Many men die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they’re seventy-five.

This line aged rather well. It points to something many people experience, but rarely talk about. A person can remain physically alive for decades while slowly losing touch with themselves — their attention, emotions, values, or sense of meaning. In the physical world, neglect is usually visible. If someone stops caring for their body, eventually the consequences appear on the surface. Inner neglect works differently. A person can continue functioning outwardly while becoming increasingly disconnected underneath it all. They still answer emails, attend meetings, raise children, pay bills, and make plans for the future. Yet under it all, no one is home.

A century ago, most workers exhausted their bodies. Today, many people experience something harder to describe. They sit in climate-controlled rooms, barely moving, spending entire days navigating abstractions, emotional currents, competing demands, and endless streams of information. They answer messages, absorb information, manage reactions, and continuously negotiate what deserves their attention. By evening, they feel depleted in a way the language of the industrial age struggles to explain, because outwardly, almost nothing visible has changed. Nothing has been lifted. Nothing has been built. Nothing has changed form.

Peter Drucker called this figure the knowledge worker, and the name made perfect sense in 1959.1 It makes less sense now. When Drucker introduced the now-famous term, knowledge itself was still rather scarce. Access mattered. Information moved slowly enough that a skilled professional could realistically absorb a meaningful portion of what mattered in their field. Journals arrived physically in the mail. Reports were typed, copied, and distributed by hand. To know more than your peers often meant literally possessing information they lacked, and much of the difficulty lay upstream in the acquisition process itself. That world is mostly gone now. Today, information is abundant, frictionless, searchable, and permanently available to almost anyone with a phone and an internet connection.

***

In 2026, a knowledge worker can access more material in an afternoon than many researchers could access in months fifty years ago. Large language models can, within seconds, summarize books, explain unfamiliar concepts, generate drafts, search literature, write code, and answer factual questions instantly.

The bottleneck has clearly shifted. An increasingly central form of labor of the information age is no longer acquiring knowledge, but governing the self that must live amid this infinite flood of information.

This is the job description nobody handed you. Your job as a knowledge worker is no longer merely producing output, answering messages, and solving problems, but governing your attention, filtering signals, resisting fragmentation, and beneath it all, reevaluating your own ambitions. Modern life demands all these capacities yet treats them as secondary, optional, private, and nonconsequential. But they are clearly not. For many people, they have become part of the work itself. Choosing what to pay attention to, resisting distraction, managing emotional reactions, recovering from overstimulation, interpreting meaning, and protecting attention from systems designed to fracture it — all of this consumes real energy. This is real work, even if it rarely appears in job descriptions or productivity metrics.

The language of knowledge work describes the handling of external information. It says little about the labor required to maintain the inner conditions from which judgment, clarity, and action emerge in the first place. That deeper layer is what I call mindwork. And a person who does it is a mindworker.

Mindwork is the deliberate labor of regulating, examining, maintaining, and shaping the mind itself.

Not every thought qualifies, and not every moment of reflection deserves the name. Daydreaming is not mindwork. Doomscrolling is not mindwork. Rumination is usually not mindwork either, even when it disguises itself as self-awareness. Genuine mindwork changes the conditions from which future thought and action emerge, while compulsive self-analysis often traps a person inside the same loops they were trying to escape.

***

Mindwork overlaps with several older forms of labor, but it is not identical to them.

Peter Drucker’s knowledge worker primarily handles external knowledge: information is analyzed, transformed, communicated, and applied to real-world problems. The outputs are outward-facing things such as reports, diagnoses, designs, and strategies. In a previous essay, Popper’s Razor, I borrowed Karl Popper’s distinction between the material world (W1), the subjective inner world (W2), and the shared external world of knowledge and culture (W3). Using this language, we can say that knowledge work mostly operates in W3, while mindwork points a lot more toward W2 — the inner layer where attention, interpretation, emotion, identity, and meaning are continuously shaped and negotiated.

