A Productivity App Should Work For You Not The Other Way Around!

In this day and age, there’s an app for everything and rightly so!

I mean apps can be incredibly beneficial to people in their everyday lives! Whether it’s reminding you to take medication at a certain time of the day or helping you become more productive on a day-to-day basis, these are all ways in which an app can help you.

They even have the potential to improve your lives and ways of working. But this is the thing, a productivity app needs to work for you, not the other way around!

I’m a huge fan of productivity apps in general and there are 6 apps I swear by, but if I find that an app I’m using is no longer working for me, I will look elsewhere.

With the increase of the fast-paced working environment, people are naturally looking at ways of becoming more productive and that’s where productivity apps come in.

We can access them on our phones, our tablets, our computers, and in some cases even our watches! If we bring productivity apps into the equation, there are countless things we can do to apps to make your life more productive.

The Problem With This Approach

There’s no denying the fact that apps can be incredibly useful, but this is the thing. With there being so many apps and possibilities, it can be difficult to find an app that works for you as an individual.

I mean, I think that productivity is a very funny subject because you have all these experts giving excellent advice which can be applied to so many aspects of your life, but what works for Harry, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for Joe.

And while the advice and techniques being given are incredibly good, they may not work for your needs as an individual or the needs of your team.

Now let us think about this in the context of apps, there are many apps that influence you to work in a particular way by focusing on certain things, such as Kanban, the Eisenhower Matrix, or a mix of different things.

Some of these things may not be suitable for you. For example, I tried TickTick and I think it’s a great app, it’s also one that MKBHD has recommended in many of his videos and that’s got to mean something, right?

Not really, remember what works for others, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you!

In my case, I don’t like the look and feel of TickTick and when I used it personally, I never used the Eisenhower Matrix because I didn’t find it beneficial to me. But these things don’t mean the app is bad, I just didn’t think it worked well for me.

Productivity Apps in the Business World

Let us now focus on the business world, companies of all shapes and sizes invest in productivity apps for their teams, hoping that they will make staff more productive.

But what happens when someone in the team doesn’t find the app being used helpful or productive, or a new project manager joins and prefers not to use it at all? Then that app is not serving its purpose.

As with many cases in the business world, staff will have to be trained to use the app to its full potential, but that causes a lot of time waste. I argue that it can also make people less productive as they will be concentrating on using the app to its full potential instead of what’s really important.

A productivity app should work for you or the needs of your project, not the other way around and that is exactly what I want to talk about in the next section.

Productivity Apps In General

As a whole, productivity apps can be very beneficial, but they shouldn’t be complicated. That is the main issue I had with Notion, I think that it’s a great app full of potential, but there are so many options and customisations you can so that it’s easy to get overwhelmed or distracted by the features.

Productivity apps should be simple to use and easy to learn so that you as an individual and project teams can just download them and use them straight away without the need of editing and creating complicated databases or workspaces.

There is an argument that you should spend time perfecting your workspace before you start using it, but it shouldn’t have to take long, after all, these apps are designed to improve productivity, not make things difficult.

Final Thoughts

As a tech and productivity enthusiast, I’ve tried many productivity apps over the years and let me tell you something, it can take time to find an app that works perfectly for you, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t one out there.

The truth of the matter is that we all work in different ways and we all have different ways of achieving maximum productivity, whether it’s with the use of an app or not.

This is the exact reason why there are so many different productivity apps out there which focus on different things.

On a separate note, sometimes, it’s worth going back to basics, with a basic To-Do list app such as Apple Reminders or Google Tasks or even pen and paper. It all depends on what you are doing or working towards and working in the way in which you feel comfortable.

What are your thought’s on this?