Bought a Tool and Don't Use It?

You bought a new tool

You wanted to get faster and more efficient at your jobs, so you followed the latest rage and bought a new tool – like a tilt rotator.

Then the first hour you run the thing, you feel like you are all left-handed and all thumbs, and wonder for a brief moment if you’ll ever figure this thing out.

In fact, sometimes you just stop using it for a moment, because it’s “faster” and you’re more “familiar” with the old way.

But then eventually, after hours of running it, it suddenly seems to click, your muscle memory is taking shape, and it actually IS faster and more effective.

I use that analogy because it was easy. One that you’ll understand instantly.

That’s the thing with a new tool. The easy part is buying it. The hard part is disciplining yourself (or your team) to use it.

Nothing is worse than buying a tool that no one ends up using.

The tricky part is in the beginning, it DOES seem “not worth it” to use the new, complicated tool. It’s often faster than the “old way”.

Software can be a new tool

Software is no different. It’s a tool to help you:

• prevent mistakes
• be more accurate
• be more effective, in less time
• reduce friction in your process
• reduce dependencies on your key people

Here’s the thing though… The easy part is looking at the testimonials and saying “Yeah I want that outcome or benefit for my business”.

The hard part is disciplining yourself to use that new tool.

Because at the end of the day, what you’re really doing is changing habits. And you don’t have to know very much about humanity to know that changing habits is hard. (Ever tried to change your lifestyle around diet or physical fitness? 😬)

So hard in fact, that many people will (consciously or unconsciously) opt to stay right where they’re at, to not grow or evolve, so they don’t have to go through the temporary pain of changing habits.

Transitional pain

A friend of mine recently coined this phenomenon as “transitional pain”. I think he’s right.

I see it regularly in the SynkedUP business.

Someone will hear about us on Instagram let’s say, they want all the benefits they hear about of being more confident in their numbers, they want to track their jobs and know when they made money or not.

So after fighting a bit of a mental battle on paying for software to solve this problem, they whip out the credit card and sign up.

They think that: Yay! The hard part is done. They committed.

…except that isn’t the case.

Whipping out the credit card to sign up is the easy part.

The hard part is now changing your habits to adopt and implement these new processes into your business, your estimating, the way you schedule, and the way you track time and materials on jobs aka use that new tool!

Here’s a fact: you WILL be tempted to fall back into your old ways of estimating, tracking, etc.

It’s easier!

It’s what you know. It’s what your team knows.

Don’t be tempted to abort

But I can tell you from experience, if you mentally prep yourself for a temporary disruption to your process, push through that brick wall of unfamiliarity, and become comfortable with new processes, the results you unlock on the other side of that brick wall of changing habits are massive.

You will actually get what you came for.

But if you abort the mission, that’s got to be the worst-case scenario.

You paid for it, and you disrupted your process, but when the going got hard and uncomfortable, you punt and go back to your old ways.

And back there in your old ways are the same problems that had motivated you to “do something about it” in the first place.

If you abort, basically you are telling yourself that “do something about it” just looked a little too hard.

Do you know what I’m talking about?