Exploring versus exploiting

When it comes to tools and systems, there are two areas you can lean on: exploring and exploiting. To put it another way, are you spending time exploring new tools and playing with the shiny toys, or are you actually exploiting (in a good way) the tools at your disposal?

Admittedly, I fall a bit too far into the exploring side of things, as I love to test out new tools and make changes to my workflow. I talk about many of them on this blog, and you can see my current toolset on my always changing page for “ The tools I use “.

I justify that by considering it a form of entertainment, which isn’t untrue, but it also can be very unproductive. Grey and Myke talked about this quite a bit in Episode 132 of their excellent Cortex podcast, so that might be worth giving a listen to.

I’ll likely continue to be an over-explorer, but I like having this framework to wrap around it so I can perhaps limit things a bit and spend more time exploiting the systems that I already have. I use some very powerful tools already, so spending more time learning to make the best use of what I have will likely be the most efficient way forward. There’s a balance in there somewhere, I’m sure, any maybe one day I’ll find it.

Until then, I’ll spend a lot of time exploring but hopefully can be a bit more focused in exploiting some of the great things that I find.

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on October 2, 2022.