My laptop completely stopped working last night. It is 6 years old. It’s been sending me signals for the last year or so that it is reaching its end of life. I’ve done what I needed to do to extend its life and protect data in it. But I didn’t want to replace it with a new one until it does shut down.
I like the familiarity for the productivity sake. When you are familiar with something, when you have established routines, you can be fast. Less brain power is required to get each thing done. Your eyes know exactly where to look. Your hands know exactly where to move the mouse to. I like to keep my cell phone for a long time too - I did a quick Google search and according to one survey, majority of respondents said they replace their cell phone every 1 to 3 years (it is just one survey result I could quickly find - other surveys out there may reveal something different). But that comes with a price when there are enough signals telling you changes are needed and you ignore them. The price I’m paying today is that I don’t have a laptop to work with.
The strange thing though is how I feel right now with a completely silent machine in front of me. Instead of panic or despair, I feel freed. One less thing that requires my attention.
I save everything in the cloud and my backup drives so only few minor things have probably been lost. And this is a big part of the reasons why I’m not panicking. Given how attached I am to my work, I will be in a completely different state of mind if years of work (well, the artifacts of the work I’ve done) has been evaporated.
So, I’m feeling good. It feels like I’ve got hours of my time back. It’s 5am and I’m laptop-free until the moment I have a new one. This means I can’t do the work I planned to do on my laptop for the time being. And this means I get to be creative with how I spend the time I’ve got back.
留言