It’s easy to conflate effort and results.
Here’s an example. Part 1: I recently mentioned dropping a subscription to a meal kit delivery service. As a result, there was visible and significant (at least to me) savings. And the amount of work to make the change seemed trivial.
In short, little effort, significant reward.
Part 2: very recently, I have implemented a few of the suggestions from the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69p6tHh7qag. These changes involve more work than the above dropping of the meal kits. So more work, greater results, right?
Not in this case. The savings are much minor by comparison. (There would likely be larger savings if I adopted more practices from the video, but the point is that the few changes that I did make involved more work than the very easy dropping of the meal kits.)
And with this greater effort, I had expected to see even greater results.
But that’s not how life works. Sometimes a minor change can have a large, positive effect. And sometimes it takes a lot of work to have a large, positive effect. I am reminded here of the expression “low hanging fruit.” Sometimes there are easy pickings, and other times you need to climb up the tree, perhaps to some of the lower branches, or perhaps even to the top branches that barely hold your weight.
And that’s why tools such as hledger are so valuable. It’s not what we think that the results of our efforts should be. It’s what the actual results are. And if we have something that can show us an accurate assessment of the results of our labors, this is something worth having and using.