To customize or not to customize?

I love tweaking my tools to fit me. In the IT industry, it’s called “customization”. But I’m not talking about IT — this article is about tooling in general, both physical and digital.

How I do it

Most of the time, talking about customization, people talk about changing a single thing that annoys them. Often, it’s about the appearance. But when I use a tool for a long time, I can change it a lot, sometimes even changing the purpose of the tool itself.

For example, look at my old laptop backpack. At one point I made a “walking desktop” out of it, — a device to use my laptop while I stand.  The backpack is not a backpack anymore  — it’s not comfortable to carry something in it now.

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The Default Option™

I rarely meet avid customizers like me.  More than that, I see the opposite trend: people tend to preserve the defaults, especially in professional tools. When they use an IDE, they keep the default settings, rarely going beyond installing basic plugins when they customize.

I don’t understand this. Is it some kind of enlightenment I’m yet to achieve? How do I get to the high point where I’ll be satisfied with the defaults, whatever they are? Comfortable with only using tools like they were intended to be used?

Honestly, I don’t get it.

Sometimes I try to understand those people. Why do they settle for the default option?

Do they do it to preserve mental resource? Let’s look at browser shortcuts. Are they consistent across different browsers? Of course, they aren’t. They’re different. Granted, inconsistencies are small, yet present in little things I care about. Does it help to preserve the resource? Maybe customizing is too complex? I chose a set of tools I use. My skills become sharper the more I use them. But every tool will be obsolete sooner or later. Customization allows for an easier transition. It almost feels like the tool transition without customization is more complex than establishing the customization habit in the first place. The world doesn’t let you find a foundation to stand on. Things do change. Nothing is set in stone.

Some tools are more influential than others. Look at Vim — it’s shortcuts were so ahead of its time that they still work, and other tools adopt them. They’re not just shortcuts, they’re The Vim Way, and they’re too influential to die. I even found them in some email clients. Yet, the adoption is not universal, and some tools doesn’t adopt the whole thing, settling for the fraction. You still have to customize and adapt.

Then, there are frameworks. For example, Getting Things Done, the set of principles and conventions. Many tools do follow it, but it’s far from being a universal methodology. You still have to tailor it by adopting from others or inventing your own ad-hocs.

The “On demand” mode

By trial and error, I have chosen the way of continuous customization. It’s easier and more familiar to me. Yes, I often tweak things. Yes, I do not have a single universal standard — mine  is subjective and changes as I go along. But that is precisely the point.  Sometimes it feels like building a house of cards that is sure to fall apart. But man, it is such a comfortable process for me. My customization is alive. It makes my everyday flow so easy.

I’d rather tweak constantly than learn the new defaults of a new product made by a startup that will cease to exist a year from now.

In short, the only standard you need is your personal comfort.

This is what I tweak