Small durable things.
Why small tools and personal automation compound.
The most useful things I have built are not the ambitious ones. They are the small scripts, the single-function libraries, the one-page references that I made for a specific problem and forgot about until the problem came back.
The practice
Every week, build one small thing and put it somewhere findable. A script. A template. A reference document. A function with a clear name and a test. The bar is low: it must work, it must be retrievable, it must solve exactly one problem.
Why small
Small things get finished. They can be understood in one reading. They compose. A collection of small, working things is more useful than a large, unfinished system.
Completeness is underrated. A thing that does one thing completely is worth more than a thing that almost does everything.
After three years of this practice, I have a personal library of about two hundred small things. I use maybe twenty of them regularly. The rest sit quietly until they are needed.