Here’s a roundup of my eight favorite productivity tools.
I wrote this up for a client a while ago, and I’ve since received feedback that it was helpful. I’m sharing the unpolished version here so you can experiment on your own if you’re looking for new tools.
That said, most of the stuff in this post is pretty basic. So if you’re already pretty happy with your productivity tools, probably best to skip this post.
But if you are looking for new tools, here are my favorites roughly ordered by how often I recommend them to clients (and use them myself - I use the first six basically every day).
Lights Spreadsheets - Simple tool for habits
https://www.ultraworking.com/lights/
Lights is a free meta tool to support all the other habits that make you productive. It’s a google template spreadsheet where you track your habits daily. It can help you
increase consistency for important habits.
keep doing new habits long enough to make them routine.
remember to pick up habits when you derail, for example after traveling.
Lights is also great for tracking self-experiments. You can plug in the experimental variable and outcome variables to check for rough correlations. If you want to go a step further, it’s pretty simple to randomize the experimental variable.
Focusmate.com - Coworking on demand
A decent number of clients have reported that coworking is super helpful for staying focused, and this site is great for making coworking happen.
You schedule a work session in advance, and the site pairs you with another person. The two of you video call, briefly say what you will work on, cowork in silence for 50-minutes, and then tell each other how it went. Scheduling an early morning session is particularly helpful for making sure you start work by a certain time.
Stickk.com - Financial commitments
Stickk is your tool when you need to make a self-imposed deadline feel real.
Financial commitments tend to be particularly useful when you need extra motivation to do something at all (e.g. do a deliberate practice exercise) or step up the pace (e.g. finish a paper draft a week before the deadline so you have time to revise). For these reasons, Stickk goals often work well for self-directed projects or learning goals.
Caveats for using Stickk: you are committing to completing your goal by a certain date. This can feel stressful or you might lose money if you set overly ambitious goal. And it can feel downright bad if you commit and then realize this wasn’t the best goal. For all of those reasons, it’s important to set the right goals before you commit.
Also, if you’re not feeling motivated, check why first. Sometimes not feeling motivated is just a sign that the task is hard or you’re not excited by it, despite it being important. But sometimes that lack of motivation is because your plan is bad or there’s a more important goal you could do instead. So think carefully about whether you’re setting worthy, realistic goals before you make the commitment.
Alternatives: Beeminder.com (I find Stickk simpler to use.)
Related: If you want to work on increasing your intrinsic motivation, I would recommend Nate Soares’ blog Minding Our Way as a place to start thinking deeply about what you value and how to achieve it without forcing yourself.
Toggl - Time tracking app
Toggl is great for tracking exactly how you spend your time. It allows you to track time with a few keystrokes and then presents the data in a clean, accessible interface.
The free app is basically a timer, which means you need to manually switch the timer when you switch tasks. It comes with desktop, browser, and phone applications that sync your recorded time. Because of the automatic data crunching, I expect most people will get more value out of tracking time on Toggl than manually on a spreadsheet (plus it’s way easier to do).
I would absolutely recommend periodically tracking your time for a week to check where there are big areas for improvement. Most people I talk to are guessing about where their time goes, and they are often wrong. If you track your time, you know where it’s going and hence can concretely choose what to change.
I also think that most people would benefit from daily tracking of work hours as a combined data gathering and motivational tool. You spend your time somewhat differently when you know there is a record of exactly how long you spend browsing the internet. This change in behavior complicates gathering accurate data, but it’s a great tool for motivation.
You can use projects, clients, and tags to group types of tasks for easy processing. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the app, I’d recommend adding a tag for priority/importance of your work. This is a good way to track how well you’re doing in allocating time to your top priorities. I have a tag for “high value focused work” to indicate deep work time spent on my top priority. I track how much work time warrants that tag each week.
TickTick - Cross-platform todo app
For my default todo app, I want to be able to easily store hundreds of todos, organize them in lists, and filter by due date. All of which should sync seamlessly across my laptop, phone, and browser.
TickTick is my favorite app for this, for ~$3 a month. TickTick is a bit more powerful than competitors such as Todoist, with features such as notes on your todos and a Pomodoro timer.
I recommend immediately writing down everything you need to remember. Anytime you think of something you need to do, write it down in TickTick. If something is distracting you while you’re working, write it down (e.g. “I want to work on this paper, but I need to remember to call Dan later”). This frees up your working memory and ensures you don’t drop the ball unintentionally.
