"The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.", Carl Newport in the Deep work.

What do you think of this quote guys?

Dellu wrote:

Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life.

I get stuck on step one.

I get stuck on step one.

This.

It’s the other way round for me : I adopt various tools hoping they’ll help me “ Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in my professional and personal life”
:-))

I think that's true for anyone who wants to effect change in their lives. If you can't quite get a handle on that, you pour your energy into the abstracted process as represented by software, hoping to work your way BACK to the core issue.

Skywatcher wrote:

It’s the other way round for me : I adopt various tools hoping
they’ll help me “ Identify the core factors that determine
success and happiness in my professional and personal life”
:-))

My take on "The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection":

Experiment and get your hands dirty with lots of tools - from tools that have been around for a long time (classics) to the latest innovations.

Then you'll know a lot about tools and be more likely to choose the right tool for the right task in pursuit of whatever ideals or just to get the job done.

This is an interesting thread, and I really like the responses. I kind of find these statements a bit one dimensional, and appreciate all of the follow up posts that reflect the subtleties and complexities of how we think and behave.

--Ken

… and of course Dr Andus’s reply totally justifies the CRIMPing approach ;-)

So I’m with you, doc!

I think that if you need some sort of higher guidance on how to choose a tool -- whether it's a hammer or a word processing app -- you're spending waaay too much time seeking higher guidance.

If you don't know when something is appropriate for your use, when you use it, studying the "happiness" you feel when using that hammer won't get you too far. I'm all for the touchy-feely kinda things but, at some point, you have to get on with your life and do what needs to be done without a whole lot of circumspection.

More to the point, it's a form of risk avoidance: If you don't have to take the risk of doing something because you're busy studying how to do it, you're just avoiding the risk of doing it.

"If you’re happy to sit at your desk and not take any risk, you’ll be sitting at your desk for the next 20 years.” – David Rubenstein

Good post by Listerene. I've always said the most expensive asset invested is time.

Identifying most urgent needs and then most effective tools for those tasks can easily be neglected.

Also the 80/20 rule might not be exactly correct in terms of numbers, but it's an apt metaphor overall.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Of course playing around with new tools can be a hobby too. But should be differentiated from identifying crucial tasks and the best tools for them.