avatarArnau - Hillel Fuentes

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Productivity apps are not here to help your productivity

Photo by Minh Pham on Unsplash

I didn’t use to pay too much attention to all the productivity apps hype, until recently. After spending almost two decades using GNU/Linux, and having used only Android phones, I recently switched to iPhone and got back to MacOS. And as I didn’t needed so much software integration between phone and laptop in the past, I just used a simple note taking app on the phone, to get links or snippets of text i liked, wrote them into a draft email at my gmail account, open the draft in the laptop, and wrote something. Or directly wrote and published the whole thing on the phone. And it worked, and I think it was beautiful.

But with the switch to iPhone, I lost the old notes, because $reasons — take that, all of you who speak about leaving the Apple ecosystem. I lost everything BEFORE getting into it! Those reasons were, the app I was using only exported to a jason file, and most apps I tried, didn’t import json files, and/or they were IA/cloud-based, and/or they were subscription based, and/or they required at least 7 interactions before actually starting to write the note.

Furthermore, some of those apps give an overwhelming span of options: color notes; being able to set different aspects of font-style, font-size of title, body and links of the notes; you can set the font into bold, italics, underline, strikethrough… ; background color design; putting the notes into different notebooks, with different options each, under different categories (home, work, leisure, shopping list…) and many many more. Basically, most of note apps are “little” word processors.

That is, for me, too much previous work to “find my productivity a happy place” or to “easily organize” my thoughts. I understand that there are people who are more “visual”, and working with colors helps a lot. But I just neded a simple note taking app:

First line, I write what the note is all about.

Second line, blank.

Third line onwards, I write my stuff.

If the note is an idea for an article, once I write it, I delete the note. If the note was something I needed for work, or for home, or for any given $task, once I complete it, I delete the note. I don’t think that clinging to your old notes adds any value to your life — other than add used space to your cloud service, which will charge you more for it. I like to KISS.

Because life is simple. It is mostly us who build up complications. And this is not a bad thing for itself. You have to learn to live with complications. If you sort out your day to day complications, your creativity will improve. Complications help you grow. Even if you chose to complicate everything for a living. As corporate lawyers, bankers, bad rabbis or note taking app developers do — at least they will grow their bank accounts!

As I said, after all the research about note taking apps, the most fun thing started to happen: I started to notice productivity apps. Those are apps that help you to work more. Or better. Or both. I still don’t know yet. The thing is, I notice that all those productivity apps focus on “how much time is saved by the employees” by “helping them to focus and have less distractions”.

Focusing and having less distractions is a good thing. But when all a company/boss/employer strive for is that, we have a problem. And that problem is the company/boss/employer is starting to view workers as productive machines, not humans.

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I say that because in all those productivity apps sales pitch, I see the same thing once and again: One day saved per week. 12 minutes saved per day. 20 hours and 35 minutes spent in email this month, that being an average of 4 hours and 10 minutes this week (but last week it was 3 hours 28 minutes, Dave. I can’t let you do that, Dave). And thanks to GPS, you will know exactly where you were when checking those emails, Dave.

But not a single one of those apps measures how much time you spend thinking about one specific project, be it at the office, at home, in the bathroom or while having a drink with friends, or even when you sleep — by the way, I fear the day in which someone will develop neuronal implants to measure thought.

How can we measure that? How can we aggregate thought-data into our productivity apps, to show our employers that, even when we may spend a 3:28 average reading email at the office, we use our leisure time — or even bathroom time — to improve shareholder’s value?

Even more: not a single app measures our happiness. Having in mind that a happy employee is 13% more productive, and that all those apps strive to “find your productivity a happy place”, I miss some happiness measurements — just kidding.

But this measuring-addicted IA software goes beyond. If you happen to use an iPhone, you can even measure your “mindful minutes” during the day, manually or automatically (the device gives you at least 5 different app suggestions). And instead of switching off your phone, you can spend some time setting it up to help you relax, by playing some music while you read a book. Oh, and measuring those relaxing minutes into the app, of course.

I use some of those apps myself. Specially the sleep monitor and the weekly usage report, or how much water I drink, or how far I walk. I use a toothbrush shortcut to remind myself to brush my teeth every day. And the headphone audio levels alerts to keep my tinnitus at bay. Due to my long-covid condition, some days I monitor my resting heart rate — manually, I don’t need an Apple Watch for that. And I set up the Wind Down shortcuts to activate sleep mode and cut off the Internet at night. But measuring my mindfulness start and ending times seems to me almost ridiculous.

Photo by Mindspace Studio on Unsplash

So, going back to the main topic here, all those “increase your productivity” apps are not there to help us focus and work more and better. They are telling us how, when and where we use our devices, so we can change and adapt our behavior to “work better and with less distractions”. It seems the same, but it’s not.

Besides having little word-processors in disguise, our phones and computers are acting like an old punch clock, but now measuring even those seconds you spend staring any given text app, waiting for a reply from your partner, to confirm if you have to buy tomatoes or not.

Our phones and computers are softly forcing us to become gadgets like them. And gadgets don’t think. Machines don’t think. Even computers don’t think! They are, at the end, terrifficly expensive calculators with improved graphic capacity. Inversely, we are not apes with improved communication skills. And definetly we are not gadgets.

We are humans. And humans talk and comunicate. Humans think, and do a lot of unmesurable creative things besides working 17 minutes more on Tuesdays, or reading emails at an average of 4:10 hours a week (last week it was 3:28, Dave. Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?).

I’m not a gadget, neither are you. I refuse to be treated like a gadget, and so should you. And in the next post, I will speak about the hype of “how to improve your writing productivity” apps. Hint: write for humans, instead of doing it for SEO.

Productivity
Productivity Hacks
Focus
AI
Bullshit
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