I can’t be trusted with powerful software
It’s happening again. My love of powerful, complex software has overrun my ability to avoid tinkering.
For example, I’ve spent several hours this week working on my Org-mode agenda display. Configuring org-super-agenda is tons of fun. It can make one’s Agenda absolutely sing and dance, which is not ideal for me because I’ve spent way too much time trying to teach it to sing and dance. I could have finished all of the tasks on my todo list in the time I’ve spent getting them to display just right.
I did the same thing with tweaking Elfeed for my RSS feeds and Notmuch for email. They’re just so cool and they can do so much. But they’re not really better than, say, NetNewsWire or Apple’s Mail.app. They’re just cooler.
Basically, I’ve been feeling like the more powerful the tool, the less effective I become. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s real. I get so deep into the weeds that I have a hard time finding my way back to wherever I started.
I’m not sure how to fix this. I’ve been down this road before so I just want to talk it through.
At times, I fall back to Apple Notes and Reminders and Mail and THAT’s IT! But nope, that frustrates me almost immediately. The ideal solution would be to find tools that are just right. But what? Probably Things, BBEdit, DEVONthink, and TheBrain. As much as I love Tinderbox, it’s second only to Emacs on the Powerful Software scale, so I’m backing away from that for now, too.
Stay tuned.