Stop Tweaking Your Tools and Start Actually Using Them — How Perfectionism is Killing Your Productivity

Discover why your endless tool customization is actually procrastination in disguise, and how to break free from the tweaking trap.

Which desk actually gets work done?

In this article, I want to discuss about a pitfalls that I see so many people fall into: overcomplicating the way they use everything, keeping busy with futilities, and actually avoiding the meaningful work.

Introduction

“Last week, I spent 3 hours customizing my …”. “The week before? 2 hours tweaking my …”. Sound familiar? 🤔

The nice thing about Obsidian is that it’s not very opinionated. It’s like a blank sheet of paper. You can do almost whatever you want with it. When I started using it a few years back, I wanted to set it up “correctly”. I wanted to align it with the way I work. It required careful design, and a lot of time and attention. But at some point, there were diminishing returns. I could have continued tweaking the settings, changing the visual styles, adding plugins, etc. But once I reached a certain level, what was initially a useful activity could have turned into an fruitless obsession.