There’s a monotony that comes with working at home. Same room, same desk, every day. No one in the house ever puts things in my office without me knowing. There’s no coworkers who ever stop by to torpedo my day. I can listen to whatever I want. I can do whatever I want.
My office is mine, and mine alone.
This is good. This is great.
But it can also be a bit boring. So I try to break up my days and weeks by getting out of the house. A walk to the closest coffee shop (Starbucks), or being the one to take my daughter to school, and then stay out of the house until she is done.
Sometimes, as life happens, I get very little notice that I am the one taking my daughter to school. Sometimes I have tons of notice, or know I am leaving for a bit of the day.
My varying and seemingly never set schedule for departing the house doesn’t always lend well to this site. A site which causes me to need to constantly be switching bags, using what I need to test, what is new, or what needs to be refreshed in my mind.
How do I do that, without going crazy?
As with how I travel, I take very few things with me, making switching between bags a piece of cake. Here’s everything I take to the coffee shop:
- GORUCK Wire Dopp mini
- Apple Earbuds
- Chapstick
- 0.5m Lightning cable
- Purell
- Battery backup (I have an older, 1400mAh model)
- Lens cleaning cloth
- Hardgraft Box Case
- MartianCraft business cards
- DDC Stuff Sheath
- Retro 1951 Tornado
- Field Notes
- Apple Pencil
- iPad Pro 12.9″
Not very much overall. There’s just six things I have to physically move from one bag to another. And honestly. That kit is overkill for what I need.
I’ve long dreamed of being able to have this identical kit in each bag (save the last two items) so I never have to move stuff again, but that just seems highly budget busting.
What does any of this have to do with anything? I’ve been going to coffee shops long enough, and working there for long stretches of time, that I’ve noticed a common trend: people bring way too much shit. I’m not even talking about the people showing up with a desktop computer.
Just in general, people bring bags packed full of their entire office, only to only use their laptop, headphones, and cellphone the entire time they are there.
I would actually be all for not even taking a bag and showing up with just my iPad and headphones, but it is a bit of a pain in the ass to carry around the iPad without some way of holding it hands free. So I tend to just chose the smallest backpack I can, put very little in the backpack, and call it good.
I’ve never once been out and wanting any of the items I didn’t bring. And yet I wonder how many of the people sitting around me even know what is in their bag — would they even be able to list half the stuff?