Constant optimizer that I am, I recently decided I needed to overhaul my own editorial calendar. I set up something in Airtable for my actual calendar of written work and then a separate place for my AI assistant to log insights from meetings and written work and trends throughout the week that might be worth bringing into content. I was amazed at how clever and comprehensive my setup was and in awe of how far these things had come from the basic spreadsheet editorial calendar I had to use back in the days of managing corporate Facebook pages.
After four weeks, I went back to a spreadsheet. I couldn’t add the basic info I cared about to Airtable as easily as I could to a regular Google Sheet, but more than that, the AI assistant was dumping so much stuff in there that going through it became a chore in itself. The actual things added were good but a lot were duplicative so then I suddenly gave myself a whole new job of weeding a garden I didn’t even want.
So I can’t fault anyone who thinks the answer to getting things done is a different app. The more technology advances, the more we assume someone must have built the thing that works perfectly for our brain, our life, and our job. Now, with AI, the number of people vibe-coding said tool is increasing (or at least that’s what the productivity subreddit seems to indicate).
The right app or shared calendar or project management tool or even notebook can reduce friction, but only if you open it, use it regularly, and have a reason to come back to it. Without those things, it’s a graveyard or a burden, and our brains end up carrying the weight anyway. Even when we’re not holding the information itself, we’re using our brains to remember which notebook, Google Doc, or archived Slack channel it lives in.
I call these destinations Containers. A Container is a trusted place with an edge — task lists, calendars, reference, etc. New information probably doesn’t need a new Container. And you likely have too many in the first place. While I consider myself a pretty streamlined person, when I was thinking about this topic, I counted so many I’m almost embarrassed to list them (but will anyway).
Personally, I have my to-do app, my notebook, my journal (just a different notebook), Capacities, Apple Notes, multiple Google calendars, and, at this point, Claude. I’m ignoring any inboxes like email, text, and WhatsApp because while info comes in those places, they’re not destinations and my goal is to get actionable or timely info from them into the Container I work from. When I’ve worked in organizations and not for myself, that list expanded to include work messaging apps (Signal/Slack/Teams), project management tools (sometimes different ones for different teams), Salesforce, knowledge bases, Confluence/Jira/etc.
I have absolutely tried to pare down and pursue the “one tool to rule them all” route (and have several time-consuming but abandoned Notion builds to prove it). The point, however, is not the number but the purpose. The key questions to ask are:
Do I have a choice about using this?
Does this serve a purpose that no other Container can?
If not, does it do something better or in a way I like better?
Will I look at this at least once a week?
Do I have a choice about using this?
If your company is on Teams, then Teams is a destination for information for you whether you like it or not. You can’t reduce or eliminate a Container that has been selected for you and where you have to collaborate with others.
Does this serve a purpose that no other Container can?
I use a specific app for notes and saved information (Capacities) but it’s not collaborative. The fact that it’s built for individuals is actually why I like it, but there are a handful of notes that I need to collaborate on with my husband (large trip packing lists, our “what’s in the depths of our freezer so we don’t forget” list, and, crucially, the “words we always forget in Spelling Bee” list — I’m looking at you, callaloo). So I use Apple Notes almost entirely for that purpose.
If not, does it do something better or in a way I like better?
This is really the argument for any specialized tool. Theoretically, you can use a notebook to track tasks, but that doesn’t work for recurring ones. Similarly, there’s info you could keep in a spreadsheet and manually sort but there’s a lot of appeal in tracking certain information in databases so you can present different views. Sometimes the answer is aesthetic: yes, I could buy a composition notebook at a CVS or I could get a Seyès-ruled Clairefontaine notebook with super smooth paper from a sketchy “French imports” website.
Will I look at this at least once a week?
If you don’t have either a review cadence or a mechanism for getting info from that Container to a place you do review regularly, the information there is dead and buried. Maybe that means you have a meeting at work that becomes the forcing mechanism for updating the tracker or the tool (this is not me advocating for an unnecessary meeting!) or you have a note for your weekly review of all the things to check. Regardless of the how or the when, there needs to be habitual or forced visibility.
My Airtable build failed on question three. It didn’t do what I needed better than an existing Container and, in the process, introduced a whole new place to keep track of. (No shade to Airtable.)
I joined one organization when they were in the process of rolling out a project management tool, and I assumed that meant that needs and criteria had been vetted and confirmed across the team. They had no existing tools (or even any defined workflows or processes in place), so investing in a project management tool made sense on the surface, especially when there was confusion about what work was done and what needed to be started. Months into the rollout, we’d introduced a number of new processes for reviewing and communicating the status of work across the team, but no one was using the tool. We were a small organization with a limited number of clients, so just having a consistent way of staffing work and managing reviews solved most of those problems. When I asked someone, “Why did everyone say you needed a project management tool?” I was told, “maybe we just needed a boss who managed the team.”
A tool can hold the work, but it can’t decide what the work is, who owns it, or when anyone looks at it. Your operating system needs an operator: you, plus everything about your life that no app will ever know.
