Project and task management software is one of the many growing fields of the information age. The use for effective digital methods of people and task management has increased amongst corporations, institutions, and the individual layman alike. With the market saturated with applications like Trello and suites like the Microsoft Office Suite and Google Workspace – formerly G Suite – whose intended purpose is to increase collaborative efficiency and productive, why does it perpetually seem like we’re unproductive?
The answer is relatively simple, these applications and tools are incredibly great at achieving their intended purpose, and that’s great; however, the wide array of applications and software options available in the wider digital world makes it nearly impossible for them to holistically impact our lives in a way that actually increases collaborative work efficiency and productivity. In fact, I would argue that in some ways the vast array of options promotes greater inefficiency than it does efficiency.
The average individual is generally part of more than one team or collaborative environment and more often than not each team, even if a part of the same institution or corporation, tend to have a different management software they use/prefer. Of course due to the various origins of these collaborative tools, they don’t tend to mesh well together if at all. This leads to the average person having to juggle the existence of multiple tools at the same time. I myself currently use Google Workspace, Trello, the Microsoft Office Suite, Moodle, and Microsoft Teams.
The problem with this plurality of management tools is that people have to split up their already limited attention in order to encompass everything they have to do, and of course this cuts down on efficiency and productivity. I often find myself jumping between management tools in order to figure out what I need to get done and then entering that into a separate task management tool to make sure nothing gets lost in translation, leaving something unfinished. That period of consolidation is what management applications were developed to erase, instead I would say they have made them worse.
Before these applications, I would say task consolidation was immediate. People had methods in which they kept track of their tasks and no matter where the task originated from it went into the same task list. Today one might have a separate task management application for work and school, will need to enter both separately, and then manually consolidate the tasks anyway. For personal productivity, these applications, have made our work harder.
The worse part of having multiple sources to find tasks is that briefly forgetting that one of the task management applications exists means that you forget that you forget to check it for task, this at best can lead to last minute work and at worst can lead to incomplete work. Additionally, the steps that these applications add into figuring out what needs to be done also increases, at least in perception, the amount of work that needs to be done; at least personally. I feel more daunted by four separate smaller lists than I do one larger list, especially if the expectation of the smaller lists is that I’m going to need to look at each list and put them together into a singular list ordered by priority.
Perhaps we shouldn’t blame these applications for making it harder to get to work, and should blame ourselves for being unable to choose one or at least fewer of them. But it does need to be acknowledged that at least in the scope of the saturated market now, that in at least several ways, they make getting things done more difficult rather than easier.
