I don’t care too much about productivity apps, but in late 2023, I found one I really loved, mostly because it had everything: a to-do list, background music, a timer, a gamified points and ranking system, and even a community chat to occasionally share whatever was on your mind. It was called Sukha.

I used the app every day and got pretty involved in the community. Sadly, it went downhill from when I joined. They moved the standalone app into the browser, completely changed the user interface, and many bugs started happening. It was a classic case of engineer’s disease: trying to fix something that’s not broken and making it worse in the process.

Eventually, I got fed up enough to start looking for alternatives. There was no shortage of them. Well, productivity tools in general, that is. With one search, you can find hundreds of Pomodoro timers, focus music apps, and to-do list tools. Finding one that combines all the features I wanted was a bit trickier. Eventually, I decided to give LifeAt a try.

LifeAt was available as a standalone app, which is nice when you’re trying to have your virtual work headquarters somewhere other than lost in the million tabs you already have open in your browser. It had beautiful backgrounds, sounds, timed tasks, and so on. There was also a community with a handful of chat rooms, and they boasted four million users. So I gave the free trial a go.

I still can’t 100% put my finger on why, but despite the beautiful design and flawless features, but after a few days of using LifeAt, I felt…nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had no connection to the app. No interest in using it. It was like a leaf lying somewhere on my terrace: If the wind carried it away any moment, I would not have cared at all.

One thing I did notice was that the chat rooms felt empty. On-screen, they had thousands of members. But no one shared anything. The only room where I could even get a response was one that consisted exclusively of high school students studying for exams—and even then it took a day to get a single answer. I soon abandoned ship in search of greener pastures.

After LifeAt, I looked at multiple other solutions. They all looked and felt more or less the same: beautiful but uninteresting. Eventually, I gave up on most of my requirements and settled on a tool called Flocus. Not because it was great, but because it covered the essentials: an on-screen timer that I can set to be as long as I estimate my task to be, along with a list of other, upcoming to-dos.

Having traveled around the productivity app space and back again once more, my number one takeaway was this: Soulless software is everywhere. We are now drowning in a sea of beautiful apps that make us feel nothing yet keep us tapping buttons and paying our subscription charges. The more I think about it, the more examples I can find. And this is to say nothing of the software spaces I’m less familiar with, like those for design, coding, making music, process management, and so on. If you’re experienced in either of these, perhaps you’ve noticed the same.

For many of the apps I looked at, I couldn’t even find who made it. After much digging, I’d end up at some blandly named “venture studio” in Canada—probably an agency firing out apps by the truckload, hoping one will go viral to then charge for the premium features—or an anonymous Twitter account with no posts in the past month.

I’m sure it’s not the only part, but that aspect I can’t and never will knock Sukha for: The community was the best in the business. Just real people doing real work and sharing their wins and frustrations along the way. One was a freelance designer. Another doing his PhD. Someone was trying to make it as a writer. It was the most water cooler chat I’ve had since water cooler chat stopped being a thing, at least for us remote workers.

Whatever you’re building, whether it runs on code, trumpets, or heated floors: Remember that it also runs, first and foremost, on people. Make sure it has some soul to keep the gang together.