🔀 Incoherent: Why We Should Let Employees Bring Their Own Productivity Stack

Onboarding to a new workplace can be overwhelming, but it’s also a time of significant disruption. Every new job brings an upskilling cycle of learning fresh rituals, adapting to unfamiliar productivity flows, and embracing a new set of company tools. While this is meant to ensure everyone’s aligned and efficient, it can often lead to a frustrating dip in productivity and a months-long journey before hitting your best-foot-forward.

But what if there’s a better way?

The Case for “Bring Your Own Productivity/Agents” (BYOP/A)

In most modern workplaces, people rely on a favorite set of tools, prompts, AI agents, and custom workflows that help them operate at their best. Moving to a new job, especially in tech, usually means leaving much of that behind, resetting workflows, and taking weeks (if not months) to regain past productivity levels.

What if we changed this default? If companies allowed employees to bring their preferred productivity stack; be it productivity apps, custom prompts, or Agents, and made it easy to plug in and go, we could drastically shrink the unproductive onboarding dip.

Making Tools More Flexible: Adapting to Changing Workplaces

An essential enabler is giving people a way to keep the same accounts across jobs. Workplace tools will need to accommodate this: offering both a “primary” and “secondary” email option so changing work emails can simply be attached as a secondary (as GitHub elegantly does). This allows for continuity and less painful migrations when switching organizations.

Documenting Mental Models: The New Career Differentiator

The next frontier isn’t just about which tools you use, but how you use them. Employees start maintaining living documents of their “work mental model”. How their prompts, tools, and agents empower them. This transparency allows for:

• Easier onboarding, as teams can align on best practices.
• Knowledge sharing, as personalized workflows become part of team intelligence.
• Career differentiation, with mental models and tool-kits becoming a new portfolio or cover letter that demonstrates unique working styles and value.

The Cultural Shift: Tooling as a Platform, Not a Lock-In

For this to work, companies need to shift from “locking in” employees to specific tools, toward offering platforms that integrate with diverse personal stacks. The future looks like a hybrid: core company platforms (for security and compliance) alongside plug-and-play slots where employees connect their own agents, workflows, and productivity hacks.

The Upside: Faster Ramp, More Empowered Teams

• Faster productivity: Employees get up to speed using tools they are already masters of.
• Less friction: No need to relearn everything.
• Greater agency: People feel in control, able to bring their “A-game” from day one.
• Richer culture: Documented mental models foster cross-pollination of the very best ways of working.

In short:
Adopting “bring your own productivity” as a principle could reshape how we think about onboarding, productivity, and even career growth. The tools we use, the prompts and agents we design, and the ways we document our mental models of work; these might soon be as valuable as our resumes themselves.