Build the boring tool that saves time

I build a lot of small tools. Not products, but tools. The difference matters.

A product needs users, a roadmap, and a reason to keep existing. A tool needs to save me (or my team) time today, on something we’ll do again regularly. The bar is much lower, and the return is much faster.

How I think about things

Before we build anything, a few questions worth asking:

1. How often do we do this? Monthly? Weekly? More often?
2. How easily can it be messed up? If a mistake costs hours of time redoing it, automation can easily make a difference.
3. Can we create something useful quickly? If half a day now can save lots of time in the future then its worth the effort.

The Sitemap Keyword Filter is a good example. Pulling a section’s URLs out of a sitemap and turning them into a Google Search Console regex is something I’d done by hand dozens of times. It’s fiddly, it’s easy to get the regex escaping wrong, and it’s exactly the kind of task that drains focus. An afternoon of work, and it saves me time whenever I’m looking for related content.

Boring beats clever

The temptation is always to build the impressive thing. The tools that earn their keep are unglamorous: they take a tedious input, apply a transformation you’d otherwise do by hand, and hand back a clean output you can paste somewhere.

If you can describe the task as “take this, do the obvious thing, give me that,” it’s probably worth automating, and perhaps a few hours work.

Make them fast and private by default

Two non-negotiables. Tools should be fast, with no spinner where a synchronous function would do, and private, doing as much in the browser as possible so there’s no data to leak and no account to create. This make it easy so people actually use them.

The overall impact is real. Each tool is small, but a complete set of them quietly removes a whole category of busywork from your week.