Later thinkers pushed beyond Drucker toward ideas like knowledge building and wisdom work. Researchers such as Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia emphasized the collective creation of genuinely new understanding rather than merely applying existing knowledge.2 More recently, writers like Chip Conley have argued that judgment, discernment, and emotional intelligence are becoming economically central forms of labor in an increasingly automated world.3 Both observations point to something real. Yet even these frameworks mostly culminate outwardly in better knowledge, better leadership, better decisions, and better guidance. Mindwork points one layer earlier and quieter. It concerns the cultivation of the inner conditions from which those outward capacities first emerge.

Knowledge work handles information.
Wisdom work applies judgment.
Mindwork tends the mind that makes both possible.

A few examples make the distinction clearer. A software engineer debugging a production issue is doing knowledge work. The same engineer, noticing that every difficult task triggers avoidance, defensiveness, or compulsive stimulation, then deliberately examines and reshapes those patterns, is doing mindwork. A manager writing performance reviews is doing knowledge work, while the manager realizing halfway through a conflict that her need for control is distorting the conversation is doing mindwork. A writer producing an essay is doing knowledge work, while the writer questioning why he compulsively reaches for productivity systems whenever he feels uncertain about meaning is doing mindwork. The output of knowledge work is external: a document, a design, a strategy, a decision. The output of mindwork is subtler: greater clarity, a revised belief, a weakened compulsion, a healthier emotional pattern, or a more stable relationship to attention itself.

Mindwork is not the same as “mental work” — as a category, mental work is much broader, and almost anything cognitively demanding qualifies, from mental arithmetic to remembering a phone number. Mindwork refers to a specific subset of cognitive work: the deliberate shaping and maintenance of the mind itself. By this definition, a person can of course be a mindworker, knowledge worker, and wisdom worker all at once.

***

Historically, much inner regulation was scaffolded externally. Religion provided identity and moral structure. Local communities enforced norms and stabilized expectations. Traditions supplied scripts for adulthood, relationships, and meaning, while slower information environments protected attention from continuous extraction. Modern life weakened much of that scaffolding. The individual now performs far more self-governance internally, often without realizing how much labor it requires. Who should I become? What matters? Which ambitions are genuinely mine? Which inputs deserve entry into my attention? Which parts of my identity are inherited, and which are chosen? These questions are no longer philosophical luxuries occasionally asked at midlife. For many people, it is ambient background labor running beneath ordinary workdays.

This is where the modern crisis begins. Many people are already performing enormous amounts of mindwork without recognizing it as work. They experience exhaustion but lack the language to describe it, so they interpret the problem through older categories such as laziness, weakness, poor discipline, insufficient optimization, or lack of motivation. The deeper problem, however, is often unmanaged inner labor.

Three shifts pushed this labor from the margins toward the center of modern life.

First, input became effectively infinite. Modern workers live in an endless stream of messages, feeds, articles, dashboards, podcasts, alerts, recommendations, and generated content, and the challenge is no longer acquiring information but deciding what deserves entry into their attention. That decision is not neutral. Without deliberate inner filtering, the filtering gets outsourced to algorithms optimized for engagement rather than coherence. Attention stops functioning as self-direction and becomes a downstream consequence of someone else’s optimization system.

Second, more output is being automated. Drafts can be generated more readily, summaries produced more readily, code written faster, and images synthesized more completely by systems that process information faster than humans ever could. What remains distinctly human is harder to automate: judgment, interpretation, restraint, ethical orientation, aesthetic taste, long-term coherence, and deciding which questions are worth asking. Those capacities depend less on information itself than on the quality of the mind interacting with it.

Finally, the inner world itself has become contested territory. Modern life mediates attention, identity, emotion, desire, and social reality through systems designed to compete for psychological engagement. Notifications, outrage cycles, feeds, recommendation systems, and infinite entertainment all reach inward. The inner world no longer passively belongs to the individual. It must be defended, maintained, and consciously shaped. Mindwork is the labor of defending inner coherence without collapsing into either fragmentation or endless self-obsession.

