Nicole Junkermann on Working Patiently With New Tools

The first week tells you almost nothing

Anything unfamiliar is either delightful or infuriating on day one, and neither reaction survives contact with a month of ordinary use. Nicole Junkermann has learned to treat the first week as orientation rather than evidence, and to postpone the verdict until the novelty and the irritation have both worn off.

The temptation in both directions is strong. A tool that does one impressive thing quickly earns more credit than it has, and one that fails at an unimportant task gets written off before it has been asked a real question. Both mistakes are expensive in time.

Give it one real task

The useful test is a piece of work that genuinely needed doing, chosen because it was next on the list rather than because it suited the tool. Demonstrations are designed to succeed. Real tasks are untidy, badly specified and full of the particular details that decide whether something is actually usable.

One real task done slowly teaches more than a fortnight of experimenting, mostly because it reveals where the work goes when the tool is not helping. Some of it disappears, some of it moves somewhere less visible, and occasionally it simply doubles while looking as though it has halved.

It also matters that the task is one you could do unaided, because then there is a standard to measure against. Handing an unfamiliar tool a job you could not have done yourself produces an answer nobody in the room is able to check.

A short routine that holds up

The routine below is deliberately plain, and it works just as well for a piece of software, a new way of taking notes, or a technique borrowed from somebody else. None of the five steps is clever. The difficulty is entirely in doing them in order and in not skipping the last one.

• Pick a task that already needed doing, not one invented to suit the tool.
• Do the same task once the old way, so there is something honest to compare.
• Read the output sceptically, especially when it is exactly what you hoped for.
• Write down the point at which it failed, in the words it failed in.
• Wait a month before deciding, then read what you wrote at the start.

Patience is the whole method

None of this says what any tool will eventually be able to do, and none of it is a recommendation of anything in particular. It is a way of staying unhurried while other people are certain, which is a good deal harder than it sounds and usually produces a better answer. The same willingness to sit with a long run of unclear results runs through learning by trial, and the record it depends on belongs in the notebook rather than in memory.