Simplicity

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I firmly believed that my productivity was directly proportional to the number of screens on my desk. One screen? You’re a civilian. Two? Getting serious. Three? Welcome to the big leagues. Four? Now we’re talking. Five? You, sir, are a professional. Possibly even a Bond villain. For much of my adult life – from 1997 to 2022 — I was on a one-man mission to surround myself with glass rectangles. I wanted dashboards, terminals, Slack, Outlook, scrolling logs, live bond market charts, rolling 24-hour news, and maybe even some code all visible at once, like a NASA flight director minus the buzzcut and the cigarette. I told myself that it was efficient. That more screens meant more throughput. That toggling amounted to waste. ...

I know, I know, you’ve heard all this before. Once again Ian is migrating his blog from one platform to another. And yes, it’s true that I have spent more of my life converting my blog posts between different platforms and markup languages than I ever have actually writing the damn blog posts in the first place. There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to it. I began my blogging life in the late 1990s with nothing more than some hand-rolled HTML, a text editor, and a dial-up connection. Over the years I have moved my content over to various platforms: .Text, Community Server, WordPress (twice!), GraffitiCMS, Ghost, and now I find myself almost back where I began. ...