***

I slowly began to notice this during my years as a software engineer. On paper, the work did not look especially taxing. I answered messages, attended meetings, reviewed code, wrote specifications, and solved technical problems while sitting at a desk most of the day. Yet I often came home mentally exhausted in a way that felt disproportionate to the visible work itself.

Over time, I realized that part of the fatigue came from another layer running quietly beneath the technical tasks: constant prioritization, emotional regulation, uncertainty, self-monitoring, low-grade background tension, and the ongoing question of what actually mattered amid all the competing demands. Some of that pressure was practical. Some of it was psychological. Some of it was existential. But together, it created a form of inner labor I had never really learned to think about directly.

What changed my relationship to work was not eliminating that layer entirely. Much of it is unavoidable. The change came from recognizing it more clearly, naming some of its patterns, and building structures around it instead of leaving it as undirected weather.

***

Most mindwork involves a small set of recurring moves.

The first is noticing, because you cannot change what you cannot see. Most people move through their inner life half-automatically, reaching for the phone, tightening against criticism, avoiding difficult conversations, and drifting toward distraction without registering the movement itself. Mindwork begins with nothing more dramatic than awareness.

The second move is naming. Once a pattern becomes visible, it can be recognized clearly enough to interrupt. The same anxious spiral before difficult work. The same defensiveness during conflict. The same impulse to escape uncertainty through stimulation or busyness. Naming gives the pattern shape, and things that remain vague tend to remain powerful.

The third move is installing. Mindwork is constructive as well as corrective. Healthier defaults, values, habits, and relationships to attention can be cultivated deliberately over time.

And finally, there is pruning, the slower and more painful process of releasing beliefs, identities, ambitions, and narratives that no longer fit the life around them.

Most productivity systems barely touch any of this. They optimize calendars, task lists, morning routines, and output metrics. Useful things, but downstream things. The deeper question is whether the mind producing those systems is becoming clearer, steadier, and more coherent over time, or merely more optimized inside its own confusion. If the productivity stack runs from aspirations through arcs, programs, projects, and tasks, mindwork sits underneath all of it. It’s the layer that makes every other layer possible.

***

That distinction matters because mindwork has failure modes, too. Not all introspection is healthy. Some people disappear into endless recursive self-analysis where every emotion becomes a puzzle, and every decision becomes identity construction. Some no longer fully live their lives directly because they exist one layer above experience, continuously interpreting, narrating, optimizing, and evaluating it while rarely inhabiting it. The self turns inward so aggressively that contact with reality weakens, and the mind becomes a hall of mirrors.

Healthy mindwork returns a person to clearer action, stronger embodiment, deeper relationships, and greater contact with reality. Unhealthy mindwork collapses into self-consumption.

The goal is not permanent introspection. The goal is maintaining the inner conditions required to live deliberately in environments designed to fragment deliberateness itself. And that is one of the central forms of labor in modern life.

We already have sophisticated language for managing information. We have far less language for managing the mind that must continuously live among it.

Maybe we need some.

My book Scale-Smart Productivity explores in much more depth what changes when inner regulation becomes part of the work itself: proper effort scoping, cultivating aspirations, commitment structures, and the systems required to sustain inner coherence over long periods of time. Find it on Leanpub.

A while back, I read an intriguing essay by titled The Naming of Things. In it, she argues that the words and metaphors we use for a phenomenon shape our relationship to it. The names we settle on quietly influence what we believe a thing is, what we allow it to do, what responsibilities we attach to it, and what possibilities we can even perceive.

Zoe makes this case using AI and large language models. Are they tools? Assistants? Collaborators? Interfaces? Minds? Each label carries its own assumptions about capability, agency, trust, responsibility, and control. A name is never neutral. It frames the relationship before the relationship even begins.

