5 Personal Productivity Tools I Use Every Day

One of my new year's day resolutions should have been to write more blog posts, or at least more regularly. But you know how it is: You think that the beginning of the year will be slow, but the exact opposite happens and the first time you have a few extra minutes you realize it's already February :-).

Anyway, here it is: The first blog post of the New Year is about the 5 personal productivity tools I basically use every day. The word "personal" is important here, because I also use a number of enterprise productivity tools such as Planforge, Jira, or Confluence quite frequently, but this post really focuses on those tools that I use to support my very own personal workflow.

• Firetask. All my tasks and to-dos are (mostly ;-) neatly organized in Firetask, my personal task management app. I like Firetask, because it (A) supports David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) approach quite well and (B) allows me to easily focus on what currently matters. As it also supports task priorities and Kanban, I can really use it "as is" to support my very own take on GTD.
• iA Writer. I do all my creative writing in iA Writer. It is such a simple and at the same time powerful tool for creative writing. I like that if you make it full-screen it gets all the distractions out of the way, but still only uses the center area of the screen for the content (see the screenshot above). The CMD+D shortcut is also quite nice for highlighting only the current sentence -- especially for tuning marketing messages.
• Infoplane. While I manage all longer notes with iA Writer -- including my scratch file -- I have all the short notes and infos in Infoplane. I use Infoplane, because it makes storing and retrieving short pieces of information really easy. "Infos" are stored as cards that are automatically arranged in a grid sorted by modification date (so the latest infos are on top). You can also use tags and optionally, you can group together related infos in stacks (which I use also but only for very special use cases). You could say that Infoplane is my main database for reference information (in GTD terms).
• ChatGPT. I probably do not have to introduce you to ChatGPT, but maybe you do not yet know that OpenAI also has a quite good (more or less native) Mac app. For a few weeks now it also has a practical menu bar icon that you can use to ask something really quick. While I also use Claude (great for coding) and Gemini, ChatGPT is still my go-to app for general questions, research and marketing support.
• Inseries. Finally, there is Inseries: A practical menu bar app that resembles an interesting mix of a super lightweight spreadsheet and a business calculator. I like that it retains a history of everything I calculate, that I can bring it up really quickly using a global keyboard shortcut and it includes date calculations (which I use a lot). It also provides some practical shortcuts for percentage calculations and basic support for converting between hex, binary and decimal numbers.

Disclaimer: I have co-designed three of these tools (I leave it to you to determine which ones, but they are probably easy to guess ;-). Still I use them every day, so I can definitely say that I "eat my own dog food" :-).

I use the official Mac App Store to purchase my personal apps whenever possible, simply because it is convenient and quite safe in terms of malware. The ChatGPT app I installed directly from OpenAI's website, as the official app doesn't seem to be available in the Mac App Store (only a number of third-party tools).