saving ink

I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, and no matter how I try to rationalize it (I’ve had a lot of work, my parents visited, there was an epic wedding weekend, I had to clean up cat puke) and say I’ve been too busy living to write, I find that excuse leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Imagine me dropping dead and my obit reading, “She was doing so well but then she got too busy to breathe. Poor thing.”

So what’s the problem, exactly? It’s been eight months since I left my old job and turned freelance. I’m slowly getting to the position where I’m getting steady work (though I need to do more marketing and sort out some legal details still). My website is set up, so all that’s left is to do the actual work when I have it, and that takes far fewer hours per week than my old job required of me, especially since I no longer have to spend eight hours in an office whether I have work to do or not. I have more time than I’ve had since my first year of college (the only time I didn’t also have a job), and plenty of ideas for writing projects, not just in this blog. And yet, it seems that every part of my day is increasingly occupied. So what’s the matter with me?

I think I’ve isolated at least part of it: I may have left my old job behind in December, but I took my old habits with me.

When I had to sit in an office all day, I developed coping mechanisms. As I’m a late riser and night worker, I’d spend the first hour or two of each morning just trying to force my brain awake so I could start being productive. This involved visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, downing enough coffee to dispatch a small elephant and generally killing time until I either had to do something time-sensitive or felt like my brain was present enough to start writing an actual article.

When I used to check email at work, it was a matter of keeping my head above water during the daily flood, which meant ignoring a good number of messages, putting many off until the absolute last minute, and dealing with the truly urgent ones - but not immediately, just before it was too late.

These days, I set my own hours. If I feel like working early (say, noonish), I work early. If I feel like getting groceries and working out and making a nice dinner during the day and then working until the wee hours, I do that. I don’t have a set schedule, I have a schedule regulated by necessity and efficiency. I work when I feel I’m most productive. As for email, it’s no longer a flood but a manageable trickle.

And yet, I still won’t answer some messages for days, though they require minimum effort on my part. Worse still, I find myself spending significant parts of my day visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, drinking coffee and energy drinks and generally killing time. Except now it’s my time that I’m wasting, not an employer’s, and I’m the only one losing out.

This week was a bit of an eye-opener, in that all of my precious habits that I had developed during my years of working at the newspaper and continued into my freelance life were forcefully disrupted. My parents visited for the week, and since my apartment is tiny that meant I slept at a friend’s place while they took over my flat. That meant no computers, TV or even wifi before bed or right in the morning. Over the weekend two of my good friends got married, and since it was a proper Polish wedding that meant the festivities started on Thursday and finished Monday morning. Luckily, I didn’t have much work during that time, and none of it was that urgent, so that means I spent less time in front of my computer and more time surrounded by breathing human beings that weekend than I had in years - and I had an amazing time. Sure, it helped that the wedding party was well stocked with enough food and booze to keep a small nation-state going for weeks, and that I was surrounded by old friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, as well as my parents, who I see about once a year, but in the end what matters is that the world kept going even if I wasn’t constantly reading about it, and I didn’t die of boredom even if I didn’t constantly have a screen in front of my face.

Does that mean I’m going to throw out my computers and start crashing Polish weddings? No, I like working just enough to ward off imminent starvation (though, have you ever seen a Polish wedding? Crashing those would keep me fed for life…). But it does mean that I need to reevaluate how I spend my time, so that every minute spent in front of a screen is spent doing something that will either earn me money now or in the future. I need to start creating more and consuming less. I need to unsubscribe from RSS feeds (or just delete Reeder off my Mac and phone), be content with listening to the BBC while making breakfast for my daily news fix, turn off the screens before bed and get enough sleep so I can drink coffee for pleasure, not necessity, and take back my time.

In other words, I need to unsubscribe from my old habits, and embrace new ones. It’s about time.

*Or, in which I geek out for the first time on this blog. Your regularly scheduled rants about the news media will resume shortly.

