Important tools

[mrissa]

One of the things I often think about advice is that it usually reflects the advice-giver's needs rather than being some kind of universal law. "Don't smack yourself in the face with a frying pan," okay, sure, but once you leave that realm, you'll run into "definitely write every day because you need the momentum" and "definitely don't write every day because you need to take breaks," and...those two things are advice designed for different people who have opposite problems. And the milder versions, "momentum is valuable" and "rest is valuable" are both true.

So I've been thinking about another pair of aphorisms in tension. And they are "it's a poor crafter who blames their tools" and "get the right tool for the job." I think this is a case where both are true and it's a matter of finding the balance and figuring out where you are on the spectrum of "how true is this at the moment, how much does this apply to me right now."

Example: for Christmas in 2018 I got a traveler's notebook. And that has been astonishingly helpful for my productivity. I was productive before, no one who lives outside my skull could deny it. And yet this: this is staggeringly useful. This is a thing that helps me be both more productive and more relaxed about it. What is this magic. It is an amazing tool for me. It is objectively much, much better than its absence. Was it worth spending the money? Oh God yes. (It was not my money, it was a gift. But if it had been? STILL YES.

Now: if my productivity device had been an extremely fancy laptop instead of a traveler's notebook, this math would be somewhat different. Or if I was finding productivity leaps from a different system every month. Because then you start asking: are these genuine productivity leaps? But I think we're culturally skewed toward Puritanism in some ways. We're skewed toward sit down, shut up, you can't possibly benefit from the thing, do not ask for anything.

Except...hammering with a hammer is better and more efficient and safer than hammering with the handle of a screwdriver. You can hurt yourself doing that. There's a reason professionals use a hammer. No one is going to hurt themselves trying to write in a spiral notebook from Walgreen's instead of a nice traveler's notebook, but it's entirely 100% possible that they might not get as much written. I myself have written on basically anything, computer, paper, whatever. The back of junk mail. Just to prove to myself that I can, that I don't need a special system, that if I'm in a random location with scrap paper I can still write. I still do that now, so that I don't get too precious about having to have things exactly right. Buuuut having things that I like is actually great and it is totally okay if you want things that you like too.

And the difference between, for example, really good artist-grade colored pencils and the bottom of the barrel cheapest colored pencils is staggering. You literally can make immensely better art with the good pencils. That's not being "precious," that's not being spoiled or demanding or a snob, that's...there is a difference in the quality of what comes out.

I suspect that nobody reading this has infinite choice. I suspect that I have not attracted any billionaires to be regular blog readers. (If so, hi! I have a whole list of artists you could patronize, billionaire reader!) So it's a matter of balance, balance, balance, as in so many things. I just...feel like there's a certain amount of cultural default that if you purchase organizational tools to make things easier, you're being self-indulgent and you don't really need them, and I want to push back on that. Sometimes the right tool that fits your hand is amazing, and you can do better work with it. Hurray for finding those moments. Let's celebrate them when we can. Even when they seem random and weird from the outside.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

100% true.

I make beadwork for my own pleasure, not for sale. Every time I use my fancy Lindstrom flush cutters, I appreciate how easy it is to cut exactly where I need to on the first try.

[rosefox]

I'm confused by this post because I think I've never heard the argument you're pushing back against. Of course better tools make better art, craft, organization, laundry, etc. I don't understand how anyone could claim otherwise who has any experience of using any tool ever.

I taught videography to teens in the summers of 1998 and 1999. The first summer we used 20-year-old analog equipment (we named the various components of the editing setup after characters on The Flintstones because it felt about that old) and the second summer we used digital cameras and this shiny new software called Final Cut Pro. The difference in both quantity and quality of output was staggering.

I just...feel like there's a certain amount of cultural default that if you purchase organizational tools to make things easier, you're being self-indulgent and you don't really need them, and I want to push back on that.

Is the organizational-specific part of it a version of "everyone who claims to have ADHD is just lazy" or something?

[mrissa]

Well, for example, there is a certain amount of "haha people just buy planners to buy planners and they never use them they just like buying fancy planners" cultural meme.

There is also a rather legitimate question of "which things are tools and which are accessories."

Example: when I started learning to play tennis when I was 7 or 8, I dearly wanted a tennis skirt. My parents did not have a great deal of money at the time, and an extra specialized garment that was in no way necessary when I could just play tennis in a pair of shorts was deemed unnecessary. And it was much, much further along the spectrum toward "really" unnecessary than nice colored pencils or better video equipment, farther even than my traveler's notebook.

Would a kid who got to take sensory and aesthetic pleasure in such a thing have taken to tennis more strongly than I did? It's not at all impossible. How strongly do the parents need to weight that possibility compared to all their other budgetary concerns? That's why it's a balance. That's where "but you don't really NEED that" starts to come to the fore.

I could buy every single one of my writer friends a traveler's notebook like mine, and I bet 90% of them would not find it to be the productivity tool I have. So at that point, where is it just buying accessories on a whim and where is it investing in tools? You can't always know in advance, and that combines with the finite nature of budgets to make it not an obvious question.

