Tag: “Tools”

I suppose you know Pocket. It is an excellent service that allows you to save all kinds of links to read or watch later. It integrates perfectly with all your social media, your email, your browsers and all your mobile devices, so that whenever you find something that seems interesting, wherever you are, and you don’t have enough time to go through it thoroughly, you can capture it with just a simple click to look it up later. Frankly, I believe it’s a great idea.

In forums regarding personal productivity, GTD, and mainly, personal management apps, I always find quite a big percentage of people who are really worried about questions regarding speed. Why do I need to double click, when I could just click once? why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for every operation in the app? why does it take a few minutes to perform a specific process instead of just seconds? etc.

Everyone likes tools. Tools excite us. They empower us. They slow us down. A tool that is not sharp doesn’t allow you to do so much. A very sharp tool allows you to stab yourself.

Technology is sometimes a double edged sword. While it allows you to do more and faster things it also allows you to do the wrong things easier.

To-do lists were invented at the same time that time management started to become a problem for many people, especially for knowledge workers. There was too much to do, so at the beginning it was at least necessary to have a clear inventory of all that stuff.