Tools for thought

This is not a quiz

It's time to start on a new project or feature. You're doing something you haven't done before. The problem or the proposed solution is new to you and/or your organization. Pick your tool: what are you going to use to get the job done?

Next time this happens, think in terms of what you want to accomplish. In all likelihood, you will pick the wrong tool. Either the right tool doesn't exist, you don't know about it, or you don't know that you want it.

For example, a few years ago I heard about Bitfocus Companion through the open-source community. I thought it was promising (we love integrations!), showed it to my team, and... we had no idea what to do with it. We had no "attack". No way in, nowhere to get started with understanding it, no apparent handles. A year later, it came back up in a (very slightly different) context and we all said, "Ohhhhhh."

Outside of tool-first thinking, I get to a much more interesting place in a shorter time.

I might even discover that the "wrong tool" leads me somewhere original. Once I have the right answer to the right question, I can build the solution in anything.

Forgetting the hammer

So first, I put down the hammer. I think (walk, sketch, whiteboard). As I'm thinking in these ways, at any time I can ask myself any of the following questions:

• What's the most impractical way I could do this?
• What's the laziest way I could do this?
• What's definitely the worst way to do this?

Method-based changes

That part is supposed to be fun, to break me out of the patterns of that day or that week. If that doesn't get me where I want to go, we can start asking "in what ways":

In what ways...

• ...could I do this with a text editor? With no text editor?
• ...could I accomplish this with only sound? Color? Light?
• ...could I make this complicated for myself? For others?

Applying it

There's a saying in a lot of performance-based or creative disciplines, especially ones with a lot of preparation or technique requirements. It goes sort of like "Practice all of your techniques, then go on stage and forget it all".