[moiread]

Oh, I so hear you on this. FOR EXAMPLE:

When I decided to try to make freelance editing into an actual career, I decided to buy myself a laptop even though I already had an old desktop computer. The laptop cost $1000, so it was not even a top-of-the-line machine, but at the time $1000 was my entire disability assistance budget for a month! It was more than I was going to spend on the roof over my head that month, and more than three times my grocery budget! When the most I could manage for free spending money in a month was ~$100, that meant it represented every penny of spare cash I'd have for almost a year. It was a colossal expense.

I bought it anyway, on credit, but I felt tremendous anxiety and guilt over doing so. And this was partly the kind of anxiety that I think any person making a purchase that is really considerably beyond their budget would feel, but it's also very much a cultural thing, as you said. It's not just a hang-up I have (and a bunch of that hang-up about "being poor means you can't and shouldn't ever try to justify having something nice" comes from social forces anyway!). And those two sources often feed off each other and combine into a shitty amalgam that amplifies the "but do you really neeeeeeeed this" thing quite horribly.

Buying the laptop turned out to be incredibly useful for me, considering my specific disability needs and lifestyle, and has made the career jump much, much, much easier to succeed at than just using the desktop PC would have allowed for. It was the right call, and it has been absolutely worth the money, as evidenced in part by how quickly I was able to get work to pay it off.

But I still think of it as a luxury item, because for many other poor folks I know, it absolutely would be. I know other struggling part-time freelance editors and would-be editors who would not be able to afford a laptop, even on credit, even though it would allow them to work in more flexible arrangements. (Even my disability case worker, who has a great deal of information about my disability needs at her fingertips and who herself works at a desktop computer all day, grilled me about why I felt I needed such a thing when I had an alternative that would not require spending any more money. Even though I was not using ODSP funds to buy it; like I said, it was on credit, to be paid off with income brought in by the editing work I bought it to do.) But even if their budget is the same, their math may be different than my math, in that the cost/benefit analysis might work out differently when one isn't dealing with the same disability restrictions.

So as with so many things: NUANCE, MOTHERFUCKER. One-size-fits-all answers are usually bullshit.

(I feel like more than half the conversations we have come down to somebody saying, "MORE NUANCE, DAMN IT. NUANCE!")

[mrissa]

Yeah, and...you didn't have a guarantee when you bought it. You could do the best research you could do, but you don't have a guarantee that it wouldn't cause RSI workflow problems or some other issue. You do the best you can, you hope you're making good decisions, and then you try it and find out.

Which is particularly painful when, as you say, it's more than your rent for the month. Far easier to say, "well, let's see if this works" on a $30 or $50 traveler's notebook than a computer that is almost a year's discretionary budget.

[swingandswirl]

It never hit me how important non-crappy - they don't have to be super expensive the best ever - tools are until I switched out the crappy, who-knows-how-old frying pan that a previous tenant had left for a new one. It wasn't top of the line or anything - Tramontina from Costco, about $30 for a set of two. And oh man, the difference the new pan made! Eggs didn't stick! Food cooked evenly! Feeding myself was so much less of a chore with this one upgrade it was sort of ridiculous.

And oh yeah, I feel you on the frivolous thing. I wonder if it's yet another legacy of America's Puritan beginnings, that enjoyment and luxury and even ease is sinful and you're a Bad Bad Person for wanting nicer/prettier than the bare minimum, or not wanting to suffer needlessly.

[swan_tower]

My equivalent to your frying pans was the kitchen knives we were given as a wedding gift. You mean . . . cutting up chicken can be easy? WHO KNEW??!?

[mrissa]

And...nobody can replace all of their items in every area of life with the next notch up. That is not within anybody's budget, for most values of "anybody" I'm likely to know...and even if it was, at some points "next notch up" becomes nonlinear. Will the same pan that cooks the eggs better also be easier to clean, or is that a different "notch up"?

One of my revelations about things that are non-crappy was when we moved from our apartment to our house. We didn't live in a roach-infested horror of an apartment. It was a reasonable enough apartment. But the kitchen counter tops were the sort of thing that apartment managers put in when they're not running an absolute top of the line apartment building...and they were harder to clean. Literally the same actions with the same substances (a soapy rag, for example) will get my kitchen counters cleaner with less effort than they did in my apartment. And the counters here are as old as the house, they are 40 years old, it's not that we have the fanciest most upgraded kitchen. It's just that they are a notch nicer and it makes a huge difference. And that, in turn, makes a huge difference in my life, how exhausted and frustrated I am.

[gwynnega]

I'm curious about the traveler's notebook. What features have you found so useful? Is it a specific brand?

[mrissa]

It's an A5 format with pockets in the front and back and a little pen holder on the side, and an elastic holds it shut. And that's it, no specific brand--my family member bought it on Etsy, I believe.

The thing that's particularly useful is that I can have a schedule notebook, a general "scribble journal," and two specific project notebooks with me all in one tidy package. When I'm on an airplane, in a cafe, in a hospital room, I can work on whatever I'm working on in unified but separable form. For example, right now I have the project notebook for the thing I'm revising and the project notebook for the thing I'm researching in there. It's extremely useful.