Yes, it’s been forever since I’ve written here. No, I’m not dead, though part of me is - and not in some exaggerated metaphorical way or anything, but literally - my computer died at the end of October. My beautiful, two-and-a-half-year-old brain extension in the form of a MacBook Pro decided to depart for the great scrapheap in the sky - or its logic board did - at the absolutely least opportune time for me, the end of October, when I had a heap of commissioned Unsound photos to shop, gigs and gigs of Iceland photos to sort, shop, and post, and, of course, work to do, as my personal laptop is also my work computer.

So here I sit, nearly a month without my baby, and what have I learned? First of all, backing things up is awesome. Even though there’s nothing wrong with my hard drive and when I get my computer back, all of my files should still be there, thanks to the cheap 320 GB portable drive I use as my Time Machine disk, I’ve been able to access all of my files for work from my latest backup while my computer’s been at the shop.

Second, it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes, 2.5-year-old motherboards die, even if you take damn good care of your machine. Yes, even if it’s a Mac. And when it does, and if your laptop is not under warranty (of course), don’t take the shop’s suggested price for fixing/replacing it, but instead, do your research. Thanks to this, I’ll have a brand new 2.6GHz board to replace my fried 2.5GHz for roughly $500 including shipping and labor, rather than the $930 for a new board alone the Apple guys wanted to charge me. Still a hell of a lot of money to spend just to get a dated machine running again, but a lot less than a new one, which I definitely can’t afford.

A side-note to point two is that it’s much better to have an emergency savings account to pull this kind of money out of, than an emergency credit card - both for your wallet and for your peace of mind. Had I no savings and had to put this repair on my card, I’d just be tempted to get a new machine if I was going to spend the money anyway, especially if I were offered a shiny no-interest deal on it. But I love my current machine (when it works); it’s still running like new, I can run every program I need on it (including resource-high games like StarCraft II), and frankly, I prefer the all-aluminum body over the newer black-framed ones, so I have no need to spend $2000 for a new computer just because I could.

And finally, there’s the topic of this whole spiel: using one app at a time. Since my computer broke, I’ve had two alternatives: my iPhone, and the ancient G4 that my boss dug up so I could have a computer at the office (which I’m writing on now). One is designed to run one program at a time (yes, even with multitasking), and the other is so old and slow that it only functions properly when running one program at a time (even after I pimped its RAM and upgraded its OS from Panther to Leopard and did a massive hard drive cleaning spree).

While at first this seemed like a huge disadvantage, and it was taking me twice as long to do most tasks as it would have taken on my own laptop, I’ve now gotten used to both this machine and its limitations, and turned them into advantages. I no longer have my mail client on all the time, which before would cause an automatic reflex to open the program the second that new mail sound chimed. I no longer have 30 tabs open in my browser, because the G4 really, really doesn’t like that - which forces me to read the contents of each tab as I open it, take what I need from it, and close it right away. I can no longer have four or five Word docs plus a Pages file open at the same time; in fact, it’s quite difficult to have any Office program open at the same time as a browser, forcing me to actually edit without interruption. Forget about running iTunes or Spotify with more than two other programs open. Oh, and when I’m Photoshopping or Lightrooming, that’s all I’m doing.

(Side-note two: I have to say, it’s impressive that a seven-year-old, 1.25GHz PPC machine with under a gig of RAM can even run Photoshop and Lightroom, much less run at all. Of course, this is significantly undercut by the fact that my machine died at only two and a half years of age.)

After the initial frustration subsided and I came to terms with the fact that I will be MacBook-less for over a month (and bought this sweet adapter to watch my iPhone videos on my TV), I’ve found that this forced single-tasking is both extremely difficult to get used to, and ultimately far more effective. It’s been a constant struggle with my own, easily-distracted brain, that I’d tried to wage with less success using tools like Isolator or Think on my very multitasking-capable laptop. Now it will be a struggle to maintain this focus once my own computer is back, but I think this experience has given me the motivation to truly give it a go, now that I’ve seen just how effective single-tasking can make me.

Needless to say, after reading numerous rumors about Lion’s iOS-like interface and push towards full-screen programs, I’m definitely looking forward to the upgrade. Here’s hoping my MacBook is up and running by then.