Buy The Boring Tool And Use It Until It Fails

Tool Cost Kill Sheet – $4 – audit which tools are actually paying for themselves — One sheet. Every tool you’re paying for, what it costs annually, whether you’ve used it in the last thirty days. The subscription graveyard is real. This is how you close it.

250+ Tools and Resources – Mr Pugo’s list for finding the thing you’re doing manually that doesn’t need to be — An actual working list organized by use case. Useful for finding where you have a gap that a simple tool could close for less than you’re paying to do it manually. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)

The Boring Tools Win

Beautiful tools make you feel productive. Boring tools make you productive.

A publishing operation, a radio station, a newsletter, a fiction imprint, and a handful of other things, and most of it runs on a text editor and an SSH connection.

A diagnosis, not a brag.

There’s a class of tool that makes you feel productive and a class of tool that makes you productive, and the overlap is smaller than the software industry needs you to believe. The first kind has a beautiful interface, a feature set that takes three sessions to learn, and a changelog arriving every six weeks with improvements to things you haven’t touched yet.

The second kind is boring, fast, does one thing well, and is still running after the company that made the first kind has pivoted to AI features and repriced its tiers twice.

I’ve tried most of the tools. Paid for subscriptions I forgot existed until the credit card statement arrived. Migrated platforms three times for reasons that felt urgent and turned out not to be.

The tools I use: a file system, a terminal, an email service that sends what I tell it to send, and enough discipline to write the thing before I go hunting for a better application to write it in.

Buy the boring tool. Use it until it fails. Upgrade under protest only.

Reply and tell me the one tool you actually use every day. ~ J.D.