Creating an Environment for Productivity

I generally find it hard to find time to work on my own projects or to learn new things. When I find the little time that I can, I find myself just wasting it. I get easily distracted by games, social media and YouTube. It’s not the worse thing, as it’s my free time to relax and chill, however I don’t want to be doing those things even though they are fun. When I want to sit down to work on my projects, well I want to work on my projects. There are other times I can use to play games or watch YouTube.

This has become such a problem that I’ve decided to do something about it. As always the way to solve this is to tune the environment to help me to do this. I need to explain my desk to get the full picture. I have a single monitor, nothing special just a 27 inch 4K screen, but it has lots of connectivity which is the reason I got it. The requirement of the connectivity is that I have three computers connected to it.

Firstly is my main desktop computer, then there are my two laptops that I need for work. They all have to be connected, and I need to switch between them with the use or the source selector as well as a USB switch, to share hardware; webcam, speakers, microphone, mouse and keyboard.

Now the issue is with my Desktop machine, it’s my do everything machine, so I can work and play. I’ve tried to disable things, and profiles and such, however nothing has really worked. I still get distracted when I want to work on my personal projects. So the best way to solve this I decided to get another computer to add to the desk.

New Machine

The new computer that I’ve added to the mix is nothing super, it’s the machine that I actually need for my projects and just gets the job done. The new computer is of course a Raspberry Pi, it’s actually a Raspberry Pi 5 (16Gb) model. This has been paired with a 256Gb NVMe drive, and fan with a heat sink. After long consideration this is more than I generally need for my projects so thought why go crazy. The operating system is just PiOS, because hey I don’t care about the OS, and it’s Debian and in reality it really doesn’t matter as long as it’s Debian based. Let’s be honest when I start a computer, I open three things Terminal, VSCode, and a Web Browser.

How does this help? Well it doesn’t really, I could be distracted with this as well, however hardware restrictions help. I’m not going to really be able to play games on this, well not the games I want to play unless Open Transport Tycoon Delux sneaks on there. For gaming this raises the barrier to distraction, I would have to boot my other machine, switch the sources and such. So far this raised bar has helped with being distracted with gaming.

The next biggest distraction was YouTube, wow that’s a big one. Really the monster in the room. I have solved this by having no audio on the Raspberry Pi. Yep it’s really that simple. I’ve not connected this computer the to USB switch, so it doesn’t have access to the webcam, microphone or speakers. As for the mouse and keyboard it’s connected via Bluetooth. As simple as this sounds it’s worked, because think about it what’s the point of video without audio?! Also considering the content that I would get distracted by, it makes no sense at all without audio.

Closing Thoughts

It’s a shame that it’s come to this in order to get around the issues I was having with being distracted. I would love to have the willpower and strength to say nope I’m going to focus on this task and get it done. Sadly, this wasn’t the case and I can’t say that I didn’t try. However, having a new machine is always nice, and my problem is solved so far. So if it’s working, then it’s working, leave it alone.