My [[ADHD]] is a big stressor in my life, and so you often see me talking about [[Organization & Productivity]]. Not because I'm into toxic productivity, but because I need to constantly hone, refine, and alter my techniques so that I can focus when my brain does its best to fight against me. On that note, I've been doing some tinkering and I figured I'd write about it. The thing that I've done now is break things apart and make a "Tech Stack." Let me explain! ## One App to Rule them All I LOVE Obsidian. I love Obsidian so much that I literally put my friends on it because I'm a big nerd that loves to yap about apps non-stop. One thing that I always liked about Obsidian is that it can do it all. With some tinkering you can make Obsidian your calendar, your task manager, your pomodoro timer, your white noise machine, your kanban board, and more stuff that I haven't even thought of yet. This is cool! And for the people it works for, that's great. What I've come to realize for *myself* though is that there's a sort of "debt" that comes to putting everything I just mentioned into Obsidian. I start to forget where all these things are, or am on my phone, where Obsidian is weakest, and can't update things appropriately. So the system sort of falls by the wayside. Also, while Obsidian can do all of the things I mentioned, the level of which it can do all of those things *well* varies. You end up becoming dependent on plugins that may or may not get updated in the future, which isn't ideal! So I've now broken out all of the things that help me get stuff done across different apps. I'll explain what they are and why I use them! --- ## Obsidian Wait weren't we just talking about this?? Yes, but Obsidian is still the cornerstone of where all my work gets done. My notes, random thoughts, blog posts, newsletter and everything else are contained right here. Even my website is built off the back of Obsidian Publish. Obsidian is perfect as a tool for writing and consolidation of thought, and backlinking works perfect for my broken brain. It's pretty indispensable for me and definitely isn't going anywhere. ## Focumon [[Focumon is Pretty Cool|I've written about it before]], but to reiterate, Focumon is a web-app that lets you focus. The more you focus, the more you power up your little critters. I am bad at taking care of myself, but I love watching numbers go up and taking care of others, virtual pets included. The app is pretty new, but it's in active development by one guy that makes updates pretty much every workday. I'm quite happy with it as someone who constantly needs help focusing. ## Raindrop This is actually the app that got me to separate my whole tech stack. I used to put all my bookmarks in Obsidian. But I never really took the time to resurface the bookmarks again after I put them in here. Raindrop is a bookmarking app that is so good at being a bookmarking app that I feel kind of silly using Obsidian in the first place. It captures anything that I throw into it no problem: reddit threads on how to properly engage with [[SaGa Emerald Beyond]]'s combat system, apps that I think are cool, youtube videos I wanna check out later, .pdfs (**VERY** important because I somehow always lose these), vinyl I wanna buy and more. You can separate them into different lists, sort them by date, name and website, tag them for more granularity, and view them in whatever format might look prettiest to you that particular moment - I'm personally fond of the moodboard. ![[My Productivity Tech Stack-20240428123200735.png]] One thing I really like about Raindrop is that it lets you highlight and annotate anything you grab in the link. It's super easy to share to from your phone, using the plugin, or just copy-and-pasting into the desktop app. I highly recommend it! ## Omnivore I used to put my Read-it-Later articles directly in Obsidian, but lately I've been using Omnivore for that. I put all my long-form articles in here and read them whenever I have time, usually on my tablet. Omnivore is nice because it's completely free and open-source, whilst doing what it needs to do very well. I *do* use the Omnivore plugin with Obsidian, though. If I make any highlights or annotations in Omnivore, they automatically get transferred over to Obsidian as a long-term knowledgebase, particularly useful if I end up archiving stuff in Omnivore. ## FlowSavvy FlowSavvy is a calendar app that I've found recently that I really like! I've talked about [[The Time Blocking Experiment|time blocking]] before but it doesn't really work for my ADHD. This is because I often get distracted by some dumb side-quest or a pop-up meeting, which throws off all the blocking that I meticulously crafted that morning. FlowSavvy helps with this by automatically rescheduling stuff when that happens, and based on other factors. For example if I wanted to write this piece from 12PM-2PM, but then find out that I now have a meeting from 1PM-2PM. FlowSavvy looks at: - How long I want to spend on the task - How much time I have now that this meeting showed up - Whether the task can be split up - Other events Once it does all that, it pops my time for writing this article into a new slot, so I can pick it back up later. It's pretty neat! I can maintain my flow without having to go back and rearrange everything because I spent too long on a task or stopped to look at the ugly Tears of the Kingdom t-shirts at Uniqlo that I'm not even going to buy. ## Nirvana This app replaced Obsidian and all my other attempts at using to-do list apps. I've been reading about the GTD method, and while I still think the book is, like most productivity books, very dumb, I took some good key points away from it. Nirvana acts as a 1:1 recreation of the GTD method in app form, and it does that very well. You drop tasks into the inbox when you think of them, then move them into "Next," "Waiting," "Scheduled," or "Someday." There's a lot to that that's very GTD-specific in its language, but I'm not gonna get into it because there's plenty of material on GTD out there. Maybe I'll write a review of the whole book once I'm done with it. **ANYWAYS** the point is if it you like GTD as a method, this app replicates it pretty much perfectly. And most importantly, it doesn't have too many bells and whistles - it just does what it needs to do, and the free tier should be more than enough for most people. ### Free Data One little side-note: what I made sure of going into creating this "Productivity Tech Stack" was that everything I used could have my data exported in some way. What I love most about Obsidian is that in the end, you're manipulating markdown files. [Steph Ango gets into why this matters pretty succinctly](https://stephango.com/file-over-app). If I'm going to use an app, I need to be able to back up and leave it, because nothing is on the internet forever. --- That's about it! I think I might keep this page updated if I shift my stack around and add some patch notes if that's the case. Let me know if you find any of these particular apps useful! # Patch Notes - [[Tech Stack - 07252024]] - [[Tech Stack - 11162024]] - [[Tech Stack - 12012024]]