Zach's PEN #29: The Lonesome Valley of Change

2021 Week 6: Reorganizing my office, currently in the "despair" stage 🙂

Happy Saturday PENpals,

Inspiring but functional spaces are important to me. In setting up this office, the office that I may very well work in for the rest of my life (I may very well but probably won't), I want to be able to switch contexts with little effort.

This week, with some help, I accomplished getting the 100+ wires on my desk (literally) into raceways, velcros, zipties, mounted under things, run in channels around the room, etc.. I now have a full studio in my office with multiple (I would say pleasing) angles for filming, space to do anything I might want to do digitally, physically, analog, and otherwise.

As a lifelong Yak Shaver (see my thread below), I have a tendency to get hung up on optimizing things before I'm even using them to do a thing. I can honestly (and perhaps embarrassingly) announce that this is the first time I'm optimizing a space in which I'm already doing the thing that I'm optimizing for, therefore staying on the right side of yak shaving.

Working on software (can't wait to show you what we've been working on at Markee) teaches you something about the practicality of the Release (1.0, 2.1, etc.). By all means, you can have all kinds of ideas, new features, changes, tweaks, bugfixes, optimizations, you can have all this stuff going on, but you also need to BE on a current, stable, usable Release. Any system, workflow, process is not of any use if it cannot be used 😃.

So while working on optimizing this office, it has needed to continue to be functional to produce the stuff I'm producing every day.

It's way more satisfying than optimizing because "I need to do that one more thing before I can—"

But then I did a really extreme thing and cleared off every shelf and dumped everything out of every drawer... Now I am in The Lonesome Valley. I wrote about that this morning.

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Yesterday, a day "off," I elected to reorganize my office. REALLY reorganize it. I should be able to reach out and have precisely the right tool to do whatever I want with zero friction. So I emptied every drawer and shelf. I am in the in-between now: The Lonesome Valley 👇

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/13/the-lonesome-valley.html

I think that next week I'll be out of The Lonesome Valley and I'll show some before/after pictures.

This Week's Other Posts

I wrote about a really counterintuitive aspect of "passion projects" and procrastination. The post is sort of a mess but I've been proving out the core idea to myself daily for... a while.

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/07/the-wantmust-matrix.html

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Today I had this perfect set of tasks that fit neatly into all four quadrants of an idea I'm playing with called the Want/Must Matrix. The counterintuitive thing I’m arguing is that the tasks that create the most resistance are those we both MUST do and WANT to do. 👇

I wrote about Security Theatre and a reason why we should maybe feel good about humanity.

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/09/security-theatre-and.html

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Warning: This thread is intended to make you feel better about humanity, but it could have a different effect: It could make you feel scared. So if you’re someone who obsesses about danger, maybe don’t read this thread. 👇

I wrote about why I've second-guessed my feelings throughout my life and what helped me begin to get over that.

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/11/how-do-you.html

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

I’ve spent my life incredulous of people who can state “how they feel” with confidence. I realize now it’s because I never learned to trust, or even pay attention to, my own sensations: physical, emotional, otherwise. MOST PEOPLE I’m feeling XXXXX ME But how do you KNOW? 👇

I wrote about the Yaklog. If you need a primer on Yak Shaving, this scene from Malcolm in the Middle (which I've never watched) is decent, though it doesn't full capture how deep the connoisseurship of yaks can go:

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/11/introducing-the-yaklog.html

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Yak shaving has a presumed negative connotation, but most in the Eternal Order of Yak Shavers truly enjoy shaving yaks. But not all Yaks have that luxurious, sumptuous hair that truly satisfies a Yak Shaver. These should be immediately relegated to the Yaklog. 👇

I wrote about "Teach a man to fish" and why the people who most espouse this are usually the least willing to pay for it, or even consider what it might cost.

Microblog: https://micro.zachphillips.blog/2021/02/12/teach-a-man.html

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

The "teach a man to fish" thing has been claimed more often by a conservative "helping people is actually bad for them" ideology than by any other. The irony is that "teaching a man to fish," in any form, is incredibly expensive. Conservatives aren't willing to pay for it. 👇

Photography

Here are some other panoramas on the same roll I shared from last week. This camera is the Fujifilm TX-1 (also known as the Hasselblad XPAN). This first one was taken in the same place as the others but months earlier on the evening the election was called for Biden. In the third and fourth ones you can see the church we go to in the background.

Much love, PENpals,

Zach