Time is gold. There are tons of productivity tools out there to bring you gold, but it might feel hard to measure which one is the most suitable for oneself. I am writing this article to share what I consider the best and use myself.
A list of the best productivity tools
Schedule/Time management
Calendar
Google Calendar or Outlook can be a good choice. Still, I consider GCal the best. Their functionality as the calendar is the same, but the interface is better and clearer. Also, it provides slightly better integration with other productivity apps, which is a valuable feature never to be missed.
Also, you can subscribe to your calendars via device-native apps such as Apple iCal . By using native apps, you can save time by logging in to multiple calendar accounts and browsing your whole schedule at once.
To-do
For managing daily(or longer)-basis to-do, I consider Todoist the best. It comes with a flexible view and reasonable configuration. The interface is very simple and yet powerful. You can sort and filter tasks by priority and due dates. Subtasks and categorization are also supported. What I like about this app is a two-side integration with Google Calendar. The calendar items are visible in Todoist, and vice versa. The items are not only visible but also modifiable in both environments. The free version works pretty fine, but I guarantee you will upgrade to a Pro account without any hesitation after some time of using this app.
For alternatives, I recommend Microsoft To-Do and Things 3 (Apple only). I frequently used Microsoft To-Do and Things 3 before I moved to Todoist. They also offer brilliant design and are well focused on the role of a to-do manager. I especially love the calendar integration of Things 3. However, you have to pay each time using different device types(iPhone/Mac/Watch), which is for me hard to understand.
Project management
There are literally tons of project management tools being developed. I haven’t used much of them, but my few past experiences led me to answer what a good PMS is :
- Use anything with Gantt Chart.
- Avoid ones with functionalities that add complexity to the user experience.
- All changes should be logged and can be backed up whenever we want to.
Gantt charts are the best. They provide a clear unified sight of the project status, deadlines, and task dependencies, which are the most crucial. No other views (board/list/calendar) so far can do much as the Gantt chart can do.
Simple is the best. The features should be enough and at the same time not excessive to your team’s needs. For example. tools like ClickUp have numerous features which most people might not utilize 100%. I believe these rather hinder project integrity by making team members show off their useless creativity.
Unlike personal tools, PMSs are usually used by organizations where mistakes lead to painful damages. Thus I recommend tools that can log changes and revertible any time. Tools embedded with the system for preventing those mistakes are also recommended.
To sum up, so far I find Asana the best. It internally embeds a Gantt chart but also integrates with Instagantt, a much more powerful Gantt chart app. Also, Wrike, Basecamp, Zoho projects, and TeamGantt can be good alternatives. Omniplan is quite powerful but is highly costly.
Habits
Besides your to-do list, you sometimes want to manage your daily habits as well. I believe good habit apps should remind and force you to keep habits by phone alarm, watch app, mobile widget, and possibly some kind of compensation.
Streaks is considered the most famous habit management app. I also recommend Habitify, Momentum, and Everyday. These apps in common provide a simple interface, support heterogeneous devices, and provide timely notifications.
Communication
Just use Slack.
Handwriting-based Notebooks
From my experience, there are two major usages of handwriting-based notebook apps. The first one is when you literally draw or handwrite, and the other one is when you annotate to pdf. GoodNotes and Notability are the top two choices serving both needs. They both provide good drawing features with pdf annotation. Of course, you can write texts as well.
OneNote is slightly different. It does not provide pdf annotation, but you can still embed pdf as images in your OneNote document. You can draw/write ‘in’ and ‘by’ the image. Considering that the two tools above only provide ‘in’-pdf annotations, with OneNote you can write long marginal notes, which I love OneNote about. However, it lacks detailed features such as nice pdf export, templates, and templates.
