UPDATED: Every Digital Tool I Use (Early '26)
All the apps, tools, and services I am currently using to accomplish stuff!
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 📅
This section lists the apps I use to manage time- and day-bound information.
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 🚀
This section lists apps I use for task artifact management, as well as for managing personal projects and actions (if applicable).
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 🧠
This section lists PKM apps—or, as I call them, knowledge companions—that house one’s most important personally relevant information and assist one in building and managing personal knowledge.
Obsidian 📜📜📜
Any notes & project support material
Personal Project 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 📥
This section lists apps used to capture things at light speed. Sometimes, more elaborate tools are too heavy and slow for that.
Todoist 🗡️🗡️
task artifacts
actionable and timely stuff like links and ideas (on mobile)
log to Obsidian daily note journal with global keyboard shortcut (on desktop)
E-Mail ✉️
This section lists email clients.
Spark Mail (legacy version) 🗡️🗡️🗡️📜
Personal & side-business mails
Pending emails
Reference emails for tax returns
Microsoft Outlook 🗡️📜
Work emails
Incubation 💡
This section lists tools to store incubating artifacts. Think “do-later apps”.
Main peripheral incubation space of my ±PEAKER org method
Read Later Queue for Blog Posts
books "to read” lists
lists of read books
book reviews
IMDB
movies to watch list and tracking
movies to watch list and tracking
Tracking 📏
This section lists quantified self-tracking tools of any kind.
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 💻
This section lists any other productivity 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
PDF highlighting
Highlight export
Apple Maps 📜
stored locations like home, work, …
Google Maps 📜
saved and favorited locations
Safari & Chrome
Fallback web browsers
Focus music for flow
OCR clipped selection of the desktop screen
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 🧑💻
This section lists tools I used as an iOS software engineer in my day job. There are no links here and few details, as they will be irrelevant to most.
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 📡
This section includes tools in the often-overlooked social media & communication category. Most messaging apps allow saving messages and marking them as “unread,” essentially working as a task artifact manager. Some also may function as storage of past conversations, i.e., to look up old information from the past. There are no links here, as these are all well-known.
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
Tools dedicated to blogging and writing essays.
Substack 📜📜
Drafts for new posts
Scheduled posts
For revising and improving my essays
AI-generated images for my essays here on FP
Grammar improvement before publishing texts
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 🔎🕵️
This section includes everything new, shiny, or otherwise interesting that I encountered but haven’t tried (yet). It’s here to fight the relentless urge to pursue the novel and have a great starting point when moving on.
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
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
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 :)
Thanks for your updated inventory of apps et. all! Really appreciate how much you share, Dennis.