I Stopped Trying to Be Productive. Here’s What Actually Changed.

Last year I spent six months paying for an app I wasn’t using.

It was a social media scheduling tool — $9.50 a month. Not a lot on its own. But six months of not using something you’re still paying for has a way of adding up, and not just financially.

I set it up carefully. Connected all three accounts, figured out the posting times, ran a few tests. Used it for about a month. Then stopped. Then kept paying anyway, because every month I told myself: maybe next month I’ll get back to it.

I never did.

The reason wasn’t that the app was bad. It was that I had three accounts. The app was built for people managing twenty. Every post still needed manual tweaks for each platform — different aspect ratios, different caption lengths, different everything. The “one-click posting” I imagined turned out to be roughly the same amount of work as just posting directly. With an extra layer of interface in the middle.

I had solved a problem I didn’t actually have.

The real problem was different

I had too many tools telling me they would make things easier — and I kept believing them.

At one point I was running a scheduling app, two AI assistants, a note-taking system I’d carefully built and barely opened, and a handful of browser extensions supposed to help me focus. Each one made sense individually. Together they were just more things to manage.

There’s a specific feeling to this. Not stress, exactly. More like low-grade noise — a background awareness that you have systems you’re not using properly, apps with unread notifications, workflows you set up optimistically and then quietly abandoned. You’re not drowning in work. You’re drowning in the infrastructure you built to help you with the work.

The pattern is almost identical every time: find a new tool, spend real time setting it up, use it for a few weeks, let it drift, keep the subscription because cancelling feels like admitting defeat.

I did this for years.

What I actually changed

I didn’t find a better system. I just stopped adding to the pile.

Here’s what my actual workflow looks like now:

I use Claude when I need to think through something I’d otherwise spend an hour researching alone — business decisions, content planning, figuring out how a piece of technology works. Not because it gives me perfect answers. It doesn’t. But it’s faster than opening twelve browser tabs and trying to synthesize what I find across all of them. It’s closer to having someone sit next to me and work through the problem out loud. I built parts of this site that way: instead of searching for how to do something, I ask, get a specific answer, do the thing, ask the next question.

I still use Gemini for image generation. It’s fast, and the output matches what I’m picturing more often than not. That’s the only reason. Not because I planned a two-AI system — it just turned out to be the thing that worked for that one specific task.

(I wrote more about why I think this happens — and what the pattern looks like — on the AI Productivity page.)

That’s it. No project management app. No elaborate note-taking system. No automation tools connecting everything together.

The test I now run before adding anything new: can I use this on a day when I have no motivation, no focus, and three things already going wrong? If it requires the right mood, the right setup, the right amount of patience — it won’t last. I’ve learned this enough times that I trust it now.

If you want the specific breakdown of what I use and why — including what I cut and what stayed — I wrote that up separately: My Real Stack Is Embarrassingly Small.

What’s actually different — six weeks in

I want to be honest here: six weeks is not long enough to declare victory. I’ve had “this time it’s different” moments before, and I know how they end.

But something does feel different about this one, and I think I know why.

Every other time I simplified, I was waiting for the moment I’d want to add things back. Telling myself I’d return to the scheduling app when I had more accounts. That I’d build out the note system properly when I had more time. This time I’m not waiting for that. I cancelled the subscription and didn’t feel like I’d lost something. I felt lighter.

I’m not managing fewer things because I’m less ambitious. I’m managing fewer things because I finally ran the honest calculation: the overhead of maintaining a tool has to be worth less than what the tool gives back. For most of the tools I was running, it wasn’t.

Six weeks of this is not a conclusion. But it’s the first six weeks in a long time where I haven’t thought about switching to something else.

That’s enough for me to keep going.

And if it isn’t apps, it’s the room — the same loop happens with furniture.

— Still Set

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