tools for sustainable web design. Set a target for how heavy each page should be, and your team is working toward the same goal. It’s like a marathon. Without a finish line, how do you know when you’re done?

#WebDev #PageWeight

In the Philippines I saw something I’d never seen in Denmark.

The smartest student was the popular one. Kids fought for the chance to help in school. Education wasn’t a burden — it was a weapon.

That cracked something open in me.

#GrowthMindset

A fun thought: a single tree can store about 50 megabytes worth of text. That makes trees pretty terrible hard drives. But it also puts into perspective how much digital data we’re creating and storing every single day. 🌏🌳

#DigitalSustainability #DataStorage #SustainableWeb

Using a WOFF2 font instead of TTF can save you between 60% and 85% in file size. The Inter UI font, for example, goes from 253KB in TTF down to 88KB in WOFF2. And WOFF2 is supported in all major browsers. There’s really no reason to use anything else.

#Typography #WebPerformance #FontOptimization

My mother spent years working as a cleaner, wearing herself down. My father — same factory, 25 years, same pay.

I didn’t just watch that. I absorbed it.

I inherited their worldview without realising it: life is hard, the system wins, so why try.

#Mindset

I remember the first few years of web design when websites didn’t contain much more than text and maybe a colored background. We didn’t have complicated CSS. If you wanted to style a website, you had to design tables in Photoshop and cut them into pieces.

#WebDesign #Throwback

Growing up, I was taught that work is something you endure. Life happens on weekends. The weekdays? Just survival.

It took 20 years, a move to the Philippines, and building my own company to completely unlearn that.

Here’s what changed. 🧵

#Entrepreneurship

Semantic HTML has been around since 2014. A header tag, a main tag, a footer tag. That’s all it takes to start making your site more accessible. It’s not hard. It just requires us to care.

#HTML #A11y #WebDev

System fonts: free, already installed, zero extra kilobytes, high readability. “But they don’t look good.” Have you actually tried building with them recently?

#Typography #WebPerformance

What are you going to do for earth day on April 22 2026? 🤩💚

#EarthDay #EarthDay2026

This is so true 🤩

Lesson 7 - Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons The entire 7th chapter of the book Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons.

I published the 7th chapter about accessibility from my book Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons on my Substack. Go read it here: open.substack.com/pub/michaela...

#WCAG #Accessibility #DigitalSustainability

Great initiative! Love the idea and I would love to do the same. My wife and I are thinking about buying a small farm and then I will turn the land around it into wild flowers and forest 🌳

Good part (part 2): By having less space we are now forced to think about whether we really need something. And if we buy something we will have to throw something out. Makes me think of the saying: 1 in 1 out.

#Sustainability #SustainableLiving

Now to the good (part 1): By having to throw out lots of things I realized exactly how many things we had that we never used, and also how little we actually need in the new apartment. #Sustainability. It’s hard to grasp before trying it yourself.

Next negative: It’s super hard squeezing 130sqm into 96sqm, where 20 of them are terrace 🫣 but it’s going surprisingly good. 👍

The first negative: The moving company we used promised to put off some furniture’s we couldn’t fit at the recycling station. Instead I got approached at night outside the new apartment having to pick up everything again because they dumped it around the corner 😣

I’m in the process of moving me, my wife and two kids from a 130sqm apartment to a 96sqm apartment. It’s tough, and it’s really making me think a lot. There are also lots of positives which I will talk about here.

#NewMe #Sustainability

I was asked a while ago why I don’t have my own website talking about what I do in digital sustainability.

Now I do, but I warn everyone it’s a work in progress 🤩

michaelandersen.net

Awesome! 🤩 great to see you also rock the left side of the scale!

Sustainable Web Design gets more and more popular. Did you know UKs government’s website was redesigned and slashed page weight by 50%, cutting energy use. Every bit counts!

#SustainableWeb

10.000 visits with an emission of 1.97g per visit equals 19.3kg CO2. If the website is optimized to approximately 0.07g per visit, then you would have saved roughly 97% emissions.

#SustainableWebDesign #GreenTheWeb #CarbonEmissions #SustainableWeb

Fact: Average web page view emits 1.76g CO2. Optimize your site to shrink this footprint.

Optimizing them to A+ level will reduce their emissions 25-30 times (approx. 0,07g)

#SustainableWeb #WebsiteCarbon

Sustainable web design creates digital products that prioritize people and planet by minimizing energy use, optimizing resources, and using green hosting. It’s efficient, accessible, and eco-friendly.

Read more here: sustainablewebdesign.org

#SustainableWebDesign #Sustainability #GreenWeb

What can we do about it? 🤔

- Build sustainable websites and web applications.
- Remove the content is no longer relevant
- And much much more.

#SustainableWwbDesign #Sustainability