We're stuck in rectangles.

Published Nov 25, 2025 · Around 2 minutes to read

You're probably reading these words in a browser, or the LinkedIn app. You're reading this inside a fixed rectangle. Soon, you'll jump over to another rectangle: email, another browser tab, or a different app.

And so your days go: jumping from rectangle to digital rectangle, copying data from one, and pasting it into another.

This is inefficient.

And it's a particularly bad design since screens can render infinite representations. Yet we choose to confine ourselves to rectangular prisons, where data is contained, has to be rendered in an extremely specific format (prison uniforms), and cannot leave without our explicit permission.

Let's say I'm creating a presentation, which is a result of several conversations over email, video, and Slack conversations. We share files in Google Drive and Canva. I refer to my meeting notes from Granola. And once it's put together, I schedule a meeting in GCal to walkthrough the changes.

Throughout this process, I've tabbed over a 100 times between applications. Opening and closing them like physical filing cabinets. I use pieces of an app. I want to be able to tear those pieces out of my apps and bring them all together in a freeform canvas to get my work done.

Today's operating systems don't allow us to do that. And it limits the way we think.

I've posted previously about the Browser Company's philosophy about apps being too constraining for modern knowledge work: “We think in projects, goals, and people. So why are our smartphones built around apps?”

I came across another article by Alexander Obenauer that expands on this. I highly recommend reading it: here. Here's a key quote:

"Our software interfaces are fiercely rigid; they can’t be meaningfully nudged — in big ways or small — to more closely reflect our mental models or meet our individual needs. We can’t modify the interfaces which render our things, and we can’t bring things together to reflect our thinking. Each thing lives in its pre-determined box, can’t be taken elsewhere, and can only be seen in a handful of pre-determined ways.

As more of our cognitive artifacts collapse into the realm of personal computing, this problem becomes increasingly alarming."