How your beloved productivity tools are ruining your life
They’re arriving too late to the party.
If you’re a creative, or generally just a computer user, you would most probably spend as much as 28% of your productive time organizing knowledge in office software, working with productivity tools, and the like.
With these dear tools taking up such astonishing amounts of our professional time, you’d expect them to be more effective and actually work for our own good.
(Spoiler: they don’t)
Before you begin overthinking it, don’t worry; MS Word and Google docs don’t have crosshairs trained on your back with an aim to consciously sabotage your work. Not yet, that is. But these productivity tech and software giants could be shortchanging loyal users by not rising to the challenge of advanced tech that can handle our present and future needs.
Simply put, in an age of increasing data complexity and layered analytical intelligence, the suite of modern productivity tools that are built to solve our dependence on the past actually isn’t cutting it. Productivity tools are giving us less than we deserve, less than we require in the age of data. To be frank, they’re making the problem increasingly worse. Instead of overhauling and pivoting the knowledge-based economy to sync with the huge store of big data that Industry 4.0 is bringing in its wake, the productivity software niche has become regressive and has stalled further development of useful features to enrich the work experience.
As the world is undergoing a data revolution that draws us closer to a world more dependent on hard data, the tools that we use aren’t being improved or adapted to our changing needs and as a result, are being cogs in the wheel of overall progress.
Take for example MS Word, Microsoft’s poster boy a well-known work processor that debuted at Microsoft some 36 years ago. Microsoft has done unusually well in an age of rapidly changing tech standards and retains a substantial portion of the word processor market — of course, as a component of trusty old Windows that controls >70% of the global desktop market.
Productivity tools have remained simplistic in an age of increasing knowledge complexity and technical demand. It appears that the solutions we’ve designed to address its challenges came too late to the party. We’ve grown to expect more and more from these established data giants and over and again, they’ve kept on having less and less to offer.
How do you explain that despite the volume of tech talent available at Microsoft, MS Word’s native desktop app cannot reliably work in sync with the cloud?
Is it justifiable that Dropbox, despite being valued at over $12 billion and having a pool of thousands of top-tier engineers still can’t figure out a way to sync files seamlessly, despite being noted continually as a killer by Dropbox users?
Or how do you present complex technical concepts as vividly, realistically, and engagingly as possible in a tool like Google Docs that doesn’t even let you caption images?
What if tech giants could actually invest intensively in modern productivity software that’s built on a recognition of the fact that the age of data is here to stay, and that data can be harnessed to improve individual productivity?
What if companies could actually commit to building software that works for us and not just ignores our needs, while trying to solve problems that have and are getting increasingly complex and out of control?
Or are Microsoft, Google, and the entire Big Tech Mafia content with making money off selling us solutions of the past without recourse to how the future of an increasingly datalytical mankind will look like?
Sure. They could ignore, but a few disruptors have taken notice and are taking focused action. The future isn’t as bleak as we’ve let it stay for so long.
Thankfully, a new generation of productivity tech startups is marking the loopholes the giants are leaving uncovered and taking well-aimed shots at them. Coda is one of those.
Founded by ex-Google engineers, Coda is an intuitive word processor that lets you create rich, app-like documents without jumping back-and-forth from Docs to Sheets and whatnot. In their words, Coda offers makers and creators and avenue to create full-stack docs as powerful as apps, going above and beyond to provide immersive experiences. Anything from to-do list applets to full-stack excel-style apps that can handle complex data for bigger organizations can be built on Coda’s no-code platform that enables makers to create docs as powerful as apps.
Already, A-class teams across the world’s most innovative startups are already using Coda to launch rich experiences that put MS Word & Office Suite and Google docs to shame, with experiences including:
- Organizing complex editorial processes into simple workflows.
Any writer, social media manager, or editor knows one fact: creating a simple content calendar is harder than it should be, simply because you have to either use clunky spreadsheets or choose from limited functionality tools. Not with Coda.
Jen Jeffries and Peyton Marcus, makers and editorial geeks aboard the Cheddar team, a NY-based media agency, used Coda to create a full-stack content marketing + editorial calendar that not only keeps their editorial team on the same page but enables an efficient workflow that gets content published in less time & with better precision. Editors can know right away that a draft is ready, edit it based on a detailed guideline (built in Coda, of course) — and on, till the article hits the CMS. Published!
- Building team-wide collaboration docs that engage the entire team structure from the ground up. Much like at Uber, where Yuhki Yamashita and Yixin Zhu built an advanced tracker that triggered a complete redesign campaign of the Uber app from the ground up.
The Coda doc created to launch Uber’s ambitious Project Carbon eventually ballooned to the point it was being used seamlessly by hundreds of engineers, marketing personnel, and executives to track the progress of one of Uber’s most ambitious projects till date.
- Building fully functional apps from a doc framework.
In less than a week, Andrea Soverini built Recyclify, a full-stack recycling app, from scratch, powered by Coda’s advanced no-code design capabilities. Recyclify is a blueprint app that lets waste recycling facilities create and adhere to a workflow, starting from picking up users’ recyclable waste to recycling and selling the by-products.
Think of Coda as a comprehensive office suite stack that combines the best of MS Word, Google docs, spreadsheets, drag-and-drop, no-code app builders, layered Google-like analytics — all at your fingertips, a full-stack knowledge and productivity suite that’s detailed as our complex data needs are.
When I spoke to Al Chen, Solutions Architect at Coda, he noted that the way people work today is incompatible with outdated tools like documents and spreadsheets that haven’t fundamentally changed in more than 40 years. “Today, it’s common to see people use spreadsheets or documents well beyond their intended purpose. People use a tool originally intended for things like making simple tables, for uses as complex as organizing organization-wide projects. Instead of trying to fit new workflows into old systems, we want to merge some of the most commonly used tools, like documents and spreadsheets, into one unified productivity suite for makers and creators of all sizes and scope.”
It only remains to be seen if the software giants will stay complacent until an upending comparable to Europe’s crazy neobank revolution takes them by storm and begins building a better future by force.
Time will tell.
Are you looking to take a stab at the productivity tool built for teams of the future? Try out Coda here!
