Team task management tools are bullshit

Team tasks management tools don’t work. Here’s why.

The false promise

We were promised efficiency. Transparency. Fewer meetings. They lied.

The reality: we’re still knee-deep in meetings - now we also have meetings about the tools, and meetings about how to use the tools better. You break tasks into tiny pieces to be “Agile”, “iterate faster”, fill the board to look productive. Last sprint you spent half a day breaking down a feature into 12 subtasks. Three days in, you hit an edge case that reshapes the whole approach. Now 8 of those tickets are irrelevant, but they’re still on the board, haunting your standup. So you discuss how to break down tasks better. The cycle repeats.

The backlog becomes a graveyard for ideas nobody will revisit. And all that “transparency”? It doesn’t create accountability - it creates surveillance (and that’s a job of its own). Your manager shouldn’t need to see every subtask. If they do, that’s the problem - micromanagement dressed up as process. And there’s always that one person who has made it their life’s mission to become a bona-fide Jira police-officer. They’re not doing the work - they’re serving the tool.

So what does work?

Talking to my wife the other day about her Notion setup, it hit me - it works because she built it for herself. That’s the point. Professionals own their own process. What matters is that you don’t drop things, you hit deadlines, and you decide your own granularity. How you get there is your business. The Unix philosophy nails it:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Write programs to work together.

Those programs that do one thing well? Those are your personal tools. The coordination layer is shared - email, Slack, whatever you agree on. Keep it lean. It’s not the main thing. Delegated something? Track it in your system, at your granularity. David Allen covered this in Getting Things Done - every level of the chain has what’s important to them.

What about managers then?

Managers need the bigger picture, not your subtasks. Their granularity is different - milestones, dependencies, blockers. Not “refactor auth module step 3 of 7.” Delegated something? Track it at your level. Your report tracks it at theirs. Sync when needed.

Closing thoughts

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” (Steven Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

You were going to have that meeting anyway. We’re humans, we like to talk. Just have it, stop serving the tool. It won’t love you back.