The great thing about covering productivity as a writer is that people will start pointing out new and better tools to you. The not so great thing is that, often, these tools turn out to be neither new nor better. But every once in a while, something truly different comes along.
My last ‘once in a while’ happened two weeks ago. The tool is called Workona. You can think of it as an operating system for Google Chrome.
It groups your tabs into workspaces, allows you to store and move them around, and at the same time makes switching seamless without cluttering your desktop with windows. It’s great. Except for one thing: It made me less productive, not more.
How come?
The Anatomy of Anxious Browsing
One of my big time savers while browsing is grouping tabs in separate windows. Everything related to a new article goes into one window, background music into another, email into a third one, and so on.
It’s not just a way of sorting tabs by task, but by state of mind. When I go into the music window, I know a few relaxed minutes will follow. The email window is one of fast-paced, but distracted activity, while writing requires deep focus. With normal windows, this already used to work quite well.
Since Workona is a tool to organize tabs, I expected it to make this process even more efficient and reduce clutter. Soon after I installed it, however, I noticed my state of mind while browsing deteriorated altogether. I felt slower, more anxious, and less decisive. What was going on? Yesterday, in a moment of clarity that happened in the shower, not the browser, I figured it out:
Workona fooled me into believing I could now manage more tabs. While that was true for my browser, it wasn’t true for my brain.
Yes, I could keep more Youtube videos on file in the background and add workspaces for all my weekly recurring tasks, but I still couldn’t use them all at once. I have the same amount of attention today that I had two weeks ago.
Now, however, the heightened awareness about everything else I could do leads to increased anxiety about what I should do. I take forever to decide what to tackle, then fret about the choice, and go back and forth a lot.
With my old solution I had to choose my windows carefully in order to not clutter my desktop, but at least I wasn’t permanently exposed to all these options. Now, I realize this need to avoid excess was the exact thing that allowed me to pick what’s important, focus on it, and keep other browsing activity to a minimum.
It was only once I had a great way of managing clutter that I began to allow more clutter to exist in the first place.
It’s time to go back and listen to my own advice:
You don’t want a homepage that prompts you to do something. You want a homepage that prompts you to think.
A Job We Can’t Automate
This post isn’t meant to bash Workona by any means. It looks sleek, people love it, and I’m sure it’s very useful for teams. And while you could argue I’m just using the app the wrong way, I’d like to offer a different perspective.
This behavior of tab-hoarding is the natural response Workona triggered in me. Anyone else’s reaction might be different, but this was mine. If an app prompts you to behave a certain way and it’s a behavior you don’t like, you have two options: you can adapt your behavior or you can ditch the app.
I’m choosing to ditch the app and I suggest whenever you get the chance, you do the same. Improving your life is difficult enough as it is. No need to adopt tools that force us to fight even harder. That’s one reason. The other, far bigger one, is that, in the end, digital responsibility is our job, not software’s.
Like me offloading the resourceful management of browser tabs to an app, trying to delegate our responsible use of technology to technology itself will never work. Ultimately, each attempt only leads to a painful confrontation with our own lack of said responsibility.
No matter how smart or efficient they may become, the truth is our tools can never cultivate our good behavior for us. It’s not something anyone can do in our stead. The only way to do it is to ask questions, step back, breathe, and wait for answers to emerge. Sometimes, taking a shower might help.
Sadly, this means technology will forever keep showing us the limits of what we can do as humans. But there’s also something heroic about this burden:
As long as we carry it, we’ll always be in charge.