Knowledge workers have an arsenal of tooling they trust to make them more productive and make their work lives a bit easier. More companies are adopting the BYOS (Bring your own software) model - much to my own skepticism.
Regardless - here are the tools that I use to make my life a bit easier.
Productivity
- Todoist - Ridiculously amazing and beautiful todo app. Everything I need to do is tracked here - it’s a single repository of every action (past, current, and future) that I need to take.
- Evernote - This is where all my personal knowledge is stored - from references for appliances in the house to goal planning. It’s where all my content flows into and makes the entire repository searchable and omnipresent.
- Arc Browser - Yet another chromium browser - but delivers a better UI and controls browser window creation. I particularly love that all browser tabs are saved so you can review what you did all day long.
- DayOne - This is where my private writings live. It’s a simple journaling app. There’s no fluff. It comes with some features that make journaling a lot more enjoyable and helps you recall past entries.
- Google Workspace - I’m bias, we use this at work, but I love the entire Google Suite of applications. They recently added blocks and smart chips to give Google docs more notion-esque functionality too!
- Notion - I have a love-hate relationship with this tool, but you cannot deny its flexibility. It’s dizzying what you can do with it. I use Notion and Super.so to power this website and keep track of my hobbies and interests.
Personal Finance
- Mint - I’ve always been split between using Mint and Personal Capital, but Mint is just superior for budgeting and tracking day-to-day spend. Mint helps me track my net worth, budget against household expenses, and track savings towards specific goals.
- Betterment - I love Betterment’s robo-investment strategy - you just contribute to the account, set your risk tolerance, and the robo-advisor invests across the assets in their portfolio. I’ve seen Betterment manage my assets remarkably well during economic downturns.
- Fidelity - This is my investment platform of choice, it also gives me access to Fidelity’s low ER index funds. I still invest in Vanguards indexes purely out of habit.
Utilities
- Witch (Mac) - A much more robust CMD+TAB experience for the mac that even allows you to cycle through tabs in multiple chrome windows.
- Magnet (Mac) - Window snapping and management for the Mac. Since Apple struggles with basics, apps like these make window management significantly more enjoyable.
- Alfred (Mac) - Replacement for spotlight that is a lot more robust. The key benefit is the ability to configure hotkeys to trigger searches in sites. More outlined here: Configure Alfred to search online resources
- Alt: Raycast - currently free and has a significantly nicer UI with an extension store built in.
- 1Password (All) - I freaking love 1Password. This password manager makes sure that I always have a repository of credentials to access whatever I need. I also use to to have unique passwords for every service to create a security blast radius (if my data is leaked for one account, it’s just for one account, not for everything).
- BetterTouchTool (Mac) - This supercharges your mac trackpad and keyboard to create more customizations than MacOS allows - see more here: Navigating Chrome Faster with BetterTouchTool
- F.lux (Mac) - To me, all laptop screens are glaring and hurt my eyes. F.lux helps make the screen warmer and reduce your blue light intake during bedtime. It’s a joy to use. I especially love the ‘dark room’ mode which is amazing for early AM game camera scouting.
- Cleanshot X (Mac) - A better screenshot utility for the Mac - it’s wicked fast, allows in-line screenshot edits, and can record videos/gifs.
Sites
- Concensus - Helps dig for research papers online.
- Hemingway - Simplifies writing and makes your shit writing sound good.
- Reddit - There’s a community for everything imaginable. When I get stuck on a problem, I go off to Reddit to find other folks that were in similar positions.