Most of the time, there is a "low/no tech" way to make progress on some problem. Yet, very often, we turn toward tech solutions to make life "easier". What often happens is that the tech over-complicates things and makes us get wrapped up in secondary concerns that prevent us making progress on the main thing at hand.

For instance, you may want to eat a healthier diet. The solution to this is not hard—you can find someone who knows what they are doing and copy what they do. The alternative nerd thing to do would be to lie to yourself and say that by reading XYZ chemistry books and blah-blah-blah you are somehow making progress at your stated goal. The solution is already before you if you will be humble enough to learn from someone who perhaps has read fewer books and received lower marks in school than you.

Similarly, if you have some need of tracking some data—let's say where you planted some tomatoes. The quickest way to record this information may just be to create a simple diagram. Later, you can digitalize this, compile photos into a blog post, or whatever you would like to do. To just move on and do more work, however, the low tech solution of filling out some manual chart (or using a spread sheet program you are familiar with) or just making a sketch on a piece of paper may the most effective course of action.

Low tech solutions often are helpful because they don't force us to make needless categories. If you just pull out a piece of paper and start writing you won't think about all sorts of nerd questions like,

• which format to save the document in
• which keyboard layout to use
• how often to save
• how/where to make backups

Choosing the simple, but perhaps "slower" solution may be the fastest way to make a draft of something you can later refine, redistribute, etc.

Lern 2 code

In the modern world, many young people are graduating high school or college thinking about what to do. "Should I do coding?" they ask. Then, many struggle to find motivation to continue to learn python or JavaScript or whatever—and they are burdened by the thought that they should be learning because "coding" is supposed to be useful for getting a good job, right?

Computers are tools and having knowledge in some scripting or something can be useful for automating processes. However, for most people most of the time, the coding itself will not be the "bottleneck" that prevents actual work from getting done in the world. It is for this reason that you see many non-coder people running YouTube channels, Wordpress sites, etc. and being far more effective on using the Internet to get things done that symbol shuffling nerds.

To "learn to code" is to learn how to formalize problems in the real world in a particular way—such that some computational solution can be applied to them. For example, you may do some buying and selling; to automate some process, what you may have to do is design some chart that automatically does some arithmetic. You could do this in Excel, using some web programing, or even in some ancient software like Emacs. What is most important, however, is that you do a good job designing that initial table that you "translate" into code. A few minutes of careful planning with pen and paper can save hours of stupid-coding.