I'm working from home fulltime now, for a company that has no physical office. While I've had some teething pains with this, on the whole it has been a good thing. When I started, I had just moved to Atlanta, found an apartment, and had to get on my grind. I was working with a 4’ home depot plastic table, from my 12” thinkpad, on a chair I found on craigslist for ~$5. It was miserable. I've slowly reacquired the things that I need to get things done with any real comfort, which are a set of decent studio monitors, (for my work desk, I rock a set of used Edirol MA-10D self powered monitors), a unicomp keyboard that has the thinkpad mouse clit, and a decent widescreen monitor. These things are pretty important to me in terms of having a functional workstation. Today I decided to solve the other side of the equation, and get myself some decent furniture. I found someone selling a shipping container full of used office equipment, and got myself all hooked up.
This was my work situation when I woke up this morning:
This is my situation 4 beers, a chick-fil-a #4, a 60 mile drive, and 5 hours later:
Super sweet.
I also came across a weird part of my personality today. I was able to pull all this furniture out of my truck, set it up, hang the whiteboard, setup and new box I aquired (more on that later), install new seats in my truck, and clean up after myself, without once losing focus or deciding something else was more worthwhile. The only reason I bring this up as interesting is because this project required a tremendous number of context switches, like pulling the tools out, organizing the closet so the old stuff fit, assembling the chairs… the list goes on. When I'm working on a project with unknown outcomes, like learning clojurescript or organizing MP3 files, the slightest suggestion of a context switch can often throw my whole workflow off. It's something interesting to me that I have to investigate further. Why is it that I can get things like this done with laser focus and minimal effort, but getting past a “hello world” while I'm learning to use noir to build webapps requires a herculean effort of forcing my attention?