This was an interesting read, so I thought I’d pass it along.
Ask these 3 questions about each app
For each tool, I boiled it down to three essential questions that exposed unnecessary tools immediately:
“Am I actively using this at least weekly?”
“Does it perform a unique function I can’t get elsewhere?”
“If I removed it today, would my workflow actually suffer?”
I was surprised how many tools failed this simple test.
This is also a good, related article:
I certainly agree on removing as many apps as you can. But there are still some single purpose apps that are necessary. The key is deciding which is which.
I’ve never agreed with the idea that using more tools makes for more cognitive load. We already interact with thousands if not tens of thousands of tools every day - light switches, forks, door handles, car keys, cash machines, TV remotes, watches, sunglasses, bottle lids, etc. Volume is not the issue.
The real issue is the additional cognitive load involved in learning the new tool. Once you go past memorisation and simply “know” how to use something, it barely has any mental load whatsoever. At that point it simply becomes a question of the functionally of the thing you’re using.
Keyboard shortcuts are good example of this. I have dozens I use daily, but, because I added them one at a time over a period of years and reinforced the learning through endless repetition, there’s no cognitive load whatsoever anymore. If someone else added all my shortcuts to their Mac in one go, they’d probably find it unfathomable, but that’s not because it’s inefficient to use them.
Not to mention the fact that learning how to use a new tool for one purpose often allows you to build more learning on top of it. A global launcher like Alfred or Raycast is like this. Learning the new behaviour of launching and using it might be harder at first, but once you’ve got the habit, it opens the door to adding many few functions with almost no additional effort. It simply builds on the existing habit. Hell, you could make the same argument for computers in general.
Sometimes the cognitive load of switching outweighs any benefits you gain in the long run. This is why the Dvorak keyboard is such a hard sell, you’re overcoming some very ingrained behaviours for a fairly hard to perceive benefit. Even I’ve struggled to bring myself to try it out, and I’ll give anything a shot.
But oftentimes when people think that simpler is better, what they’re actually benefitting from is just getting rid of a poor tool from their setup.
It’s like if someone has a terrible food processor that always gets stuck, leaks, and takes ages to clean, so they simply start chopping stuff by hand and think “this is much easier, simplicity is so much better”. When in fact replacing it with one that simply works would be even better yet.
I wonder what the personal computing space would be without the obsession with “productivity”. It seems a somewhat unhealthy concern. I managed to work, with lots of success, for five decades without ever wondering “gee, how can I be more productive”. I either got the job done, or I didn’t. Even doing piecework on an assembly line, in my earliest jobs, was a game of “how fast” rather than “how much”, and making it a game relieved the boredom. From then on I enjoyed figuring out how to game the job to make if interesting.
Katie
Lean methodology would support reducing waste and adding value.
But beware the Halstead effect whenever you hear/read, “I did X, and immediately I observed Y.” The mere act of paying attention to workflows will improve processes, even though it may not be directly related to the intervention. Proof of this effect is that while streamlining one process, other unrelated processes commonly improve as well.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is as simple as it gets: for every thing, consider the final cause, the ultimate purpose, the reason for doing it. Then, the secondary, efficient and material causes become more obvious. You will know what you need to achieve the goal; no more, and no less.
I strongly believe there is a drag on productivity to use too many tools (apps) such that you can’t remember how to use them efficiently. How many keyboard shortcuts do you remember?
However throwing out seldom used apps just because they are seldom used when they are productivity boons when needed isn’t a good idea either.
The same reasoning applies for other tools – kitchen gadgets, mechanics tools, woodworking tools. And that big box of various cables I bet we all have. You might only need it once a year, but when you do you do.
The same reasoning applies for other tools – kitchen gadgets, mechanics tools, woodworking tools. And that big box of various cables I bet we all have. You might only need it once a year, but when you do you do.
My dad used to say, “If the tool is not right, the mechanic is not bright.” 
Agree 
I still turn to HoudaSpot for searching ~twice per year when Alfred can’t find that one document from ages ago. I don’t use HoudaSpot much at all, but I still keep it around. It’s a tool in the tool shed.
How many keyboard shortcuts do you remember?
If we’re talking about cmd+P, Cmd+C type shortcuts I probably have 50. If we include typinator shortcuts and alfred text commands, probably double that.
For what it’s worth you probably have 5 times that many locations you regularly click with a mouse on a screen across all your apps and services.
The learning and ongoing learning is the crucial thing.
