Today marks the third Tuesday of December, which means it's time for the third installment of Wildcard Month. This week's topic is about platform switching: the process of moving and often converting your digital stuff from one platform or format to another: physical media to cloud storage, Word Documents to Notion pages, Google Photos to Mylio, and so on.
Even though this is a necessary part of living in the digital world, sometimes it occurs because we're overly enamored with the latest and greatest new tool--a condition unofficially called shiny object syndrome. Just imagine Doug the dog from Pixar's movie Up, and you'll have the right idea.
But what if moving your data to a new format or tool could really help your day-to-day digital workflow? When and why might you want to do this, and what are some important considerations or pitfalls to watch out for?
Wildcard Week 3: Platform Switching
Like some of you, I have to make a conscious effort to avoid letting myself fall into the rabbit hole of trying the latest and greatest app, service, platform, or technology that promises to help me do the things I want to do better, faster, and more efficiently. Succumbing to these impulses usually results in a time sink that extends for days or weeks as I explore what value I might be able to squeeze out of some new calendar system, todo list, notetaking app, photo management tool, or AI classifier.
Fortunately, since I recognize my tendency to do this, resisting is easier. I see the intentional marketing spin for what it is and temper it with the reality of how the new thing would truly affect my workflow, compared to whatever I'm already doing:
- Will it perform some tasks better? Probably.
- Will it perform some tasks worse? Also probably.
- Will it take time to learn to any degree of proficiency? Definitely.
- Will I encounter limitations that I didn't expect up front? Almost always.
These kinds of questions help break through the initial rose-colored view presented by marketing literature. Anything that looks even remotely appealing at first glance will probably have the same answers. It's gotten to the point where I just intuitively dampen my initial impression of any new platform even before looking at it.
To Switch or Not To Switch?
Despite the apparent negativity above, switching to a new platform sometimes makes a lot of sense. For example:
- Your data is all on storage technology that is rapidly becoming incompatible with modern computers (floppy disks, CDs, or DVDs)
- Your data is stuck in software that nobody except you knows how to use
- Your current workflow creates friction and stress every time you need to do anything
These and other situations still don't give you a simple and definite answer, but they help point you in the right direction.
Unless you try every new tool out for fun or research (and some people do!), you first need to identify what problems you want to solve for yourself. Once you've articulated the issues to address, you can explore potential solutions in light of how well they actually address those issues.
Of course, it's hard to know how well something will work for you until you start using it for yourself. Here's where you can rely on two wonderfully helpful resources:
- Online review videos, usually on YouTube
- Free trial usage period, if it's not a free platform or app
Whenever I see something that looks good enough to consider trying out, I first look for demonstrations of how others have already used it. This is as simple as putting "[product name] review" into the YouTube search bar and sitting through a couple of them. Video reviews with screen captures and explanatory dialog provide not only a look at the basic usage of the product but also stand-out features or hiccups that others ran into. Questions that I have about a new app are often answered clearly in these videos, so I don't have to hut down documentation or reach out to the developers.
After checking out the reviews--or, in rare cases, if I can't find an informative review--then I look at the free trial options. Companies usually offer something along these lines, at least for personal consumer-grade products. (Businesses marketing to other businesses often skip the free trial so help establish vendor lock-in, which is understandable but annoying.) Free trials are usually somewhere between two weeks and 30 days.
Time Investment Trade-Off
If you get this far and decide the new platform looks good enough to try, consider a few final practical items:
- Can you start using the new tool with your data without fully committing, so you can easily step back without more work if something goes wrong?
- If you decide to fully commit, can you migrate slowly from the old to the new over time, or does it only help if you convert everything up front?
- How much time and effort is required to migrate from your existing system to the new one?
The best situation is when you can import your entire old data collection into a new tool automatically without affecting the old one, and then use both simultaneously until you determine that the new one does everything you want. Then, you simply decommission (or delete) the old one.
But more often--especially with the platforms and apps we've been painfully stuck on for a while--it's not that easy. Migrating data from old to new is tedious, and there's no practical way to use both systems at the same time without doing twice as much work. So, either you're stuck with doing exactly that (twice as much work) until you're confident that it's a good idea to switch, or else you have to take a leap of faith and make the switch with less confidence than you'd like.
