Some people who do most of their work with computers also have some control over how that work is done. For example, as an independent information architect, I am my own IT department; I choose what tools I use. At this stage in my career, I’m proficient with most of them. Still, it’s important to occasionally​ look around for more efficient/effective ways of doing things.

Changing key components of your personal information environment is not something to undertake lightly. There are costs to doing so. The least onerous is the cost of the software itself; the big investment is in time spent learning new workflows and migrating to the new tool.

The various components of your personal information environment sit on a stack. At the bottom of the stack — the foundational layer — is your OS platform of choice. In my case, this is macOS. I’ve been using Macs for almost thirty years, changing to another platform (Windows, for example) would be tremendously costly.

Switching components higher up in the stack would be less onerous. For example, although I use Gmail for my email needs, I access it using Apple’s Mail.app. I could change mail clients fairly painlessly; I’d just need to point the new application to my Gmail accounts. Yes, I’d lose some functionality in the process (e.g., links to individual Mail.app messages from OmniFocus), but there’s not much work I’d need to do other than learn the new application. So if a new mail client comes along that is radically better than Mail.app, I’d be willing to give it a spin.

I’m currently testing an application that would replace one of the foundational layers of my information environment: OneNote. I’ve used OneNote as my note-taking and information-gathering system for many years. I have many dozens of notebooks in OneNote, and have internalized various workflows around this app. Changing this layer of my stack would come at a considerable cost.

Are big changes such as this one worth it? That depends on whether the new tool allows you to do important things that the old tool won’t, or allows you to do similar things significantly better/faster. To be worth it for me to switch from OneNote, I’d need to see orders-of-magnitude improvements. Alas, it’s difficult to evaluate worthiness without extensive testing, and that in itself is a big time sink. That said, there are also significant opportunity costs to continuing to use a tool that may be less efficient/effective.

Making time to experiment with new components in your personal information environment can open up new possibilities; it can make you more efficient, and even give you new superpowers. But undertaking such changes is not something to be taken lightly, as it can come with significant costs. Sometimes, leaving well-enough alone is the wiser choice.