I’m in the second week of my transition to a more iOS-friendly mobile workflow, and it’s been enlightening so far – just not in exactly the way I expected.

There are, of course, things that iOS just can’t do - edit Photoshop and Illustrator files, resize a browser window to test a responsive layout, and serve up an offline stand-alone web development environment are the some of the first things that come to mind.

That being said, there’s so much this platform can do that I wonder how many of my previous complaints were really just about getting in my own way.

I’ve carried a laptop with me for years, but I could usually come up with a reason why I wasn’t quite ready to work on that much more capable platform. Maybe I didn’t have the right editor, maybe I forgot my mouse and had to use the trackpad, maybe there was something terribly annoying about how my .vimrc file just wouldn’t display the editor’s color scheme correctly.

None of those “problems” were real obstacles. They were all just handy excuses.

The more time that passes, the more I realize that we’re the only ones that can put all these hurdles in our way. We’re the ones telling ourselves that we just need a slightly different notebook, or just the right font, or the perfect keyboard. Then we’ll be ready to get to business.

That’s total bullshit.

Freddy Rumsen is one of my favorite characters on Mad Men and he gets one of the best lines in an already great show. That line has been coming back to me more and more lately.

“Do the work, Don.”