tools : mackenzian

Death to Stock Photo image: Keystone K-77 projector exposed on a light wood desk next to a white wall. — You can’t avoid all tedious processes, but you can use tools that make your life easier.

As the last third of the year begins, I’ve been reviewing this summer’s finances. I spent about 6 hours combing through transaction records today—until I realized that there are no prizes for suffering, just as there are no awards for doing every job myself or taking every course available without putting them into action right away.

I forgot the first principle of Doing Good Work Without Exhaustion:

Use the tools at hand.

For finances, I have You Need A Budget and QuickBooks. For categorizing revenue and certain transactions, I have online banking export files and Excel. For task management, I have Asana and Workflowy. For notes and source management, I have Evernote and a dedicated hard drive folder. For mid-writing back-ups, I have three cloud services, including email.

These are all tools that someone literally designed to make routine work processes easier, and my life is in fact easier with them than without.

Ever the would-be student, I don’t like to use tools that make the logic of a process opaque to me: I want to know why each tool works so that I can apply that learning to other tools in its class.

But there’s no benefit to unnecessary suffering, not in business and not in the rest of life.

There are so many analytical tools for mapping personality traits and leadership modes.

Myers-Briggs (MBTI), the Big Five, the Enneagram of Personality, astrology too: people use these and many other conceptual and analogical mapping systems to order and interpret patterns that they perceive as they look at their lives and their interactions with others.

A separative way to use these tools is to insist that you are your test results: you are an ISTP; you are open to experience or not; you are a One; you are a Virgo; you are that and not much more. Your test results can explain why you lead the way you do, why you can’t stand this context or that, why you thrive in one role over another, why you often notice certain things while others are opaque to you.

A more integrative way is to recognize your potential access to other categories of experience than those you usually live in. Even if a few modes seem to come much more easily than others, and even if some produce less comfortable or effective outcomes, integrating them all means leaving none of them so far away from psychological “home” that you can only respond with fear when you see them expressing in other people.

Treat each of your categories as a utility, not a uniform. Treat them as an instrument that grounds you where you stand and allows you to perceive more about yourself and the world about you, not as a restricting chain that gives you a free pass not to move or grow.

You are that. And you can be more.
Don’t box yourself in.

Tools: Use them

Categories