An analogy for app switching
I buy a house.
The new house is amazing. It has so many rooms, and so much room. It’s got a nice fridge with a cool little ice maker. The island countertop is huge. The garage has one of those peg board organizers and all of my tools are so easy to find. It even has a little sewing room with a automatic sewing machine so that I don’t need anyone else to hem my pants.
I move in. I live there. I live there some more.
I see some other houses in the city for sale. Those houses look nicer than mine.
Our house has the same number of rooms, but there’s no room for anything. I can never find what I want in the fridge and the ice maker broke and I haven’t had time to order the part that I need to fix it. The island countertop is always full of toys and birthday invitations. I can barely open the garage door because of all the half-finished projects in the way, and besides, nothing is where it’s supposed to be on the peg board. I can’t hem my own pants, either: we put all of our saved search queries and tags in the sewing room. Besides, I never learned how to actually use the sewing machine.
I buy one of those other houses in the city.
The new house is amazing. It has so many rooms, and so much room. It’s got a nice fridge with a cool little ice maker. The island countertop is huge. The garage has one of those peg board organizers and all of my tools are so easy to find. It even has a little sewing room with an automatic sewing machine so that I don’t need anyone else to hem my pants.
I move in.
Tools like note-taking apps and task management tools feature a special kind of cruft: the detritus of old parts and ideas that builds up as someone works on projects. Cruft leaves you with the feeling that it needs to be intentionally and deliberately sifted through and recycled. What can you remove? You can’t just throw it all out, as it might contain important parts that are hard to replace! But you never have the time or energy to deal with it, so it accumulates, and sort-of gets in the way although you can kind of step around it if you know where to put your feet.
In software development, cruft can lead to technical debt and dependency hell. In knowledge/task management, cruft leads to knowledge management debt (“where should I put this? In the projects folder in my role folder? Did I tag it with the new-project and topic tags? Maybe I’ll just put it in one of my inboxes for now.”) and to-do dependency hell (“before I start on writing about this new idea I really should finish this reading to-do I had in this related project because it might be relevant and I need to know that before I start”).
The hidden problem here is that these tools typically feature a special, easy solution to cruft: just start using a new tool.
When you start using any kind of new knowledge or task management tool, there’s a sense of shine and wonder to everything. Yet the most important reason for this is not because the new tool is better than the old one: it’s simply because you haven’t moved in yet.
Crucially, this effect is more than “tabula rasa,” the blank slate. Yes, as you start using the shiny new tool, you’ll end up adding the projects you’ve been anxiously avoiding, the repeating reminder you keep pushing off, and the notes on that blog post you’re never actually going to write. Yet an even more sinister problem than crufty stuff is crufty softerware. Your knowledge and task management system contains to-dos and notes, yes, but it is also made up of the habits and behaviours and idiosyncratic use cases that you develop as you write those to-dos and notes. In those first moments of adopting a new tool, you forget about all of that cruft. However, even though it may take months or even years of use to build up new piles of crufty stuff and softerware, it will eventually happen — and this cycle is the engine of the industry.
Is it always a bad thing to switch tools? Of course not. Sometimes the new software is absolutely better than the old, and sometimes the new softerware you develop empowers you to do things more effectively or efficiently than before. But it is important to be aware of both the cost of switching and the reasons why the new thing feels better than the old. So, when you are tempted to switch, try to look for your own system design smells: are you switching because there’s too much cruft built up in the system around the new tool? If so, take a moment to reflect: setting up a new tool will probably cost you as much time and energy as cleaning up the cruft of the old tool. Which is the better expenditure of time? Only you can decide.