Productivity tools keep getting “smarter”. Things like auto-tags, AI summaries, suggested links, and predictive dashboards promise to save you loads of time. But in practice, these features often end up adding more clutter and friction, which completely contradicts the whole point of a productivity system. Every suggestion or auto-classification requires a decision, and when the tool guesses wrong, you’re left having to fix it. In a way, AI tools can make you feel like you’re constantly babysitting your setup.

The reality is, most productivity systems don’t need AI, they just need to be simpler. Fewer features and predictable behavior often get the job done faster than any AI assistant. I want to break down why AI isn’t necessary for all workflows, why minimalism beats automation (most of the time), and how intentionally limiting features and tools can make your system easier to stick with.

Why most productivity systems don’t need AI

Even if AI can help, it’s not always faster or better

AI tools in productivity apps can seem useful at first, but in practice, they rarely save as much time as you think. Auto-analysis can often mis-tag notes or tasks, which means you have to go back in, remove the tag, and create a new, more suitable one. Summaries can also omit important parts, forcing you to double-check the original content anyway. And even if an AI works perfectly, it can still add an extra layer of decisions on your part: approve, edit, ignore. This is just cognitive overhead, which is counterproductive to having a productivity system.

There’s also the problem of outsourcing your thinking to an AI tool. It might seem like this could make for a faster and smoother productivity system, but I’d argue otherwise. When a tool decides how notes are organized, what’s important, or even how tasks are phrased, it becomes easier to stop practicing judgment about your priorities and the context of your content. This means your mental map of projects and information starts to erode. For example, you won’t be able to know what matters just by glancing at your dashboard anymore because the AI handled all of it for you. So come time you need to actively engage with your information, you’ll be behind on what’s going on.

Fewer features mean less friction

Less is usually more

I understand that product teams try to balance business pressure and user demand, so adding more features is usually to cover as many use cases as possible and to try to make everyone happy. However, those features don’t disappear just because you don’t need them - they sit in menus and sidebars which increases the amount of stuff you need to scan just to do one simple task.

For example, Affine is one of my top productivity tools that I open nearly every day, and I don’t even use half of the stuff that’s on offer. I almost never touch the Journals or Intelligence tabs, and don’t recall once opening Notifications since I don’t use the app collaboratively - it’s just visual clutter to me. All I need is to be able to create documents and add a bit of formatting. I’ll admit, I do appreciate having a whiteboard tool built-in, which prevents me from jumping back and forth to a second app like Miro.

I’m not nitpicking Affine’s UI in particular, I’m just trying to demonstrate how feature breadth can add interface complexity. In practice, every feature turns into a UI decision, and every UI decision adds friction, even if you never click it. And AI features arrive as yet another layer on top of this - they introduce new buttons, prompts, panels, and settings.

So, what’s the solution?

Editing down your toolkit

The alternative to relying on AI or feature-heavy tools isn't necessarily abandoning all of them, it’s intentionally simplifying the types of tools and how many of them you use. As a tech journalist, I test a lot of productivity tools, so there’s always going to be a horde of apps on my PC. But that doesn’t mean they all belong in my day-to-day system, at least not at the same time. For me, the key is in keeping experimentation separate from what I actually need and use every day. Right now, I’m using Windows Notepad for notes in my local plain text stack which is synced to Google Drive, Affine to keep track of larger projects, and NotebookLM or Gistr for studying.

I’m not saying to do it exactly as I do. The core thing you need for basic productivity is a place to take notes and a way to back them up. This can be Notepad, Google Docs, even Windows Sticky Notes, or perhaps self-hosted options like Memos or Joplin. The rest will depend on the work you do - I recommend narrowing it down to the essentials only. I need a PKM app for managing my design projects and article content, but you might need a reference manager, scripting tool, or mind-mapping tool.

Another part of simplifying your system is disabling features you don’t use, AI or otherwise, if the app gives you that option. Ultimately, if a tool or workflow requires as much work to navigate or maintain as your actual work does, it’s not worth incorporating it into your productivity system.

A simpler system works best

To me, the best productivity system is the one you keep coming back to because it’s straightforward and gets the job done without taking you on detours. It shouldn’t add extra friction or require more work to manage and navigate than the work itself. The more consistent and predictable it is, the better it supports your thinking and workflow.