Everyone has a productivity stack.
The internet has opinions about yours before you've even started. The forums, the newsletters, the YouTube channels dedicated entirely to the systems and tools and frameworks that will finally make you the kind of person who gets things done. Notion for everything. Obsidian if you want to feel like a serious thinker. Time blocking. Deep work sessions. The Pomodoro technique, which is a real method named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer that someone in the 1980s used to manage their attention and which has since become a productivity philosophy.
I have tried most of these. I have the receipts.
Twelve months of Notion at $16 a month. I built the workspace four times. The fourth version was genuinely beautiful, a home page with linked databases and a project tracker and a daily note template and a habit tracker and a reading list and a weekly review section that I was going to fill in every Sunday. I filled it in once. Then a client emergency happened on a Sunday and the system never recovered and I spent the following three weeks feeling guilty about not doing the weekly review instead of doing the work the weekly review was supposed to help me do.
This is the system problem that nobody in the productivity content space wants to say out loud. The system only works when everything else is working. The moment life does what life does, client emergency, visa run that took two days, sick week, moved cities, internet down for four days, the system requires maintenance at exactly the moment you have no capacity for maintenance. It breaks. You feel guilty about the broken system. The guilt consumes the energy that should be going to the work. The work suffers. The system remains broken.
Six months of a time tracking app that tracked with considerable accuracy how little I wanted to track my time. I would open it in the morning with genuine intention and close it by 11am because tracking the time was taking time and the time I was spending tracking was showing up in the tracker as time spent tracking which was the most demoralising category of all. Nuts!
A month of a focus app that played brown noise while I stared at the screen not focusing. The brown noise was pleasant. I was still not focusing. Brown noise, it turns out, does not address the underlying question of why the focus isn't there. It just makes the not-focusing more acoustically comfortable.
A week of a project management tool that required more project management than the projects it was managing.
I have spent more money on productivity tools in three years than I have spent on most visa runs, which are themselves not cheap. The irony of this is not lost on me.
Here is what I actually use.
A text file. Plain text, no formatting, no database, no linked references. The things I need to do today, in order, written in sentences. When they are done I delete them. When they are not done I move them to tomorrow. The file has existed in various forms for eighteen months and has never required a Sunday to rebuild.
A browser with bookmarks organised by client. Not a bookmark manager. Not a tab grouping system. Folders. In the browser. Like 2008.
A calendar with two categories of thing in it. Calls that have a specific time and things I have told myself I will do on a specific day. Nothing else. The calendar does not contain my values or my quarterly goals or my personal development objectives. It contains calls and intentions.
Toggl for time tracking when the client requires tracked hours and nothing when they don't. Toggl is fine. I do not have opinions about Toggl. It tracks time. That is what it does.
Wise for getting paid. Not because it is perfect but because it is the least imperfect option for receiving money in multiple currencies from multiple countries while moving between them and paying fees that are visible rather than hidden in the exchange rate.
A notebook from a Vietnamese stationery shop that cost roughly one dollar. I write things in it when I need to think rather than do. The thinking that requires pen and paper is different from the thinking that requires a screen. I do not have a system for the notebook. I do not index it or link it or photograph it into a digital archive. I write in it and occasionally look back at what I wrote and sometimes it is useful and sometimes it is the rambling of someone who had too much coffee and thought they were having a breakthrough.
That is the stack. Seven things. Three of them free. One of them cost a dollar. The most expensive one is Wise and the expense is the fee on transfers which is the cost of the life rather than the cost of a tool.
The version of this that gets written in the productivity newsletters is different.
That version has more items and more sophistication and more integration between the items. The calendar talks to the project manager which talks to the time tracker which populates a dashboard that shows you your productivity at a glance. The system is elegant and interconnected and requires a Sunday every month to maintain and breaks in interesting ways when one component updates and the integration stops working.
I built that version in Chiang Mai in year two. Spent a Saturday on it. Was genuinely proud of the result. Used it for eleven days before the client emergency and the Sunday that didn't have a weekly review in it and the guilt that followed.
What I understand now that I didn't understand then is that the sophistication of the system is inversely related to its resilience. The simple system survives the week where everything goes wrong because it has almost nothing to break. The elegant interconnected system does not survive that week. It requires a specific quality of attention to maintain that the week where everything goes wrong does not provide.
The work requires attention. The system should require as little attention as possible. Every hour spent on the system is an hour not spent on the work. Every hour of guilt about the system is an hour of energy not available for the work.
The productivity stack that works is boring. It does not make good content. It does not have a beautiful screenshot. It is a text file and a dollar notebook and a calendar with two types of things in it.
It survives the bad weeks.
That is the only metric that matters.
Andrew - No Refunds •••