It’s new.
It’s shiny.
It’s colour-coded.
And better yet, it promises to help you communicate with your team, assign and track tasks, project manage, collaborate, and brainstorm better than any application that’s ever come before!
Confluence. Slack. Miro. Jira. Monday. The names change, but the threat to your team’s productivity doesn’t. So the real question isn’t which tool you are using. It’s whether your organisation’s workflow is being quietly pulled into an app-driven time vortex.
I’ve seen it all before – and got sucked in too
Having just ticked over 30 years in digital, my hand is definitely up. It started years ago when I tried to get my whole team onto Trello. Then it was Habitica. Then Clockify. Each one made sense in isolation. Each one promised clarity. Collectively, they added weight.
In learning and development, the oldest sayings exist for a reason. My favourite still holds:
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.
And so it goes with “productivity” tools. Unless everyone is onboard, they just don’t work. New tools are seemingly launched every month. Some are narrow and useful. Others are sprawling ecosystems that integrate with everything from Mailchimp to Facebook. Either way, every new tool asks the same thing of your team: attention, learning time, behavioural change, and ongoing mental effort. At some point, improvement tips over into friction.
Save me now
The first thing worth asking is why the tool exists in your environment at all. What specific problem does it solve that isn’t already being solved – even imperfectly – elsewhere? “Because it’s better” is rarely a sufficient answer, especially when “better” means “different”.
Then there’s the uncomfortable question of numbers. Is there a point at which adding tools actually reduces output? Very few organisations consciously retire systems. Most simply layer new ones on top of the old. The result isn’t transformation; it’s accumulation. That accumulation shows up fastest in staff overwhelm. Every tool comes with its own logic, notifications, dashboards, conventions, and expectations. Even competent, motivated staff eventually hit a cognitive ceiling. Not everyone has the capacity – or the desire – to constantly rewire how they work. This is where capability and confidence matter. Change tolerance varies wildly across teams, and technical fluency is not evenly distributed. Assuming everyone will “just pick it up” is usually optimism dressed as strategy.
There’s also the question of balance. Are you genuinely trading effort for benefit, or are you asking people to work harder, just so they work differently? Productivity gains that only exist on paper aren’t gains at all. Often, the push comes from a small number of tech-passionate champions. That’s not a criticism – every organisation needs them – but it does raise the question of motivation. Are tools being introduced because they serve the work, or because they’re interesting to those people to explore, and gives them purpose as the resident “expert”? Meanwhile, many organisations already sit on powerful platforms like Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace. Task management, collaboration, document sharing, communication – it’s all there. If staff aren’t fully engaging with those tools, adding another layer rarely fixes the perceived underlying issue.
The complexity lands hardest on people with the least slack. Part-time employees, in particular, are often expected to absorb the same tooling, updates, and cognitive load as full-time staff. A three-day role can’t come with a five-day mental overhead.
What now?
At some point, one app becomes the straw that breaks the team’s back. Look honestly at the systems you already use. If staff are struggling to engage with the full breadth of Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams, what makes you confident they’ll embrace new, unfamiliar tools – consistently, correctly, and without friction?
Productivity tools aren’t neutral. Every new application adds cost before it adds value, and sometimes that value never materialises. Before reaching for the next shiny platform, it’s worth asking whether you’re genuinely improving how work gets done – or just becoming tech-cute while focus, clarity, and real productivity quietly slip away.