DIMM002: Productivity!
I'm what some people (including myself) would call a Productivity Nerd™. I like to see how other people work, idk what it is about it but I just love it. As a result, my phone is a clusterfuck of apps no normal human has heard of but that make my goblin brain happy. I'm just gonna yap about the main ones that I use, that's what blogs are for, right?
Before I start I want to say that most of my work happens on the ethereal Apple Ecosystem™. My day to day work is run by an iPhone SE (2020), Airpods, and an M2 Macbook Air. I do use a windows PC for recording, and editing, but I don't do that very often. Its mostly used for media consumption and being a nasty little gamer girl. Because of this duality, I try to use apps that work cross platform. It's not a super high priority, but its a good tiebreaker. I'll mention at the end of each section what platforms they are on, but you should assume that if the app is really good, its probably not on android lol.
Due:
If you take anything away from this blogpost, take this app. It's less about working, and more about being a human in the world. It is an alarm app, where snooze is the default option; that's it. That sounds like a whatever feature but oh my god its game changing specifically for repeated tasks. I have one set for take out the trash, so every week it will keep pinging me over and over every 5 minutes until I take out the trash. You can change how long the "Auto-Snooze" is for each alarm, from 1 minute to 1 hour. You can also postpone it for some time then come back later if you can't handle it at the moment. I do this for a scary number of my basic human tasks that I would forget to do on a regular basis without it. If you forget to do things like shower, or brush your teeth, it's good (for me) to have the app constantly nag at me until I do it.
However, it is only for the Apple Ecosystem™, so... i don't know what to do for the droid users out there. I assume look up "auto snoozing alarm app" for something similar I suppose, but I just looked that up and found nothing soooooooo ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Todoist:
Todoist is my main todo list in my life and I can't live without it. Normal todo list stuff goes in there, like be at XX location at YY time. I use the David Allen signature 2 minute rule for deciding which tasks even get put on there. I also use todoist for a few non-urgent recurring tasks. For example, I have in there every Thursday to claim the free games on Epic Games Launcher, which would be a weird thing to put into Due (god the names of these todo lists need to switch it up). Also I have the subscription service so I put a lot of urgent one time tasks in there for a specific time, and I'll get a notification of them 30 minutes before.
Todoist is great, and its for windows! (and linux!) you just need a web browser, cause its just a web app. I have Todoist as its own web app on my PC, and it syncs with my iPhone and Macbook perfectly. It's not the most beautiful app, but it is cross platform.
Timery: for Toggl::
I am a person that likes to track my working time. This is definitely not for everyone, but I really like it. It's nice to know for a fact how long I worked, instead of my brain just approximating how long. I have a weekly goal of how many hours of concentrated work I should have, and that's what I aim for. A big part of the reason I stick with time tracking is because of Timery. It's an app that uses another app for you, called Toggl. The Toggl app sucks so bad I cannot describe it to you. It is so clunky, so busy, it's just awful, but its really the only choice for time tracking (unless you set one up yourself 👀). But that's fine because it has an API, so 99% of the time I interact with that app I am using Timery to tell the API what to do.
You basically have "Projects" that correspond to what you are actually doing at that time. So I have a "Writing" project, "Editing" project, etc. You can save these projects into "Saved Timers" to then start them when you start that task. Despite the name "Timers" this is not the normal timer you have on your phone that counts down, this one counts up, which took me a while to get used to. I was initially trying to track all of my time in the day, including like eating and sleeping, but that was driving me insane so I went down to just working hours and this is where I like it best. Plus we'll talk about voice assistants later, and how they make this whole thing even easier.
But of course, Timery's beautifulness means that it's only available for the Apple Ecosystem™, so the 1% of the time I have to use Toggl is on my Windows PC when I'm tracking editing time. But if you are tracking your time on an Apple device, Timery is incredible. OR if you are a developer, you could theoretically make your own Timery, because Toggl has an API. I am really out of my depth of programming knowledge when dealing with API's, so Toggl is my sad reality on Windows for now...
