The Boring Stuff Is Worth It

I've spent the last few weeks setting up a Plex server on a Synology NAS drive and I have finally gotten it working reasonably well. I haven't set up the arr suite or whatever yet because I can really only tolerate spending so much of my free time debugging docker containers but I'll get there. This was a long and mostly tedious process, but now I have a self-hosted media library I can access anywhere through Plex.

I struggle a lot with making myself do stuff like this. If I'm not working on a project obsessively (which I've been trying to stop doing so much lately) I tend to be pretty lazy and take the dumb/easy way out. This time it took me about a month of noodling for a couple hours every weekend to get it done. This is actually record time on a home/tech improvement project for me. I spend so much of my day debugging this type of thing that it's very hard to motivate to do it in my spare time. But over the last month I put in 8 hours of work and now I can save myself a lifetime of fiddling with HDMI cables or trying to remember which external drive something is stored on. In the past decade of my life I am sure I have spent more time than this setup took me on that alone. Plus it's a cool and fun little thing to share with my friends and fiddle with pretty much indefinitely.

I have been trying lately to do things like this. Work on a bigger project around the house that will make my life easier. Spend a bit more time working on my setup or my vim macros in a project so I don't get stuck doing manual bullshit over and over. Writing tests! The boring and tedious bits are extremely hard to make myself do but they are, universally, worth it (and time-saving) in the long run. I know modern tech gives us a million easy ways out (at the cost of our data, money, and sanity) but there is a deep and abiding reward in doing things the slow, boring way yourself.

So I am writing this mostly as an affirmation for myself, but hopefully other people can take it to heart too. I know doing the boring big project is tedious and tiring and we're all so burned out all the time that it's easier to just turn on Netflix or play a videogame but it really is worth it to invest time now to save it for yourself later. Now I just have to convince myself to set up those fucking Docker containers.