The ‘tens of thousands’ physical tools/devices work with minimal cognitive load because no learning is required beyond a basic set of common skills.
That is a crucial element of great product design, in all fields, not just tech, that is underappreciated or unknown to some engineers and product creators.
The automobile is a great example. You used to be able to get into any car and drive it. With the move to touchscreen controls (and the now the rightful backlash against them) the basic controls suddently didn’t exist in the usual/consistent form and location.
for example, anyone getting into a rental car after arriving late in the evening at the airport and suddently realizing they don’t know how to adjust the seat, mirrors, and put the car into drive understands the devolution.)
I agree with the Zapier article for storage in particular. If you find yourself misplacing files, it’s a sign something is wrong. For me it’s a sign I aspired to do some different kind of activity and never really got going, and I should end that chapter. The workflow graphs like what @Bmosbacker has shared would also work. The questions in the article wouldn’t get you there, IMO, because they don’t help you answer what you actually want to do with your computer/Internet/business/hobby.
Interestingly, some fields, such as photography, are trending to many single purpose tools.
When it comes to productivity, I subscribe to this theory:
“Any job that is measured by productivity is a job that humans should not be doing. Productivity is for robots.” — Kevin Kelly
Well said and I couldn’t agree more. Too much time is spent here and in other forums discussing “productivity “. If folks would spend less time looking in the App Store for the next best “productivity” app and spend it doing what they need to do, they might become more “productivity “.
This is said somewhat in jest with some reality mixed in.
How was productivity measured for millennia before the Industrial Age, the Digital Age, and now the so-called “Intelligence Age (AI)” – before robots?
Productivity has always been part of human life. Whether hunting, farming, or building pyramids, people have labored and seen the fruits of their work – food on the table, a harvest stored away, or a pyramid rising toward the sky.
Productivity isn’t reserved for machines, it’s part of what it means to work, to create, and to steward the world and resources we’ve been given.
Productivity is not just for robots, it’s for us.
I wonder if what we call productivity today is actually efficiency? Most people cannot multitask. Depending on the study, it’s been determined that less than 3% of the public can actually concentrate on more than one thing at a time. What we can do is be efficient at what we are doing.
In the last 10 years or so before I retired I preferred to work on a 13 Mac laptop, normally with full screen apps. Occasionally I added a 21.5 in iMac to monitor some system or remote into a server or other device. Unless I was expecting an important email, I usually checked it at 6am, before leaving home, then at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, and 4pm. I didn’t need the distraction. I use an iPad today much the same as I once used my MacBook. I let servers do most of the work.
Isn’t that what Apple Intelligence, etc. is supposed to do to for us?
I think that is a good point. Perhaps we are conflating productivity with being efficient in our productive work.
As to Apple Intelligence, that is the promise, but well see…
That’s a really interesting discussion!
IMHO, I think the “productive madness” is driving us to a really… strange horizon.
In my own workflow, I try do differentiate apps that iI use because they are more efficient and apps I use because I like them. I don’t know, but I think that work should be a little bit fun too, and there are some tools that I use just because I like the intarface and aesthetics.
I know this is is somewhat a non-popular opinion, but I really fell the “more productive the bettter” motto a little bit “arid”.
Nah. Not in the sense used in this thread and generally in forums like this. Check the OED. We do not see the contemporary usage – use of one’s time to create meaningful results – until the mid 1900s. Sure, in the 1800s, productivity had the then-current economic meaning of units of output for units of labor. I would posit that no one today thinks of themselves mechanically that way. It’s about doing something “meaningful” – a loose, almost totally idiosyncratic idea. We all love “meaning” and have few ways to explain what it actually means. It doesn’t come in units of output. It’s probably this difficulty in actually defining the term that causes agita and also offers endless opportunities for both debate and grabbing eyeballs.
Katie
Perhaps, but most posts on this forum and other tech sites, podcasts, videos, etc., focus on “getting more done” (Getting Things Done, per David Allen). Certainly, the idea is often tied to freeing up time for those things that bring meaning or happiness, but as it relates to apps and workflows, the focus is on output. But I agree with the earlier observation; I think what is usually discussed in forums like this is related to efficiency, not productivity as classically defined. I’ll add, work provides meaning, but is not the meaning of life.
… but I think that work should be a little bit fun too, and there are some tools that I use just because I like the intarface and aesthetics.
I dare say that working with fun or aesthetically pleasing tools will actually help in being productive.