From the Editor’s Desk: One (Premium)

When we were first married, Stephanie and I lived on the second floor of a ramshackle house in Canton, Massachusetts, next to Dedham, where I grew up. Like most young, newly married couples of that time, we didn’t have any money and this house was what we could afford. It was falling apart, too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and its owner had built his own cellar by literally digging a hole under the building.

We were only there for three years–we then moved to the Phoenix, Arizona area so I could go back to school–but in that third year, our landlord inexplicably started fixing up the place. And as part of the renovations, he built a deck with stairs off our bedroom because he was required to do so by law: Before then, we only had a single way in and out of the apartment.

Late one night while watching TV or reading in bed–I can’t recall–there was a loud noise outside what used to a window but was now a sliding door leading out to that deck. We both jerked upright and were shocked to see the shadowy profile of a man run up onto the deck in the dark, perform what looked like a barrel roll, and then stand upright and bolt back down the stairs. “Call the police!” I yelled to Steph, as I struggled to climb over her from the far side of the bed, which was against a wall.

She had thrown the covers over her head. Her response at this moment of fear was to emulate a pill bug and roll up into a ball.

Bewildered by this response, I grabbed the phone and called the police myself. I explained what had happened, and the person on the end of the line told me they’d said someone over. Then I hung up the phone … and it rang immediately. I figured it must be the police.

“Paul!” our neighbor Eric, who lived downstairs with his girlfriend, yelled into my ear. “I’m so sorry, our cat got outside and went up your stairs and I had to run up there and get him back.” Cue the hilarity.

Canton was a small suburban town, the type of place where nothing bad ever happened. Except that something bad had happened–a few years earlier, a 14-year-old boy had killed a classmate in a highly unusual incident in those pre-school shooting years–and this place was still on edge. Closer to home, the day Eric had barrel-rolled across our deck had already gone south hours earlier: Our car had been stolen in Boston that night, and as I had explained to the police when I called about the deck intruder, the thieves had our address in the car documentation in its glove box. I figured they had arrived to rob us further. In fact, I had been worried about it all night.

What Eric and I met with outside the house, together, both of us only half dressed, was what looked like the entire Canton police department, with blue and red lights spinning everywhere and spotlights illuminating the trees around the house. It was one of those unforgettable moments, and while I’ve not talked to Eric in years, I know it was as unforgettable for him as it was for me.

It’s interesting how one can react in times of stress and fear. For my wife, having lived through the near-death of her son and other events over the past 25+ years, it’s fair to say she’s more seasoned warrior than ball-shaped pill bug these days. I’ve changed in some ways, too. But I have always dealt with trauma by repressing it. Forgetting it, essentially. And I know that when I get overwhelmed, if there is simply too much happening at once, I just shut down. My version of the pill bug, I guess. If I ignore it, maybe it will go away.

That strategy might work for pill bugs, but it doesn’t work for people. And so we can logically try to work our way through complex or overwhelming problems instead. There are many theories there, many approaches. For example, if you are in debt, as my wife and I were in the mid-1990s, thanks to that move to Phoenix and a horrible tax mistake an accountant made at Steph’s employer, you will get wildly different advice from different quarters.

Some will argue that you should attack the biggest of the debt first, by amount or interest rate, as it will eventually free up a lot of money each month and make short work of the remaining, smaller debts. But we went in the opposite direction by going after the smallest debts first, getting some early wins, and then watching it snowball until we were debt-free. And my wife aggressively pushed back against an unfair, escalating fee from a credit card company over several years. She was told the case was over three times, but she never gave up. She won in the end, forever shedding her earlier pill bug persona as she transformed into the person she is today. A fighter.

I wish I experienced a similar evolution. In moments of clarity, I can look at an overwhelming pile of to-do’s or whatever responsibilities and reason out a path forward. But that’s not always possible. That clarity doesn’t always come, and it’s easy to ignore problems and procrastinate. This happens in my personal life, and it happens with work. And when I stop to think about what it is I’m trying to accomplish from a work perspective, at a high level or just in a given day, that feeling of despair creeps in every time. There’s just so much to do, and so little time to do it in. And I want balance, like anyone else. I can’t spend 10 or 14 hours every single day hoping for progress but only treading water, never moving forward.

Someone asked me recently how I keep track of things. And the answer is, it depends. In some cases, I’m hyper-organized, and in others I am not. For example, I keep track of the review laptops I get in, noting the days each arrives, the day I write a first impressions post (sometimes the same day, sometimes spread out because I get two or three in rapid succession), and then the ideal timeframe for the review. Which I do or do not hit, usually not. So that’s one of about one hundred things on my “I could be doing this better” list.

