Why bother with a bookmark?
Much as you’d like to follow the ‘start a task, work on it til it’s done’ wisdom that the anti-multi-tasking, ‘mindfulness’ crowd suggest—for me that is an aspiration and not a reality. Work is weather-dependent, dinner needs made—so the projects I need done around the house get done in snips and pieces, or they won’t get done at all.
I write this post because when Ecumene (for the Bones of Tradition) asked what I use daily that’s unaesthetic but practical, I had no shortage of answers. (Zip-ties are the best compression: they’re plastic and asymmetric but they’re unendingly useful.) The Project Pail is one that is more of a technology than an object, and (though ugly) it lets me propel my projects forward. 1
The Project Pail
When I’m working on something and it starts to rain, or I find out I need extra parts I hadn’t known about and can’t continue til I have time for a trip to town, there are 3 possible responses.
1: put everything exactly back away where it belongs. Everything’s tidy, you’ll know where everything is, but you may spend your entire project’s time allotment collecting and hauling your tools to your worksite when the rain stops.
2: leave everything where it landed. You don’t lose time, but you will lose washers, and your yard is a mess.
Goldilocks: use a project pail. Put all the parts and all the tools into a 5-gallon bucket that is dedicated to this project, and bring the bucket back indoors. You lose a little time but all of your tools are right where you left them, not lost and not wrapped around a mower blade. As you pick the project pail up and walk back to your project, you can do a quick visual survey of where you left off and what your next steps are.
It’s ugly, but it helps me get jobs done in the slivers of time I can afford.
This essay is part of a series on rural tech and how it works.
“But you’ll rarely find people celebrating these as traditional lifestyles, or yearning to return to them. To those in the midst of a tradition, tradition is not something exciting and beautiful and novel, it’s just part of the way things work. And in truth, in a visual-first world, there is little to commend mere practicality. The experienced beauty of these lifestyles is not in visual aesthetics, but in the practical utility of their way of life and the experiences and competencies that emerge: being able to have regular family feasts and bonding time with grandparents, a vast array of seedlings each spring, making chicken coops or mending tractors on your own.
Those of us who study traditions must maintain a sharp distinction between the appearance of tradition and the bones of one.
Ecumene. “The Bones Of Tradition,” 2022.