One more proof that we can’t make it. Not for long, surely.

Digital collaborative productivity tools should help workers to work remotely, possibly on different independent teams at once.

In theory, that is. In practice, I keep hearing complaints, at increasing rates, by people overwhelmed and frustrated because, instead of having to find documents only in their mailboxes or a corporate server, they have to hunt them every time across any combination of many Slack chats, Sharepoint or Google Drive folders, to name only the most popular tools.

And, more often than not, what all these people independently end up with as the “least-ugly, least-effort” solution to survive that mess is the same, primitive, ubiquitous tool: their email inbox, or archive. That is the place where it takes less time than with any other system to create and search one “index” of every file one has to keep available to pay the bills.

Peak Complexity is the idea that “all societies and civilizations have natural limits to complexity and diversity, and surely collapse when they pass them”.

If the frustration from the complexity of bearing too many “productivity tools” in grievous working conditions keep growing, western societies may collapse because of that limit, even before peak oil, climate change and similar disasters.

What about YOU? Are you, too, unproductively overwhelmed by productivity?

Image source: “We are at peak complexity, and it sucks”… in 2016!