Keeping it simple

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One of the perks of the writing profession is that it has virtually no hardware requirements. My friends in the 3D animation or video and photography fields have to spend money on powerful rigs with lots of fast storage, but I work with text. Everything I’ve ever written, a dozen novels and as many novellas and short stories, could probably fit on two or three of the old 1.44MB floppy disks if I saved everything in plain text.

My entire computing life fits onto a 2017 MacBook Air with the base 128GB storage, and I’ve only filled a quarter of even that modest storage. (I only use the essential apps I need for work—Scrivener, Word, and web and email because I can’t take those off without breaking the OS.) There’s nothing on this machine that isn’t needed for putting words down and editing them later. All my pictures and non-essential data are saved in the cloud, so I don’t need a lot of local storage. The processor in the MBA is a few generations behind, but I don’t need a ton of horsepower to run a word processor, and I picked the old model over a newer one because of the vastly superior keyboard and better battery life.

The external 27” display is there for ergonomics, because looking down at a 13” screen all day gives me a literal pain in the neck, and my eyesight is going downhill as I get older. But whenever I need to take my work with me, all I have to do is disconnect the laptop and stick it into a bag. All the benefits of a desktop, but with the added ability to take everything on the road without having to worry about keeping stuff in sync.

Paring my electronics use down to just a handful of single-use devices has done wonders for my productive workflow. It’s amazing how much fluff you can cut from your setup once you focus on the essentials and ruthlessly drop everything else. I have a blog post in mind for those friends of mine who have expressed curiosity about my recent ditching of social media and technology distractions, but that one will have to wait until I have turned in this novel.