Workflow-Centric Computing

Depending on what you consider to be the genesis of mobile devices, it’s been somewhere between 1 to 2 decades since smartphones and tablets have overtaken personal computers as the primary computing gadgets—at least for personal use. For professionals in the workplace, PCs have stubbornly stayed the productivity tool of choice for the office, taking advantage of smartphone-driven advances in batteries and power efficiencies but keeping the same hardware form factors with modest iterations on operating system paradigms. It turns out that PCs are still really good for serious work.

The difference lies in PCs’ ability to model workflows. The GUI was invented at Xerox PARC, commercialized with the original Apple Macintosh, and popularized with Microsoft Windows. This concept of managing floating windows on a 2D canvas, representing multiple programs running concurrently, has persisted as a great way to manage work. Each program can be semi-specialized to its part of the task, and all it takes is tiny, atomic pieces of interoperability—copying text and images, importing files, or passing over some formatted data between apps1—to establish a coherent workflow.

Credit, though, goes to UNIX. Its philosophy spoke of small, simple utilities that can be composed to do interesting stuff, and this was defined and implemented in the 1970s on the command line well before GUIs expanded the popularity of PCs. In modern computing with our emphasis on web services, the rough equivalent would be something like IFTTT, connecting multiple and generally disparate services for non-trivial bits of automation.

Given the history and the effectiveness of supporting complex workflows via modular applications, it’s unfortunate that recent design trends have driven towards more simplicity and full-screened, singularly focused computing. Maybe it made sense on the first couple of iterations of the smartphone with its limited screen sizes and computing & memory bandwidth, but phones have grown by leaps and bounds—they’re comparable to small computers a decade ago in hardware capabilities. The limitations are now with the operating systems and the abilities of its users to leverage the powerful devices. Tablets have done a bit better to cater to power users who want to establish their workflows, but they’re getting there by reintegrating pieces of the PC: adding keyboard folios, reintroducing file systems, and implementing tiled and floating window managers for multitasking.

For instance, my setup has my email client (currently Mimestream), my to-do app (longtime user of Things), and my calendar (Fantastical, still) all on the same virtual desktop alongside a web browser window. This combination of apps lets me triage and process incoming tasks, schedule them on my calendar when necessary or push to a third-party app like Calendly, and then push items that don’t fit a predefined time window as a to-do with reminders. Sure, the apps have some level of integration with each other, and I suppose you can technically do the same thing on a phone with lots of app-switching, but at a fraction of the speed2. I have similar desktops for processing photos, going through my RSS and social media news feeds, and on rare occasions, coding.

Sadly, I see the modern paradigm of singular screens and apps becoming the norm. I see colleagues with powerful multitasking machines at work with a single, giant browser window, clicking between 50+ tabs to approximate this workflow at a much slower, more error-prone process. Alternatively, some services like Notion and ClickUp are taking the big-bundle approach, and instead of encouraging modularity, they’re expanding their apps to adjacencies, tying together wikis and docs and chat and email into one platform. As you can imagine, it’s difficult for a single company to build and maintain all these tools—let alone to do it well.

I suppose all of this is me pining for more interoperability between apps and services so that power users are free to compose the best-of-class utilities and tools into their ideal workflows. Investing just a little bit of optimization here goes a long way—and you get to feel like a badass.


  1. E.g., Pasting a CSV into Excel properly populates a spreadsheet.

  2. Not to mention the OS getting in the way by deciding to reload a switched out app and losing all its context.

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