For a very long stretch of my career, with a brief sojourn into the vast corporate wilds, the professional and the personal grew tightly together. Strangler vines are to trees like my job is to my life. Maybe that’s a take too far, but the point I’m vaguely gesturing at is that there hasn’t been much distinction between the two.
Well, truthfully, it was that work loomed much larger than my life and I oriented my career to allow my life to thrive in different ways. I’ve worked from glaciers, volcanos, Roman ruins, Byzantine catacombs, Minoan palaces, and taken meetings while wandering lost in a Costa Rican cloud forest. I was a single parent who brought my kid with me while I tried to have something that went beyond the paycheck. If I was going to work all the time I might as well live too.
It has been a life of deliberate choices. The space between personal and professional became so blurred as to be indistinguishable. The work laptop became the personal laptop and for a decade long stretch, there was only an iPad (I never want to hear again that an iPad cannot be used for serious work). That was a choice. This summer I made another: to peel apart these two worlds.
I bought myself a laptop.
Don’t get too excited, it’s a 15” MacBook Air M5 with 32GB and a 512GB SSD. I’m (mostly) happily rooted inside their walled garden and this spec felt like the best balance of weight, size, power, portability, and more importantly, longevity. Apple makes quality hardware. The only downside is that the current state of things (hyperscalers, RAM shortages, The Strait of Hormuz, oh...well) meant it was a long 45 days from order to delivery, which reminded me of my father ordering a 40MB hard drive in ’82 and waiting some six months for its delivery. It had a very “collect two hundred cereal box tops and send them with a self-addressed and stamped envelope to a P.O. Box in Omaha, Nebraska to get something cool...someday” feeling.
Setting this up has been a very interesting experience because there is nothing work about it. It’s a throwback to an earlier period when my time and energy and focus had clear boundaries, and the job didn’t come home. Hell, my job and personal life have been inseparably tangled, in some shape or form, for over 20 years. In my mind, there is this bright and sharp moment of before, before I became a portmanteau for Personal and Professional in a Hawaiian shirt. Before, when all my personal gear was messy, personalized, and very much mine. This feels like I’ve returned to that place.
It isn’t just that Slack, Outlook, Excel, et al are missing or that I bring the apps I use most forward: IA Writer, iTerm2, Mindnode. This is my space. I don’t have notifications enabled because if my wife needs something she can lean over and ask. I use full screen more because there is only one thing to do at a time. I am here to be present, yet not productive. I can play more. I can experiment more. I can be more curious. I can be more myself.
A week with this laptop has been meditative and reflective, which is a lot to ask of a piece of hardware. It is showing me something. Nudging me to linger and look. There is a glint on the horizon and it compels me to wander.
Because sharing is caring, Context/Action on the CLI is my favorite thing...
jameselwood ~/Personal/dotfiles (main)
❯
Which is made possible by tucking this snippet into .zshrc...
autoload -U colors && colors
autoload -Uz vcs_info
precmd() { vcs_info }
zstyle ':vcs_info:git:*' formats ' %F{yellow}(%b)%f'
setopt PROMPT_SUBST
PROMPT='%F{cyan}%n%f %F{blue}%~%f${vcs_info_msg_0_}
%F{green}❯%f '
