(Counter)Productivity: The Case Against Productivity Apps
With excessive record-keeping and needless subtasks, productivity apps offer a convenient path for distraction, simultaneously draining our time and executive planning skills. Are they really worth it?
Whether they’re targeting corporate teams or type-A personalities, productivity apps are everywhere. Each day, we spend minutes to hours making lists, prioritizing tasks, sorting tabs, and other bureaucratic busywork.
Traditional project management apps like Todoist, Asana, and Trello are ubiquitous across the business and professional world, overseeing the daily workflows of millions of users. Personally, I’m a fan of the Things app.
But even the best workplace software can be a counterproductive time-suck. Inundated with notifications and interruptions, employees are constantly shifting their attention and needing time to recover. On average, it takes ~23 minutes to refocus after being sidetracked. Companies are building an internal bureaucracy of excess project management, failing to weigh the balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
Our always-on lifestyles carry the side effect of persistent distractions. Productivity software is nothing compared to the other habit-forming applications that gobble up our daily micro-moments. Globally, users spend about 2.5 hours a day on social media, which amounts to 38 days per year. Over a lifetime, that’s five to seven years of scrolling. To what end? You’ll forget nearly everything you see anyway. You can’t get that time back; worse, you’re giving it away for free.
In an effort to regain some of that lost time at work and school, we often turn to productivity apps to keep track of daily tasks. They’re useful for many people at an individual level, including myself. But, in a larger team-based environment, it’s unwise to require all employees to build distractions into their workflow. Wouldn’t we get more value from actually doing our work, rather than planning it?
Plus, life is often better without structure. Excessive rigidity impedes spontaneous decision-making and creativity, stripping away our freedom of experimentation. There’s no substitute for the joy of actively participating in your own self-development and growth. I can’t help but think that productivity solutions are, in many cases, a wasteful rabbit hole of passivity.
This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter.
Work Productivity Apps and Our Daily Bureaucracies
The proliferation of productivity apps across professional society has institutionalized the practice of controlled distraction. Tasks are managed, monitored, and stored in a group account for cross-team communication. In many jobs, this level of collaboration isn’t necessary for the average non-managerial employee. While there’s value in ensuring teams are on the same page, the net gain diminishes when it costs minutes to recover from every interruption.
As a tangential issue, frequent meetings — and the minutes spent coordinating them — add to the list of everyday micro-demands, raising the risk of collaboration overload at some companies. Weekly meeting times grew 252% after the pandemic, according to Microsoft 365 data from 2020–2022.
Meanwhile, work-life balance isn’t getting easier. Burnout is physically changing our brains by overwhelming our cognitive skills and neuroendocrine systems. One recent study used a novel physiology-based biomarker to show that burnout is a neuropsychiatric brain disorder “with alterations in cognitive control functions and corresponding brain physiology.”
The toll worsens when workers’ attention is constantly in flux. Many jobs require regular “context switching,” in which one’s focus immediately shifts to a different fixation. Humans aren’t wired for multitasking, which is part of why the workforce historically preferred monochronic work (one task after another). With industrialization and the internet, polychronic work became the norm, requiring regular breaks in focus.
Most people have adapted to these conditions, with some externalizing their prioritization and memory in the form of physical sticky notes and personal planners. However, distraction creeps in when digital tools are constantly being updated throughout the day. Productivity apps aren’t designed at a level of granularity to help users recover from interruptions.
How much time do you spend on repetitive filler work? In a 2022 Reclaim survey, managers and individual team members said they spend over nine hours a week sifting through task lists, hopping around Slack, or checking emails. For nearly a quarter of their 40-hour workweek, employees must override their focus to tend to notifications and messages — many of which were unnecessary just a short time ago.
In this environment, context switching is an inevitable reality. Workplace software inadvertently promotes it. According to a Harvard Business Review study across three Fortune 500 companies, employees toggle between different apps and websites almost 1,200 times a day, at ~2 seconds each. At 40 minutes daily, that adds up to 3.3 hours per week or about 8% of their total work time.
In another study by Qatalog and Cornell University, professionals reported spending 36 minutes a day switching back and forth between different applications and online tools. On average, it took 9.5 minutes to get back into the workflow. Employees’ time is further drained by the maze of messaging apps, cloud storage, and project management boards they’re navigating at any given moment, several tabs deep. Professionals report clocking 59 minutes a day looking for information trapped within work software.
Such distractions chip away at our already-stalled economic output. Labor productivity in the U.S. (output per labor hour) has grown at a below-average rate since 2005, reversing stronger growth in the late-1990s and early-2000s. The slowdown leaves the U.S. nonfarm business sector with over $10.9 trillion in cumulative losses, or $95,000 in lost output per worker. Wages and a tight labor market play into this story, but the content of our workdays also matters. Take data from Microsoft 365, one of the most popular productivity suites: 68% of users say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time in their workday. The average employee spends 57% of their time communicating (meetings/email/chat) and 43% on creating (documents/spreadsheets/presentations).
Productivity apps might be necessary to some extent, but think of how much we could get done without them. Are we enhancing our productivity or slowly succumbing to a counterproductive lifestyle?
On the other hand, it is possible to continue using productivity apps while finding ways around the context switching problem. AI tools like ChatGPT require less manual input than project management apps, supplying true automation. Or, if you’d prefer a low-tech solution: One study suggests a ready-to-resume intervention, in which “one briefly reflects on and plans one’s return to the interrupted task.” This reduces attention residue — where one task draws focus from another — and ensures that performance on the interrupting task doesn’t suffer.
Question the Forces That Occupy Your Time
Statistically, if you’re in an office or work-from-home job, productivity apps likely consume up to an hour (or more) of your day. Off the clock, you may use the same apps to manage personal projects or chores.
While these tools may be helpful on an individual basis, consider the broader impact beyond the hours we spend on them: When we outsource our planning, we’re passing up an opportunity to exercise and advance our executive function and self-regulation skills. These mental processes allow us to plan, remember instructions, focus our attention, and juggle multiple tasks.
Context switching opportunities are limitless when Americans check their phones 96 to 144 times a day. We become entangled in counterproductive technologies because outsourcing is easier and cheaper. It’s a very basic formula. The industry hones in on a legitimate need, either mystifies it or waters it down, and serves up a convenient solution for a reasonable fee. They assume our busy lifestyles are beyond our control. Their codependent business models keep us comfortably under their wing, setting self-improvement aside for the false convenience of a streamlined workflow.
Note: This is an opinion essay. Like a traditional newspaper column, my newsletter is a side channel to voice my personal ideas and observations. This project is separate from my main gig as a journalist/reporter.
Stay tuned for more monthly essays. If you like a critical take on today’s tech-centric economy and culture, you’re in the right place. I try to focus on angles and questions no one else is talking about. Outside of Medium, you can follow this blog on Substack. ✨
