In our age of information overload, here—newly revised and updated—are the everyday tools I use to manage the chaos.
As regular readers know, I think a lot about our limited attention and how to conserve it. One way to do this is to deal with the super-soaker of information squirting at your face all day, every day. This issue is about the tools I use to help manage that onslaught.
(Note: I first wrote about the suite of applications, services, products and gadgets I use to keep my head above water in 2012, then revised it in 2015, and then again in 2022, but enough has changed that it’s time for an update.)
By the way, I’m becoming suspicious of productivity as a metric. It substitutes quantity for quality, but I don’t have an articulate point of view on this yet.
Here are my “Change Your Life” productivity tools and how I use them. Please share yours in the comments.
This is a long piece, but unlike my usual it’s skimmable. I’ve divvied up the apps into sections:
- Analog
- Digital & AI
- Tasks
Analog (because not all productivity tools are digital)
Blank Index cards: I’m a fan of writing things down on pieces of paper rather than taking digital notes, although I’m also a passionate scanner and tagger (see Evernote discussion, below). I use blank 5 x 8 index cards like these. Piles of them are always on my desk.
Notebooks: When I’m not at my desk, I have notebooks because that way I don’t lose track of anything. I like the Volant line from Moleskine because the pages are perforated for easy scanning. They also lie flat nicely. I prefer plain paper to ruled or dotted, which can be hard to find.
Kokuyo has a similar, cheaper, version, but the plastic rings take up too much space in my backpack. I do have one in the glovebox of my car.
Pocket Notebooks: the Volant line from Moleskine is my preference for this size too. But you can also find less pricey versions at Muji (go to the store if you can because the website is hard to navigate) and at your local Kinokuniya bookstore.
I always have one of these little notebooks with me. It’s rude and distracting to whip out a smartphone, tablet or computer to take a note when I’m meeting with somebody (after all, I could be looking at Facebook), and despite my inhumanly fast typing speed on a conventional keyboard my thick fingers make tapping on a virtual keyboard slow. Old fashioned paper and pen help me to capture ideas and convey the truth about what I’m doing: engaging with what another person is saying.
Pens, Pens, Pens: For taking notes in meetings, I prefer cheap Japanese pens. I always have three different colored pens on my desk: black, blue-black, and red. The black pen is a Zebra Sarasa Clip with a thin line for when I need to write small. The blue-black and red pens are both Uniball Signo gel ink pens. The red pen is to capture to-dos. I love my iPad and Apple Pencil, but the ability to drop one pen and grab another color is more efficient.
Fountain Pens are a recent passion. I use them when I’m writing to think. A fountain pen helps me to slow down and focus. Rob Noorda gave me a Pilot for my birthday a while back (it lives in my backpack at all times). La Profesora brought me a beautiful Waterman from Paris, and Béatrice Mousli introduced me to Sailor inks. It is dangerously easy to fall down the fountain pen rabbit hole, but sure is a nice ride.
And after you’ve written things down…
ScanSnap scanner: Small, fast and powerful, this scanner integrates nicely with Evernote (more on that below). Using it, I can shove business cards, receipts, PDFs, notecards and the like into Evernote. If you buy this, then get in the habit of sorting and tagging things daily: it will only take a few minutes, but when you later need to find that thing that happened that time, you’ll be glad you did. More importantly, if you get distracted and forget, then it’s a drag when things pile up. When I’m running multiple projects, having all my notes scanned and tagged is priceless.
Scannable: Although the Fujitsu scanner is my go-to device, Evernote’s handy, free smartphone app turns your phone into a pretty good scanner, perfect for on-the-go capture of that receipt you just can’t lose. Or, if a new acquaintance is low on business cards, you can scan the last one and leave the hard copy behind. It’s also one-click to save the scan to Evernote, which is handy.
The Evernote mobile app has these capabilities as well, but I like a single purpose scanning app. Adobe Scan is another handy and free scanning app, but for my purposes its lack of interoperability with Evernote makes it a second choice.
Artefact Cards: My friend John V. Willshire of Smithery invented these. These cards are deceptively simple: small, blank playing cards with a bright color on one side and white on the other. Add a fine-point Sharpie and you have a playful, tactile medium for ideation, iteration and collaboration. The physicality of the cards is what makes them so useful: when you touch something you own it, at least in part. When John and I met for coffee in London a few years ago, he brought me a couple boxes. When we opened them up and started writing and drawing the ideas came flying fast.
The cards are different than Post-Its at least in part because of the slide-around quality… it’s easier to ideate, rearrange and juxtapose—to “dump and clump” as my friend Bill Sanders says. Use these cards, and you’ll find that group think-it-out sessions become more interactive. John is eloquent on how these things came to be here.
Digital & AI
Cozi: A shared family calendar that divvies up activities in columns by family member. When the kids were little, if my wife and son were doing something together it was easy for me to see that I’d be the one to pick up our daughter. UX-wise, Cozi is my leastfavorite daily productivity app because the UI is cluttered (the iPhone app is Flintsonian). Another ding is that Cozi has zero interoperability with other calendars, but it’s in the cloud, easy for any of us to update, and keeps the different strands of family activity separate but juxtaposed. The ads are intrusive on the free version, so I pay $5 per month.
Cozi’s other terrific function is shopping lists. If I’m heading to Costco, I can text La Profesora and ask her to add things directly into Cozi.
Dropbox: Drop dead simple file sharing across my two computers, iPhone, iPads and the web. It’s also fantastic for sharing big files, so you don’t have to cripple your correspondent’s email with that 1.3GB video.
