The scene is familiar: you start your day ready to move forward with that important project. You open Notion to get organized. You spend a while tweaking the board’s typography. Then you switch to Asana to move tasks around—some marked “in progress,” others “blocked.” You open Mural to build a mind map and before you know it… half the morning is gone and you haven’t done anything concrete.
Welcome to the dark side of digital productivity.
In this article, we invite you to rethink how you use tools like Figma, Asana, Notion, and Mural. Do they make us more agile or more scattered? Are they key to innovation or cleverly disguised distractions? Here's what we’ve learned from the real experiences of teams—like ours—who live among timelines, boards, and collaborative flows.
The promise of the tools: organization, agility, collaboration
Each of these platforms has a clear superpower:
- Figma: real-time collaborative design, fast prototyping, frictionless co-creation
- Asana: task management, streamlined workflows, full visibility of what needs to get done
- Notion: docs, databases, wikis, planning—all in one
- Mural: collaborative whiteboards for brainstorming, workshops, experience maps or journeys
And yes: when used well, they’re powerful allies. The problem starts when we let these tools replace the real work instead of enhancing it.
The trap of false productivity.
Does this sound familiar?
"I’m organizing the project so I can execute it better."
Translation: you’re procrastinating in style.
Sometimes we spend hours perfecting structures, colors, tags, workflows… without taking a single concrete step. We feel productive, but we’re not actually moving forward. It’s like sharpening your pencil for three hours before writing the first word.
That’s when these tools stop being helpful and start stealing the spotlight in your workday.
What the research says about tool overload?
Beyond team anecdotes, studies show something worrying: the more digital tools a team uses, the greater the risk of distraction.
According to Harvard Business Review, digital workers switch between apps around 1,200 times a day, losing nearly 4 hours a week just reorienting themselves after each switch. That adds up to five full work weeks a year, according to another cited report.
Meanwhile, Asana’s Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023, reports that employees use an average of 10 different apps per day, and that this fragmentation is a major cause of lost focus and burnout.
This phenomenon has a name: context-switching fatigue. Every app or tab change forces your brain to stop, reload the context, and try to refocus. Studies show that regaining focus can take nearly 10 minutes per interruption, creating a constant cognitive cost.
5 tips to use these tools without losing your way.
- The tool is never the project.
Your goal isn’t to have the most perfectly organized Notion board in the world. It’s to move a project forward. Use only what you need—no more.
- Define what tool works best for each phase.
Figma for prototyping, Asana for task tracking, Notion for documentation, Mural for ideation. Don’t mix roles or you’ll lose clarity.
- Set time limits.
Use a timer. If you’re spending 40 minutes in Mural to develop an idea, make sure it doesn’t turn into an endless decorating session.
- Close boards, don’t just open them.
Don’t leave whiteboards open for “continued iteration.” Close them. Draw conclusions. Make decisions. Action is the most overlooked step.
- Innovation lies in people, not in buttons.
These platforms are great. But the real value still comes from how you think, connect ideas, and execute them.
The paradox of focused innovation.
The digital world is becoming richer, more collaborative, more visual. But also more demanding of our attention.
Focused innovation means consciously choosing what to use, when, and why.
It’s not about rejecting technology—it’s about not getting lost in it.