Documentation
Notion is definitely the best choice. I would rather call notion a user-friendly document database. In Notion, every component you write is considered as a single block or page. You just simply put these items in a table view to make a relational database or in a calendar. It serves almost every feature you can think of, even ones in other categories. You can take class notes, manage a project and make a gallery with Notion. I primarily use Notion as my private database. I’m writing about daily diaries, annual plans, the books I read, important meetings, my financial statuses, and so on. But I use other tools when I’m writing a long, organized document and when organizing a large amount of data in a spreadsheet view. Though Notion provides a user-friendly interface, the one thing that doesn’t come to mind is that the margins for every item are so wide, leading to a lack of showing a wide view of your records at once. I thus recommend using Notion to maintain and record data that are not frequently changing, for instance, no more than once a week. To utilize Notion as your personal dashboard or to an online index of external documents is a great idea.
For writing documents, Evernote can be a good choice. You can simply think of somewhere between Notion and Microsoft Word. It only provides essential writing formats, so you can keep all your documents organized and structured. It provides a very powerful search which can even search for texts from the embedded image.
Graph-based tools such as Obsidian and Roam Research are likely to be the next trendsetter. They are usually referred to as knowledge graph tools and are likely to provide a higher level of knowledge management than relational ones. I am currently not using these, but planning to migrate to these tools someday. You should check these out too.
Storage
You may choose among Google Drive, Onedrive, iCloud, and Dropbox. I am using Onedrive as my personal drive and Google Drive as a workspace drive. I am a fan of Onedrive because it provides a slightly better public sharing option for a reasonable price. You can embed Onedrive images or documents on a website. Also since it is fully compatible with Microsoft 365 apps, you can directly edit your documents in the cloud online. Its desktop apps work great in both Windows and Mac.
Drawing
For drawing wonderful diagrams, I strongly recommend Draw.io. It is free, simple yet powerful. You can draw it online and even export or embed it via a public link. For more professional use, I recommend OmniGraffle. It provides super-powerful diagramming and prototyping but is super expensive as well. One thing for sure is that using these tools is much better than drawing your diagrams with Powerpoint and taking screenshots of them.
Research
Researchers may use Mendeley as a bibliography management system. You can upload pdf files with automatic metadata management and also annotate/write notes inside the system. Overleaf is so far the best app for writing latex documents. It supports various templates and real-time sharing.
Et Cetra
With Pocket and its extensions, you can easily scrape documents while surfing the internet and manage them in a separate place. With Feedly, you can integrate all kinds of incoming news, blog RSS feeds, and so on. Its AI filters and classifies all incoming information. I guarantee using this is much better than receiving all your newsletters to your email, which is sometimes quite annoying. As a markdown fan, I also recommend a collaborative markdown writing tool, HedgeDoc. For grammar issues, I recommend Grammarly.
I’ve introduced so many apps by far. The problem arising here is that we become sick of making transitions between each app too much. This will consume your time and make you out of your mind. For this, Shift may be a solution. It is a desktop app that integrates hundreds of apps in a single window. You can switch between apps quickly without having to display all apps over the window. It integrates almost all of the apps introduced in this article. The subscription fee is quite expensive. Nevertheless, worthy enough.
So, what tools do I use?
The diagram below is a summary of all products I am currently using.
To conclude: Rules to keep in mind
Beyond all this, here are the most important rules you should keep in mind.
- Make your own productivity rule, and then strictly follow it. If your rule is not working, distinguish the cause on whether it is lack of your motivation or the rules do not fit or are inefficient to your routine. If it is the former, motivate yourself. Do reward/punish yourself. If latter, simple. Perform diagnosis and change your own rule! You will one day find your best fit, which will last forever and be one of the most valuable, permanent assets.
- Try to write and archive everything. Some of the trivial things you’ve ignored a long time ago become very crucial someday. Most importantly, always remember to take your time to paraphrase/organize your records so they should be placed where they should be. Your records should have some kind of structure to be kept persistent. Otherwise, they become lost.
- Back up every data you can. Export everything from your apps and store it to clouds, hard drives, and other places. More copies are never enough. Before entering the world of cloud services, I once made three copies of my records to hard disks, and accidentally lost two copies. It was fortunate to keep the third one. Thanks to cloud services, I now just upload everything to the cloud, but who knows?