Getting any new equipment can always alter your workflow in interesting ways. I've spent a fair amount of years falling down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole. I was lured in by the original Matias recreation of the Apple Extended II keyboard, which made an awful clatter. (Actually, I was originally lured in by a southpaw keyboard I found in a junk drawer in my Help Desk days and used it as a way to keep people out of my desk on my days off. The Matias was the one that I bought for my home set up, and a few years later, I purchased a Ducky with green switches that died during a desk move.)

I think that the clatter did help me connect the kinetic nature of typing into something tangible. It felt more like a typewriter than the mushy keyboards I'd had most of my life. While my love of the typewriter was mostly one of hipster fetish, I think that the sound and feeling of something moving along stuck with me. I keep a ton of different keyboards now around the house, stashing a few older ones at the office even if I haven't been in regularly in over a year.

I pounded out this on a new wireless keyboard that I have for the laptop desk in the living room, it's an Epomaker 96 if you're curious, and it was mostly purchased because the weird ergonomic keyboard I had out here didn't jibe with the other person sharing this space. One of the weirder aspects of working from home is that you find that you'll be doing some serious work in places you don't expect. With a soon to be toddler in the house, we're spending a lot of our workday now tagging out of the office for work on the couch to let the kid play in his big playpen.

It’s lead me to think a lot about the context of work, and often that our trappings of trying to be in the "right" place or get the "right" tools can be a hinderance to actually getting to work. I'll be the first to admit that a lot of my more fiddly set ups are more a preference than a must have, I can bang out just as many words with a crappy chiclet keyboard. It's just one of them is a lot more comfortable.

Yet I do think that how you're approaching work can have an effect on it's outcome. Shoving your desktop full of windows with notifications coming at you in every direction is probably not going to be the time you can sit down and do a complex project. At the same time, you may find that stripping down your workspace to an austere set of essentials leaves you bored and listless. Finding that happy medium that works for your concentration and creativity is key.

Yet so much of the productivity media out there really works form a model that prescribes a magic bullet. Changing this one thing about how you work everyday will fix all your problems and make you fall in love with work again. Instead you have a half read book on your desk and a feeling like you're the problem. Let's get the first thing out of the way, most of those book are created and written to be bought in bulk with corporate credit cards. Either they are bound to sit unread on a senior executive's bookshelf, or HR is buying box loads of them because someone at the company happens to work the book is telling everyone else to.

There are people out there that want to help you work better, everyone I think understands that a lot of the current landscape of work is weird and unhealthy. I genuinely feel bad for those people because they're stuck in an industry that doesn't seem to care they're being drowned out by crap.

Which if we are really being honest is the problem with the whole publishing industry.

I am in the process of thinking deeply about where and how I work, and paying attention to where I succeed versus fail. I'm really restarting everything as I move to a new role at work, taking the opportunity for a hard reset. Yet it's clear to me that most of the industry to help you get organized for work is predicated around selling things or quick dopamine hits, just like the diet and self-help industries. More parasitic people sitting atop your insecurity and poking it until you hand over cash.