A Mason's Work

[00:00] I should have to think back on something. Maybe something you built as a kid,
[00:06] clubhouse, fort in the backyard, a pillow fort with your friends, a project that maybe you got
[00:14] pulled into at school. Any of these kinds of things that really imply a building where you
[00:20] and maybe a group of your friends or a group of fellow students or what have you got pulled into
[00:27] just the work and disappeared into it for an afternoon or an evening. And you only sort of
[00:34] came up for air when somebody called you for dinner or, you know, the first person had to go home or
[00:42] what have you. Nobody gave you a workflow. There wasn't an agenda. There wasn't a Kanban board or
[00:52] any of those kinds of things. Uh, yet stuff got done. The memories were forged. The experience was
[01:01] cemented as a permanent part of who you are. I draw your attention to the environment in that memory.
[01:09] Really look at it. The garage you were in the out in the woods, the patch of yard or in the,
[01:19] in the library that you may have met in as a student.
[01:24] You'll probably remember some of the details. Um, and really that it wasn't necessarily the ideal
[01:34] place. Most of the work that you did in those environments was improvised and you kind of went
[01:40] to the spaces where you needed to go to do the work. Uh, and none of that was really important
[01:47] because the work itself kind of consumed you. When you look at that memory, uh, without knowing it,
[01:55] without a framework or a productivity system or any of that kind of stuff, what you really built
[02:00] or, you know, found was a minimum viable environment to do the work before, uh, the least
[02:09] that needed to be true for the work to start. You cleared just enough space. You gathered just
[02:15] enough material. You established just enough separation from the people around you or the
[02:19] environment. And then you stopped managing those conditions and started doing the work.
[02:26] And that's the concept I want to talk about today. Most of what gets written about environment
[02:32] and productivity is about the ceiling. It's about the optimal setup, the perfect desk, the right
[02:39] lighting, the right temperature, the ideal noise level. And all of that is fine. The ceilings are useful
[02:45] to pursue, but the ceiling itself is useless. If you haven't found the floor, the minimum viable
[02:54] environment isn't necessarily about comfort. It's about removing as much friction as possible that
[03:01] prevents the work from starting. That's kind of all it needs to do needs to have three things, a clear
[03:08] surface or space, uh, uh, managed interruption, like a place where the outside world just can't kind of
[03:16] come in without some level of, uh, alert or alarm. And it needs to, uh, make sure that it satisfies
[03:26] your physical requirements, whatever they might be. Uh, you know, if it's freezing, you're not going
[03:31] to be able to do the work if it's too hot or too cold, or you don't have a way to, you know, go use the
[03:36] bathroom or things like that. But once those minimum viable environment conditions are met,
[03:43] you have your established floor. Uh, when you're moving to the work, you kind of have a tendency
[03:52] to forget about the entirety of that floor. You are able to then bring in the mindset of play from
[04:01] the first episode this week that we talked about and the curiosity kind of takes in and the, as you
[04:08] loosen your grip on the outcome, the environment sort of disappears into the background of stuff
[04:15] that, uh, that allows the work to go. Uh, that time dilation that we talked about the days that
[04:25] lasted forever. It's, it's not nostalgia. That's what flow feels like from the inside.
[04:31] It's, uh, it's proof that the environment has successfully done its job and its job was to
[04:37] essentially get out of the way. There's things that your environment can and can't do. It clearly
[04:44] can't do the work for you and it can't really replace the mindset, although it can help if you
[04:51] massage it a little, uh, it can't make you care about something you don't care about,
[04:56] but what the environment can do is remove obstacles between you and the place where your best work
[05:03] becomes possible. And as a craftsman, your responsibility is to sort of build those minimum
[05:10] conditions and then forget them. Uh, you want to make sure that you've set your environment to be
[05:16] productive and then work in it, dismiss those conditions so that you can then go about the work.
[05:26] It's not a destination. You're not building a workshop as the goal. It's the work that the
[05:33] workshop enables, right? It's the threshold environment that once you cross it, you've moved
[05:38] into the work. So for today, I want you to go back to that memory, go back to that place where you were,
[05:45] um, you know, really successful at kind of being fully enmeshed in the moment and write down some
[05:53] of the conditions that were actually present. Maybe not the perfect ones, but the real ones,
[05:58] what was, what was there, what kind of made it happen, what allowed the work to start. And as we go
[06:06] through the remaining episodes of this week, we'll talk a little bit more about ways to not only
[06:11] support those, but elevate them so that you may be able to start at a higher level of engagement or
[06:19] enmeshment in the work when you go.