Why I deleted all my productivity apps

For a year I collected apps the way some people collect houseplants — hopeful, over-watered, mostly dying quietly in a corner of my dock. In April I deleted all of them.

In April I opened my dock and counted eleven productivity apps. Not eleven apps, total. Eleven apps whose whole marketing promise was that they would help me get more done. Two task managers, three note-taking apps, a habit tracker, a "second brain," a Pomodoro timer, a "context capture" tool, a calendar that was different from my other calendar, and a hand-drawn kanban app that I had installed on a Sunday and never opened again.

I deleted all of them.

I want to be clear that I am not, philosophically, opposed to software. I make software for a living. I have opinions about typography. I like a well-considered UI as much as anyone. But something had happened over the previous eighteen months that I could no longer ignore, and it was this: I was spending measurable amounts of time thinking about my system of thinking, and demonstrably less time thinking about the actual work.

What I actually did

I bought a plain, unbranded A5 notebook, the kind you can get for four euros at any newsagent. I chose the smallest, worst-looking pen I could find on my desk. And I made three rules for myself.

• Every morning, the first thing I write in the notebook is the date. Then, under the date, three things I want to have moved forward by the end of the day.
• Anything that arrives during the day — a new task, an idea, a "we should really" — goes onto the same page, in the margin, next to a small square.
• At the end of the day, I re-read the page. Anything not moved is either done tomorrow, actively delegated, or crossed out.

That's the whole system. There is no board, no tag, no filter, no daily review template. There is a page. The page has a date on it, three intentions, and a margin. When the page is full, I turn it. When the notebook is full, I buy another one.

Most productivity software is a costume for a decision you haven't made yet.

What came back

Two things came back almost immediately. The first was the ability to hold a full day of work in my head. Not as a list, but as a shape. I could feel the weight of what was on my plate without needing to open an app to remind me. This alone was worth the entire experiment.

The second was a kind of small, everyday courage. When my system was six apps deep, I could always postpone a decision by "reorganising it." When the system is a page and a pen, there is nowhere for the decision to hide. The task is either done, delegated, or crossed out. There is no fourth option, and no app to make it look busy.

What I did not miss

Everything. And I mean this quite specifically. In four months of not using any of the eleven apps, there was not a single moment in which I thought: "if only I still had that task manager, this would be easier." Not one. The one thing I did miss, occasionally, was the tiny hit of satisfaction from arranging things in a new colour on a new board — but that turned out, on inspection, not to be a work feeling at all. It was the feeling of a decorating project I did not have to finish.

I will not pretend that a notebook is right for everyone. If a team of nine depends on you keeping a shared board updated, you should probably keep the shared board updated. But if you are one person, and you have been quietly suspicious that your tools are absorbing more time than they save, I would offer only this: try the notebook for two weeks. If it does not work, your apps will still be there. They almost always are.