For vaguer, less schedule-based writing–that series about retro tech history I keep meaning to add to, and will, I really will–it’s less precise. Things get lost in the mix. Life happens, priorities shift, and whatever organizational structures I’ve put in place can’t compensate. Here, again, all I can do is be cognizant of the problem and try to fix it. Another one for that list. It’s a long list.

But there’s a third type of writing, or “work,” as I think of it. The writing that is more involved and detail-oriented. The work that can consume me, like an obsession, blocking out everything else. As a writer, I want to experience this, in a way, to be in the zone, to keep going and going on something until I’ve seen it through to the end, no matter how big it is or how long it takes. One perfect example of this is the digital decluttering work I did over several months in 2023. That was overwhelming. I was never going to finish it. And yet, I was going to finish it. And then I did. To the point where other work, and vast amounts of time, dropped off, forgotten. I did that work knowing it would take precedence over other things.

Mark Minasi used to joke that he used “his super-powers for good,” which wasn’t a joke: He was enough of an egomaniac to believe that he literally had super-powers. In my case, I will simply rationalize this behavior as using my ADHD for good. Or at least to get stuff done. Maybe that’s a fairer assessment. I can apply this near-mania, this hyper-focus, on a problem and actually get it done. It’s what I think of as making lemonade.

I did that kind of work this past summer with my Modernizing .NETpad project, which to date has resulted in over 20 articles, most many thousands of words long, and an unknowable amount of time writing–and rewriting and then rewriting again–software code to solve what seems like a simple problem but is, in fact, an all-consuming unfixable problem I can only partially address. When I started this work, I saw it as a half dozen articles spread out over six months, something that wouldn’t get in the way or occupy my brain in my off-hours. But there are no off-hours. I dream about this code. I live in it every single day. I do that knowing that very few readers will even care in the slightest, that most will never even glance at this work let alone try to understand it.

One might argue that this is not a good use of my time. My wife might argue that with you, having sat through numerous demonstrations of my various mini-breakthroughs, smiling at me like one smiles at a terrible’s children’s drawing. As this person who is not a programmer, and doesn’t even play one on TV, nonetheless tackles a problem–modernizing a WPF app despite Microsoft announcing and then ignoring the tools and functionality needed to make it possible–that it seems like no one else on earth is even attempting. That’s not literally true, what is? But if you’re in the Windows app dev space, a community shrinking faster than the playable zone in any given Fortnite match, then you know I’m pretty much it when it comes to this topic. No one else seems to be tackling this issue at all. Microsoft certainly isn’t.

And so I rationalize the time and effort spent, as one might. But in the background, lingering, are these other things I need to do. Other big projects, like the ongoing 24H2 updates for the Windows 11 Field Guide. Like the Eternal Spring guidebook that my wife and I are working, more my wife than me these days. And other things. And I wonder how or whether I can find time to somehow do it all. I spent last weekend trying to catch up on some of this work while my wife was away, visiting family in Boston. And with a looming six-week trip to Mexico City coming up, I have that deadline, too, things I need to finish before we leave. Review laptops to send back to their makers, so many of them. Clothes to buy. Health-related appointments. All kinds of things.

I read something recently that resonated in a timely way. It’s not necessarily profound, may in fact just be obvious. It’s the type of self-help advice that’s everywhere these days, on services like Medium or Pocket, spewed out by experts and non-experts alike. But there’s a central truth here. And it goes like this.

You can only do one big thing at a time.

This is immediately and obviously correct. But we’re stubborn. We’ve all been told again and again that people can’t multitask, and yet many of us try to do so regardless. Sometimes with tragic results, as when a person texting and driving at the same time veers off course and into oncoming traffic. Oftentimes less dramatically, as when we juggle multiple projects and complete them all, yes, but poorly. It doesn’t matter whether we acknowledge our limitations or not. What matters is acting on them. And doing the right thing going forward.

And so I’m trying that out for size. With this programming project, you may have noticed that I suddenly started documenting how to do this work via a series of Step-by-Step posts. And that these things are appearing rather quickly. As with the broader series, I had hoped for this bit to be shorter than it is, but in documenting the work, I was forced to confront how much it is that I accomplished, while also putting a limiter on its scope. Because otherwise, I’d just keep working on it, even though some of the problems I’m trying to solve are, again, unsolvable. But now it’s winding down. My goal at the start was to finish this before we went to Mexico. And that will happen. I can put it behind me, at least for a while, dream and think about other things, and move on.

Tied to that is a goal to make progress on those books while we’re in Mexico. This, I have experience with: Multi-week trips like this are often a terrific framing device for writing projects, a time of great focus. And I’ve had success in the past, as I did with turning my Programming Windows series into a book called Windows Everywhere in early 2023.

You can only do one big thing at a time.

It’s an interesting concept. I know it’s true. I’m just not sure how successful I can be in accurately scheduling each of these big things, getting them done in turn, and then moving. But I’m going to try. In the end, it’s all I can do.