Founder here currently building a product to address a problem I’ve seen repeatedly in modern teams.
We use Slack to talk. Notion to document. Jira or Asana to plan. But every time a decision is made in chat, someone has to manually copy, summarize, or “translate” it into another system. Context gets lost. Work slows down.
I'm starting to wonder: is it the tools themselves, or the gaps between them, that hurt our productivity the most? I’m not here to pitch anything, just trying to learn from your workflows.
"How do you and your team deal with this?" "Is switching between apps a real friction point for you?" "Have you found any habits or tools that reduce this friction?"
Would love to hear from you.
Switching apps isn't the root problem, switching contexts is.
If tools are well-integrated and mentally compartmentalized (e.g., Slack for fast input, Notion for synthesis, Jira for logistics), switching shouldn't feel painful. But when decisions get scattered and nothing enforces consolidation, yeah, it becomes chaos by slow erosion.
Ironically, the more we try to unify everything into one tool, the worse the mental clutter gets. The problem isn't that we have too many tools, it's that we try to make each one do more than it's supposed to.
So, It's not app switching that kills productivity. It's app misusing.
Of course it does.
There is no silver bullet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
But there is Zawiski’s Law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_La...
And the reward for good work is more work.
https://youtube.com/shorts/SUu1R0Sdfy8?si=ZrXy7uYRMV08WNP3
Good luck.
My contrarian view is that if someone wants to get stuff done, they will get it done or find a way to get it done. Or else there will always be one excuse or another. Of course, there might be some legitimate blockers or onorous processes, but you don’t need a reason to do stuff and one can come up with thousands of reasons to not do.
>We use Slack to talk. Notion to document. Jira or Asana to plan. But every time a decision is made in chat, someone has to manually copy, summarize, or “translate” it into another system. Context gets lost. Work slows down.
Have you got multiple monitors or ultra wide monitor?
As switching between Apps is much easier if you are only moving your eyes and everything mostly stays where it is.
I have email/slack on one monitor, then main ide on wide monitor taking up 70% width and other things split vertically in remaining 30%.
Same with laptop, went for 16" as again screen size is key for me.