Your tools should match how you think
Imagine seeing a championships leaderboard, but instead of a score ranking, it's a list of 20 teams sorted alphabetically. If you want to know which is in first place, you need to scan the entire list and compare each row to find the one with the highest score. And if you want to calculate your team's position? Hard work. The leaderboard is not doing its job. It should give a clear picture of the rank, but it's creating noise instead.
Noise. Mismatch creates noise: you see one thing, your brain expects another. The leaderboard case was just a funny example, but there are real cases of noise hiding important details in our routines that we don't even notice. Which cases are those? That's what I will talk about today: everyday views that hide what you need to see.
Everything starts with organization
Organization is essential to keep things working well in our life. We organize many demands in calendars, money spreadsheets, task lists, project boards, and so on. All this visual stuff is a mirror of what is arranged in our mind. However, each mind is unique, so maybe generic formulas of productivity and fixed organization layouts won't fit well with our expectations.
The goal of this post is to give you a different perspective on how to manage the important things in your life, clearly, with less mental translations between the screen and how you think. These mental translations are the "noise". For me, the eyes should see exactly what they need: the important numbers, the relevant metrics, the priority list, the "what next?" answer. And your mind just needs to take the decision and act without worrying about whether the data is correct or you miss any details.
Well, how can I do it? The answer is: improve your tools. But before diving deep into it, let me give you my personal opinion about "productivity apps" and why they, at least for me, don't reduce that noise.
Why I don't like using apps for everything
We usually use tools to avoid being overwhelmed by keeping everything in the mind. We turn how we think into lists, calendars, boards, spreadsheets, or other reports and views. Some of them are apps that already come with a limited set of options and ways to customize.
However, everyone has their own priorities, personalized mental categories, and preferred order of doing or viewing things. So, many apps could fail to fit all your needs inside them. After some days you can be struggling to adapt to the new system, then you give up and think that it was your fault and that you are not an organized person. But sometimes the problem isn't you, it's the tool. My point is not about using the best system or the best app. It's about fit. It's about using tools that match your life and make the day-to-day tasks easier.
Most apps I used didn't fit my needs. I have highly custom preferences on how to view my demands. That's why I prefer to organize everything in my way. After spending months testing different apps, I just turned around and started from scratch: paper and pen, alarm clocks, and raw spreadsheets. So, I could build up my own customized system to organize my life. And it has been very good.
Just to be clear: I'm not condemning using apps. It was only my personal experience. Maybe apps are totally fine for you. You have your own preferences, and probably they are different from mine. That's totally expected.
Now, let me give you some examples of how we can organize differently, even in the small things.
Everyone has different preferences
- To-do list or Kanban board: Some people think in a flat list of next actions, like a queue. Others think in columns as stages of work (e.g. To-Do, Doing, and Done). The board would match how you naturally group and move the work.
- Email inbox organization: One person may prefer folders by project, another may work fine with statuses like "Inbox", "Waiting", and "Archive". Your inbox view should reflect how you decide what needs attention first.
- Bookshelf organization: On a physical shelf, you might group the next books to read together, separate what you have finished from what you haven't started, keep series together, or group them by author, etc. You probably have your own preferences for organizing your books.
Each person is unique, and that shows up in how they organize. Having your own customized system and layouts is great, but it's just a way to achieve the real goal: see a report or view that matches exactly how you think.
Let's move to the financial part, which is the best example for the noise idea.
Different ways to see the money
Different people organize their money in different ways:
- One person may use very detailed expense categories, another may use generic ones.
- One person may split "food" expenses into "fast food", "dinner", and "lunch" sub-categories. Another person uses just a single "food" category.
- Someone separates "Uber" from "gasoline" expenses. Another person can group everything under the "vehicle" category.
I won't extend this list much. I think you got the point. Everyone has their own priorities, their own way to manage their money. And, at the end of the month, your financial report, if you have one, should match how you are expecting to see how money flows.
If your report doesn't match your expectations, it creates noise between your mental picture and what you see. While you are reading the report, you start fixing it mentally:
- "Oh, this line should not be here, it should be in another category."
- "This expense I should ignore this month because XYZ."
- "This isn't actually an expense, it was an investment."
But when the report matches your expectations, everything is clear. You don't need to manipulate everything in your head. All the data makes sense.
Your system should evolve with your mind
Having tools that match how you think is nice, but it's the initial step. Since your mind changes, your system should too, so they still match. Sometimes creating a new expense category or renaming an existing one is enough. The same applies outside money, such as adding a new column to your board, or splitting an email folder into two if they need specific categories. But there are exceptional cases that require a bigger structural change.
My monthly bank statement report (a custom HTML file generated from my bank data with my defined categories) changed a lot: new important bills were added while others were removed, and also their priority changed, transactions started going to another category, while others started being ignored. This nature of changing over time makes maintaining personalized tools not always an easy job. So, in my case, I decided to use AI to maintain the script that generates the report.
With AI I can tell in natural language what I want to customize, like "Move all expenses from this store to category X", or "Please list at the top of the report the top 3 biggest expenses of the month". If I need to adjust it manually it won't be worth it to use it.
If you don't like using AI for this type of data, that's okay. It's just my way of doing things. You can have great results with a raw spreadsheet or whatever you prefer. I kept a spreadsheet for months and it worked well. What matters is keeping what you see in sync with what you think.
Conclusion: Eliminate the noise
The goal of being organized is to eliminate effort. If the tools are hard to use, they are not doing their job. If a tool doesn't provide what your mind expects, it creates noise.
Once you have good tools that match how you think, you will worry less about losing control of the money, priorities, and tasks, since just a glance at that spreadsheet, or opening that board, or running that script, will give you the answers you need.
Have you already thought about it? Are your systems giving the answers you expect? Why not give it a try and think about how to customize your existing tools? It shouldn't be a high jump to entirely recreate your system. You can start small, with a spreadsheet or a simple script, then evolve it when you see the need or feel comfortable.
I invite you for a first step: Note one thing that you would like to change in your mailbox, your to-do list, and your financial report. This simple exercise can trigger a chain of ideas to improve.
See you next time!