Not Pushing Your Tools
29 November, 2019
In the early 1990s, I was heavily into desktop publishing (DTP). As I was learning that craft, I couldn’t afford heavy-duty DTP software like FrameMaker or Ventura Publisher or QuarkXpress. But I did have a copy of WordPerfect 5.1 (yes, that version, the one which ran under DOS). And, coincidentally, I around that time I stumbled across a book titled Desktop Publishing with WordPerfect 5.1.
Using the two, I managed to learn how to publish long, well-formatted documents using a tool that wasn’t really designed for that task. It was a cumbersome process, but it was possible.
In learning to desktop publish with WordPerfect 5.1, I garnered a valuable lesson: unless you have no other choice, it’s not worth the time or effort to push your tools beyond their intended uses.
It’s not uncommon to come across blog posts and hacks that tell you how to wrestle an application into doing something it wasn’t designed to do.
Take Evernote, for example. Ostensibly, it’s a tool for collecting and organizing information. But it’s not a word processor. It’s not a blog post editor. It’s not a task or checklist manager. It’s not a flashcard app, and it’s not a presentation tool. Yet many people who use Evernote use it for all of those tasks. And a whole lot more.
As good as Evernote is at collecting and organizing information, it’s not as good as the dedicated application people try to use it to replace.
I can understand why people try to push their tools beyond their uses, beyond their limits: they might not want to clutter their hard drives up with specialized applications. Remember what I did with WordPerfect those 30-odd years ago?
Sometimes, though, you need to bite the bullet. You need to recognize the limits of the tool that you’re using and, when necessary, turn to something else.
Remember that the goal behind using tools is to help us do a job faster and more efficiently. To free up our time to do other thinks besides work. I don’t think that trying to push your tools beyond their limits is the most productive use of your time and energy.