Creating a Working Environment: Part I
This is a real nice room
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” — Mike Tyson
Not relevant to me, you say to yourself, I don’t get in fights at work and what does this have to do with crafting a working environment? First off, kudos to you, you’ve chosen a good place to work (If you want to choose a great one, we are always looking for talented people that would view fights at work as somewhat of a red flag). Secondly and to the actual point… well read on, I’ll get to it.
What is relevant is that in everyone’s day to day, surprises are rampant, and by their very nature, unexpected.
You sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee and a dream of what you will accomplish the rest of the day. The pure brilliance of your thoughts will effortlessly flow through each keystroke, mouse click and pithy remark to your colleagues. Every email is concise and relevant, every slack just the right information when you need it and every one of your very few meetings ends fifteen minutes early. Birds sing and unicorns bring you donuts.
What actually happens is maybe that task you were almost done with suddenly gets sidetracked by a brand new request. Perhaps you always have several different things you are working on at the same time. It could be that one simple task was actually a Cerebus-like behemoth and you fed and watered it and sang it a song and then it turned out to be more of a Hydra-like behemoth and you know, life gets complicated.
There is a lot you cannot control or anticipate, but you can determine the foundation you need to be successful. In this case that foundation is your working environment and consists of a few different spaces: physical, virtual and mental. Each leads to the next and contributes to your productivity, satisfaction and happiness.
Physical Space (Why do I keep running into things?)
How do you feel when you sit down — or stand up — and get to work? Is your chair too low, does the edge of the desk dig into your forearms when you type or does the sun glare off of your screen in an irritating way? (oh, look at how fancy you are, with a window and all)
My work setup is an electronic standing desk with two monitors — one vertical, one horizontal — a laptop, an external keyboard and trackpad. I have plenty of open desk space with a wire cabinet beneath with sticky notes and a few notepads. Nearby a large whiteboard covers most of a wall. There is (was) a succulent, someday I’ll buy it a nice pot to sit in.
My desk is the equivalent of the apartment that the spy or hitman has in a movie. The kind of place where the protagonist shows up and realizes that this is a place designed to look like someone lives there, but is merely a facade to give the appearance of normalcy, the person could vanish and nothing would be left behind. My desk is basically a safe house.
But this is normal for me for a few reasons. It took me a long time to figure out how I work best. I don’t work in a single spot and I never have. Back in the days of desktops I would create stubbed out versions of projects at home so I could work on small pieces that I could easily recreate once I was back at the office. I would copy over code in notebooks. Laptops made it easier, but then I was often switching between differing sets of input devices and monitors or just the laptop itself. Flexibility became the priority and with that, locations that allowed me to quickly plug in and get to work. I often am also frequently interested in a few different things simultaneously and the natural order of things is for my workspace to reflect that. It is easy to fall into rabbit holes when they are always scattered around lying in wait for a misstep. A simple workspace gives me more flexibility and prevents me from setting traps for myself.
My desk at home is similar, but not quite as antiseptic as I give myself a bit more latitude to fall into those rabbit holes (everybody needs a hobby). What is the same between work and home is that I have a designated space. The irony is that I will sometimes go work somewhere else. By explicitly defining my workspace I’ve made it so when I break my own rules and work from the couch or coffeeshop (in the before times) I’m doing it on purpose to break out of a routine, often because I am trying to switch my mental space to think about a task or problem in a different way.
It took me so long to figure out what worked for me because I was paying attention to what others had done. Instead of using their experience as inspiration for things to try, I replicated it and just dealt with the parts that didn’t work for me. Once I identified my personal priorities of flexibility and focus, I worked toward making my physical space reflect those ideals.
Virtual Space (So.Many.Tabs)
Early in my career I had a tech support role for a software product and having a setup that matched the user’s experience made it much easier to troubleshoot. I then proceeded to hold on to that habit much too dearly for much too long and as I moved into using new tools I would always stick to defaults. Even when customization options existed I would bias toward ‘standards’. I never fell into the dreaded trap of “well, it works on my machine”, because mine always matched theirs, but I never gleaned the benefits of tailoring my experience to fit how I actually work. For too long I didn’t realize how many tools I was missing out on and more importantly the ‘why’ those additional tools would help.
The beauty of computers is that they are not one thing, my laptop can provide whatever I need at the time that I need it and I was unnecessarily hamstringing myself by making a dynamic tool a static anchor (mixed-metaphors much?). Having a broader grasp of options and how to easily move between all of those different options unlocks more power and everyone knows what comes with great power. So how to use that power responsibly? Figure out what helps you personally and what detracts and distracts. There are a myriad of options, tools and other assorted shiny objects and at a certain point you are just falling down more rabbit holes (rabbit hole reference quota officially reached).
