There’s nothing wrong with some good natured competition but we live in a time where there is an abundance of project management tools around. Probably too many.
Think Notion, ClickUp, Asana, Monday.com, Jira…and that’s just a tiny portion of what’s available online.
It’s good to have choices but this can then lead to the temptation of either one person using multiple tools or a team member all using different tools. And then when there’s a shiny new tool advertised on social media, promising you that it will change your life, you can’t help but dabble with it.
In both scenarios, nobody wins. Least of all, the business.
Let’s discuss what happens, for the solo founders or for your entire team, if multiple project management tools (let’s call it ‘PM tool’ from here onwards) are used:
- You become the bottleneck across the business
- What tool sprawl will actually cost you
- Remote work makes this worse, not better
- You end up doing the same job twice
- AI only earns its keep in one place
- You end up managing blind
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1. You become the bottleneck across the business
If you, as the owner, manage the projects in your own way, whether it’s your own PM tool (or even without having anything), you will no doubt create a bottleneck within the business and crucially, to other internal stakeholders in the business.
If everyone is waiting for you or has no idea what you are working on, the unknown or lack of information will cause frustrations.
And it’s even worse if you have multiple people working in the business, where everyone is operating with their own respective tool. It creates disjointment, frustrations and lack of movement within the business.
2. What tool sprawl will actually cost you
If you are the solo operator of the business, you only have to pay for yourself, but having multiple tools can add up the cost. And it’s so stressful to jump from one place to another to find information. It’s not worth the costs.
If you are managing a team, it’s not just about paying for each tool, but you will also need to pay for each individual user to have access to each tool. Meanwhile, each team member is frustrated about the lack of information, transparency and ability to find the relevant information to move projects forward.
And that can all add up.
3. Remote work makes this worse, not better
Since everyone is using different tools, there is no one place for the necessary synchronous communications to take place.
You could argue that you use Teams or Slack for your asynchronous communications. But there is an argument to be made about ensuring smooth synchronous communication regarding specific tasks and projects, rather than having everything in a generic chat tool.
Or worse, via emails. 😱
At on-site offices, it’s (kind of) easy to predict barriers and bottlenecks ahead of time and be able to deal with it quickly. That is not the case in remote work, where the correct communication method, more efficient communication, transparency and efficient process are essential for the business to succeed.
This is not to say that PM is better for remote/hybrid than for onsite working environments. But it’s clear that being remote requires a specific working style where the use of a unified PM tool is essential to create a smoother and more efficient working environment.
4. You end up doing the same job twice
The more tools you have, the more work you have. Which is ironic considering its general purpose is to help you have more time, courtesy of being more organised.
Think about the number of times you may have to duplicate your data entry for each tool.
Or if one person is one tool and the other is on another, and you have to repeat yourself on both platforms.
Or if you have all the data in a spreadsheet so that leaders can access it, but you need to put it in a PM tool for collaborative work.
5. AI only earns its keep in one place
Now that every tool under the sun has AI features in it, you may as well use it effectively if you are paying for it.
But at most, it will only be useful if you actually unify your project management in one place. Otherwise, you are wasting your time, money and the power of AI within the PM tool of your choice.
For example, within Notion*, I have used the AI feature to organise my transcribed meeting notes for individual tasks. So when I have an agenda with one client to discuss website management, automations and SOPs, and they are clearly labelled in my Kanban board too, the AI chat can easily organise my notes in a structured way for relevant tasks.
I don’t have to write or type my notes, then manually jump from one task to another. The transcription is working away and once done, the AI tool will organise them in the respective task.
This wouldn’t be possible if I manually write my notes by hand or type them a Word document, didn’t create a project board with relevant tasks and haven’t organised my agenda and projects appropriately before my calls.
6. You end up managing blind
For business owners who run a team, having a unified place for your projects will give you a birds-eye view on what’s going on within your team and potentially across the company. It’s not so you can micro-manager but allow you to be more proactive on what’s going on.
Most PM tools will have reporting features that allow you to have an understanding on, not just project progress and tasks in progress, but also forecast anyone who is struggling with issues such as being overwhelmed with tasks, facing brick walls or experiencing bottlenecks to move things forward.
These features will also allow you to better assign responsibilities and expectations while being proactive on any barriers in front of your team.
So what’s the conclusion?
For many years when working on personal and professional projects, I have been using Trello. Prior to that, it was Evernote during its heyday. Today, it’s Notion*. But at no point did I combine them all together. Even when I was working at certain employment jobs, none of them had a proper project management system in place (that’s another story) so I continued to use what I had at the time and just stuck to one PM tool.
It’s exactly the same in today’s world where there are AI tools available, making bold promises about what it can do for you. So what have I decided to do? Stick to mastering one, which in this case is Claude. And because there are new features all the time, I don’t think I will ever learn everything.
You might think that I’m ignoring the other possibilities and what’s around me. Not true. This doesn’t mean that I don’t keep my ear on the ground and look at what else is out there. But it does mean choosing to be more than just a basic user of a tool that I have signed up for.
So the solution is simple: in a specific task, use one tool and master it. In this context, I’m mainly referring to project management tools. But the same can apply to AI, video editing, graphic editing, etc.
You’ll get more value out of being a master of one than being average at many of them.
How we can a smoother business process together
If tool sprawl is where your business is stuck, that’s exactly what I help clients sort out: picking the right system, setting it up properly, and keeping it running so it’s not something you have to think about again.
Learn more about the digital operations that we offer or simply book a discovery call if you want to talk through yours.
