The standard tech stack audit goes like this: list everything you’re paying for, cancel what you haven’t used in the last month, done.
That’s useful. It’s not enough.
The bigger cost of a bloated tech stack isn’t the monthly subscriptions. It’s the cognitive load — the mental overhead of managing multiple platforms, remembering which tool does what, logging in and out of different systems, and dealing with the friction when tools don’t integrate cleanly.
For neurodivergent brains especially, context-switching between platforms is expensive. Every time you move from one tool to another to accomplish a single task, your brain pays a tax. Do that ten times a day across fifteen tools and you’ve burned significant mental energy before you’ve done anything resembling actual work.
A good tech stack audit measures both the financial cost and the cognitive cost. Here’s how to actually do it:
List every tool you use — paid, free, occasionally used, the ones you keep meaning to cancel. Don’t filter yet.
Rate each tool on cognitive load, not just cost. Ask: How often do I dread opening this? How much mental energy does it take to use effectively? How often does it create friction? Score 1-5.
Identify your integration gaps. Map which tools need to talk to each other and whether they actually do reliably. Every place where data has to be manually transferred is a cognitive load point and a failure risk.
Separate essential from habitual. If this tool disappeared tomorrow, would your business break, or would you just need an alternative? The ones that would genuinely break your business are essential. The others are candidates for replacement.
Identify consolidation opportunities. Look for clusters of tools doing related things and research whether a single platform could handle that cluster with acceptable functionality.
The article also covers three principles worth keeping that most tech advice skips: integration over features, why one login fewer is a real (not trivial) win, and what it actually means when you consistently avoid a specific tool.