She is fundamentally right. But the idea reaches further than technology.

The same principle applies inwardly.

The words we use for our own experiences quietly shape our relationship to ourselves. What remains unnamed stays vague and atmospheric. A drifting discomfort. A recurring tension. A heaviness without edges. But once something is named, it changes character. It becomes graspable. It turns from weather into an object. Something you can return to, examine, question, and perhaps even change.

This idea is older than psychology.

In the Grimm tale, Rumpelstiltskin loses his power the moment his name is spoken. In Egyptian mythology, Isis gains dominion over Ra after learning his true name. In A Wizard of Earthsea, magic itself is rooted in true names. To know the name of a thing is to know its nature. Across cultures and centuries, the same pattern keeps appearing: naming creates a strange form of power.

Modern neuroscience hints at something similar. A 2007 UCLA brain-scan study, replicated many times since, showed that putting a feeling into words calms the brain’s alarm system and engages the part that thinks things through.1 The lived experience matches the brain data: naming a feeling makes it easier to carry.

What you cannot name, you cannot properly hold.
And what you cannot hold tends to hold you instead.

It’s like a monster in the dark. Naming the monster weakens it. Not because the monster disappears, but because it moves into a room where you can finally face it.

There’s an echo of all of this in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous line:

That’s the principle I call Name It to Tame It. Before anything in your interior can be tended, examined, released, or grown into something else, it has to be given a name. To name it is to conceptualize it. To name it is to give it a handle. But to name it is even more than that. It is to accept it. To embrace it. Until something has a name, it’s Schall und Rauch — sound and smoke.2 After it is named, it can be worked with.

The most practical example is the stalled task. An item that’s been on your to-do list for weeks. Months. You keep moving it forward, never doing it. The usual suspects — laziness, lack of time — aren’t the cause. The task as written doesn’t name what’s actually there. Vagueness has no handles. The brain skips what it can’t grip. That’s why rewriting a stalled task often dissolves it. You sit with it. You ask what it’s really asking of you. You give it a sharper name. Once the name fits, your hand can find it.3

Much of what I do on this Substack is coining terms and conceptualizing things. Arcs of Aspiration named a layer of life-design that goals don’t reach. The Triple E Game Plan split execution into the three modes it actually contains. The exact terms I land on don’t matter. The things behind them do.

Some of the names you need will be your own, coined for whatever nobody else’s vocabulary quite captures. Others will be borrowed, found in books and conversations that handed you a handle just when you needed one. Both kinds work.

Scale-Smart Summary: Some work changes the physical world, like cleaning the dishes. Some happens inside digital systems, like answering email. Some changes your inner world, like committing to a goal. And some creates knowledge that survives beyond you, like publishing an essay. These four “worlds” or work follow different rules, and problems arise whe…

Read more

1. Being productive has a well-definable shape. 

   1.1 The word productive is wide in use and loose in meaning. 

      1.11 The looseness is a problem of language, not of the shape of being productive itself.

      1.12 Part of the looseness is conflation: economic productivity (output per input — what a business measures) and personal productivity are di…

Read more

Scale-Smart Summary: At any moment during your workday, you're either in a work session or not. A large part of your day likely isn't sessioned at all; it slips away like sand. When reflecting, you often can't remember what you did or whether it was productive. A simple fix is to label the type of work session before each work period: Espresso (deep), A…

Read more

Over the last four years, I’ve published over 130 pieces, invented dozens of concepts and frameworks, and built an entire productivity philosophy from scratch. It’s getting harder to find your footing on here. This post is your map.

If you haven’t already done so, also check out my ABOUT page for more background on who I am, plus the Atlas to browse posts by category and the Lexicon to browse by index.

The Foundation: Fractal Productivity

I started this Substack based on a simple idea: that personal productivity is fractal. I only much later wrote a piece that actually explained what fractals are:

But from the beginning, fractals were always part of my writing. Fractal Productivity was the initial name of this Substack and the name of the very first piece on here:

In this first series, I identified one of my most important concepts: the personal program — the work unit that sits above the personal project.

