Focusing On The Work Not The Raw Material

Video files are big.

I'm running out of disk space. Been juggling video file for the past couple of days. As I continue to shoot more on the GoPro, it's going to be a constant thing, but, it should be a problem. I built a server a few years back that has 10TB of available space. Just gotta get a new shared drive setup on it.

That's another thing that's changed with my thinking about things. Currently, I've got about 12 shares setup on it to split out various things. My photos, my videos, my music. my backups, etc... My thinking was to have them nice and spit out to make it less likely to have issues where if I was messing, for example, with my music that I accidentally screwed something up with the photos.

The thing is, I only have one hard drive on my laptop and that has literally never been a problem. The drive setup on the server is another example of what can only be called overthinking during my hypo-manic days. When I'd work on something, my brain would fire off on it and think of all the possibilities of using it and how it could go wrong and then come up with ideas and strategies for how to prevent that. I still do, but the different is, I can pull back and think easier about the likelihood of things happening.

And, there's a different angle to it. I used to be very... worried isn't exactly the right word, but it's close... so, we'll use that.... very worried about precision in things and making sure I wasn't going to lose stuff and that things were always in precise places what would make them easy to find and deal with.

This was all about making stuff. I'd have these grand ideas about everything all the time. Or, I guess it was grand ideas of potential. Though, calling the ideas grand is overselling it a bit. It was more that I had ideas that burned hot in my mind about things I could make. Whatever the label, the thing I'd think about is the raw materials and that's what I didn't want to lose. So, I'd got to all this extra effort to try to ensure that I didn't lose them. Or, that I had the theoretically optimal way to store and deal with stuff that would make it easy for me to work with things.

Actually, that's more what it was. I'd bounce around so much that a big part of my focus was to get things where they were as easy for me to deal with and think about as possible. Because any extra work or effort or thinking was frustrating in a way that I'm only now coming to understand.

The issue was focus. Getting focus was containing a nuclear reactor with my bare hand. I could do it, but it was precarious. Interruptions felt like getting a blindside smack in the face. This was true even at the smallest level. If I was working on a photo project and had to dig around to find photos in something other than the structure that I'd designed, it would hit me with minor rage-frustration-aggraviation. (I still haven't come up for the right term for the feeling, but I think the combination of those works.)

Anyway, that's at least what I thought would happen, I'd want things to be as well places as possible so they would be as easy to work with as possible.

Now, that stuff doesn't bother me. I'm just working with these videos and I'm coming up with the naming conventions and where to store them as I'm using them. And, sometimes I have to look for a file for quick minute to find it, but that doesn't bother me. I don't have to have the entire solution plotted out before I can make progress.

It's liberating and with that liberation I'm able to do exponentially more work than I was before.

I'm digging it.