Sometimes you don’t realize how blunt your knife is until you sharpen it a little bit.

For the last few years I accepted that my tools are what they are and I don’t need so much more to do my job. It was good enough, my job could be done, so it was done this way. This attitude towards my work is quite revealing I believe, more importantly, switching around to obsessing over my tools actually triggered a positive internal change recently.

This thought is not about productivity (though it is tangential). My tools being “better” for me, doesn’t only make me work faster, they make me feel like I live in a decorated cabin, its perfect shade of wallpaper blending the dark wood of the coffee table perfectly. Without my tools tailored, I live in an Ikea showroom, equally uninspired and untethered to my surroundings.

What motivated this post is the tech I work with, it’ll get nerdy, a lot. Feel free to skip that one if the vibe gets too awkward.

default

University was a wonderful forcing function to get into LInux, where showing how slick your desktop environment was felt like the business card scene in American Psycho. We were nerds trying to one-up one another, and it felt great.

We would spend weekends fighting with our school-provided laptops to setup the perfect distribution, window manager, shell, configs for all the tools we needed to do our school work. It’s a moment of discovery I hadn’t really felt before, there’s only so much you can brag about with fountain pens in middle-school (while you brag about not doing the work at all in high school).

I have found memories of installing and re-installing systems, taking the time to pixel adjust border-padding between windows and recompiling dwm when I needed to. Having a beautiful environment felt right, did it make me work better ? maybe. At least it brought some happiness anytime I’d open that brick of a laptop.

The other consequence of caring so much about your tool was the curiosity to discover better ways to set things up. I’d naturally look at other setups online, keep an eye out for new releases or features, stay interested in what was possible. Crossing the barrier of accepting the default becomes a slight burden, as the quest for tools never really finishes.

As I grew older, I became more motivated by solving the task in front of me than the way I would solve it. The management capitalist brain messed my head up. I didn’t care about how I would achieve work, as long as it was done in a relative efficient way.

Process debt was only really addressed if they hindered on productivity (shocking), and since I wasn’t doing the work but really managing others, my tools had no importance in the realization of corporate success.

Sigh.

The corporate ladder quickly made me switch to a very default macos, as emails and ticketing boards were the center of my life then. I accepted that whatever tiling window management life was behind me. I mostly used one browser anyway, and if I ever ventured into the terminal, tmux wasn’t far.. So I guess that was fine ?

mediocrity

I realize that I have been living for about 10 years in this default space. My tools were barebones, as long as they could let me do my job, I didn’t need to upgrade. In project management, you can often hear “perfect is the enemy of good”, and that axiom resonated a lot with me (still does to some degree).

macos has a desktop management … system (they call them spaces) that lets you have horizontally aligned virtual desktops. They’re pretty easy to setup and work well for the most part. They are good enough to do anything really, they sometimes make me angry but I get over it quickly.

Window switching is a bit of a pain, the OS has something obnoxiously called mission control. A quick three fingers swipes brings all your windows in random placement across the screen, left for you to scan which one you want to focus on, after a couple zoom animations, you’re back to work!

What kills me deep inside is how painfully slow the animations are.

Workspace switching takes 500ms to occur. A grandiose powerpoint like animation cuts through the fat of your work focus to bless you with ultimate smoothness and unusability of your desktop for half a second.

Oh you want to switch four spaces over ? that will be a two seconds tax (if you’re quick enough). Not only this time is completely lost, your brain needs to recover from seeing your life flash by (I’m also not even going to mention mission control here, please don’t get me started).

waking up

So here I was, stuck in a status quo I accepted and luckily woke up from. I think it happened because I finally saw what life could be. From the bare walls and grey furniture I could see through a carefully crafted living room, one that made sense and worked for its inhabitants.

Enters Aerospace, it only took 91 seconds for my mind to be made up (I could write another story on the effectiveness of such a demonstration material). Its premise was simple, bring the i3 tiling window management to macos. It does one thing right, it’s not production ready at all, but many people swear by it already.

I decided it was time, took the necessary effort and dove into it. Within minutes it was installed and I had to relearn ways of interacting with my laptop. It took a while to get used to the new keybindings, but within a day or so, it felt natural (and expected!) to instantly switch between a browser and a terminal.

Did I feel more productive ? Maybe, but this is hard to measure. What I felt was more aligned with my environment, my tools were acting closer to my intentions, like an extension of mind, and less of a hinderance on what I wanted to achieve. Less friction made my mind quieter, as I didn’t have to suppress the irk of dealing with subpar interactions anymore.

reflecting on the practice

There are a few lessons I’m still working through with this experiment.

Working with non-default tooling implies more cognitive load initially. Branching out of a well defined path is an effort, one I should be ready and intentional with. The hours of ramp up with the new tool should also be a time of self-reflexion, I should recognize going overboard with trying new things for their own sake.

Working through customization is contagious, within weeks I was back in analyzing many parts of my day-to-day for improvements, writing some software along the way, the good thing is that writing tailor-fit applications is technically cheap nowadays. This is a further reflection on how writing software for yourself or a super restricted audience has really exploded lately, I want to think more about this at some point, as it clashes with the VC-backed hell tech is perpetually living in. I would, maybe, dare to say that this is an exciting recent development ?

Finally, writing this is a bigger effort towards not hating technology, my feelings have evolved in many directions in the recent years and I’m processing a lot through writing lately, so I am hoping for more thoughts on tech as I continue to navigate the unruly waters we’re surrounded with lately.