I’ve since thought and written a lot about the personal program, and to bring everything together, I eventually wrote:

---

If you read one thing from this section, make it this one.

---

Magnitude Tuning

After that, I explored a practice I had never seen before elsewhere. I called it magnitude tuning, and I wrote 4 pieces about how I used it to improve my goal-setting, weekly reviews, and other parts of my productivity system.

The PARA Years

Back then, I was deep into PKM — Personal Knowledge Management — and was still using the PARA method, so I wrote extensively about it.

If you don’t know what PARA is, read this quick intro:

I experimented a lot with PARA over the years, having been part of many of the creator’s online cohorts, and even moderated one. Over time, I identified many ways to improve the method without breaking its core invariants:

Building a Smart Task Management System

I then ported an email newsletter series I had written many years earlier and turned it into a long series on building a smart task management system. If you want a ground-up approach to how tasks, lists, and inventories fit together, this is it. The series included, among others, my idea of a digital inventory.

I actually quite recently wrote an update on my personal inventory:

The series covered many other topics — contexts, energy management, recurring tasks, and more:

Second Brains and PKM

After that, I shifted my focus back toward PKM and “second brains.” If you don’t know what these topics are about, these two short intros cover the basics:

I also wrote several shorter knowledge pieces in this field:

And I reported in detail on my painful migration from Evernote to Obsidian — useful if you’re considering the same move or just want to understand what switching a PKM system actually costs:

±PEAKER: My Organization Method

Several years later — now — I no longer use PARA or ACE because I built my own organization method called ±PEAKER. If you struggle with digital organization in any form, this is where to start:

This is one of the pieces I’m most proud of. It lays out my overall philosophy and how I actually organize everything. Read it.

---

If you are still stuck with PARA or ACE but it just won’t fully work, read this first:

And once you’re convinced, go here:

Goal-Setting

Another big arc in my writing is goal-setting. I wrote quite a bit about it over the years — from the mechanics of how to set better goals to the deeper question of what goal-setting is actually for:

Snowflakes

And then there were standalone, non-canon pieces that I call “snowflakes” — one-off ideas that didn’t belong to any series but were worth writing:

The Book: Scale-Smart Productivity

All of this prepared me to shift gears away from just “fractal productivity” to something bigger. I realized that the personal productivity “industry” is broken. And I tried to wrestle with how to save it. That work led to my book, which after several title changes arrived at its final name: Scale-Smart Productivity: A Philosophy of Productive Life — How To Think, Plan, And Act From The Right Level.

If you want a sense of what the book is about before buying, these essays cover the core ideas:

And complement those with what I consider my most important series:

Scale-Smart Moves (2026)

My first post appeared on April 27th, 2022 — almost four years ago. My latest series from March 2026 is called Scale-Smart Moves, and it feeds ideas from the book back into the blog. If you want to see the framework applied as practical, single-concept essays, start here:

That’s the territory. Four years, 130+ pieces, one system built in public.

If you actually read this far, your perspective matters immensely to me. So if you ever got anything out of my writing, please do vote here:

My son is obsessed with axolotls. He’s three, and our recent visit to the zoo convinced him that this is the animal. The best animal. The only animal that matters.1 So, as it goes, he now owns a book, a plaything for the bathtub, a cuddly toy he can take to bed and, above all, a quiet certainty about it all. I don’t…

Read more

Every year, I sit down at least once and update what I call my digital inventory.

A digital inventory—as per my definition—lists all the apps, tools, and services a person uses to accomplish things in the digital realm. Sometimes I share it online, as I did here in 2024.

The idea behind this practice is to fractal out (to zoom out to a higher level), take a bird's-eye view of your entire digital landscape, and see if there are any obvious improvements you can make or subtle shifts that could make your digital life healthier. So, the overall goal is to raise your awareness of your productivity setup and identify areas for improvement. And that’s not just about cataloging what you have but also about visually presenting it in a way that encourages consolidation and simplifies your digital workflow.

