Fighting your tools

One phrase struck me from a post on Pixel Envy:

These are likely developers and other people who are more technologically literate placed in the position of increasingly fighting with the tools they use to get things done.

Especially since my company switched to Outlook, Teams, and the the related Microsoft house of mirrors, I spend an inordinate amount of time bogged down in basic admin work.

Beyond Microsoft, every product is pushing their, larlgely useless, AI feature down my throat. I don’t need to see anything about AI in Notion, Figma, or the translation CMSes I use. It’s rare to see a modern app designed for power users and well documented.

At some point our computers ceased being tools we own and control and have become marketing machines for software companies. We’re paying to see ads now. This will only become evident in hindsight, but my guess is that we’ve passed peak productivity.