Post by Henry Bampfylde

4 things productivity tools get wrong (that nobody talks about): The problem with most productivity tools out there: They expect you to already be productive. Every time I sign up to a new one, there's a whole load of onboarding. It takes time. It asks you to spend quite a lot of time on the system, every day. And you have to gain a certain level of accomplishment just to become productive in it. That's backwards for most people. Especially neurodivergent people. I've been thinking about this a lot while building Alluvia. And I think there are 4 real differences between a productivity tool and what I'd call a personal resource management system: 1/ Productivity tools expect you to already be productive Take Notion. Fantastic tool. But you have to really use it and learn how to use it and improve learning how to use it to be able to be productive in it. Otherwise, it's just a blank canvas. Most productivity tools are like this… they hand you a system and assume you're ready to run it. 2/ They expect you to clean up the whole messy room at once I've got five different email accounts. Two hundred and something passwords for different accounts. Seven social media. Two computers. An old computer. Some old phones. If that was a room, that'd be a very messy room. And a traditional productivity tool would just expect you to go clean up that room, organize it, tidy up, and maintain that on a consistent basis. But a resource management approach is more like… let's focus on this section now because this is where your budget is, this is where your energy is. 3/ They organize tasks but don't understand why you're not doing them A task sits in my head. I know I've got to do it. But it's not on a task list, and it's definitely not on a calendar. And there's all sorts of psychological stuff behind why I'm not doing it - it's kind of not interesting to me, I don't feel comfortable doing it, there's a whole lot of reasons. A productivity tool just puts it on a list. A resource management system asks… why aren't you doing this? What's going on? And if you're still not doing it, it reschedules and it finds out why. 4/ They give you a checklist - not a reason I don't have a goal to comment on LinkedIn. It's just comment on LinkedIn. It's not comment on LinkedIn so I can build a fantastic community and contribute. It's just comment on LinkedIn. Sometimes I'm literally just commenting because I feel like someone told me to go on there. So I'm just commenting, and that's no value to me or anyone else. A checklist doesn't fix that. Attaching the task to the bigger goal - so I think, okay, I don't feel like doing it, but this connects to something that matters - that's what actually gets me to move. We're not trying to replace productivity tools. We're trying to bridge the gap between where someone is and where they need to be to actually use those things. That's what I'm building Alluvia to do.