Have you ever noticed that the more “productivity” tools your team adopts, the less productive you feel?
One week, you’re sold on a project tracker that promises to replace three other systems. Six months later, you’re juggling the tracker, the old spreadsheet someone refuses to give up, a chat thread full of “quick updates,” and a dashboard that was supposed to be the single source of truth, but now needs its own update schedule.
I’ve rolled out the new platform thinking it will improve the mess left by the previous manager. I have also worked on building the master dashboard. For a short while, it felt like it did help. Until I noticed the work isn’t moving faster. It’s just moving between more places.
This is how many managers end up spending more time managing tools than managing people.
And the way most of us try to fix it? That’s where things get worse.
Let’s dive in.
When Fixing It Makes It Worse
Most managers (with good intentions of course) try to cope the same way:
Add another tool to make the existing mess easier to navigate.
Create a master dashboard that “pulls everything together.”
Lean on integrations so “you only have to update in one place.”
In theory, this should reduce the mess. In practice, it creates a new kind of problem: meta-work. Work about work. Now you’re not just doing your job, but you’re also maintaining the infrastructure of doing your job.
The cognitive load piles up quietly. You start to remember where information lives more than you remember what the information actually is.
The Comfortable Lie About “Adoption”
When a new tool fails, people often say: “You just need better adoption.”
Translation: The tool is perfect; the people are wrong.
It’s convenient logic for vendors and for leaders who don’t want to admit they picked the wrong thing. But it ignores a truth every manager has felt in their bones: no amount of adoption fixes unclear priorities, ambiguous ownership, or a culture of knee-jerk requests.
A platform can make disorganized work look prettier. It can’t make disorganized work go away.
Tools Can’t Think For You
The real problem isn’t the tools. It’s the belief that tools can replace clarity, decisions, or conversations.
A good tool can store your decision. It can’t make the decision for you. It can track priorities. It can’t choose them.
When I work with teams in this spiral, I start by stripping the conversation back to three questions:
What actually matters this week?
Who is responsible for it?
Where is the single source of truth for tracking it?
If you can’t answer those without looking at a dashboard, you don’t have a tool problem. You have a leadership problem.
Four Moves to Break the Cycle
Even if you can’t control which tools your team has to use, you can still control how they’re used. These moves have helped me to keep tools in their place and most importantly serve the work, not running it.
Picking one primary per function. For your team, agree on a single go-to for each major function (e.g., one for communication, one for task tracking). The others can be used if needed, but they’re secondary. This keeps everyone’s default clear, even in a tool-heavy environment.
Decisions before updates. Don’t let the week start with “updating the board.” Start with deciding priorities, then update tools to reflect those. Tools follow choices, not the other way around.
Having a kill-switch. Simple rule: if your team hasn’t touched a tool for 60 days, you stop maintaining it. If you can’t delete it (because it’s mandatory), at least stop treating it as an active channel.
Auditing before you adding. Before adopting anything new, map your existing tools and their purposes. Make overlaps visible. Redundancy is a silent tax on time, attention, and goodwill.
The Bottom Line
Most managers inherit their tools. That’s fine. What’s not fine is inheriting the belief that more tools mean more control.
Once your team starts to treat updates and dashboards as the work itself, not the work that matters, focus will slip, energy will disappear, and credibility - both yours and the tools’ - will quietly erode.
Step back and take a hard look at your own tools and how they’re used.
Are you managing the work… or just managing the tools?
That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday.