The Great App Consolidation: What Happens When You Actually Cut Your Stack
There was a point last fall where I had four places a task could live. Todoist for work tasks. Apple Reminders for things Siri captured. A note in Craft titled “stuff to do” that I added to when I didn’t want to open a real task manager. And a running section at the bottom of my daily journal that I was pretending counted as a system.
Four places and none of them were reliable.
I knew what the problem was. I’d known for months. No single app was broken. I’d just accumulated a stack instead of choosing one. Each app had a logical reason for being there. Together they were a productivity liability.
Two of those apps were paid subscriptions doing overlapping jobs. That’s the part that should sting if you recognize yourself here: I was paying real money every month for the privilege of being confused about where my tasks lived. And the money was the smaller cost. The bigger one was time, two years of tweaking and re-tweaking systems instead of just using one.
The Audit
The consolidation started with an audit I’d been avoiding. I opened every app in my dock and asked three questions:
What is this for?
Do I check it every day?
Does anything else in my stack do the same job?
The answers were uncomfortable and obvious. I had two apps that both captured tasks. I had three apps that all held reference notes of some kind. I had two calendars that were supposed to sync and regularly didn’t.
The rule I set before starting: if two tools overlap in function and I can do the job in one of them without meaningful loss, one of them goes. No exceptions for “but I like the design” or “I’ve used this for three years.”
The Decisions (and the Grief)
TickTick was the hard one. I’d used it for a long time. The habit tracking feature was genuinely good. The calendar integration was smooth. But I was already paying for Todoist, and maintaining two task managers was adding switches without adding value. TickTick went.
I consolidated note types into Obsidian. Craft stayed for documents and writing, but reference notes, daily logs, and thinking work all moved to the vault.
The “stuff to do” note in Craft got deleted. The journal task section got deleted. One task manager, one source of truth for what I’m doing today.
You do feel something when you close an app you’ve opened every day for two years. It passed faster than I expected.
What the After-State Feels Like
What changed is the number of decisions I make before I start working. Before the consolidation, the first ten minutes of my day went to checking four places and reconstructing what I was supposed to do. Now I open one thing and the answer is there.
I also stopped losing things. I was never losing important things before, but there was a low-grade anxiety about which system was current, which one I’d updated last, whether the capture I’d made on my phone had synced to the version on my Mac. That anxiety is gone.
The stack I landed on: Todoist for tasks, Obsidian for notes and thinking, Craft for writing and documents, Google Calendar for time. Four tools, clear lanes, no overlap.
Staying Cut
Here’s the part most “I simplified my stack” posts skip. Cutting the apps was a weekend. Staying cut is the actual work, because in three months something shiny launches, gets a glowing review, and the old itch comes back. I’ve reinstalled TickTick once already since this. Lasted four days.
What keeps me from re-cluttering now is a single rule: a new app doesn’t get added, it has to replace. If I want to try something, it has to take over a job one of my four tools is already doing, and the old one comes off the phone the same day. No “let me run both for a while to compare.” Running both for a while is exactly how I ended up with four task inboxes in the first place.
The shiny new app isn’t the threat. The threat is keeping it and the old one.
The Three Questions for Your Own Audit
If you want to run the same process:
List every app you opened in the last week.
For each one: what specific job does it do that nothing else in your stack does?
For every overlap you find: which one would you choose if you could only keep one?
The answers tell you exactly what to cut. The audit is easy. The hard part is trusting what it tells you and actually closing the app. Let me know which apps you decided to cut!
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