Give a tool one job, not five

When I ask for a small business tool, I keep it to one job. One tool checks orders, another sends reminders, a third builds a report. I don't ask for one thing that does everything.

A tool with one job is easy to describe, easy to test, and easy to fix when something changes. A tool that tries to do five things at once is hard to explain to a coding assistant, and even harder to explain to yourself six months later when it breaks. Small, single-purpose tools also let you swap one out without touching the rest of your setup, which matters a lot once you're relying on several of them daily.

Try this today: look at a tool idea you've been putting off and split it into two smaller ideas if it's doing more than one job, then build the simpler one first.

• one clear input
• one clear output
• one clear owner who checks it