The tools we keep

Tools are the one purchase that spends your attention as well as your money. Every app in the studio stack wants a tab, a shortcut, a notification channel, and a corner of your working memory. So once a year, in the quiet week of January, we lay the whole toolbox on the table and make everything re-apply for its job.

The three questions

The audit is not a spreadsheet of features. Each tool gets the same three questions, answered out loud, by the people who actually use it:

1. Would we adopt it today? Not “is it fine” — fine is how dead tools stay on payroll. If it showed up new this morning, knowing what we know, would we say yes?
2. Does it hold work, or make work? The best tools are places where decisions land. The worst are places where decisions go to be reformatted, re-linked, and re-discussed.
3. What does leaving look like? Plain-text notes leave in an afternoon. A proprietary database of five years of research does not. Exit cost is a price you agree to at entry, so we read it before signing.

What survived this year

The survivors share a temperament rather than a category. A version-controlled monorepo that remembers everything. A design tool the whole studio can point at. A terminal, a text editor, and a handful of command-line friends that have outlived four generations of shinier rivals. A shared calendar that is allowed to interrupt, and a chat app that is not.

The cuts were all a version of the same thing: a second place to do a job we already had a place for. The second whiteboard app. The third to-do system. The AI notetaker that produced summaries nobody re-read of meetings nobody needed. Each was good software. None of them survived question two.

A tool you almost use is more expensive than a tool you never use — the almost is where the attention goes.

Boring on purpose

The pattern after a few years of this is unmistakable: the toolbox gets more boring and the work gets better. New tools still get trials here — two weeks, one real project, one owner — but the bar they must clear is no longer “is this impressive?” It is “which incumbent does this retire?” A tool that only adds must add a lot.

None of this is a verdict on any product. It is a verdict on accumulation. Your stack is a studio-sized decision about where attention lives, renewed by default every day you do not examine it. Examine it once a year, and the default flips: everything you touch is there because it earned the place — this year, not three years ago.