Learning to “live with it”

For my entire life I’ve been obsessed with my tooling for any given job being perfect. Rather than use what I have I can agonize for weeks or more on the tool itself often to the point where I never complete the project itself.

In some ways the phenomena has been an asset. Instead of building websites I build tools for WordPress. Instead of often building new tools for WordPress I’ve built some rather sophisticated developer tools and environments for WordPress… the list goes on. It’s helped my build a level of knowledge that has lead to my current job and some of the most rewarding projects of my career, even if those projects were in lieu of other “great” ideas.

The catch is that, anymore, I want to build some of those “other” projects yet every time I start I find myself obsessing over my tools again and it is time for that to stop.

My new promise to myself is to learn to “live with it” when it comes to my tooling and, honestly, I don’t think it’s going to be easy.

Wish me luck.