My Backbone Apps
It’s been a while since I have posted here, so today I wanted to share a bit about one of my favourite past time: productivity apps. Over the years, I have tried in some way or the almost all the popular (and sometimes not so popular apps). Through those years, I have gained an insight into, not only into the kind of apps that work with my particular bend of grey matter, but also the ones that are most likely to stick with me even if they don’t offer me the latest and greatest in features and UX.
Does this mean they will stick with me forever? Probably not! I love redefining what personal and professional productivity means to me relatively often (but not as often as I used to) and that means there’s a chance that this list will be out of date in a year. However, as I’m getting older, I am less inclined to shake up my anchor digital systems, so who knows — this might be the end game for a while.
Let’s dive into the system.
Things #
If there’s one app in my arsenal that has stood the test of time, jobs, personal milestones and innumerable other changes, that would be Things. This app is an indispensable tool and has been a constant companion for me almost 7 years. It’s the app that runs my life and is also the app, that I am most sensitive to missing features from when I switch to one of the other competitors. No matter how much the more shiny features in those other apps entice me, I always come back to Things, just because my brain works the fastest within the apps buttery smooth interface and strict bounds of structuring work.
Over the years I have perfected my own system in Things, that works exactly like I want it to. It’s a system that I am hard pressed to replicate anywhere else other than the guilded cage of Things elegant GTD system and UX.
If I had to pick just one app from this list as my forever productivity, it will unequivocally be Things.
Obsidian #
Obsidian is the app where I come to think. Frankly, when I first tried Obsidian almost 2 years ago, I found the app ugly. However, almost a year ago, I was managing a lot of projects both personal and professional. Up until then I had been satisfied with Bear (especially the second version), which had been an mainstay app for managing my knowledge for a while - but, I seemed to keep hitting the limits of the app frequently. I realised I needed more degrees of freedom with my notes to allow lateral thinking and I decide to give Obsidian a go. To my surprise, not only had the app improved by leaps and bound, the sync, plugins and overall look and feel that could be customised to look quite nice now, made me really get back into it.
I haven't looked back since. I don't follow any PARAs or a million other Obsidian guru's selling short courses on how to organise your "PKM". I simply dump my notes, tag when I feel like, file them in folders when I feel like it. The paid sync service has been flawless for me and I do all my thinking, archiving and most importantly writing in it now (including this post).
I still like Bear and I think the app has a lot of potential; but at this point of my personal and professional life, obsidian fits me better.
Fantastical #
The flip side to Things, Fantastical is the place where I commit to things. I have been a long time calendar user, getting super into it during my uni days. I have continued using calendars as immutable event ledger of my life since then. Every important commitment makes its way back into my calendar. I used and enjoyed Apple calendar for quite some time, until I finally pulled the plug and got Fantastical around 3 years ago and in that time it has become a core part of my daily workflow.
I enjoy using the fluid NLP to add events, switch between calendar sets using keyboard shortcuts, interesting calendars (i subscribe to the F1 calendar and Aussie holidays). I also love that it syncs with my work google workspace account, fastmail calendar and our shared family iCloud calendar in an instant and just always works. I can't count the number of times Apple calendar has missed an appointment request via google workspace, completely lost an event or just simply decided to not alert me for an event change.
I don't subscribe to the school of tasks and events in the same app. I prefer to keep the separate. My tasks tell me what to do, but they're are more or less fungible. But my events are not. It's very rare that I put something in my calendar that is fungible.
Devonthink #
This has been a blackhorse entry into my workflow over the last few months. Initially, I hesitated mentioning it in this post as I do think it sits in a separate island to the apps above. However, while the past apps are my golden trifecta; this is such an indispensable tool for me, that it's worth a mention.
Devonthink is many things (far more than I probably will ever use it for), but I essentially use it as my paperless office + research vault. I have a few databases for personal and financial documents. This is where anything that is saved to my desktop or scanner folder in iCloud gets auto moved to (thanks to Hazel and Devonthinks ctrl+c).
I also use the companion Devonthink to Go app for iPhone and iPad; and it has already saved me from going home and fetching documents a few times. There are two main features of devonthink that are core to my workflow now:
- Auto moving files to the right database and folder, based on it learning my behaviours for previous files
- Being a really good pdf reader and highlighter/note taker on my iPad - which I use to read research papers and pdf ebooks
It's an expensive one time purchase app, but I find it's good value for me. Might not be for everyone.
Overall, super happy with this setup for now, as I find it help me stay productive; but also allows me the freedom to flex hidden or more advanced capabilities of these apps when the need calls for.
I plan to do an individual in depth workflow posts for each of these apps in the near future, detailing my own workflow.
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