My mood is 100% dictated by the amount of sunlight I receive. There are no other significant factors.
Over the past week, I’ve been working in one of two spots: my basement hallway and my half-finished sunroom.
My desk is set up in the basement hallway at the moment until my sunroom is ready. Naturally, the basement is dark, gloomy, not completely windowless, but most lit by artificial light.
The desk has everything I need (at least I thought that I needed). It has an ergonomic keyboard, a large monitor, a comfy office chair. It’s even a standing desk, a huge help for days with endless meetings.
But it has no sunlight.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been grumpy. I couldn’t pinpoint the cause. It’s performance review season, so I thought maybe the pressure was starting to get to me. Maybe it was the amount of project management I had to do that was keeping me from coding and other fun activities that stopped me enjoying the day-to-day. Maybe it was my personal life stress seeping into work life, where constant remodeling and construction in the house ruined my focus at work.
No, it’s because I had no sunlight.
I’ve started to work in my half-finished sunroom this week. It has windows covering three sides of it. The walls are finished, painted and everything. It has the best insulation in the house. Just no floors yet, so no furniture in it. My workstation in the sunroom is simple: a camp chair and my laptop.
And sunlight.
My mood is instantly better. My todo list at work looks a lot less intimidating. I completed a relatively advanced feature without moping about the tech debt lying around. I’m productive again. All of this with a less ideal setup.
Except for sunlight.
Lately, I’ve been pondering what minimalism looks like in my life. What are things that I can let go? What can I throw away in the dumpster and never miss? I thought I’ve actually done pretty well for myself having a minimal setup for my workstation. But all these thoughts about what I could get rid of pushed away useful thoughts about what I should introduce. What’s one simple thing I could add that could truly make my life better?
Sunlight.
Going forward, I want to make sure I build for myself the best work environment possible. Until now, I thought that consistented of these things:
A laptop that doesn’t break a sweat (MacBook Pro M1 Pro)
A chair I can’t tell that I’m sitting in all day
A monitor leveled at eyesight
An ergonomic keyboard
An Apple Trackpad
That’s it. But I was clearly missing one piece. The most important piece.
Sunlight.