This year, it was interesting to see how many consolidations have happened over the last couple of months (fewer but better tools!) and what new AI-based tools I have added to my stack. It is, however, also grounding to see that my tooling setup is still 95% based on tools that are not AI-based or even AI-enhanced. This goes to show that, against the current hype, they are still just the very tip of the iceberg.

Please don’t take this post as an opportunity to fall for shiny-object syndrome. If you find an interesting tool you would like to try out, I suggest putting it on a monitoring list instead of acting immediately. See my own such list at the very bottom of this post.

My Digital Inventory (early 2026)

Emojy Legend

• 🗡️ — used rarely for task artifact management

• 🗡️🗡️ — used now and then for task artifact management

• 🗡️🗡️🗡️ — used heavily for task artifact management

• 📜 — rarely used for personal knowledge mangement

• 📜📜 — used now and then for personal knowledge mangement

• 📜📜📜 — used heavily for personal knowledge mangement

Important Note: I have not listed all apps install on my computer or phone, only the one’s I use regularly.

Calendar  📅

• Fantastical 🗡️🗡️🗡️📜📜

  • meetings, events, webinars, online calls

  • time- and day-bound information like holidays, vacations, retreats, birthdays, when my mom takes care of our son, etc.

  • selective timeboxes for workouts, progressive efforts, and rituals like my morning & evening rituals

• Microsoft Outlook 🗡️🗡️

  • work-related events & meetings

Project, Task & Action Management 🚀

• Todoist 🗡️🗡️🗡️

  • actionable task artifacts

  • pending task artifacts

  • recurring routine task artifacts (standards, habitual patterns)

  • backlogged task artifacts

  • incubating task artifacts

• Obsidian 🗡️🗡️🗡️

  • today's high-priority tasks from Todoist (bi-directional sync)

  • actions

  • daily intentions

  • someday-maybe / incubation task artifacts

• Scrivener 🗡️ 📜📜

  • The app I am using to write my 1000-page book Scale-Smart Productivity
    

Personal Knowledge Companion 🧠

• Obsidian 📜📜📜

  • Any notes & project support material

  • Personal Project Management

  • Personal Program Management

  • Inspirational Material & Incubating Artefacts

  • Knowledge Building Blocks (“Intermediate Packets”)

  • Life management

  • Store insights, lessons learned, ...

  • Connect ideas

  • Increase understanding

  • Coding-related "personal wiki" for references

  • Work-related tasks, artifacts, and actions
    ALL OF THE ABOVE ORGANIZED IN MY ORGANIZING METHOD:
    

• Craft 📜

  • Currently in use only to share my ARCs of Aspiration to the web

Quick Capture 📥

• Todoist 🗡️🗡️

  • task artifacts

  • actionable and timely stuff like links and ideas (on mobile)

• Raycast Obsidian Integration

  • log to Obsidian daily note journal with global keyboard shortcut (on desktop)

E-Mail ✉️

• Spark Mail (legacy version) 🗡️🗡️🗡️📜

  • Personal & side-business mails

  • Pending emails

  • Reference emails for tax returns

• Microsoft Outlook 🗡️📜

  • Work emails

Incubation 💡

• Readwise.io 📜

  • Main peripheral incubation space of my ±PEAKER org method

• Readwise Reader 🗡📜

  • Read Later Queue for Blog Posts

• Goodreads

  • books "to read” lists

  • lists of read books

  • book reviews

• IMDB

  • movies to watch list and tracking

• trakt.tv

  • movies to watch list and tracking

Tracking 📏

• Timing 📜📜📜

  • Manual and automatic time tracking in one tool

  • I wrote an in-depth article on why and how I switched from my previous Toggle+RescueTime combo to this amazing new tool

