Every productivity tool is a blessing and a curse, or rather: for extended periods of time a given tool can chime perfectly with your way of working and thinking; when it doesn’t, it ceases to be a machine for converting your energy into accomplishment and becomes a wastebin for everything you throw at it.
As Jonathan dreams about his perfect PM plugin I note that, largely without much plan, I’ve downgraded my software requirements this past year. Gradually I’ve moved from complex, unwieldy development environments like Eclipse to smaller, more modular and easily-missed applications, like the Vim that I used to hate (although I need to try the new and utterly undersold Emacs now it’s out). I tie it all together with my own wikis and Trac, and it works as well as the original IDE used to. Recently I’ve practically retrograded, off line entirely, into my paper diary against which I can plot events that have staked themselves out around me and simply chart a course from one to the next, unconcerned about the next point.
Sometimes our plans, and the structures of our wilful minds, are complex and polyhierarchical. Then they need collating, aggregating, reordering and generally organising, and productivity tools do all that for us. But sometimes the moving forward we desire in our lives winds itself down to a single thread, or many parallel threads, that we can treat as linear and plot according to the calendar or the stars. And later our world might once again branch and sprawl, tangle itself up in itself and need managing or even pruning: then we must once again reconsider the tools we use. Changing one’s preferences, in software as in anything else, should not preclude changing them back in the future.
