Productivity Apps: Bane or Boon to Getting Your Work Done

A few years back, one of those fashionable self-help books doing the rounds was Cal Newport’s A World Without Email. Newport, a New Yorker contributor with a knack for making contrarian views on technology compelling, ended up with a bestseller on his hands.

The book basically espoused the theory that having too much technology makes us unproductive and, arguably, unhappy too. It talks about ideas like communication overload, a world where you have Gmail, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Insta, and everything else following you around all day.

Newport’s book was published in 2021, and while it resonated with many, it still remains the case that the average desk worker uses more than double (11 on average) the apps they did in 2019. The argument is that while each app offers a service – a productivity solution, as such – the fact there are so many can lead us to be inefficient.

Instant Entertainment In Your Pocket

There should be, of course, a line of demarcation between how we use our devices – phones, laptops, tablets, etc. – for work and for entertainment. You can flip out your smartphone and start watching Netflix, playing social casino slots, or scrolling Instagram – whatever it is that entertains you – but when it’s time to work, we can all feel guilty about procrastinating.

Most certainly, there are solutions. One that has been getting a lot of traction is Brick, a piece of hardware that blocks specific apps on your smartphone for a specific amount of time. Brick, which has a companion app, has seen a surge in sales, largely thanks to a slick marketing campaign. Yet slick marketing or not, it has clearly resonated with many of us.

Of course, options like Brick still fail to solve the underlying problem – do we have too many productivity apps? There are several articles posted online arguing that we do, all basically saying the same thing: the partition and disjointedness of different applications means you waste too much time working through different platforms.

A Middle Ground Can Be Found

In a 2022 article, The Verge mused on the problem of too many apps doing similar things, opining that a super app is probably out of reach yet hoping that a middle ground could be reached. Most experts are in agreement that the perfect number of productivity apps is one.

As we go through 2025, there is another issue – AI. On paper, AI is going to help everyone be productive, but you have to remember that many, many tech companies have made big bets on AI, and they are going to want some return on their investment. The marketing of AI productivity apps is going to be intense, and they will make a hard sell that you or your business will be left behind without them. It’s up to you to decide which will be truly necessary and which won’t.

That said, there will be a future for AI productivity apps, and perhaps it can solve some of the issues we have today. For example, an AI tool that can auto-reply to emails with personalization while you are out of the office is most welcome. The key, however, is that AI applications don’t cause you to spend more time logging in and out of apps than you do today. That sense of independence – via AI agents – is the holy grail of the AI movement, and it’s a worthy goal, but if you’re constantly babysitting AI, it might be more hassle than it’s worth.

To finish, we will give the last thoughts to Cal Newport’s book. There are some holes in his theories, yet his overall argument is that if you can cut out all the distractions – including those applications that ironically are supposed to make you less distracted – you will be much more productive. While we do need a world with email, it’s hard to argue with that last point.