Accretive Versus Ephemeral Tools
Tools have two basic modalities: accretive and ephemeral.
Accretive tools compound as work in them. Whatever you create or change stays around. Things build on top of one another.
Ephemeral tools are tabula rossa each time you come to them. You start over every time.
According to Matt:
Ephemeral tools are about the conversation. Slack is one. Zoom is another. Google Docs, weirdly, is another, even though it’s all about files. There’s no shared “front page” to Google Drive and no Schelling Points for team members to gather around, so all documents are temporary working documents (and doing otherwise is pushing water uphill).
Accretive tools build over time. Developer tools tend to work like this: platform-as-code. Wikis are the main one: Notion is accretive. (I love Notion.) Pipeline-based tools like Trello fall on the accretive end, for me – memory resides in the tool, not the users. Accretive tools need gardening because they don’t forget by default.
Matt Webb offers this distinction in his article The Map Room.