Do-everything workplace managers like Asana and Trello promise organizational utopias. But they reveal limitations that date all the way back to the factory floors of the 1900s. //

If you put something on a digital kanban board without enough information, it is no more useful than it was before you created the task. Workforce software is offloading the job of managing projects to countless mini-projects, each only as useful as the skill and utility of the individual user. And we can’t expect each user to be both a maker and a self-manager, especially with the imperfect tools on the market. When we line up the Trellos, Asanas, Wrikes, Airtables, and endless clones of the same inherent project-management misses, their differences matter less than their end results—to paraphrase Anna Karenina’s line about families, each project-management app promises the same happiness, but each creates unhappy users in its own way.