Tools do matter

I know a lot of people think tools don’t matter, and mostly I agree. There’s no point buying expensive gear only to discover a few weeks later that you don’t actually like your new hobby.

But once you’ve committed, your tools start to matter. Not because expensive gear proves you’re serious, but because using it becomes part of the work.

A good tool should help you stay in the flow, get better results, and spend as little effort as possible on the tool itself.

That’s why I love using Things 3 for task management and iA Writer for working with texts. And that’s why I didn’t like WordPress as a blogging platform. Publishing a post was too much hassle.

I thought moving to something else would help, so I chose Ghost. But after a few weeks, I noticed that I didn’t want to post anything. The workflow I’d set up was too complicated. Several times, a GitHub Action didn’t run properly, and the post wasn’t published.

The problem wasn’t writing anymore. It was getting the writing onto the blog. Switching tools hadn’t removed that friction; I’d ended up with a different version of it.

So yesterday I installed Page CMS. It has the same minimal approach I liked in Ghost, but far fewer settings.

So far, so good. Whether it helps me publish more remains to be seen. A simpler tool won’t do the writing for me, but I’d like it not to give me another reason to put off publishing.

We’ll see.