A few weeks ago my friend Svetlana sent me her Joy of Not Working manifesto.  While I would love to be independently wealthy I am still not at that stage in my life when I could quit my day job, stop developing software and photographing weddings and travel the world with my wife and my daughter.

Just like everything else in this world, working as hard and as much as I do has both benefits and drawbacks.  Having a day job and a photography business allows my wife to be a stay-at-home mom and will allow me to give my daughter every opportunity to advance in life when she is older.  It also allows my wife and I to take a few really amazing trips every year.

The darker side of being a workaholic means that I have less time to spend with my family.  More often than not, I would leave for work at 7 AM, come home around 4 or 5 PM, grab a quick dinner and spend another 2-4 hours editing photographs from a previous week’s wedding or bar mitzvah.  On Saturday I would photograph another event, spend Sunday with my family and start all over the following Monday.

A few weeks ago Pittsburgh got hit by a pretty bad thunderstorm and my house was flooded.  Since my editing room was in my basement, both of my desktops got damaged by water.  Luckily, I keep offsite backups and I did not lose any data.  With my desktops gone, I had to move my photo editing to my 3-year-old MacBook. 

At first, I was a bit worried – I’ve always edited my photos on a top-of-the line desktop with lots of RAM and a large monitor.  To my surprise, I found that editing photos on my laptop tremendously sped up my workflow.  I was able to go through thousands of photographs from one or more events and delete the bad ones while commuting to and from work.  I was doing color-correction in Adobe Lightroom on my lunch break and during especially boring meetings.  I edited in Photoshop while waiting for my baby daughter to fall asleep.  I would set the laptop on my night stand and start large batches such as exporting raw files from Lightroom to JPEG before going to sleep.  The only time I connected my laptop to my 24-inch monitor is when I needed to do some precise Photoshop surgery.

All of a sudden, I had hours and hours of free time, time that I could spend with my family.  I no longer had to sit in my basement and miss my daughter’s laughter just so I could sift through thousands of photographs.  The flood that destroyed my basement office turned out to be a great thing.

As much as I loved my new mobile workflow, my laptop was really too old and too slow to run “heavy” applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop.  I needed something better.  When I told my coworkers that I was planning to buy a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, most of them told me I was nuts to spend over $2000 on a laptop.  A few days ago I bit the bullet and coughed up the money.  Now I am a proud owner of a brand-spanking-new MacBook Pro.  Today I edited a wedding on my new laptop and I’m loving it.  And while $2000 is a hefty price tag for a laptop, it’s definitely worth it to me because it buys me more time with my family.

P.S.  Macs rock!