• YNAB 🗡📜📜

  • Tracking expenses and setting budgets

  • The following budgets can be considered “tasks” in some sense

Other Helpers 💻

• 1Password 📜📜📜

  • storing passwords

  • storing secrets & sensitive info like medical/banking data or software licenses

  • subscription details

  • Watchtower (see compromised website with leaks and duplicate passwords)

• Raycast 📜📜📜

  • Quick Launcher

  • Hyperkey

  • Clipboard manager (referencing recently copied stuff)

  • Window Manager

  • Text Expander (storing text snippets)

  • Obsidian Extension (see section Quick Capture)

• Arc Browser 🗡️🗡️📜📜📜

  • Permanent Bookmarks

  • Program bookmarks

  • Bookmarks for work (separate browser profile)

  • FYI: Considering switching to Dia, the browser company’s latest product, as they seem to slowly bring back the best features of Arc Browser

• macOS FileSystem 📜📜

  • to-read folded for PDFs

  • large files and documents

  • backups

  • confidential files

• CleanShot X (macOS)

  • My favorite screen capture tool

• Cotypist (macOS)

  • LLM-enhanced auto-complete across apps

  • FYI: Free beta software (0.20) from the creators of Timing

• Caffeine (macOS)

  • keeps my MacBook awake even if I am afk

• DeskRest (macOS)

  • a tool that helps you take smart breaks—see all about that here:
    

• CaffeineApp (iOS) 📜

  • logs of my caffeine intake

• PDFExpert 📜

  • PDF highlighting

  • Highlight export

• Apple Maps 📜

  • stored locations like home, work, …

• Google Maps 📜

  • saved and favorited locations

• Safari & Chrome

  • Fallback web browsers

• Focus@Will & BrainFM

  • Focus music for flow

• TextSniper

  • OCR clipped selection of the desktop screen

• CamelCamelCamel

  • Price tracker for Amazon

• Apple Shortcuts

  • To copy my Timing activities into my daily note at the end of every day

Tools I Use Professionally 🧑‍💻

• Jira 🗡️🗡️

• Confluence 📜

• GitHub Enterprise 🗡️🗡️

• Xcode 🗡️🗡️📜

• draw.io 📜

• GoogleDocs 📜

• Microsoft Outlook (macOS & iOS) 🗡️

• MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

• Warp

• Git Tower

• xcodes

• Kaleidoscope

• Android Studio

• Charles

• Eraser

• Zed

Social Media & Communication 📡

• Slack 🗡️🗡️ 📜📜

  • unread messages & threads

  • saved (bookmarked) messages for later reference

  • search whole chat history for reference

• Substack 🗡️ 📜

  • drafted and scheduled Substack Notes

• YouTube 📜

  • for later watch list

  • saved playlists

• iMessage 🗡️

  • unread messages

• Whatsapp 🗡️

  • unread messages

• Instagram 📜

  • saved collections

  • created drafts for posts

  • messages

• LinkedIn

  • saved posts, messages

• FaceTime

• Zoom

Dedicated Side-Business Tools

• Substack 📜📜

  • Drafts for new posts

  • Scheduled posts

• Claude.ai Pro & ChatGPT Go

  • For revising and improving my essays

• Leonardo.ai 📜

  • AI-generated images for my essays here on FP

• Grammarly

  • Grammar improvement before publishing texts

• Hemmingway

  • Grammar improvement before publishing texts

Honorable Mentions

• Docko (macOS)

  • Probably the only atelic app in here — just looking cute

• One Thing (macOS)

  • menu bar app to place a single task artifact to focus on

Monitoring 🔎🕵️

Do you use any of these and if so, can you recommend them?

Artifical Intelligence

• Vercel - open agent skills ecosystem

• ElevenLabs - Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform

• AudioPen / Wispr Flow - Effortless Voice Dictation

• Elephas - Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac

• Runway - Magical AI tools, real-time collaboration, precision editing, and more.

