Why I Use One AI Tool Instead of 10 (Compound Effect)

I used to collect AI tools the way some people collect sneakers: one for writing, one for meetings, one for research, one for “automation,” one for tasks, one for notes, and somehow none of them talked to each other. It felt like I was upgrading my productivity. In reality, I was just upgrading my friction.

At some point I noticed something uncomfortable: I wasn’t losing time on the work. I was losing time on the transitions between the work. That’s when I stopped chasing “10% better” tools and started going all-in on one system.

Tool sprawl doesn’t feel expensive until you do the math

When you add a new tool, you rarely think about the full price. You see the feature. You don’t see the switching.

Switching isn’t just opening another tab. It’s reloading context. It’s remembering where the information lives. It’s re-deciding how you do the same thing in yet another UI. It’s finding the right page, the right project, the right prompt, the right template, and then getting pulled into whatever notifications are waiting for you there.

Researchers who study attention and digital work have consistently shown that interruptions and task switching carry a real cost. Gloria Mark’s work is often summarized with a brutal number: it can take around 20+ minutes to fully get back into focus after an interruption. Whether your personal number is 5 minutes or 25 minutes, the effect is the same. A day made of constant micro-switches becomes a day that feels busy and produces very little.

The real problem is attention residue

There’s a second tax that’s harder to notice: even after you switch, a part of your brain stays behind.

When you leave a task unfinished and jump to another one, you don’t get a clean reset. You carry leftover thoughts, open loops, and half-made decisions into the next task. That “residue” makes the next thing slower, messier, and more tiring than it should be.

If you’ve ever reread the same paragraph three times because you can’t get your mind to stop thinking about a Slack message, you’ve felt it.

Why one tool wins: compounding, not collecting

Here’s the shift that changed everything for me: productivity doesn’t come from having more tools. It comes from having stronger defaults.

When you commit to one tool as your home base, you start building muscle memory. You learn the shortcuts. You refine the templates. You stop deciding where things go because there is one obvious place. You build automations once and then you cash the check every day.

That’s the compound effect.

A small improvement that you repeat hundreds of times becomes a big advantage. Saving two minutes a day sounds like nothing. Until it’s the end of the year and you’ve bought back hours of deep work that used to be burned on “where is that doc?” and “wait, which tool did we use for this?”

Consolidation versus best-of-breed (and why I still pick consolidation)

I get the counterargument. A “best-of-breed” stack looks rational on paper: pick the top app for each job.

The issue is that your day is not a product comparison spreadsheet. Your day is a sequence of moments. Most moments don’t need best-in-class. They need fast, reliable, and consistent.

The best writing tool in the world is not helpful if the note lives in one place, the action item lives in another place, the meeting transcript lives in a third place, and the follow-up lives in your head.

So I optimize for a different metric: how quickly can I go from thought to captured, from captured to clarified, and from clarified to shipped, without breaking focus?

What this looks like in my day (founder reality)

Most days, I’m switching between strategy, product, writing, hiring, sales, and customer support. The work changes constantly. That’s exactly why the toolchain can’t be another source of randomness.

When I keep everything in one AI workspace, the workflow gets boring in the best way. Capturing is always the same. Searching is always the same. Turning a messy note into structured output is always the same. The system holds the context so my brain doesn’t have to.

That boredom is a feature. It’s what protects my attention.

The rule I use now

If a new AI tool can’t replace an existing one, it has to earn its place by being exceptional. Otherwise it’s just another login, another prompt history, another place for my knowledge to fragment.

I’d rather have one tool that gets 90% right and that I use fluently than ten tools that get 99% right but keep me in permanent setup mode.

If you want the compound effect, pick a home base

If you feel “busy” but not “effective,” there’s a decent chance you don’t have a work problem. You have a workflow fragmentation problem.

Pick one place where work lives. One place where decisions get written down. One place where action items are created. One place where your AI lives with your context.

Then commit long enough for the benefits to compound. The first week will feel slower because you’re building the system. The next months are where the interest kicks in.