On the last leg of my bike route back home from work, I face a not-too-steep-but-very-lengthy hill. Last night, as I was huffing and puffing up the incline, a question slowly formed in my mind: Doesn’t this bike have 21 speeds?

The truth is, until yesterday, I’d never bothered to use the left shift lever, effectively taking the front derailleur entirely out of the equation and using only a third of my bike’s gears. Most of the time, when the road slopes only slightly, the middle seven gears are sufficient. So, that’s all I used. Even when I encountered more abrupt hills, I apparently decided it wasn’t worth twisting my left hand a quarter of an inch to switch the font gears.

It’s unfortunate because, as I discovered last night, it is waaay easier to climb a hill when you downshift to 4th gear. It got me thinking about other tools I’m not using to their full potential. Are there aspects of my work that can be made easier simply by more completely utilizing the tools available to me?

The first thing I thought of is the way I design logos. In the past year, I’ve tried to freshen up the logos for our products and created a new logo for the company. I do all my graphics work in Gimp, which produces bitmap images. Normally fine, but lately I’ve been thinking that our logos should be vector images. Logos tend to be used all over the place in a variety of placements, and it would be ideal if we could scale them up or down quickly without losing quality. Currently, it can be tedious creating a newly-sized logo, and we can pretty much only make them smaller without losing quality.

I’ve got a great open source vector graphics editor on my machine; just haven’t bothered to learn it yet. Maybe it’s about time I learned how to use all 21 speeds.