Time Travel helps.

Wednesday 7th June

Yesterdays reflections put my mind to the future. The reason I’m gardening isn’t to have a garden, it’s to clear space to construct a forgehouse. With a walled and roofed workshop in place and a firepit at my disposal, my projects won’t be limited by weather anymore.

Being able to control some factors and not others is typical of engineering tasks, and has been a reality through human history. Whether you are working stone, bronze, steel, or C++, you always find a balance between what you can control and what you can’t.

Future Roger is going to thank me, however, Past Roger is the guy who watched it become overgrown and didn’t cut it back sooner. I hate that guy, he’s a jerk.

A little bit of time travel does you the world of good, you can borrow resources from the future by incurring a debt now and repaying later. And you can lend to the future by establishing resources and improving your workflow.

Think of your future self as a coworker and treat them with respect and generousity. This is what I’m doing now. Preperation for the future, although it does feel a bit like tidying up for the past.

In this instance, I'm trying to balance overkill with shortcomings. A decision made now will be difficult and expensive to change later, so overall I've opted for a very high minimum bar so that the workshop is never "not enough" for any project I can line up. A little bit of overkill, a little wiggle room to go bigger, but overall should be more than I need.