The first Peter McKinnon video I have watched in a while summed up a very modern photography problem perfectly:
just go shoot a sunrise for no other reason than to absolutely fucking enjoy it. In the questions of what will you do with the photos? After. Who cares nothing, do absolutely nothing. If anything, it’s just one for the books.
It doesn’t have to be a sunrise of course, but just go shoot. Who cares what you get from it, what you do with it. Forget the likes you think you need, the stress of worrying what happened to Instagram and where you are going to post your photos. Just go shoot.
Remember why you picked up the camera in the first place.
As I move my working life towards planning, proposing, and delivering on major projects, I’ve realized what a pain it can be. From the outside looking in, those three steps look easy, but to do them properly, you first need to outline exactly what the result shouldn’t achieve.
You read that right. More than anything else, the first step is to think about the worst possible solution you could deliver. This solution technically achieves the goal correctly but with all the wrong metrics. Andrew Wilkinson outlines this well in his post about The Power of Anti-Goals:
The idea that problems are often best solved when they are reversed. That it’s often easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do.
He’s absolutely correct. It’s much easier to think about the worst way and then work backward to ensure you move in a better direction. A great example in Andrew’s post is considering what they didn’t want their positions in their company to be when building the company. They did not want to spend too much time away from their family nor be too busy and stressed and as such put checks and balances in place to achieve that goal.
Once you are aware of what you absolutely do not want to deliver, you tend to steer well clear of the pitfalls and issues that can plague a poorly thought-through project and deliver a better solution. At this point, it’s also important to ensure that you measure the project against company and personal values. No one wants to deliver a product they are ashamed of nor work on something they would rather not.
Ensuring your planning and project lives up to what you expect from it at this early stage makes for a much better experience all around. There are fancy words for these kinds of things, of course. Here’s a recent post discussing what and how Multi-Scale Planning is and in true Sweet Setup style, how to do it in Obsidian:
Multi-Scale planning is a way to make sure that your vision and your values get translated into your everyday actions.
I think, now more than ever, it is important to deliver work that not only fits your expected level of quality but also fulfills your values as a person. That’s not going to be relevant for some projects; however, this important step enables you to ensure you do not deliver work you later regret. To use the words of Mike Monteiro in Ruined by Design: “Effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work.”
So by bringing to mind what you do not want to deliver as an end product, you can be certain that the plans you now begin to put into place will deliver an end result you can be proud of.
It was, as Thanos says, inevitable. I am so shockingly boring that I couldn’t stop working even for one day off. There was little point in tidying up after myself and trying to hide the fact that I can’t do other things. So, when all the family returned from their normal day at work and school, of course the question came.
The answer is a simple one, but a little bit painful to admit: I have nothing else in my life to do. I do have things to do, but not anything that I really want to do, and nothing to excite me for the few hours that were free. The truth is I am so exceptionally sad that there is very little else in my life to entertain me. I have tried for years to focus my mind elsewhere when these periods occur, but I inevitably find myself working.
To try and explain why is far too complicated a topic, one that may one day be recited on a therapist’s couch, but I theorize many reasons intertwined in my psyche. One of which is the relationship between myself and my technology. All of which are used for both personal and work tasks. As soon as I sat down to write my blog post earlier, I knew that I would end up checking my email, planning for my return tomorrow, and more than likely completing some simple things to check off my list.
Thankfully, I did get out for a little while today, walked my dog in the woods where we both enjoyed the sunshine. As well as doing some exercise, and finished watching Fallout. 1 Unfortunately, I always feel that there is something lacking to do. Many people I know spend these sorts of spare hours playing games or binge-watching TV, and I don’t think I can switch my brain off for long enough. All I have are books to read and blog posts to write, and there’s only so much of that you can do.
And so, I worked, on my day off.
It’s ok. I’ve never played any of the games so I can’t speak for its accuracy, but the storyline was entertaining. ↩︎
For the first time in recent memory, I booked a day off from work today with absolutely nothing planned. My company leave is usually taken up by family holidays, hospital appointments, and other things that occupy my time, but today I am free to do whatever I please, which of course means absolutely nothing.
Not that I don’t have anything to do; I have lots of things that could occupy my time, but I am incapable of deciding what to do. How do you decide which one of the million things to do that you have put off for a day like this? Just like my ‘someday’ task list, these things that I put off until I have the time to do them are often things I don’t really want to do. If they were, I would have set aside time for them anyway.
As such, my day will be filled with nothingness, and that’s exactly how I like it. Walking my dog, enjoying the sun that is gracing the UK at the moment, and writing some blog posts. I feel a little bit like I have bunked off school, and instead of finding the nirvana that I expected, I instead have to wait around for everyone to finish school. This day will be ‘wasted’ and that’s perfect.
My first exposure to computers and technology came at a very early age. My mum was convinced that I needed a computer to do my school work, and for reasons only known to her, bought me a ‘486’. I would later learn that this was a description of the processor in the machine, but all I could take in at the time was how massive it was and that I had to type everything to get it going. I wouldn’t begin to use anything resembling a modern computer until much later with Windows 3.1.
Even then, technology wasn’t really in my life. It was just a tool to use when needed, and that wasn’t very often. You would have to fast forward more than a decade until I became remotely interested in what these things could do for me, and this all happened by complete accident. With an iPhone that I purchased simply because I had an iPod. I’d had computers to do my college and school work, bought phones to text my friends, but this gadget entered my life and put just the right amount of restrictions in the way that I wanted to get around them.
I discovered that I could enable my primitive iPhone 3G to do more than Apple allowed. With a few lines of code, I could enable copy and paste, and MMS - as shocking as it seems now that an iPhone didn’t have these things. I installed beta software downloaded over peer-to-peer networks and network unlocked them for friends. This interesting world filled a hole in me that had been empty since my dreams of professional football were taken away from me in my late teens. The excitement, skills to learn, and ever-changing landscape was addictive and I can pretty much plot a course from iPhone purchase day to my working life now.
This course went through years of hacking Palm tablets, working with custom ROMs on Android, and writing for technology websites about anything and everything I could. Learning HTML and CSS to build my own blog and gaining the skills to go along with producing content for the web. Because of my love of technology, the people I met, and the skills I picked up along the way, I am where I am today. I am pretty confident to say that had I not bought that iPhone, my life would be a very different place.
Which brings me to today. My world is not as exciting as it once was. The technology that I love is now in a very different spot. It no longer sits idle until called upon like any other tool, it muscles its way into every corner of our lives. There is a lot to be excited about, but also a lot to be wary of. Modern life is a hard place to navigate, and if you’ve had to have this conversation with your children, you will appreciate that it seems to be getting worse. In many ways, we are the tools that technology companies use. To make more and more money while improving less and less about the world.
I cannot get excited about new iPads, task list apps, and camera specs as I used to, but I think that is because I am too jaded by the past. There are others out there that are as excited as past me was about OS updates and new phones, but for AI advancements and wearable technology. I didn’t worry about what these new smartphones would do to the world, and neither will they about LLM’s and image generators.