Working with the Garage Door Open

It's an evocative phrase. One of those powerful ones you can go your whole life without hearing but when you do you know exactly what the other person means. It's an uncommon thing in language to be able to transmit not just an idea but an entire context surrounding it. At least, that's been my experience after adopting it and sharing with others whenever core values around work and life take over the topic of conversation.

Working with the garage door open is a quiet, public way of working. It is not demanding attention, but invites interested parties to stop by and engage. It is accountable to the act of work, but not necessarily to some grander scheme or external demand. It's not "drinking beers with the garage door open" (that happens too but you don't pretend it's work). It's enjoyable, though often it's a type II sort of fun . If it wasn't, you wouldn't be doing it. Not-fun work happens somewhere else: an office, a job site, behind a counter.

That's not to say people don't envision the finer details exactly the same. Some folks picture their fathers sawing and hammering away at the custom shelves they're building for the deck. Others think of study halls, lab time, or co-working spaces—creating your thing in the presence of like-minded peers. For me, it's the 1980s in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses where each garage has something different going on. The next Nirvana is rehearsing across the street from the Corvette Stingray restoration which is two houses down from Doc Brown digging through a pile of electronics either trying to reverse-engineer the IBM ROM or upgrade the flux capacitor in his DeLorean...

The original source, a newsletter by Robin Sloan saved by Andy Matuschak , paints a word picture of a street in West Berkeley where modern artisans practice their craft:

...a physical business enlivens public space, by making the simple, eloquent statement: I am here, working.

There’s a scientific glassblowing studio north of us; I walk past it on the sidewalk often. By simply existing, and having a nice sign that faces the street, they are doing a small public service every day. We are here, working.

In the same light industrial complex as the Murray Street Media Lab, there’s a woodworking shop, and the man who runs it always keeps his door propped open. Simple as that. What a delight, every damn day, to ride my bike past that door and peek inside and see all his tools, the boards stacked up for whatever commission he’s undertaking. I am here, working.

I am here, working with the garage door open.

I am here, working.

I am here.

What more could you want from a tagline?

What more could you want from your life?

I found Andy's note because I had found myself on Tom MacWright's blog in a pique of frustration with the bloat in Wordpress, Bluehost, and the more traditional Web 1.0 blogging lifecycle. I wanted minimal, to know what exactly everything did and be able to work with it at the speed of thought without having to fight the opinions of my CMS and webhost on proper paragraph margins. That led me to the 15kb webpage , which was a big inspiration for my personal website . From there, I could not tell you how I made it to Andy's Notes but somehow I actually managed to surf the web ( which is still a thing , believe it or not) from Tom's site to Andy's.

That particular note is just one of a collection that makes up Andy's Zettelkasten system. These "external brain" note-taking systems have fascinated me for ages. A) because I am absolute crap at taking notes (a fact which will no-doubt make for a long and cringy post in the future), and B) because the concept of delegating the noise and chaos of life into a place where you can synthesize ideas clearly is such an intoxicating one. Of course, it's never actually worked for me (a fact which will perhaps also be part of that future post), but having such a rich example to browse through is like having a guided tour of the small corner of the internet that Andy inhabits.

To be clear, I don't know Andy Matuschak or anything about him beyond what a 15-second glance at his home page told me (a UX researcher into using computers to expand how people think; looks like he's done some pretty cool stuff at Khan Academy and Apple). But in putting his notes out there for the internet to read and share, Andy is working with the door open. If you want to engage with his work, you have to actively engage with it. There's no feed or publication mechanism cramming it down your throat. None of the notes claim to be anything but thoughts and references that he found interesting or useful at some point in the past. In the "attention economy" era, it is such a blessing to be able to just sit in a space where you get to unearth new ideas because you actively want to, not because there's some algorithm or team of SEO engineers who have figured out the exact right language to serve at the exact right moment to trigger your lizard brain.

Andy, as far as I can tell, is sharing because he finds it interesting. He's not worried about who else finds it interesting. Maybe someone will, maybe they won't. But in the meantime, he's gonna keep working, he's gonna keep saving his notes, and if someone stops by to chat then maybe he'll hand them a cold one and show them just how he's overclocked the fusion core to get those last few jigawatts needed to get where he's trying to go.

There are plenty of other spaces where people are working with the garage door open, even if that's not how they'd describe it. If you're in a group of people where the most common opening phrases to a conversation are "hey, check this out" and "whatcha been working on?" odds are good you might have stumbled into a community operating on the open garage wavelength. Essentially, you're looking for folks who agree with most of the following statements:

Creating is as fun or more fun than consuming

Too many projects, too little time

Wacky ideas are always great conversation subject

The successes of others are to celebrate and be inspired by

You can figure out anything with enough time and perseverance

Mishaps and failures are often funny, often frustrating, and an integral part to figuring it out.

I've always found those environments to be far and away the most pleasant ones to spend any significant time in. Right now, I'm probably in 2-3 of these communities: Seattle Indies (Seattle-based game dev), Chickensoft Games (C# Godot game dev community), and the work culture at Eyrus (my day job) comes pretty close. In the past, I've found it in the common room in my college dorm or in the rowing club boathouse.

I don't think I'm alone either. There are plenty of people who actively talk about work this way , but even if they don't I think the instinct is there. We could talk about the fact that a solid majority of Americans prefer mixed-use neighborhoods , but a more visceral example comes from the world of cinema. If you've ever watched a movie in the last, oh, ever, the following scene probably rings a lot of bells:

EXT: RENAISSANCE FLORENCE - DAY

The cries of merchants ring out across the piazza as Florentines of all classes, creeds, and ages enjoy the warm Italian morning. Some are shopping at the market stalls, browsing wares ranging from the local olive harvest to spices and silks from far to the east. A blacksmith tends to his forge; next door a cobbler and a tailor are fitting a scion in the latest French fashions. The apartments at the far end of the square are covered in scaffolding, swarmed by bricklayers and masons refinishing the medieval façade. Old men sit smoking and drinking; a swarm of children dart among the adults, startling one woman who curses and shrieks at them to the amusement of the other patrons. Florence is a vibrant, animated city; not just lively but alive.

It's a pretty default opening sequence for so many movies, the 15-20 seconds right before whatever calamity befalls the happy community. But that's the point—we instantly translate "people working and living together" into "happy, healthy society."

Hence the tagline. I'm working with the garage door open because, as far as I can tell, it's the best way to do it. I hope to have some interesting things to share, and I hope folks will be curious enough to stop by to chat. Or perhaps I'll end up with a pile of unfinished projects and the posts will all be the equivalent of a printer run over by a lawnmower. Either way, I've hung up my sign and the shop is humming.

I am here, working.

Photo credits: Slashgear , Back to the Future (1985)