I was intrigued by a recent post by Alex Tiniuc about tool creation in software development. In “Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools”, Tiniuc describes how he’s been making a video game (main task) but that he took a detour to work on a simple tool for editing the inventory of “assets” (game-developer-speak for “stuff in the world”) possible in the game (side task). But once he returned to the main task, he found he’d boosted his productivity in such a way that he wasn’t in the weeds anymore; he was working at a higher level and, freed of drudgery, seeing ways to make the game (main task) better.¹

Tiniuc observes that when we develop small tools that save us cognitive burden, we create, in aggregate, space for inspiration and intuition to blossom. I found a fascinating echo in the case of Tiniuc and that of William Oughtred a 16^th century Anglican clergyman and mathematician.