Looking at the tools we have in front of ourselves today, an exercise you can do is to ask what sort of thing is some modern invention. For instance, before automobiles there were chariots. Now, we have digital tablets but in earlier times there were stone/clay tablets. There are a number of types of things that seem to be "primitives" of human experience, at least back to our earliest written records of large civilizations. ¹

Computers: Digitalizing Analog Processes

With computers, we have the "desktop metaphor". Just as you might have files and folders on a wooden desktop, so people fill their digital desktops with files and folders. Applications are like various tools—for instance, you might take out drawing supplies to do some drawing and likewise there is computer software for drawing, painting, sculpting, and so forth.

Understanding the more "basic" task of what we are doing (e.g. writing a letter vs some complicated technical procedure) can help us be more effective at what we're doing.

People who want to get seriously good at something—for instance, 3D modelling—will need to practice the traditional arts of drawing by hand or sculpting with clay. It is easy to get caught up in the myriad of features available in some modern software suite, such and lose sight of the fundamental things which make our work high quality. Refocusing on the underlying analog task returns us to what is natural for us as humans to work with.

Organization Strategies

One technique I've talked about at least a few times in my blogs is the Getting Things Done system for organizing many projects and getting the complexity of an information-driven society out of your head and onto pieces of paper or some computer system.

This system, and other comparable organizational tools/techniques (see for instance the kanban system, Trello, and others) provide a way to get organized in a rather software agnostic way. If you succeed in getting organized with any one of these systems, it won't matter if you're using Windows or Mac OS or just a notebook—you should be able to implement a successful information management office space for yourself.

In its modern manifestations, probably most people that make use of these systems use some kind of digital tool. But this is not necessary—these techniques could have just as readily been taught to ancient peoples provided they had sufficient command of reading and writing tools. ²

Don't mind the tooling too much

You can look at the "lifespans" of many tools we have in front of us. Even things we may view as rather old—such as the piano(forte)—may be relatively new on the timeline of recorded human experiences. A piano is really a kind of stringed instrument, a lute or harp thingy with hammers... and there have been very skilled people at playing stringed instruments through all centuries.

Identifying the more basic action you are doing, you can focus on mastering enduring techniques which you will apply with your specific tools, but also which you know you can apply to other tools in the future.

For instance, to learn to play piano or guitar, you can explore learning techniques attested hundreds of years ago.

While the popular "science" of our day may give us a new language to talk about things—e.g. terms from psychology like flow of positive psychology to describe being "in the zone", focused on some activity—we should not presume that our experiences are anything new under the sun.

We face the same sorts of challenges that humans for hundreds of years before us faced—

• boredom
• fatigue
• anxiety
• envy/jealousy
• laziness

...by assuming our tooling doesn't make us better, we can learn to do better work by learning from people more accomplished than us even if they happened to be using less fancy/specialized tools.