Ryan's Journal

I've stopped sleeping with my laptop.

For the past two years or so I've been making my vocational way mostly by finding a spot to sit down somewhere on our shared quarter acre of land, whether that was the kitchen table, living room couch, patio chair, back stoop, or, most frequently, my bed. My room is a tiny affair, dominated by the sleep furnishings with just a periphery for movement and no other sitting furniture. This is more than suitable, the lack of excess space forces all manner of minimalism. A room just for sleeping keeps one from spending much time in it, too.

Except, as observed, I ended up working from my bed the most often. This made it practical to affix a power adapter nearby and keep the laptop at my side, which in turn made it the first thing I turned to when I awakened and the last before I slept, pulsing its light away in electronic sleep to await the next phase in the cycle.

I made attempts to boot the machine from my bed in the past, but working was too easy to take with in my night owl world, and those attempts never gained traction. Until now. Lo and behold, I now have an office.

It may seem odd that having reached the responsible slacker nirvana of a home occupation I'm now laying out extra resources for space that is readily available to me on a perpetual basis, but there are long reaching benefits to this simple shift. As I continue for the time being in my mode of occupation, the benefits of the normal work routine became obvious: regular hours, a firm, physical separation of work from living, even the slow decompression period to bring a mental state in or out of work during a commute. The ten second trek from office to home doesn't leave much in the way for decompression time; I may force a commute out to the local park and back instead of heading straight for the back door.

There are drawbacks. I tend not to look at personal digital matters while in the office and then tend not to do anything digital at all when I'm gone. Like deal with photos (once, I used to take pictures), respond to email, or write here. I will have to find some way to compensate, but I like the separation so much that I'll it, warts and all.

With this one change comes many good things. Starting with my ability to keep my bed to my organic self.