Latte maker from surlatable.com

I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of being married, and as any newlywed knows, with marriage often comes a strange fascination with small kitchen appliances. Walking around Crate & Barrel on wedding-gift-registration day with my price scanning laser in hand, I was immediately awe-stricken by hundreds of mini-solutions to problems I had never considered, and didn’t know existed.

Case in point – potato peelers are better than knives for peeling potatoes. They just are. And wine tastes better aerated (or at least I feel cooler aerating wine before drinking it).

So, as my first married year comes to an end, I’ve decided to mull over my new found appreciation for culinary contraptions, and I made an important connection. When cooking a complicated recipe, a chef often uses inventive and specific tools for accomplishing each task at hand, bringing about the desired result in a consistent fashion. Regardless of the chef’s abilities, following a recipe and using the right tools can even help a fumbling newlywed like me make a decent meal.

In business and life, we so often hear recipes in the form of advice, but then we do the equivalent of opening a can by hand, and we fail.

There are three lessons here:

Find some appliances
If you are still opening cans by hand – or practicing any manual, time-consuming, and inefficient tasks – think about what tools there might be for the job. Is there an online service you can subscribe to? Maybe something you could outsource? Or maybe an updated piece of equipment that will save you time in the long run? Make the investment, it will be worth it.

Pick the right tool for the job
Just like you wouldn’t cook pasta in a toaster, many people are using the wrong tools for the job. Today, most solutions are so focused that you’ll end up building a customized toolkit for your specific needs. At EVC, we use over 15 different applications and services to get the job done.

Remember how you did it
Did you make a change to a recipe, or find a way to do it better? Be sure to write it down and share it with others.

Have you found any tools that work for you? Share them with others in the comments! Need advice? I’m here to help.