• Soundraw.io - AI music creation

• Aki by Akiflow - Your Executive Assistant beyond human limits

• Reclaim – AI Calendar for Work & Life

Task Artifact Managers

• TickTick: Looks a lot like Todoist. A free tier is available, premium, more powerful, and slightly cheaper (I would love the statistics, Pomodoro timer, Eisenhower matrix, and only one layer of indentation! action). Available on all platforms. Has Todoist import (but I would need to drag all projects into PARA...),

• Amazing Marvin: Highly customizable with calendar integration, todoist import and, time estimates, procrastination counter

• sunsuma: daily planner with calendar, todoist, and JIRA integration -> pick tasks, estimate durations, and get them timeboxed in your calendar

• Things 3: one-time payment, no subscription, German company

• Locu - focus timer, to-do-ist and notes in one

AI Scheduling (Calendar+TAM)

• motion: AI scheduled days (“To-do lists and calendars are dead”)

Internet Browsers & Bookmarks

• Dia

• ChatGPT Atlas

• Zen Browser - Firefox-based (no account needed, still very small)

• Raindrop.io - Browser Bookmark decouple from browsers

Knowledge companions

• NotebookLM: Personalized AI - AI notes app by Google (US only so far)

• DEVONthink: Sits on top of file system, powerful search

• Supernotes: A child of Notion + Roam

• Nimbus: Marketed as "The way Evernote should have evolved"

• Pandoc: Convert files between markup formats (may need after Obsidian)

Writing

• Ulysses: distraction-free interface, project management, proofreader, and more.

• Spear: an all-in-one solution for writing, note-taking, and PKM.

• Elephas: Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac.

Research

• Booksends: reference manager for students and professionals.

• Otter.ai: powerful Speech-To-Text Software

Collaboration

• PliimPRO: Safely share your screen with one click

• Codeshot: 6€ to make nice code shots

Reading/Books

• The StoryGraph: at some point, this may replace Goodreads

That’s all!

Let me know if you have any other tool recommendations!

I’m always happy to add them to my list :)

Go Deeper

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

I

Mark Forster, a British time-management writer who was less famous than he should have been, built much of his productivity thinki…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

There is a small productivity hack I occasionally use when I find myself endlessly postponing the same task. Often, when I push somethi…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Over the last few decades, folders quietly lost their charm. First, file names stopped being constrained. Then search improved dramatically. Now AI is going commonplace. The promise — don’t organize, just search — grows str…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Four million. That’s how many books are published every single year. A tiny number compared to the countless manuscripts that stall and starve along the way. When I first attempted to write a book, at twenty-one, I made it …

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Two years ago, in a piece called Free To Collect + Allowed To Keep It, I argued that, while hoarding atoms can have dire consequences, the same idea does not apply to the world of bits. Digital gluttony, just-in-case-storage

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

If there is one thing I got right early in life, it’s deep work.

Almost everyone around me struggles with focus. I don’t. Never have. But I only recently understood why. It’s not discipline. Not willpower. Not even “good ha…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

We all chase rabbits sometimes. The sirens await at every turn these days, and we c…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

About a decade ago, a fri…

Read more

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Modern life is full of text. And text has two major problems: it…

Read more

This is the index post of my series on scale-smart tactics & operations. Here’s what’s inside:

1. Build Your Legend 🦸‍♂️
   Turning The Emoji Into A Visual Anchor for Your Digital Life

2. Progressive Efforts
   One Hour, One Project, Every Morning

3. Your Daily Note isn’t Working. Here’s Why.
   A Rite-Based System for Beating the Attentional Vortex

4. Work Fixtures
   Engineering…

Read more

This is just a quick note about a change I’ve been thinking about for a while. Over the last 1,5 years, in writing my book, I’ve come to realize that I no longer want to use the term “productivity” to describe my work. In the past, I’ve defended the term here and proposed an alternative—Productiveness—and I will, of course, keep writing…

Read more