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I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for Productivity Porn. I love the pictures of perfect Bullet Journals. I love reading about your systems and workflows for managing your Calendar. I will go through your notes garden. I've read far too many self help books. When I learnt I had adhd, I saw these systems I built differently. I started building them for myself. I became invested in "Workflows, not Tools". I wrote a brief journal entry about this too.
My interest in them continues to deepen. Lately I've been working on poms. But I noticed something. I'm developing software a way to do thing that I don't currently do. At least not really. I mean I could start timing myself with pomodoro's and marking tasks as start'ed and stop'ed. But I don't. I like to believe that if I made the UX experience ✨fun✨ enough, I would use it. And why not? It's worked for me in the past. I only got into reading after getting an E-Reader. I got into climbing once I had shoes. I write way more than I would if I didn't use vim, and all my bespoke tooling surrounding it's publishing means I don't have to think about it as much. Sure I could rent those things, or find other ways to accomplish them, but
But then I zoom out a bit. I change my perspective and see code as a liability. I already run so much software to make my life work. Some of it is definitely of questionable use. Some of them really do make me feel better. Which I think is far more important than whether they empirically improve my productivity.
Which brings me to why I write this software, something I've struggled with in the past. The "why" of building something. I think it's to do with this underlying understanding of maintenance. I maintain a lot of software. I keep it running on my home server or VPS'. If I could accept less agency over my tools, perhaps I would not have to maintain so much of it, but somebody would have to.
What's particularly annoying about maintaining my own deployment stack, is when things break. Currently, my Wallabag instance is broken. I spent lots of time trying to debug it, but I can't figure it out. It's broken in such an odd specific way too. Everything works fine once logged in, but the login page is a static HTML website. None of the clients recognize this as a valid wallabag page. But when I log in through this static web page? Everything works normally. Anyways, since it's been broken, I've moved to Omnivore, which is similarly open source, but it VC funded, and can't yet be self hosted (not that I have the capacity to try right now, I'd much rather focus on getting wallabag fixed).
What I realized though, in replacing wallabag, is that I don't actually use Wallabag, or Omnivore. I have a habit of saving articles to my "Read it Later" service, but rarely, if ever actually reading them. I do the same thing with bookmarks. I make a habit of bookmarking interesting, useful websites, but don't often turn to them. It got me questioning them. If I never looked at these stashes of data, what's the use? (I do go through them, and honestly, remembering some tiny fragment of something you once went through and finding it in the stash is worth so much pleasure that it almost makes the maintain of my own tools worth it. Even if that only happened once a year it'd be worth the stash, but I find I use my bookmarks around once a month.)
Even if I never look at the giant data stash I've accumulated, in some ways, the workflow itself is useful. It's given me something to do with some data. Being neurodivergent, if I don't know what to do with something, I tend to get anxious. My brain doesn't implicitly know how to parse things, and giving it some structure really helps. Similar to the way I feel so much better when I write a list of my tasks, even though I've still yet to accomplish any of them. I've organized the chaos.
This need for both Chaos and Order feels like a very central theme in my life. I think it's why I keep overwhelming my self with information. Then I'll tinker on my tools until I find the perfect workflow, and failing that, invent tools that are highly opinionated about their workflow. Even if I don't use them. It's why I (guiltily) enjoy productivity culture. It feels like I can quell the chaos of my own making.
Previously I hadn't recognized this. Despite only coming to this recognition recently, I don't wonder if I would be happier without Chaos altogether. I can confidently say I would not be. It's not that I was absent-mindedly creating chaos in my own life without meaning to. I thoroughly enjoy chaos. I'd be far too bored with my life if I didn't make it harder for myself.
So no, I don't feel bad about creating tools I may or may not use. I have many many more ideas for tools I want to build that may be of questionable use. I'm thinking of re-writing vimwiki and vim-zettel into my own code: Parchi. I want a backlogger, and a de-backlogger for my tasks as well. I want a AP-based social highlighting web extension tool. A want a god damned TUI calendar that doesn't suck, that I can trigger on-click in my bar. I want to rebuild my website so it's more useful for me. I want to centralize all my clippings and favourites into a singe database and build on top of that. I want single panes of glass for everything.