My friend has an ingenious device on his desk. It’s a work / no work switch. And it works.

What is this ingenious device, you ask? Well, it’s a WiFi dongle. He pulls it out of the USB port when he wants to get some real work done.

Brilliant.

There’s simply no way to cheat the circadian rhythm. My peak brain activity is 11PM-3AM and it resists the half-assed attempts to budge it. Guess it’s either all or nothing – it won’t magically move to some other hours unless I put lots of efforts in. The question is, what’s to gain? (and to lose?)

Why is the entire world running all the time? In the last six months I barely had a chance to actually spend genuine time with someone without either of us having some time constraints. I can barely count the times I could stay at someone’s place overnight without feeling guilty of taking too much of their precious time. This is very bad since I find it nearly impossible to connect with someone when our minds are constantly jumping towards the rest of things to do on that day. The art of being there seems almost forgotten in the technology & smartphone era – or maybe it’s just me?

The worst part of this is that even though I’m doing my best to keep my mind uncluttered, I’m still constrained by other people. Everyone seems to have so much stuff to do it almost sounds silly – except that it is insane. And I’m a part of this insanity.

I hereby make a resolution not to hurry unless not doing so would threaten my well-being. Which is ironic considering the fact that most of the time, hurrying actually decreases my well-being slowly but surely.

The most ridiculous piece of advice so far: it’s too risky to simply buy a one way ticket to <somewhere>! Guess what I did just a few days ago. Welcome, Spain!

The problem with perceived risk is that people tend to consider any change as potentially harmful. This is the very same kind of mindset that prohibits any change, even the constructive one, and including the painful one that leads to many good things.

Someone once said that the magic begins outside your comfort zone. If it is so, my comfort zone is a vanishing point on the horizon. I just wonder if there’s any limit to this – if I can actually push myself too far and break.

Air and light and time and space

Click on the above link to read the whole story. Do it now – because the rest of this post won’t make any sense if you don’t know what I’m talking about, and because it’s a potential lifechanger.

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I’ve fallen into that trap countless times. Something has always stood in the way…

• In photography: the weather was not right. I didn’t have atelier access. I was out of film. A model was too busy. I wasn’t in a creative mood.
• In programming: seems that I never had the right development platform. I’ve been using Windows for the last two years to simplify things, and Windows isn’t programmer-friendly. I didn’t have a laptop, so I couldn’t work in a cafe. I didn’t have enough RAM to run that virtual machine. A JTAG adapter was broken and I didn’t have time to fix it.
• In blogging: I could simply never decide which platform to use. Self-hosted, or a service? WordPress or Tumblr? Photos or words? Private or public? Photography or electronics?

This list could go on and on, but I’m not here to bore the reader. Things went this way for years… then, one day, something happened. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment, but some day I realized I’m actually overcoming all the obstacles instead of creating them. One day, something clicked.

I’m writing this sitting in a crammed kitchen. I’m in the process of renovating my studio and most of my life takes place in the kitchen – so there’s a huge PC workstation taking most of the table, stacks of vinyl LPs and a turntable on the counters, stacks of papers on the windowsill, a guitar in the corner and various boxes containing electronics everywhere around. I even had a TV and an old Amiga A1200 computer on the floor for a few days.

Does this lack of space prevent me from doing my work?

An important part of an artist’s awakening is realizing that living isn’t about creating a perfect world where you can go along with the flow freely. Life is about going forward despite and against the odds and the (sometimes harsh) reality.

I read an excellent book on junk food recently and thought: really, it can’t be that bad, right? Yet, the book caused me to cut down on chocolate greatly, and I discovered a pattern. I used to have this habit:

I’m hacking on something and I get a bit hungry. I eat a chocolate bar. I’m still hungry and my thoughts start to drift away from the work and towards the next chocolate bar.

Things have changed a bit since I stopped eating chocolate bars and drinking soda. Now it’s much more like this:

I’m hacking on something and I get a bit hungry. I eat an apple. I continue to work.

And yet, today I strayed from the usual course of things and I ate a huge pack of chocolate chip cookies out of boredom. And you know what?

I simply couldn’t focus for the next two fucking hours.

This translates to: no work done for two hours. No rest during the next two hours since I was now terminally bored. And boredom kills all opportunity to get any real rest.

Sometimes you have to quit something just to see how much unnoticed harm it causes in your life.

Over the last week I received many useful life & work suggestions from my friends. Somehow, a clear division line starts to appear: the best ones are invariably from people outside the IT industry.

Please don’t misunderstand me here: I don’t mean to say that IT people are dull and/or unimaginative. What I want to say is that while spending most of your time in one professional circle is nice and comfy, it’s not good for you in the long run.

Turns out quitting a job is not unlike quitting alcohol. As both of them tend to make your brain dull, removing them from your system will cause a rebound effect, which includes the following symptoms (good and bad):

• overexcitement and/or agitation
• sleep problems
• shakiness
• having more energy than you can expend
• mood swings

Those symptoms do subside after at most few weeks, fortunately.

Things become radically different once you quit your daily job. The first thing you’ll notice is how much time you actually have.

Working a daily job, there’s simply no way to experience this degree of freedom. When you have a job, days generally fall in one of those three categories:

• Working day. 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 2 hours commute, 6 hours left to do whatever you want/have to do. These 6 hours have dozens of things competing for them; balancing them is an art in itself. Also, this gets expontentially harder once you have kids.
• Weekend day. 8 hours sleep, 16 hours divided between: resting, spending time with friends/family and doing whatever you wanted to do during the week but had no time to.
• Day off. 8 hours sleep, 16 hours frantically trying to get as much rest as possible.
• If you’re a heavy drinker (like I once used to be), there’s also a fourth kind: the hangover day. It consists of 8 hours of crappy, restless sleep and 16 hours of suffering.

How does your schedule compare to mine?

• A day. 8 hours sleep, 16 hours doing whatever I want or need to do.

Unless I’ve committed to meeting a deadline (and it’s approaching), I have complete freedom to choose whatever I want to do. Days of week no longer matter that much – and weekends actually become a bit annoying because stores are closed.

The best thing about living in a free schedule is that I no longer wait for anything. Renovating my flat used to take pathetically long because I could only paint the walls during weekends (it’s just plain unwise to paint without daylight). Now I can work during the afternoon every day and put off coding until late evening – which is the best time to code anyway.

A nice side effect of not waiting is that there’s almost no backlog. I used to have a fat TODO list with things which really should be done; right now I just do whatever needs doing next – and things rarely stay on the TODO list for more than three days. Also, doing some side project no longer involves waiting for free time – unless there’s a deadline, I just sit down and do whatever strikes my imagination. This is the right way of living if you’re an artist – and building open source software is, indeed, an art.

Having my full sixteen-hour day back is something I’ll not give up easily.

Well, you should be.

People in IT tend to complain about their jobs a lot. The most common themes, in no particular order, are:

• Job is boring.
• Job is too well paid to find a better one.
• Boss is annoying.
• Overworked (for no apparent reason).
• Corporations suck, but I feel to comfortable to find a startup job.

One thing is notably missing: no one complains about being afraid, EVER. The only emotion there is boredom. People simply get stuck in their less-than-ideal jobs and stay there, often for years. When asked about the possibility of finding something better, they dismiss it as too disruptive. How lazy is that?

If you find quitting your comfortable IT job too hard, too disruptive, too risky, you’re not reasonable or sensible – you’re just plain lazy. If you don’t feel afraid, you’re not pushing your limits far enough. And if you feel bored, you’re not pushing them at all.