There's a whole subreddit, reddit.com/r/musicBattlestations/ where people show off their music setups with lots of expensive hardware. And there is something really cool about being able to occupy a physical space that inspires you and reminds you of what you are. We are physical creatures and it's much easier for us to play a role if we're in the right set with the right props and don't have to imagine it all in our heads. (This is also why working from home for an extended period of time can be hard.)
At the same time, hardware is expensive, takes up a lot of space, can be hard to reconfigure and can easily get mentally overwhelming. It's hard to switch between working on two different songs when each one requires you to unplug a bunch of wires and move boxes around. At the same time, it's maybe easier to finish that first song if you know you can't start the second one without unplugging everything...
Choosing the right space and workflow to be a productive musician is this weird sort of meta-creative process that's surprisingly hard and not talked about much (beyond fetishizing giant studios and expensive gear, or fetishizing minimalism).
Whenever I'm getting ready to push through another phase of a big project, or just getting started, the necessary accumulation of materials and tools makes it especially apparent. It's just a small loss of motivation, distraction, or injury away from becoming another burst of hoarded expensive junk.
Consider yourself lucky your project messes can hide away in a NAS...
I think anyone who takes on large costly DIY projects taking months to years for completion can relate. Sometimes I feel the only thing driving me to finish some projects is the fear of falling into a hoarding pattern while I tell myself the project is just on the backburner. If I became comfortable with letting outstanding projects enter a backburner mode indefinitely, it'd just be mental gymnastics enabling hoarding IMNSHO.
Edit:
I'm reminded of an interaction I had recently with customer service @ Home Depot, while I was returning some unused tools and materials for a project I changed directions on and no longer needed.
I'd mentioned to her how close I'd come to just keeping it all instead of returning, despite not needing any of it now, since it wasn't a large sum of money. But that a fear of becoming comfortable with such a rationalization to not return things would just enable a form of hoarding.
It apparently struck a nerve as she entered into some kind of confession mode. She enumerated a bunch of projects she has bought everything needed to do from tools to materials, sitting collecting dust for years, and never finds the time to actually start, let alone complete.
I can be obsessive about doing things the right way, but my most successful projects have always been the ones where the code looks like I dragged it kicking and screaming over the finish line and the infrastructure is basically nonexistent. And sometimes I clean it up afterwards, once I am motivated by the success of the project.
By infrastructure I mean things like CICD or even tests. If I have to choose between thorough testing and being able to finish the project at all, testing can wait.
The way I look at it, you can't test anything until you know what it's supposed to do. You won't know what it's supposed to do until it's at least close to being done. No sense in testing until you get there.
If you want to have a head start on testing, making sure to write your code so it's easy to test is probably fine, even if it's not what I'd choose.
Could be: - a cheap ukulele, tuner, with a link to some youtube lessons - a drawing pad and box of pens with some tips on figure drawing - a whittling knife and some wooden spoon blanks.
You receive the box and give it a try. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't but you can always put the stuff back in the box and return the items and receive another hobby to try without the dread of having a drawer full of nice spoon carving knives that you thought you'd love but are now just a symbol of your abandoned dreams.
1: whoa like a hobby library?
2: that's a hackerspace