Do You Re-invent The Wheel?

Are you fully utilizing the tools you have or unintentionally making things more complex by re-creating something that your current tools already do?

I ran across this a lot in my CPA days and just came upon another instance of it as I was fixing things my ex-website manager did that were unnecessarily complex.

For instance, I currently have a squarespace website, which has a built in blog function. You create the blog, and it adds automatically to a lovely blog homepage. There are several settings where you can easily adjust the layout.

As I’m taking back control of my website management, I am all about simplifying. I knew that my website manager was doing something funky to get the layout he wanted. I assumed he did all this extra work because there weren’t options he liked in the defaults. Turns out what he was doing all this extra work for is something that is a simple setting change.

All I had to do was adjust one setting on the blog layout page and the built-in blog page from squarespace looks exactly like how he had it, with 4 blogs in each row.

Instead of adjusting that setting he had:

• Created a new blog page

• Had to add a new block to that page after every 4 blogs were posted or else the new ones wouldn’t appear on their publish date

• Categorize each blog, so it would appear on the right line.

The only difference I can see is one that just doesn’t matter in the scheme of things and doesn’t justify all the extra time and complexity.

Lesson learned - have your provider justify why they are not using a built in default.

I saw this in accounting too, where people would go out of their way to not use the built in tools of a software system, thus creating unnecessary complexity and extra time spent. And during tax season, you have zero extra time to spend on anything.

Let’s be honest, you have zero time to spend on the things you have to do as well, let alone extras.

I am all about efficiency, whenever someone asks me my values this is at the top of the list.

Part of being efficient means learning how to best utilize the tools I have instead of going out and finding more of them or ignoring functions they have.

In fact I’ve had to put myself on a learning hiatus for the next six months because I have gathered so many new things the last year, and not really stopped to fully implement them and make the best use of them.

Since you’ve made it this far take a pause now and do the following:

• Look at where you’re not fully utilizing what you have available to you.

• Then see how you can better utilize and implement the things you’ve learned.

If necessary, do what I’m doing and take a learning hiatus for a few months to focus on what you already have.

At this point it’s all been done before, simplify and create efficiency by building off what has already been done, rather than starting everything from scratch.