Given my background, you may think I’m referring to servers — after all I ran the tinderbox for a long while. But no, in this case I’m referring to actual, physical boxes. And a few virtual ones as well.
See, when I listed my electronics projects, it probably sounded like my house is now top-to-bottom filled with random electronics stuff. This might have been the case if I was doing that in Dublin, but nowadays I’m not alone, and while my wife accepts the need for my random projects, making a total mess of the apartment is probably not a great idea. Indeed the “study” (that is, the second bedroom turned into a home office) is not quite sorted out, but it’s also not a total mess right now (you can see it in the test Live whiteboarding).
The way I’m trying to keep all of this together, is through a significant number of boxes. I already bought a number of LEGO boxes back in Dublin — the reason for the choice was that those boxes are particularly designed to be used by kids, and that made them particularly sturdy. Unfortunately they are also not particularly big. That made them not particularly useful for storing more bulky items, such as my multimeter, the dremel or most of my screwdrivers’ set. I did bring a toolbox with me from Italy – which includes not one but two hammers, more screwdrivers, one older soldering iron, and other similar tools – but this ended up being the kind of toolbox where tools end up to die, because it’s just so uncomfortable to use.
Instead I now bought bigger, bulkier boxes — using one to store the tools, and another one to store my “electronics” stuff, most of which is stored in tiny boxes inside — so that I have a box of transistors, two of resistors, a couple of Dupont connectors, and so on. This makes it easier to sort through what I need at any one time. I considered using bigger boxes with more compartments, but it turns out that most of the time I only need three or four smaller boxes, and sorting between smaller boxes is easier. I have unfortunately not found a very good box to hold the soldering kit – TS-100 and so on – but I might end up looking for something with foam inserts if I ever figure out how to properly design those, after all.
The LEGO boxes are now (mostly) project boxes: one of them has all of the glucometers that I’ve either already reversed or plan to reversing soon; another one has the R205 boards that I never made much progress on, and so on. The fact that I have so many half-complete projects is indeed disheartening when I think of it. Unfortunately there’s reason for that: either lack of skills on my part, the lack of time for myself, or the lack of tooling at the right time. I can for instance tell you that I definitely would have a much easier time nowadays trying to solder those those pins, not just because I improved my soldering skills, but also because I now have tools that I didn’t even know existed back then, including the Dupont crimper.
And this is where the project boxes come into play. Being able to put everything for one particular project into a box and not worry about it for a while is a liberating experience. I had to literally do that when I started my new job — it’s not that difficult passing from one Big Tech company to another, but it is time consuming, and after spending nearly eight straight hours in front of a monitor watching videos and/or reading tutorials, the last thing I wanted was to spend some more time in front of the computer… having all the half-projects in front of me was tough, and I preferred shoving everything into a project box, and going back to it a week or so later — I have indeed gone back to one of my projects already and will likely have a blog post about it later.
But as I said, there’s also “metaphorical” project boxes — that work for me both at work and at home: there are times when working on the same project for months at a time is not feasible. It may be that what was once a priority isn’t anymore, or a higher priority comes out. Or maybe you’re just too burnt out to work on one thing, and decided that it’s time to work on something else for a while. Having the ability to set aside a project, and come back to it later, having state and notes about what something was about is something important. For most of my opensource projects, I leave my own notes in the blog, which is why there’s so many posts of old projects that have not gone anywhere. For work projects, I try to leave design docs or notes, and for other stuff, I started having proper journals dedicated to the ideas. That’s how Birch Books started as well.
The main advantage I found for doing this at work is that it allows collecting rakes without losing track of the main objective of your job. Many of the examples I gave in the previous blog post on the topic have been months-long efforts. Some of those took two years to close the reported issues! And in at least one case, the work had to literally be halted, and wait for two quarters, because one of the blockers could only be solved by deleting the whole source of a service that was being replaced.
So what I’m advocating about is the ability to keep things around, but out of sight. It’s the reason why I can’t stand certain policies in projects (at work and FLOSS alike) that pretty much disallow “long-standing bugs”: sometimes you want to keep all the information you have on a project together, and a bug/issue/task that has been opened for a number of years might just be the right way — closing it for the sake of an OKR target is unlikely to do anyone a good service.
And also allowing ourselves (all of us), to box up projects — whether it is for a while or forever. Being reminded of the stuff you have not completed is not going to make you feel any better, in my experience. Being able to say “Yeah it’s in the box, one day I might or might not get to it” is a way to breathe in, and give yourself space.