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🤔 ▶️ I'm overwhelmed by the amount of tools, which ones should I really use?
🤔 ▶️ I'm overwhelmed by the amount of tools, which ones should I really use?
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

My two cents

The tools that I usually the most often are just a few:

  1. Interviews to understand people

  2. Workshops to bring people together and make them find solutions together

  3. Sticky notes to map and synthesize information

  4. Writing to understand what I learned, share what I learned, propose plans for the future.

I don't use so many tools myself. I still like to look at what are the new tools that come out because I'm a bit of a geek. But I don't change my toolbox as often.

It's not the number of tools you use that matters is how good you know them

A carpenter can build a house with just a few tools,  it's not 200 different tools, it's a few dozens. In the world of design it's not so different.

What make the difference is if you know the tools very well, then you can use them a lot and to create very good stuff.

The love for tools might be related to the years of experience

I've changed a bit with the years, five years ago, I would say that I was still in a phase where whenever I had to design a workshop, I wanted it to be totally different from each workshop I made before.

Call it being older or more mature. I don't know. But I'm now in a phase where instead of just rebuilding new things again and again and again, I'm like, oh, I created this thing and so I'm gonna reuse it maybe 5, 6, 7, 10 times and tweak it a little bit.

When you start, you're in a period where you just want to try everything, when you are arrive at the stage where you have tried a lot, you see what really works.

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