June 21, 2026/545 words/3 min read

A Nicer Place to Waste Time

Theming things no one sees.

I spent the better part of my last weekend on a revamp of this website, tuning things for the maybe three people and two bots that end up reading it. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I caught myself wondering why I do this to myself, and why I enjoy it as much as I do.

There's a nice little niche hobby for people who use a computer, which is making the computer nicer to use. Mostly, that means making it nicer to look at. You typically start by picking a font, then switching to a better font, then maybe a color scheme, and finally you spend an evening deciding the better font was worse and the color scheme was too bright. If you're like me, you also theme the terminal, the code editor, the prompt line, the little status bars, until everything agrees on the same handful of colors. None of it does anything measurable, which is the whole point!

This type of customization has almost no audience. A nice spreadsheet sees a lot of use and a slide deck could be presented to many, but the terminal color scheme gets seen by exactly one person, who already knows what it looks like because they're the ones who chose every shade of it. So the work and the reward both live entirely inside one head.

And the place being decorated is usually the same place where time disappears. The terminal, website, editor, or home dashboard is where the work tends to happen. Making it prettier can end up looking like you're sharpening the knife you keep cutting yourself with, or digging a more beautiful hole to fall into. The productivity instinct hates this, because quite often the expectation is that every hour is supposed to earn its keep, and time spent nudging window padding by two pixels earns you nothing measurable.

But sometimes, that instinct is right. Sure, there's a version of this that's pure avoidance, where fiddling with a config is a way to feel busy without going near the thing you're actually meant to be doing. I am guilty of that too! Since the actual work never starts, the tinkering has turned into a hiding place, and no amount of nice fonts fixes that.

To me, however, most of it isn't hiding, and the productivity math misses why. A tool shaped to someone's own taste is a small, quiet daily cheer. When you open something that feels like yours, the prompt shows what matters to you and nothing else, and the colors are the ones you'd have picked anyway. It's a tiny good moment repeated thousands of times a year. That adds up too, even if you can't measure it.

It helps to remember that being useful should never be the only reason to do anything. A long evening of drinks isn't useful, nor is spending a Sunday getting a color scheme exactly right. But if a thing you stare at constantly stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like home, calling it wasteful only holds up if fun is wasted, and almost nobody really believes that.

The hours go somewhere unmeasurable, but what comes back is a slightly nicer place to do everything, including wasting a bit more time.