🧱Choose Boring Technology

Attention for the unfamiliar is a small budget, so spend it only where it buys something the work actually needs. A boring tool is one whose failures are already known. A new one charges for its surprises and then goes on charging, because everything adopted has to be looked after for as long as it stays. Choose the dull, well-understood option by default and keep the few tokens of novelty for the problem you are really there to solve.

• Read at lunch on Monday 6 January, first day back, 143 unread e-mails, as ammunition against myself. The day before, I had decided not to build a fifth notes system: 📜 Use this system for ninety days without changing it.
• It is an essay for engineers choosing databases. I read it as an essay about a woman choosing between a finished vault and a weekend of plugins.
• His idea of innovation tokens: you get about three. Spend one on something new and exciting and you have one fewer for the thing you are actually here to do.
• Boring in his sense is not bad. It means the ways it fails are already known. A boring tool has no surprises left in it, and that is its value.
• My tokens for 2025: a launch, a statistics course, a newsletter. That is three. The notes system gets none.
• The second argument is about the total cost of looking after everything you have adopted, for ever. System three had forty plugins and a daily template that took eleven minutes to fill in. Nobody chose that as a whole. I chose it forty times.
• Priya has had this essay as a pinned tab for years, which is where I first saw the title.
• Where the three tokens went: 📂 Exceptions Inbox general availability, 📂 Statistics for Product Decisions and 📂 Slack in the System - 2025 issues.
• No literature note of its own. It did its job in one sitting, and its job was a line in Rules for this vault. The notes it stands beside are 📖 Ahrens on notes that outlive projects and 💎 A system I keep rebuilding is a system I am not using.
• Choosing the known tool is 🧩 Satisficing in 🏛️ Herbert A. Simon's sense, and the ninety days are James's second maxim, 💬 Never suffer an exception to occur, applied to software.