In a 2026 effort to simplify my stack and de-platform, I needed to build and remix some tools to get to better GTD. MdViews is a first release in this series. It parses markdown frontmatter and creates previewable picklists and views of your notes. Think Obsidian’s dataviews or Notion’s databases, but lighter, simpler, and faster.
harsh has been a surprisingly good accountability watchdog for forging and keeping my habits. What started out as a simple parser has turned into an indispensible tool for helping me get longer range goals done in life. Some simple changes have made it even better for long term goals and tracking.
Be your own streaming service. Free yourself from bad content and choice paralysis. Curation and focus beats unending libraries. Easy setup.
Yup, it’s that time of year again. My annual list of the tools I use and sharing what works for my productivity stack. I hope you find something useful for yourself or your workflows here.
I’m not really a stuff guy. I try to keep purchases minimal and to high quality stuff that lasts.
Why might my gear be interesting? I’ve been travelling as a digital nomad now for over a year, living without a real residence and often leveraging hotels and visa stays to bounce between various countries here in SE Asia (Singapore, Bali, Thailand, and now Hong Kong).
Riffing off my one-bag travel post from a few years back and it’s post-covid update , a number of things had changed, including my assumptions about how I would be travelling as a nomad, so felt an update was due.
2023 felt like it was about simplifying. Getting down to a non-aspirational, efficient, simple stack for productivity, planning, and collaboration. I focused more on my systems with simpler or fewer tools, rather than trying to find the one tool to do everything — and worrying less about aspirational (and heavily influencer influenced) goals like zettelkasten and knowledge bases and focused on good planning and getting things done. This is what that looked like by the end of 2023.
[This is the first in a multi-part series of posts on setting, executing on, and accomplishing your goals. This first post is on executing and about having a productivity stack to manage the various elements that affect your productivity.]
Systems trump tools.
Obsessing over the One True Tool is counterproductive and driven by insecurity, and is busywork versus real execution. Productivity is about how you manage processes. You need a tool/s to manage the element of your productivity stack, but the choice of tool is somewhat irrelevant as long as you have one that manages your underlying system well.
If you write it down, it’s capital-S Science. At least, that’s what one of my grade-school teachers told me (faced with my “samples” collection sourced from field and river near my house).
Science isn’t a lot more complicated than that, but professional academia definitely seems to be. When I decided I wanted to make a go of serious Astro again, it unceremoniously dunked me into a sudden deluge of journal papers, voluminous and near-inscrutable. It’s, well… intimidating… and a seemingly, strange rarefied, almost impenetrable world.
I experimented with a lot of new software in 2022. The main reason being a Cambrian explosion in new apps promising gains above my current tools. In the end though, I circled back to roots by 2022’s end and took ideas from those newer apps with me to enhance my existing stack and flows. New software gains didn’t exceed tradeoffs. But, my stack got much more effective without really changing software. If anything, I’ve gone back to using fewer, more open tools, and come up with more creative ways to stopgap shortcomings over the new new things.