The Productivity Tools I Actually Use

Productivity advice is mostly content marketing. The tools that get the most coverage are the ones with affiliate programs and slick landing pages. I’ve tried a lot of them. Here’s what I actually have open right now, and why.

Note-Taking: Obsidian, Not Notion

I spent two years in Notion. I had beautiful databases, nested pages, and a system for everything. I also spent more time maintaining the system than using it. Notion’s strength — its flexibility — turned out to be its problem for me. Every new note raised the question of where it belonged.

I switched to Obsidian eighteen months ago and my notes are now a flat folder of markdown files. I use two plugins: Dataview for lightweight queries and Templater for recurring note structures. That’s it. The notes are just files on my computer, synced via my existing cloud storage, readable without any app installed.

Notion is genuinely excellent if you’re managing a team or building a knowledge base for others. For personal thinking, a text editor is hard to beat.

What About Roam, Logseq, and the Others?

I’ve tried both. Roam’s bidirectional links are clever in demos and high-maintenance in practice. Logseq is Obsidian’s closest rival and I’d recommend it for anyone who prefers an open-source, block-based approach. Neither stuck for me.

Task Management: Boring Is Better

My task list is a plain text file following the todo.txt format. One line per task, optional priority marker, optional context tag. It opens instantly, works in any editor, and doesn’t require an internet connection.

Here’s what I stopped using and why:

1. Todoist — excellent app, but I was curating my task list more than working through it. Adding due dates and priority levels became a way to feel productive without doing anything.
2. Things 3 — beautiful and Apple-native, but the friction of opening a separate app made me skip logging tasks when I was already in a terminal.
3. Linear — genuinely great for engineering projects with a team, overkill for personal use.
4. Notion tasks — see above.

A text file in my home directory, opened with a keybind, is the system I’ve kept for over a year. Low friction beats features.

Focus: One Rule, No App Required

I don’t use a Pomodoro app, a focus mode subscription, or a website blocker. I use a rule: phone is physically out of reach when I’m working. That’s it. The research on smartphone proximity reducing cognitive capacity is convincing enough that I stopped looking for a software solution.

If you need something technical: I run a simple shell alias that kills my browser and mutes system audio when I start a deep work block. Takes thirty seconds to set up and costs nothing.

Terminal Workflow

This is where I’ve invested the most. A good terminal setup compounds over time in a way that a new note app never will.

My current stack is minimal: zsh with a hand-edited config file (no framework), fzf for fuzzy history and file finding, ripgrep instead of grep, and tmux for persistent sessions. I resisted tmux for years thinking it was overcomplicated. The moment it clicked was when I realized I could detach from a running process, close my laptop, reopen it the next day, and everything was exactly where I left it.

The productivity industry wants to sell you a new app every six months. The honest answer is usually: use fewer tools, learn them deeply, and stop optimizing the system.