One of the biggest hindrances to personal productivity is the search for perfect tools. Let’s consider an analogy.
John is a carpenter and he wants to be the most productive carpenter he can possibly be. To reach this goal, he decides he needs the best tools possible, so he sets out to find the perfect hammer.
John visits many stores and tries out different hammers. They all work fine, but he notices subtle differences. He finally settles on a wonderful hammer that he uses for a week, but then he discovers that it gives him a blister, so he sets out to find a better hammer.
John may or may not ever find the perfect hammer. However, the productivity gain between a “good” hammer and the “perfect” hammer is going to be very slight. If John is focused on finding the perfect tool, then his productivity is going to suffer. John needs to be focused on producing.
Right now, I see a lot of people doing the same thing with to-do lists. Everyone is searching for the “perfect” to-do list. There is software, specially printed paper, web applications, note cards, and a host of other tools to let you keep track of lists of things that need to be done.
While all these tools provide some nice benefits, a to-do list is still just a list of things that need to be done. The more time you spend trying to find a tool, the less time you have available to spend on completing your list.
If you search for a list tool that will save you 10 seconds per day, at the end of a year, it will have only saved you about an hour of time. If you spent 4 or 5 hours finding a tool, you’ll probably never recover the time spent locating it.
A better approach is to use the simplest tools you have at your disposal and concentrate on doing actual work. This may mean using a simple notebook for your to-do list. Focusing on your work will bring to light the tools that have room for improvement. By switching out your tools only when they are actually impeding your ability to work, it will help keep you from needlessly looking for new tools that have only a minimum impact on your productivity.
Our carpenter would be better off sticking with a good reliable hammer until he gets to the point that hammering is becoming the biggest bottleneck in his work. At that point, he needs to look for, not just a better hammer, but something that will significantly increase the amount of work he can accomplish. It might be time to get a nail-gun or hire an assistant.
A principle as old as the world. Even biological evolution works not through the survival of the “fittest” (this phrase was not coined by Darwin, btw), but the survival of the “just fit enough” — that would explain its incredible speed… ;-)
“The grass is always greener on the other side.” I think the concept of perfection is ruining the world. Forget being perfect…just be yourself….it’s so much more riveting…
http://yinvsyang.com/
I think the important thing to note is that tools are all part of a process. The benefits from tools are results and ideally you want them to be good results. You can count me in as one of those individuals that endlessly seeks for the perfect tools. Back in middle school, I went through 12+ kinds of erasers until I thought I found the best one.
What would be interesting is a post on technology and how it changes so quickly. At some point, changes in technology present such increases in value that you’d want to keep moving on to the better version of a tool. This is something my company, Convos, is starting to grapple with on our online group productivity tool. Is it best to release a couple of enhancements every 2-3 weeks like we do now or is it best to release a huge set of changes every 2-3 months for a bigger bang/response?
http://www.convos.com
I love my tools and I do spend a lot of time researching the “good” ones. “Good” being a relative term.
@JP – so how much time did your “best” eraser save you? My point is that the time you spent trying out different erasers was probably never recovered.
People spend a lot of time looking for the “best” in areas where the “best” has pretty much no benefit over the “reasonably good”.
Mark, you’re totally right. For a lot of things, the marginal utility gets smaller and smaller as you move up in quality. I think to some degree though, there is a level of skill/appreciation that goes into things that are the best. And while choosing the best may be costly in time and money, there is an emotional and subjective gain to it.
Audiophiles may spend the big bucks for the world class speaker systems because they are skilled at it. I, on the other hand, would do just fine with a $50 pair of speakers.
Interesting topic….=)
Very good post. I guess I have a further reason why I still use simple tools in my system. I use a weekly day planner and a notebook for recording ideas. I then set weekly goals on a legal pad.
Mark, you are so right. But it does take time to explore and I’m happy to have personally come to a finalization of tools which work well for me and I probably won’t change anytime soon.
While I believe that simple tools are effective, I also believe that everyone should take a limited amount of time to test what works for them.
I’ve come to see that for my productivity needs, an iPhone, a Laptop and a Desktop all synced through Things, MobileMe and Sugarsync just hits the sweet spot.
It might be a very high-tech solution, but it does a marvellous job and anything below it didn’t feel right.
Mark,
Are you familiar with the prinicples of Lean Manufacturing? It’s also called the Toyota Production System. At it’s most basic level it’s about figuring out what steps in a process are valuable or create value and what steps are wasteful.
@Lee – I have encountered it before (under several different names).
@Arjun – Maybe I’m stating my position too strongly. I see a lot of people who look for tools when they are really just procrastinating. For example, if you have 10 people you are trying to schedule for work, spending hours looking for a scheduling program really doesn’t get you anywhere you can get with a paper calendar and pencil or perhaps a spreadsheet.
I’ve seen other people spend hours and hours trying out different notebooks to find the best one. It is a bunch of pieces of paper with a cover on it! It might make you happier to know that you have the “best” notebook, but it probably won’t help you really accomplish anything more.
Particularly in the US there is a shopping mind set. We want to go out and buy something as a form of entertainment. I think a lot of the search for perfect tools is just trying to fill this shopping “need” and isn’t really helpful from a productivity standpoint.
Of course if you are going out to go shopping for something you don’t really need, it is probably better to focus on notebooks or ink pens instead of expensive items like cars or computers. :)