I do a fair amount of context switching. I, like many, used to say I was good at multitasking… I was not. What I am good at is serializing multiple tasks and finding similarities and ways to leverage and prioritize those tasks. When it comes down to actually getting down to the nitty gritty of doing the work I need to create focus and so that context switch needs to be as clean as possible. I can be in a research context, a development context, a documentation context or a task context that involves a subset of other types of context. In each case though I have a main priority that drives that focus.
I use multiples to keep contexts separate and also pull everything in quickly. Multiple spaces help me to separate the different types of work I am doing while being able to quickly switch back to them. In the past I have used virtual machines but found that while it worked well for separation it was slower than I wanted to switch between them. I also use multiple monitors most of the time and will have my IDE on my laptop screen and browser windows on the others. When researching I will open up individual browser windows and add additional tabs of relevant info. The end result is multiple tabs on multiple windows and multiple IDEs with multiple terminals on multiple spaces on multiple monitors and it all works until it doesn’t.
This kind of setup allows me to wrangle a lot of different types of information and tasks, but it is still easy to get lost in the weeds and become fixated on the tools instead of using the tools to support the work. With so much going on I need still more tools to help manage. For windows (the things on the screen, not the OS) I use a window manager. I set up aliases to optimize my terminals. I set up additional Keyboard Shortcuts in VS code and use snippets. And I keep finding new ways to use the tools I’ve been using for a long time. Despite using Gmail basically forever it wasn’t until last week that I started using keyboard shortcuts (Shift + ‘?’).
It takes time and experimentation to figure it out and I’ve gone down plenty of paths that didn’t pan out. I try to figure out how I could improve how I’m currently doing things and why some ideas work for me and some don’t. Give it five minutes and don’t be afraid to drop a tool or idea if it doesn’t work for you or come back to it later when perhaps you have different needs. The first time I turned a monitor vertical it was dumb and ridiculous, the second time was a year later and it made sense.
Mental Space (Whoa… I know kung fu)
This is the actual important stuff. Everything is structured to help you accomplish your goals, whatever they might be.
For me a simple physical space and a complex virtual space provides me with the focus and tools to get the stuff out of my head and into the world. When someone sees me swipe up and show all of my open windows and then swipe over to different spaces with just as many windows they often react… unfavorably. My way may not be your way, but you should know why. You can experiment and refine. When everybody has a different approach it also adds to the marketplace of ideas. That difference is not a disadvantage or something that separates but instead is an opportunity for a dialog and to understand different approaches to the same challenges.
Understanding the goal I was trying to achieve was the piece that was missing for me. I thought that by trying to match what most everyone else did I could simplify my interactions and get tasks done more efficiently. Even that was a false notion, there were always small divergences. I once spent a day tracking down what appeared to be an obscure css bug on one person’s laptop due to a browser extension that was for sure not installed or enabled (it was installed and enabled). Spending the time and energy to develop your own way of doing things not only increases your effectiveness and satisfaction but also increases your knowledge of options and makes you better at identifying the ‘why’.
I like the concept of a finger pointing at the moon as a parable for learning. In this context the pointing finger is the tools I use, the processes I follow and the environments I create. The moon is my goal, it is not just the task at hand but the framework I use to focus how I approach tasks. Also that end goal, that ‘why’ is the critical part. Everything else is supposed to be in support of it, so if any of it isn’t working I can get rid of it. It is easy to focus on the finger and not pay attention to where it is pointing and where it points is kind of the point.
Deep breath, TLDR (isn’t that supposed to go at the top so I don’t actually have to read)
Well… that certainly went in a direction but I was trying to make a point. (i.e. this is a metaphor, and a pun, and literal)
Everybody has a plan, but you are probably going to get hit eventually. You are going to forget those aliases, keyboard shortcuts for different applications are going to conflict, sometimes there are so many tabs open you can only see the first letter on the title of each, somebody laughs at your vertical monitor, etc…
You make a plan to not get hit, but more importantly the plan helps you get back on track when you do get hit and everybody gets hit sometimes. Let your plans and routines be flexible. What works for you today may be, and will be, different next week.
Figure out what helps you — whether it is a more comfortable chair, a second monitor (or third or fourth or more… I see you Swordfish movie), or aliasing ‘sudo rm -rf’ to the space bar (don’t do that). Different things will help you at different times, but you are not your tools, they are there to help you do what you need to do and can change at your whim, just be aware of what your whims are and why they are changing. You may be saying, “Hey, that’s not how you use whim, by definition it is unexpected and unexplained”. Exactly (and nobody likes a pedant).