Evernote: One of the two “you can take my left leg but spare me this” productivity services. Evernote isn’t an app: it’s a movement. It’s my prosthetic memory for storing brainstorms, receipts, flight and car rental reservations, PDFs, articles, account information… all sorted and tagged and searchable. The free version is enough for most people, but I happily pay $130 per year for one level up because that lets me shove everything into Evernote.
Evernote is for asset management rather than task management: its focus is on nouns (information to keep track of) rather than on verbs (actions to be performed). See the Tasks section below.
My longtime #1 wish for Evernote: Create notebooks within notebooks or folders within folders… that would help so much.
Google Voice: I’ve been using this since it was Grand Central, which Google acquired a million years ago. Call me, and all the phones I’m associated with ring (home, cell, work). I pick up the closest one. Missed calls get transcribed and emailed to me, domestic calls that I make are free, international calls are cheap, I can text from the computer and receive texts (although only domestic). A virtual concierge announces calls when I pick up the phone so I can screen easily, which helps with the infinite robocalls hitting me daily. Another benefit is that if I have multiple cell phones, I don’t have to think about which one to carry because all calls get routed through one number. During our time in Norway, I wished that it would forward to my Norwegian mobile number, but at least it went to the Vonage VOIP number that was virtually in the USA. Voice is part of Workspace (see next entry), but it’s too important to my productivity not to have its own entry.
Google Workspace: A combination of Google Docs, Google Calendar, G-Suite and more. This is the second of the two “you can take my left leg but spare me this” productivity services. While the capabilities of the word processor and spreadsheets aren’t as good as Microsoft’s, Google gets collaboration better than anybody. For example, their simple, easy and clear, cloud-based spreadsheet got me back 50% of an employee’s time a few years ago, and the integration with Gmail makes this a must-have. Google is trying to eat Dropbox’s lunch, but I still use them both: sometimes I don’t want everything to go through Google.
Instapaper: The other “insta.” A Niagara of information and links come at me every day via LinkedIn, Facebook/Threads, Bluesky (un-productivity apps), email, and general surfing. Often, I don’t have time to dive into something right then and there, but Instapaper’s handy “Read Later” button on the browser toolbar saves the article, makes it easier to read, and queues it up for later absorption. If you ever see me squinting at the iPad while on the elliptical machine, I’m probably looking at Instapaper. Smart phone and Tablet apps are musts. I also recommend upgrading to Premium, as it gives you quicker and better access to the archive of things you read once and are now trying to remember.
Perplexity, the much-in-the-news “knowledge engine” has cut my Googling in half. I also use ChatGPT and Gemini (I need to do more with Claude), but Perplexity’s source-sharing by default helps me double-check to see how accurate the information is likely to be.
Otter.ai is one of several AI-driven note takers, and it’s fantastic. It plugs into Zoom and other videoconference platforms, records, transcribes, and summarizes the meeting. You can also ask the built-in AI questions, and it will scour the transcript for answers. I use this in meetings all the time, and it’s also great for qualitative research. There’s a robust free offering, and then a sliding scale of premium offerings.
The best thing you can do to make your use of email more productive is to be thoughtful about sending and replying to email in the first place. I’ve written more about this here.
Email is a more pernicious distraction than social media because, for most people, if you turn social media off you don’t worry that you’re being irresponsible. Not so with email. Email is the ultimate FOMO, but instead of Fear of Missing Out, it’s FOSU: Fear of Screwing Up.
Boomerang for Gmail is a fantastic browser plugin that does many things, only one of which is important to me: “Pause Inbox.” OMFG do I love this function. Sure, I can just turn email off if I need to concentrate, but what if I need to catch up on email or consult something in my inbox while I’m working? Inbox Pause lets me have access to what’s already there while I keep the rest at bay. This should be a common feature across all email programs and services. With Apple’s Mac Mail, you have to go through a laborious process of taking an account offline and then later back online.
Follow Up Then: Such a simple and helpful idea. When you need a reminder as you’re sending an email, simply BCC this service with when you want the reminder, and it will send you a message at that time. So, if I ask a client or colleague to make a decision on something by Tuesday, I’ll BCC “tuesday@followupthen.com” and at that same time on Tuesday I’ll get a message back. You can also use 11amtuesday, or 1week or 1month, et cetera. The free version is robust, and at $5 per month the lowest level of the premium service is probably all you’ll ever need. From my friend Adam Boettiger.
Tasks
There are several different digital to-do lists, both as standalone services and features in bigger products. Both Evernote and Cozi have to-do lists, but I’m not crazy about either of them.
Right now, I’m using ToDoist. Formerly, I used ToodleDo but the site and app were unappealing to look at. There’s also the charmingly-named Remember the Milk. There are others, none of which stand out. As with scanning notes (see above), the challenge with digital to-do lists is that you have to manage them daily, otherwise the jackpot builds and it becomes a terrifying I-haven’t-done list.
Siri plus Apple Reminders (I’m firmly in the Apple ecosystem) are great for on-the-go task capture using either my iPhone or Apple Watch. “Siri, please remind me to set up overnight oatmeal at 9pm” goes straight to the Reminders app on my phone that also syncs with my other devices.
Task management is ripe for disruption by AI. Just imagine if a to-do list was proactive rather than reactive!
So what killer productivity tools have I missed? Please leave comments!
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* About the image: my initial prompt had to do with productivity information in ChatGPT generally, then I shared the essay and asked Chat to include that in its thinking. There was a long back and forth until I got the image above, which is just OK.
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