On Building Tools for Yourself

There’s a temptation in tech to reach for the most powerful tool available. Why write a simple script when you could use a full platform? Why build a basic tracker when there are apps with hundreds of features?

I’ve come to believe this instinct is often wrong — at least for personal use.

The complexity tax

Every tool you adopt comes with hidden costs: learning its interface, maintaining your data in its format, adapting your workflow to its assumptions. These costs are small individually, but they accumulate.

When you build your own tool, you pay a different cost: time spent building. But you gain something valuable — a tool that fits your exact needs, with no compromises and no bloat.

The right level of complexity

Not everything needs to be built from scratch. I use established tools for email, calendar, and communication. But for things that are close to how I think and work — note-taking, task management, reading tracking — I’ve found that simple, custom tools work better than feature-rich alternatives.

The key question is: does this tool shape my thinking, or do I shape my thinking to fit the tool?

Building as thinking

There’s another benefit to building your own tools: the process of building forces you to clarify what you actually want. When you sit down to design a task system, you have to decide what a “task” means to you, how you want to organize them, and what “done” looks like.

This clarity is valuable even if you end up using someone else’s tool afterward.

A practical approach

My current setup is a collection of small, mostly text-based tools:

• Markdown files for notes and planning
• A CLI tool for reading highlights
• A simple workflow system for tasks and context

None of these are impressive on their own. But together, they form a system that works exactly the way I think — and that’s worth more than any feature list.