It ultimately comes down to your own evaluation of how much better the new platform will be for you compared to how much work it takes to make the move. If it's a lot of work, make sure you reasonably expect a lot of benefit
Platform Switching Examples
Through my ongoing data organization journey, I've migrated my data through many different platforms. Most recently, I've done so with a focus on simplifying and centralizing as much as I can, especially if I can do it with a self-hosted and locally controlled solution. Here are three situations where I considered migrating my data to a new platform, one of which I abandoned:
- 📷 ✅ Photos: The most significant switch I made was from Google Photos to Mylio. Not only does this comprise the largest set of data (hundreds of gigabytes), it also impacted my wife as well as myself, and took a good bit of planning and effort. I decided to go ahead with it because Mylio's feature set was compelling, the review videos impressed me, I had a positive experience with a small set of photos migrated in during a generously long free trial, and I just didn't like the idea of my entire photo and video history being primarily stored on one of the biggest and least privacy-centered companies in the world. Google Photos wins hands-down (for now) with their AI-related features like Magic Eraser and image sharpening, but these are secondary features to me, and I expect equivalent capabilities to make it into Mylio and other offline platforms as AI technology rapidly improves.
EXPERIENCE: Migrating data out of Google Photos and into Mylio took some time, but it was easy to break the work into chunks. Google provides their Takeout tool for exactly this purpose, and Mylio supports importing directly from a Takeout archive, which is fantastic.
- 📝✅ Notes: Perhaps my favorite migration has been to Obsidian, a note-taking application that is exactly as powerful and complicated as you want to make it. My data has hopped through a long series of different platforms to get here: Evernote, OneNote, UpNote, AnyType, Capacities, and Notion, before landing on Obsidian, which I've now used happily for over a year. There isn't anything particularly wrong with any of the other platforms that I tried. They just didn't click with my style of taking notes and my desires for complete data ownership and offline-first access. In some cases, I migrated because I had to--Evernote shut down their free plan, for example, and at the time I wasn't in a position to switch to the paid one. After OneNote, I used the others only briefly for a week or a month each before moving on until I made it to Obsidian.
EXPERIENCE: Migrating my notes from one platform to the next was easy thanks to the simplicity of their content (usually just basic text) and the quality of the automatic import feature in most tools. However, I still opted to move some notes by hand in order to make sure the heading structure or more specific table content stayed intact.
- 📅❌ Calendar and Tasks: I've experimented with quite a few different to-do and scheduling apps as well, and sometimes I've opted to switch. I'm always on the lookout for systems that feel natural and let me do what I want with minimal friction. Earlier this year, I decided to try Motion for a while. The trial was so short that I even decided to pay for one month to spent more time diving in. But despite everything, I ran into too many hiccups that felt wrong. I might have been willing to work around them if Motion was available at a lower price point, but it's one of the more expensive options for regular non-business users. It's still really impressive in many ways, and the developers continue to work on it. I check in on it from time to time, but it hasn't drawn me back in yet. (I currently use the oddly named Amazing Marvin, which is to schedule management what Obsidian is to note-taking.)
EXPERIENCE: Migrating task data for the trial took a bit of effort, but not that much even to do by hand--perhaps 30-40 minutes at most. My calendar data didn't require migration at all, since it's hosted by Apple iCloud (personal) and Microsoft 365 (work), and all I had to do was tell Motion where to find it. After I decided not to go ahead after all, I just disconnected my calendar and removed the tasks I'd entered, which took only a few minutes.
Finding Migration Options
What if you don't like your current situation but you don't know what might be better? YouTube to the rescue, again! Just try a search like "best calendar tool" or "best document organization" or "best task manager" or "best [anything]" for some options. You'll find a lot of noise, to be sure, but look for recurring patterns and videos that have lots of views or from channels with lots of subscribers. These things don't guarantee quality information, but they do indicate someone was probably interesting and helpful enough to make people listen to what they said.
A good old-fashioned web search can work as well if you're trying to discover what's out there in any particular personal data management area. Just make sure whatever you're reading is reasonably current. A top-10 listicle from 2012 probably won't give you anything useful to work with.
I've mentioned quite a few options in different areas right on the Tidy Bytes website, especially during Tidy '24! Check that material out if you need some extra inspiration. Or, bypass all of that and ask me directly by using the contact form on the website. "Jeff, I have to do [X] every day with this data, and it bugs the heck out of me every time I have to touch it. What can I possibly do differently?" Such emails warm my nerdy heart.
For now, I hope you're enjoying these last few weeks of December and that you're ready for Christmas. Happy data-taming!