When it comes to work apps, minimizing your toolkit can maximize your productivity

As how we work changes, so do the expectations of a typical workday.

To help increase productivity, leaders are layering their tech stacks with tools and apps that promise to save time and streamline processes. Unfortunately, the effect is quite the opposite. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that the average worker takes two seconds to toggle between apps, which they do nearly 1,200 times a day. That adds up to four hours a week—or five working weeks a year—that each worker spends switching contexts.

This often means starting a project in one system, managing it in a second, communicating in a third and getting approvals in a fourth. When teams are tasked with sifting through such digital clutter, important details inevitably slip through the cracks, causing delays and mistakes.

This constant back-and-forth hinders employee productivity and happiness, but there are also substantial costs associated with having numerous apps (and the resources to manage them). A Gartner report revealed that the average company spends $1,040 per employee per year on apps, a number that’s growing by 15-20% annually.

The more we add to our toolkit, the greater the cost—in time, money and clear communication. The answer here is not to buy more tools. We need to remove the mental gymnastics of the digital age by minimizing our app toolkit and enabling our teams to be more productive.

1. Master productivity with fewer tools

To start, evaluate where you are and how your teams are feeling about the way you work. It’s very helpful to:

1. Audit your existing tools. What can you do without? If the answer is not immediately obvious, dig deeper. Look at the data and see which tools employees are using, and how often.
2. Talk to your teams. Ask them which tools are adding the most value and which are only complicating their work.
3. See what you can accomplish with your existing tools. Stay informed of new features that you may not have tried yet.

To do more with less, your tools should empower your teams wherever possible. Consider whether a single tool can serve multiple functions effectively, reducing the need for several specialized apps. To minimize disruption, choose user-friendly options that integrate with your existing setup.

By focusing on versatility, you can narrow down your toolkit to the essentials. This approach not only simplifies work but also reduces the cognitive load on your team.

2. Bring conversation and collaboration into the flow of work

Apps operating within closed ecosystems stifle integration and magnify the challenges of tool fatigue, making them easy to remove. Instead, prioritize platforms that embrace open ecosystems and offer APIs, software development kits (SDKs) and other integration tools.

In Slack, teams can effortlessly collaborate, communicate and connect all their favorite applications, right where they’re already working. Our AI-powered platform for work provides a single space to sync your people, tools, customers and partners, helping you scale your business with a new level of efficiency: Teams that use Slack are 47% more productive and work 35% faster.

One of our newest features, lists, even lets you manage projects, requests and tasks right in Slack. Turn ideas brainstormed in a channel into actionable next steps, and capture requests from direct messages in a List to share with your team. You can build automations in lists with Workflow Builder, and embed a list in a canvas brief with project deliverables and timelines.

Slack empowers you to tap into the kind of operational efficiencies that deliver the agility, transparency and speed necessary to evolve and compete in today’s market—without adding yet another tool to your tech stack.

3. Build an agile workplace that prioritizes your people

To avoid attrition, it’s just as important to focus on employee experience as it is growth and profit. When the very tools intended to facilitate our work become the source of frustration, it’s time to step back and simplify.

The consequences of tool fatigue are real, from the costs of context-switching to information fragmentation and the burden of managing multiple applications. With a toolkit audit, you can make everyone’s flow of work more intuitive and less frustrating, ensuring their days are as pleasant and productive as possible.

With the help of Slack, optimize your flow of work and maximize productivity. Get Slack today.

This article is a collaboration between Slack and G/O Media Studios.