Task management apps used to be straightforward: digital to-do lists where you’d write down what needed doing and tick boxes when it was done. But walk into any modern workplace and you’ll find something quite different. These platforms have become the backbone of how teams get work done, particularly for leaders juggling distributed teams, infrastructure projects, and vendor relationships.
The challenge isn’t finding a task management app—there are dozens of solid options. The challenge is using one effectively. Because while these tools promise to make teams more productive, plenty of organizations find themselves drowning in notifications, buried under status updates, and somehow busier than before they started.
So what’s changed? And more importantly, how do you actually use these apps to improve team productivity rather than just adding another layer of digital noise?
The Real Problem: Too Many Tools
The average knowledge worker now juggles up to 11 different applications daily, and every switch between these tools costs time and mental energy.
As Zeb Evans, CEO of ClickUp, put it during the December 2025 launch of ClickUp 4.0:
“Work sprawl is the silent killer of productivity. Teams are drowning in disconnected tools and workflows.”
The numbers back this up. Context switching between applications costs teams roughly 2.1 hours per day—over 10 hours per week lost just navigating between platforms. For UC&C teams managing everything from infrastructure upgrades to vendor contracts, this fragmentation is expensive.
How to Actually Improve Team Productivity with Task Management Apps
Stop Managing Work, Start Automating It
In 2025 task management apps largely stopped being passive and became active participants in getting work done.
“We are in a perfect spot for customers to change how they work and actually do work for them instead of just managing it,” Casey George, Chief Revenue Officer at Monday.com, explained during the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call.
But what does this look like in practice? Instead of manually updating project statuses, configure workflows that do it automatically when tasks are marked complete. Rather than writing meeting summaries, let the system generate them from your video conferences.
Put Everything in One Place
This sounds obvious, but most teams still don’t do it. They use one app for chat, another for tasks, a third for documentation, and wonder why information gets lost.
Zeb Evans argues the era of specialized tools is ending: “We believe the future of work is convergence—where you buy all software and AI from one platform.”
Conduct a tool audit. Map where your team stores information, tracks tasks, and communicates. If you’re using separate platforms for different functions, you’re creating friction. Consider consolidating them.
This is particularly important for UC&C teams managing rollouts across multiple time zones. When vendor contracts, deployment schedules, and technical specifications all live in one place, cross-functional collaboration gets significantly easier.
Protect Time for Actual Work
Task management apps are supposed to make you more productive, but they often just make you busier. Dustin Moskovitz, CEO of Asana, addressed this in an October 2025 interview with Stratechery, arguing instead for “structured workflows where AI acts as a filter”.
“The structure makes you more successful,” Moskovitz explained. Well-designed workflows mean you’re not constantly responding to notifications—the system handles routine matters and only surfaces what genuinely needs your attention.
Measure What Actually Matters
Most teams measure productivity wrong. They count tasks completed, hours logged, tickets closed. But these metrics just encourage people to look busy.
At Atlassian’s Team ’25 conference in April 2025, co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes challenged organizations to rethink their approach.
“We must kill the ideas and processes that no longer serve us to free up energy for what’s next.”
Instead of counting how many tasks individuals complete, track how long work takes to move through your system and use your platform’s reporting features to identify these bottlenecks.
Getting Implementation Right
Start with objectives: Before rolling out a platform, define what productivity actually means for your organization. Is it faster project delivery? Better resource utilization? Improved visibility? Your answer will determine which features matter.
Keep it simple: Excessive customization creates confusion. Establish standard workflows first and let teams customize later once they understand the basics.
Fix your notifications: Default settings are almost always too aggressive. Most teams need far fewer notifications than they think, so configure yours to respect focus time.
Integrate properly: Modern platforms connect with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. Use these integrations so task updates flow naturally into your team’s existing communication patterns rather than creating yet another place to check.
What Good Looks Like
Monday.com reported customers are “saving 1.5 billion minutes every year by automating 380 million tasks.” Your team likely won’t operate at that scale, but the principle holds: effective task management should demonstrably reduce time spent on administrative work.
The organizations succeeding in 2026 aren’t necessarily using the fanciest tools. They’re using their tools strategically: consolidating platforms to reduce friction, automating administrative work to reclaim time, protecting focus periods for deep work, and measuring system performance rather than individual busyness.
Task management apps can deliver significant productivity improvements, but only when deployed thoughtfully. The shift required is from doing more to doing what matters. For leaders managing the complexity of modern communications infrastructure, that distinction makes all the difference.