So what can you do in this app?
The most powerful tool is dates. This is how you focus yet ensure you don’t drop the ball. You can set the date for tasks to be whatever day you want to be reminded of them. For example, I choose my priorities for the week or month, and then set the date for the non-priority tasks to the next review. They are out of sight and mind until then, but I’m sure to come back to them at the appropriate time.
I recommend having one day a week when you review your tasks, make new next steps for the open loops, and choose your priorities for the next week. Most clients do this between Friday and Monday. If you batch small todos to one day of the week, as many of my clients do, then you can set the date of small tasks to that day.
These apps are also great for simplified Getting Things Done (GTD) systems.
At the simplest, you can organize four lists in the app to hold the complete GTD system. If you don’t already have a system that’s working for you, you may want to try out these lists:
Open loops – this list is for the big tasks that you need to keep taking actions on. It’s here to make sure you don’t forget to come back to them after you’ve taken one step.
Next steps – this list is for the specific, smaller action items that you do in a day. These include steps to make progress on your open loops. You put steps here when you can take action on them.
Later/waiting – this list is for items where you’re waiting on something. Tasks you can’t start until after a certain date go here. If you need to check in after a certain date if the person hasn’t gotten back to you, that reminder goes here. You set the due date to the date when you should next think about the task, and then you’re free to forget about it until then.
Someday/Maybe – this list is for things you’re not prioritizing right now. Maybe it’s a cool idea you could do someday, but it’s not your current priority and it shouldn’t be clogging up your mind.
You can split these into more lists if you prefer things organized by project, etc.
Alternatives: If you want something else for your todo app, check out this article by Zapier on some of their top recommendations: https://zapier.com/blog/best-todo-list-apps/#2dov
Complice - Daily planning and regular reviews
$12 a month, website only, works best paired with another todo app such as TickTick
In Complice, unlike with other apps, each day you plan the tasks you will do for each goal. At the end of the day, you mark what you completed. And that’s it. There is no list of tasks to do in the future.
First, I like it because each day you see what you planned to do next to what you actually accomplished. It’s the best todo app I’ve found for improving calibration about what you can do in a day, and (hopefully) prioritizing better.
Since there is no way to store future tasks, Complice works best when paired with another todo app. I use Complice as my daily planning tool, while using TickTick as my GTD system.
Second, Complice has a built-in system for regular reviews. Each day you enter an evaluation of your progress toward each goal along with an “enough” or “not enough” rating. Malcolm (Complice’s creator) describes “enough” as this solid little check:
“If on all days like this, I did this much, would that be enough to get me where I need to go?
Which means that if you’re sick, then very little may be enough. It also means that on days when you have lots of available time, the threshold for how much enough is should go up.
It’s not like a single day will get you off-track or on-track towards your goals. But most days will tend to be similar. What would your life be like after hundreds of days like today?”
The weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews provide a simple way to regularly check in on how things are going and how to improve. You can also add an accountability partner (who must also be a Complice user).
Ultraworking Work Cycles - Pomodoros 2.0
https://www.ultraworking.com/cycles
The Pomodoro technique is simple. You set a timer, work for that time, and then take a break (I recommend 50min working/10 min breaks). A decent percentage of people find this helpful.
Work cycles offer a little step up by helping you better use the breaks.
For work cycles, you spend the breaks reviewing the past cycle and planning the next one. This gives a natural break time without new input. Taking a walk, getting a glass of water, or stretching are all good options as well. The key thing to avoid is new input, such as browsing Facebook, checking email, or watching TV. New input seems to make it harder to dive right into work after the break.
Finally, using the breaks to plan is a good opportunity to check you’re on the right track. I frequently hear researchers say they did focused work, but went down rabbit trails that meant their output wasn’t useful for a particular chunk of time. Planning breaks are a good checkpoint to evaluate whether you should continue on your current path or correct course if you’re down a rabbit trail.
WasteNoTime – Free website blocker
I tried out a bunch of internet blockers, and WasteNoTime had the best combination of simplicity and effectiveness. It’s a browser extension that can 1) block blacklisted sites after a specified length of time, 2) entirely block all blacklisted sites or the entire internet or all sites except whitelisted sites for a specified length of time, or 3) automatically block blacklisted sites after a specific amount of time spent on them per day.
It’s only available as a Chrome or Safari extension. Similar apps with good reputations: Leechblock for Firefox, and SelfControl for Macs.
