Ask HN: Do you think switching between apps hurts your productivity?
Founder here currently building a product to address a problem I’ve seen repeatedly in modern teams.
We use Slack to talk. Notion to document. Jira or Asana to plan. But every time a decision is made in chat, someone has to manually copy, summarize, or “translate” it into another system. Context gets lost. Work slows down.
I'm starting to wonder: is it the tools themselves, or the gaps between them, that hurt our productivity the most? I’m not here to pitch anything, just trying to learn from your workflows.
"How do you and your team deal with this?" "Is switching between apps a real friction point for you?" "Have you found any habits or tools that reduce this friction?"
Would love to hear from you.
>We use Slack to talk. Notion to document. Jira or Asana to plan. But every time a decision is made in chat, someone has to manually copy, summarize, or “translate” it into another system. Context gets lost. Work slows down.
Have you got multiple monitors or ultra wide monitor?
As switching between Apps is much easier if you are only moving your eyes and everything mostly stays where it is.
I have email/slack on one monitor, then main ide on wide monitor taking up 70% width and other things split vertically in remaining 30%.
Same with laptop, went for 16" as again screen size is key for me.
Multiple monitors definitely make window switching easier—totally agree. The snag we keep hitting isn’t the physical hop, but the cognitive hop:
- A decision lives in Slack, - its rationale hides in Notion, - the actual task ends up in Jira.
Even with three screens, someone still has to copy-paste and re-explain. That’s the part we’re trying to erase: let a Slack message turn itself into a task/doc record without leaving the thread.
If that hand-off were automatic, would you still feel the need for so much screen real-estate, or is multi-monitor workflow a must for you regardless?
Side note We’re prototyping this idea right now. If you’re curious and willing to give feedback, drop me a note at (admin@markhub.ink) and I’ll send over a private link.
Appreciate your take!
Switching apps isn't the root problem, switching contexts is.
If tools are well-integrated and mentally compartmentalized (e.g., Slack for fast input, Notion for synthesis, Jira for logistics), switching shouldn't feel painful. But when decisions get scattered and nothing enforces consolidation, yeah, it becomes chaos by slow erosion.
Ironically, the more we try to unify everything into one tool, the worse the mental clutter gets. The problem isn't that we have too many tools, it's that we try to make each one do more than it's supposed to.
So, It's not app switching that kills productivity. It's app misusing.
Great point context switching hurts more than app switching when the tools don’t enforce a single source of truth.
Role clarity: Slack = capture, Notion = synthesize, Jira = track.
Reality: Decisions still leak out of channels, tasks lose owners, docs go stale.
Unifying everything in one mega-app can create new clutter, unless the app itself preserves context automatically. That’s the angle we’re exploring: keep roles clear, but let the hand-off happen inside the flow so people don’t have to think about it.
Curious how does your team make sure a Slack decision doesn’t die before it reaches Jira? Any workflow tricks that actually stick?
P.S. We’re prototyping a tool that tries this “context-in one flow” idea (still private beta). If anyone’s curious—or has horror stories about chat→task hand-offs—happy to swap notes. DM or reply here.
Of course it does.
There is no silver bullet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
But there is Zawiski’s Law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_La...
And the reward for good work is more work.
https://youtube.com/shorts/SUu1R0Sdfy8?si=ZrXy7uYRMV08WNP3
Good luck.
Thanks for the links—Brooks and Zawinski are exactly the guard-rails we keep taped to the monitor.
No Silver Bullet: We’re not chasing a “one tool to rule them all.” The essential complexity—humans aligning on what to do can’t be deleted; we’re only trying to strip away the accidental part (manual copy-pasting).
Zawinski’s Law: Instead of cramming every feature into one bloated app, we’re limiting scope to a single object model:
A message, a task, and a doc are the same object, just rendered in different views.
Chat ≠ Task Manager ≠ Wiki, but they sit on the same data layer, so hand-offs happen automatically rather than by re-typing.
Anything beyond that (CRM, billing, email) stays as integrations no temptation to rebuild an Outlook clone.
So the direction is “context cohesion without feature creep.” If we can kill the copy-paste tax and still keep each tool honest to its purpose, we think that’s the sweet spot.
Curious where you’ve seen this approach succeed or crash and burn in real teams.
My contrarian view is that if someone wants to get stuff done, they will get it done or find a way to get it done. Or else there will always be one excuse or another. Of course, there might be some legitimate blockers or onorous processes, but you don’t need a reason to do stuff and one can come up with thousands of reasons to not do.
Fair point no tool can manufacture intrinsic motivation. At the same time, even highly motivated people hit friction: digging through chat history, duplicating context, or chasing down “who owns this.”
The goal of what we’re building isn’t to make someone work; it’s to strip away the overhead that slows down people who already want to.
Think of it like version control: Git doesn’t write code for you, but it removes enough coordination pain that good engineers ship more often. We’re aiming for the same effect between conversation and execution—same motivation, less drag.
From our side, the north-star is a radically simple answer: let a single chat thread end all that visible complexity. One place, one flow, nothing to copy or sync. That’s the product we’re building toward.
Curious have you seen lightweight workflows that actually cut this friction without adding new layers?