Monthly Archive for April, 2008
Today I read a post about decluttering your desk. Right now, I can’t find that post, but this page links to a bunch of similar and related articles. Those links are on the Zen Habits site, which I’ve started reading lately. Lots of interesting food for thought there.
So, I’m pretty tidy already, and my desk wasn’t that much of mess to begin with, but there were still quite a few unnecessary items accumulated there, like a printer I’m never going to use, a stapler I use maybe once a month, etc. I only spent about ten minutes decluttering, but the benefits were huge. So huge that I had to write it again in bold AND italics.
Along with office type stuff, I cleared off some knick knacks–little bits of art and what have you.
Did I mention the huge effect all this had? Wow. There’s a sense of openness and space. There’s more room to work and breathe. There’s also less distracting visual clutter.
This is only an anecdote, but I was more productive today than I’ve been in a while.
I recommend giving this a try. What do you really need on your desk and in your immediate working environment? What I’ve found, at least for myself, is that it’s actually not much. I’m guessing everyone’s got at least a couple items that can be tossed or sold or given away. Things that only get used once in a while can be put out of sight in an easy to reach place. Things that are visually interesting (photos, say) eventually become visually distracting, especially when there’s too much of it.
Of course, there’s no precise recipe, and everyone’s got their personal preferences. For me, just thinking about this, or anything, consciously is what’s important. The “right” changes naturally precipitate from awareness.
Using sheer determination and a couple of shovels, I dug up this stump from the area I plan(ned) to use as a garden. I didn’t need to dig it up, but it suited me better to have a more uniform garden space. I also enjoyed the challenge of it and having an excuse to play in the dirt.
Click image for big version
This reminds of a Czech movie, Little Otik (Otesánek), I saw a few years ago where a woman wants to have a baby but can’t, so her husband carves one out of a stump or something. It comes alive and starts eating people. It’s a great movie. Scary. Creepy. Recommended.
Updated with links and a couple typo corrections.
I’ve been working on a fairly big Web site project lately. My partner and I initially decided to use Django to build the site, mainly because I’m a Python “expert” and Django is (apparently) the #1 Python Web framework. We were also lured by the easy admin interface.
After trying to use Django and not really enjoying it, I tried switching to Pylons because I’ve had a good amount of experience with it in the building of byCycle.org. It’s gone through two fairly major releases since then, and so have a bunch of the libraries that tend to get used with it, like SQLAlchemy, Elixir, etc.
I was having a hard time with the Pylons docs, and so I ended screwing around with Grok (which actually looks fairly interesting) and even took a look at the Zope 3 site. I’m sure Zope is really awesome or whatever, but it might as well suck. Every time I look at that site, I’m just like “WTF! This shit has been around for like five years!” Anyway, I might just not be smart enough for Zope.
This led us back toward Rails (even if it is a ghetto). I used Rails a bit last year but never did anything too serious with it. Diving into it today was quite a pleasure. There are issues to be sure, but overall I’m enjoying it by far over any of the other options we had tried. I’m also enjoying learning/relearning Ruby.
If Pylons had good docs, we’d probably be using that.
So, I don’t know if this is a particularly useful post, since I didn’t get into much in the way of reasons (what, i have back this up?!). This subject’s been hashed and rehashed, but I just wanted (needed) to make a qualitative statement about my/our experience, which, of course, is purely personal.
I’m about two thirds of the way toward having the soil in my garden prepared for planting. I got all the weeds pulled, and I’m currently working on digging out a stump. Once that’s done, I’ll just need to till up the dirt and maybe add some topsoil. Then I can move on to the fun stuff. Actually, digging up weeds and stumps is fun too, and it’s foundational. On top of that, it’s a good upper body workout.
The kitties were having a blast running around and chasing each other all over the yard. They are way more active when someone’s outside, which is interesting. They’re somewhat like (certain) people in that way.
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According to Wikipedia, “Soilwork is a Swedish melodic death metal band from Helsingborg.” I’ve never listened to them before; I’ve just heard the name and thought it was cool.
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