Half-life Productivity Software
Back in February 2024, the ex co-founder and CEO of Muse, Adam Wiggins, wrote a fantastic retrospective post after announcing in August 2023, that after loads of work and effort, Muse did not become a sustainable business, which lead to most of the team departing, while Adam Wulf continued to develop Muse as a solo entrepreneur. The post is full of insights. What stood out to me was specifically this part:
I’d speculate that another factor is the half-life of cool new productivity software. Evernote, Slack, Notion, Roam, Craft, and many others seem to get pretty far on community excitement for their first few years. After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people’s lives. Muse got there for a few thousand people, but the economics of prosumer software means that just isn’t enough. You need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.
Loads of people switch apps, especially productivity and note-taking software, constantly, as they are on the hunt for the perfect tool. The world of productivity software is ever-evolving, and people are always on the hunt for the next game-changing app. Despite the abundance of choices, many of us find ourselves in a cycle of adoption and abandonment. Adam Wiggins called this phenomenon in his retrospective post half-life of cool new productivity software. The term half-life productivity software reflects people's tendency to switch tools frequently, without allowing any single solution to become truly indispensable in our lives.
In physics half-life describes the time it takes for half of a radioactive substance to decay. When we are talking about productivity software, it represents the relatively short period between someone enthusiastically adopting a new tool and when the same individual begins to look for its replacement.
People have a weird relationship with technology. Many are striving for the quest for the perfect solution, experiencing the urge to be as productive as possible. And this is the perfect example, how toxic the whole productivity sector is, amplified by productivity gurus who keep on praising new and shiny software.
I found myself in a cycle of switching software multiple times too. As writing and note-taking is such a core practice and workflow of my daily life, I want to make sure to get the most out of it. Whenever I stumbled across a new and shiny note-taking app, I immediately signed up for it, gave it a try, and in most cases, moved my whole archive of notes to the new app. In hindsight, this was the worst thing I could do, since I lost loads of important bits while doing so. Although I often had a hard time to make a specific app work for me, I forced myself to use it, just because some people who gave the impression to be highly productive endorsed that app. I had no idea what I was looking for in all those apps, I just switched from one to another, and to another.
It was a hard time for me, since I felt incredible disconnected from writing and journaling. My notes were scattered across multiple tools. And instead of actually do the writing, journaling, and note-taking, I found myself trying to implement systems from bespoken productivity gurus, jumping between different apps, and ultimately wasting time.
Inspired by Elizabeth Butler's Calmer Notes method, I wanted to make sure to no longer jump between multiple apps, and stop striving for the perfect tool, since let us be real, it is close to impossible to actually find that perfect solution. Elizabeth Butler suggests instead to search for the 80% solution. Before that, I noted down the most important features, that I need in a writing and note-taking app. By doing that, I realized that I do not have that many demands, which immediately ruled out all the fancy and shiny note-taking apps that launched over the course of the last couple of years. Combining the must-needed features with some nice-to-have features, I was able to quickly trim it down to just a couple of apps.
I decided on one of them, and stuck with it until today. Simple as that. I am still in the half-life window Adam Wiggins spans across the first five years as mentioned in his post, however, in the meantime multiple new apps launched, and I did not have to resist trying them all out, since I was focused on writing, journaling, and taking notes in the app I was already using.
It is clear that our relationship with those tools is complex and ever-evolving. The cycle of adoption and abandonment reflects on one hand the quest for better solutions, and on the other hand the dynamic nature of work itself in the digital age. The allure of new and shiny tools is undeniable, but there is a serious cost of constantly switching. Often, people get blinded by those tools, and they quickly realize that that new app they just signed up to and imported their whole archive into, is in fact not the better solution.
The most effective approach may be one of mindful selection and commitment. When it comes to software that stick, we need to carefully evaluate our needs, and resist the constant pull of the "next big thing". Then, there is the chance to break the half-life cycle from a user perspective. However, this is only one side, since there is another challenge that the creators, designers, and developers of those apps have to face. There is a need to find a middle ground – creating tools that can evolve with our needs while providing the stability and depth necessary for long-term gains.
They may not lie in chasing novelty, but rather focusing on a deep engagement with the apps we choose, and create more sustainable practices for ourselves and more viable products for the industry as a whole.
Till next time! 👋
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