#Tools

Be your own streaming service with an easy setup. Free yourself from bad content and choice paralysis. Curation and focus beats unending libraries.

A major overhaul to my minimalist CLI habit tracker, moving over to cobra along with substantial other speed and efficiency gains. A really satisfying refactor and release milestone.

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.

I mentioned a few posts back that I’m convinced the underlying database for my life really needs to be plain text files. Simplicty works. But, it’s surprising how few tools seem to be based on this idea.

I’d ignored Obsidian after initially checking it out because it had no live preview feature and having two panes open on a laptop took up too much real estate. Them adding the single in-editor live preview feature has completely changed my experience since I’ve hit a sweet spot between writing experience, bi-directional linking, and task management along with it being simple markdown files I control. Things painful or messy in other apps work smoothly. I’m also shocked at how good thier plugin ecosystem is already, allowing me to layer on functionality I want and not have any bloat I don’t need.

I’m convinced now that the underlying database for my life needs to move longer-term to human-readable, plain-text formats. As much as practical. And files under my control. But, it’s hard being an OG when everyone is shouting cloud. How do you do it? Why would you do it?

Sounds old school, I know… but, more than a decade of hard knock lessons about applications, apps, and companies have taught me that the only thing you can rely on is plain text representations. If you want any semblance of continuity and history in your data. Doubly-so for the metadata around your data.