There’s a version of creative productivity that looks like this: the right plugin for every job, a different app for every stage of the process, a growing library of presets, brushes, fonts, and gear for every possible situation.

And there’s a version that looks like this: a handful of tools you know so well you never have to think about them.

The second one is faster. By a lot.

Not because it’s simpler. Because familiarity is a speed multiplier. And the more you spread your time across tools you haven’t fully learned, the less of that multiplier you get.

Unfortunately, I seem wired to strive for the first 😭.

The Cost of Starting From Scratch

Every unfamiliar tool has a startup cost. Before you’ve made a single creative decision, you’re navigating menus, watching tutorials, second-guessing settings, wondering which of the twelve export options you’re supposed to use. Sound familiar? (As an aside, I just switched back to Final Cut for editing my videos… and all the above were all too real.)

That cost compounds across a session. It’s not just the time. It’s the mental load. You’re using cognitive energy on the tool itself, energy that isn’t available for the work.

The familiar tool has none of that. You open it and you’re already in. The producer who knows their synth inside out doesn’t spend the first twenty minutes of a session figuring out the routing. The photographer who knows their one camera body doesn’t fumble with the menu in the moment the light is right. The writer who knows their software doesn’t lose a thought to formatting.

The tool disappears. The work begins.

That’s not a minor efficiency saving. It’s the difference between a session that builds momentum and one that never quite gets going.

What Mastery Actually Feels Like

There’s a well-studied psychological state called flow: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that self-consciousness drops away and the work seems to happen almost automatically. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades researching it, and one consistent finding is that flow is most accessible to people with high levels of skill in what they’re doing.

The reason is automaticity. When the mechanical aspects of a skill become automatic, they stop drawing on conscious attention. The musician stops thinking about the chord shapes and starts thinking about the feel of the phrase. The painter stops calculating the colour mix and starts feeling the composition. The editor stops finding the shortcut and starts making the cut.

It’s like creative muscle memory

This is what experienced creatives mean when they talk about a tool “getting out of the way.” It’s not that the tool becomes invisible. It’s that you’ve internalised it. And once that happens, the cognitive space that was occupied by the mechanics is free for actual creative thinking – you can read more about creative flow here.

You can’t internalise ten tools at once. Your time is finite. Depth with fewer tools gets you to automaticity. Breadth across many keeps you at the learning stage indefinitely.

Bonus thought: the tools you use most probably have shortcuts you haven’t learned yet. Those are free speed.

The Compounding Return of Depth

There’s simple math to this that’s easy to miss.

Five hundred hours with one tool builds a foundation. Every hour adds to the previous ones. The knowledge compounds. You get faster, more intuitive, and more creative with it, because you’re not spending any time relearning.

Five hundred hours split across ten tools gives you fifty hours with each. Fifty hours is enough to get started. It’s not enough to get fluent.

Fluency is where the interesting creative decisions happen. It’s where you stop asking “how do I do this?” and start asking “what should this be?” That shift is where the creativity lives.

Writers who commit to one editing tool learn the quirks, the keyboard shortcuts, the structural features, the workarounds. Filmmakers who commit to one editing software develop an intuition for the timeline (as I found out above!). Illustrators who stick to a limited palette learn what that palette can do that a wider one can’t.

The depth pays off in ways that are hard to predict until you’re there. But the path there is consistent: stay longer with less.

What to Do Instead

None of this is an argument for never trying a new tool. New tools can solve real problems. But there’s a useful question to ask before you start exploring: what specific gap in my current workflow would this fill?

If you can name it clearly, that’s worth investigating. If the answer is closer to “I just want to try something different”… that curiosity is fine, but treat it as exploration, not an upgrade to your core process.

The more practical step is an honest audit. How many tools did you actually use in the last month? Not ones you own or have installed. Ones you used. For most people, the answer is a small number. Those are your core tools. Go deeper with them.

Mastery isn’t about owning fewer things. It’s about knowing fewer things well enough that they stop slowing you down.SourcesReuse notes: Tools, mastery, workflow, flow states, speed, all creative disciplinesLink to blog in bio when post goes live

---

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest