How too many productivity tools can make you feel unproductive

There’s a significant amount of pressure in today’s work environment to get as many things done as possible within a given workday. Most companies use various platforms to keep employees on task and to make sure they’re always doing something throughout the day. We live in a culture where people are rewarded for their productivity. People are always trying to find better tools to increase their productivity. But how many tools are too many tools, and when does it cause you to be unproductive?

The Working Environment

It’s the norm for most companies to use a combination of platforms to assist with scheduling, communication, time, and task management. Having a few of these tools can help keep people on task and allow easy access to connect to each other. With platforms like Slack, employees can quickly ask questions about a project and share documents with people from different departments with just a few clicks. Most people, use several apps to keep themselves on task and stay productive throughout the day.

However constant reminders of things needing to be accomplished and the distractions from emails and messages being sent throughout the day can be distracting, leading to mistakes.

The Biggest Distraction: Team Messaging

The ability to communicate more efficiently within our society has been one of the greatest and most helpful inventions. We can say so long to the days of landlines and handwritten letters with the assistance of cell phones, social media messaging apps, and email. A conversation that used to happen throughout your workday in the office has now become a chat conversation as you sit in your office at home and work remotely. However it’s still a distraction at the end of the day, and in some regard, it’s an even bigger one.

You’re never officially alone when people can reach you at any time. This new ability to communicate more easily is helpful for productivity in many ways. Still, it can also work as an extra distraction and stifle your productivity in the long run. This may be why many companies currently have rules about how their team messaging should be used throughout the day. There’s usually a disclaimer about not using the chat for casual conversations. Sometimes it’s good to be unreachable and be able to truly focus on the task at hand.

Finally, a team messaging app that doesn’t kill productivity

Today’s businesses need to work fast and with geographically dispersed teams and customers using digital communications well beyond email. Messaging 1.0 apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and clones based on chats & ‘channels’ were adopted by the digital savvy, but not uniformly across the enterprise.

Chat-in-channel style forces rank and file users still dependent on emails to juggle separate apps for communication. This saps productivity immensely. Clariti introduces a new genre of Messaging 2.0 apps to transition users from a largely email-only world to one with email, chat, and calls, and much more to address the needs of every worker, not just the savvy few.

Right from its introduction, Clariti supported multiple communication apps including email, chat, calls, documents, and to-dos, and automatically connected related communications in threads. Clariti took the familiar files-in-folder concept and repurposed it for all work.

Clariti introduces TopicFolders on the Web that looks and feels like Desktop Folders but does so much more. Unlike Desktop Folders that can only store files, TopicFolders hold emails, chats, documents, to-dos, and calls. Continue working with emails, chatting with coworkers, sharing documents, and whatever else you do at work. Clariti works behind the scenes to keep all your work organized by topic in a TopicFolder. Automatically. Without the hassle.

In Conclusion

When tools are used correctly and moderated, it’s easier not to get overwhelmed by their existence. Learn how to use these tools to increase your productivity, not distract you from finishing your daily tasks. Adopting new tools like Clariti that reimagines old ways of organizing but still introduces new paradigms of communication to the non-tech-savvy folks is a true blessing in this overcrowded marketplace of productivity apps. Also, recognize when you’re overworking yourself and take short breaks throughout your day to reset. Sometimes being slow and steady works out in the long run.