Clear:
Clear is a very nice app. That's the best way to describe it, "Nice". I keep lists of things in here, and god damn the sounds that come out of this app just make by goopy goblin brain explode with dopamine. It's good for things that I have to do in an exact order with tiny little things I forget about. I'm a youtuber, so when I upload a video there are a million tiny things I have to check before I click the publish button, and this app is great for that. This app is not in heavy rotation for me, but when it comes in, it comes in clutch. I do know that some people use this as their entire todo list, and it has functionality for that as well.
Because it is so beautiful it must be true that it is only for iPhone. There's an unbreakable law that beautiful apps cannot be cross platform that's just how this works.
Trello:
Trello is easily the app that I use the least in this list but it is still useful so I keep it around. Trello is a Kanban todo list system, which I am not really interested in for my normal tasks. This is for big projects, like say making a YouTube video. Kanban kind of works by moving a card through the project one piece at a time and see what needs to happen next. So you can see on my board that there are many projects in the first draft phase, and one project in the Voice Over (VO) phase, (which I'm procrastinating on by writing this). This is nice to keep tabs on what is going on with these projects.
Trello is a web app, so its on all platforms, Hooray! Downside, it doesn't look incredible of course.
Ambie / Apple Background Sounds:
So on Apple devices there is an oft overlooked feature called background sounds. It's a free white noise machine built into your phone, and that's amazing. And for this app I actually have a good windows alternative called Ambie. You can set up profiles of different noises overlapping with each other and its free and amazing for editing. I'm a fan of light rain mixed with city street and coffee shop. It's like one of the only good looking windows apps I've ever seen.
Those are the main apps and features I use for productivity, but here are some honorable mentions:
Various Voice Assistants:
I have two voice assistants I use in my life. The main one is the Echo Dot I have in my room. I bring my Alexa on vacation with me because I cannot live without her. She is so good for quick calculations, getting the weather, getting the time, reminding me of things, and being an egg timer. All of those things I would have to take out my phone to do, but I can just use my voice so much quicker. I was able to use her with Todoist to automatically create tasks for a little bit but it just stopped working randomly so idk what's going on there.
The other one I use is Siri. I don't like Ms. Siri for most things, she is very slow, both in speed and intelligence. I hope that AI Siri comes to the rescue at some point, but until I get an iPhone 15 Pro or higher, I still have to deal with this relic that is almost able to get a drivers license at this point (came out in 2010!). However, Siri is good at exactly one thing, and that is executing shortcuts. This is where the timers come in from earlier, because I have a custom shortcut for every timer in my system. So to start a Writing timer, all I have to do is say, "Siri Track Writing" and it runs the "Track Writing" shortcut, making a writing timer start. And to stop, I just say "Siri Track Stop" and it stops the timer. Thanks Siri, you are really good at this exact thing that I told you how to do exactly, good job!
Arc Browser:
I don't even need to explain this one just use Arc Browser, you will be converted to the dark side, let the Arc take you. It's only for Windows 11 and Apple Ecosystem™. If anything, this is probably the app I use the most while writing because I use Google Docs, but I don't really think of it as a productivity app.
Health App:
This is really stretching the definition of productivity app. If a productivity app is something that lets me remember less things, I think this definitely counts. If you are a person like me that needs to take multiple pills, multiple times a day, One, get a pill box yesterday, and two, use the built in Apple Health App for your medication. I used to just use Due for this but this one is a lot gentler a reminder. It also has a really cool feature where you can put your prescriptions in exactly, and even select a custom pill that looks like the one you're taking. It also shows your streak of pills over time, so you can see which days you missed.
I'm sure there are specific apps for pill tracking out there, but this one's built right into the iPhone so that's what I'm gonna use. I will say that if you NEED to take a medication at a specific time and you are going to have serious medical repercussions if you don't, I wouldn't recommend this, it's way too gentle for that.
Anyways... Good blog post they probably won't usually be this long I was just really motivated this time