The Developer Productivity Paradox: More Tools, Less Flow

By 11:30 a.m. the other day, I had Cursor, GitHub, Slack, Jira, Retool, AWS Console, Beekeeper Studio, PostHog, Figma, Notion, Supabase, ClickHouse, Sentry, Google Meet, Claude Code, and PullFlow all open.

Dependabot was buzzing. GitHub had three review requests waiting. A Slack Huddle request popped up.

I merged maybe 30 lines of code.

My MacBook wasn’t the only thing overheating — so was I. Every click felt like a brain reboot.

The Cost of Switching Tools

Cursor → Slack → Jira → GitHub → AWS Console → Retool → Supabase → PostHog → ClickHouse → back to Cursor.

Ten seconds here, thirty seconds there. Multiply that by a dozen interruptions and your morning is gone.

Research from UC Irvine shows it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain focus after an interruption (Gloria Mark, 2008). A single Slack ping isn’t just a blip — it can sink half an hour of momentum. Do that three times before lunch, and no wonder I’ve barely moved past 30 lines of code.

Conflicting Signals

By late morning, the dashboards start fighting:

• Retool says conversion dipped.
• PostHog says it’s steady.
• ClickHouse shows the opposite.
• Jira insists the sprint’s on track.

None of them are wrong. But together they’re noise. And while I’m busy trying to reconcile them, flow is gone.

Studies show frequent context switching not only wastes time but also lowers code quality (GraphApp, Hatica). Losing focus means more defects creep in, even if the dashboards look fine.

A Smaller Cockpit

The only days I feel productive are the ones where I shrink my cockpit down to the essentials:

• Cursor, GitHub, Slack — 80% of my work lives here.
• Jira, checked twice a day.
• Retool/PostHog/ClickHouse, only when debugging actually demands it.
• Google Meet, only when scheduled.
• Slack Huddles, only when absolutely necessary.

Everything else stays closed. Dependabot spam? Muted. Slack channels that aren’t urgent? Muted. AWS alarms that don’t matter? Muted.

And one small ritual: I write down three tasks in Notion (or even a scratch file) before I start. Otherwise the tools decide my day for me.

The little glue is more useful than big dashboards: PR updates in Slack so I’m not bouncing between GitHub and chat, Jira tickets linking directly to PRs instead of sending me on a scavenger hunt. Those are the changes that actually buy back focus.

Measuring Flow, Not Velocity

Most dashboards look fine: Jira velocity up, PostHog flat, AWS all green, GitHub charts trending faster.

But none of that reflects whether I had two uninterrupted hours in Cursor.

That’s why frameworks like DORA and SPACE emphasize dev well-being and flow—not just delivery speed Atlassian on DORA metrics.

The signals I actually trust are smaller:

• Time to first meaningful review, not just merge speed.
• Hours of uninterrupted flow in Cursor.
• PRs with real human comments, not just Dependabot approvals.
• How many tools it took to finish a change.

They don’t look glamorous on a sprint slide, but they’re closer to the truth of whether the team is moving.

Closing

By the time I’ve cycled through Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub, Slack, Jira, Retool, AWS Console, Beekeeper Studio, PostHog, Figma, Notion, Supabase, ClickHouse, Sentry, and Google Meet—I’ve spent more time managing tools than building.

PullFlow helps in the background by cutting some of that bounce between GitHub and Slack, but the bigger point remains: productivity isn’t about how many dashboards you can open. It’s about how few you actually need.

What’s the smallest stack you could ship something meaningful from?