The mental cost of building your own tools

Every few months I have the same conversation with the same friend about whether I should stop building my own tools. He uses Notion for everything. He has never lost a thing to a database migration. He spends his weekends on his actual work.

I have a custom admin (this one), a custom task tracker (in progress), a writing setup I built for a particular kind of long-form piece, a photo workflow that touches three different scripts I wrote at three different points in my life. The time to build any of them was small. That is not the cost.

What the actual cost is

It is the background process. There is, at all times, a slow process running in the back of my head that knows the limits of every one of these tools, the places they will break, the things I have meant to fix, the decisions I deferred. That process runs whether I want it to or not. It uses cycles.

The platform users I know are not smarter than me about their work. They are just not running that process. They get to think about the work, and the tool is somebody else's problem.

Why I still build

Because the work I do is shaped by the tools I use, and the tools I want do not exist. That is the actual answer. Not productivity. Not control. The tools shape the work, and the work I want to do needs tools that nobody is going to build for me.

I will not pretend the cost is not real. It is. I will just keep paying it.

The tools shape the work. The work I want to do needs tools that nobody is going to build for me.