I think people benefit from seeing the tools other commonly use. Here’s mine: hopefully you’ll find it useful. A one on my iPhone apps will follow this post.
- Microsoft Excel: No surprise, but I use this every day. Specifically I have a master checklist in Excel that I use with supporting worksheets. One worksheet is a daily checklist, another contains my weekly goals, a third tracks meals, etc. It helps me stay focused and it helps me track what I need to stay on top of throughout the day, month, year. While I use Excel for many other reasons, that is my chief reason.
- Easylog, my private logging program: related to my master todo list, I have a simple logging program I wrote in python that allows me to track everything from how much I slept that night, to things I’ve accomplished, to what the weather is like. Each entry is a one liner, and each entry simultaneously goes into a local xlsx file and a remote Google sheet as a backup. It’s my one stop shop for logging what I need to log. Some things I’ve logged for years, while other items are ad hoc (e.g., headaches post brain bleed).
- Workflowy: another program I use many times a day is Workflowy. I use it mainly as a giant todo list. But I also use it to keep a list of things to blog about, recipes I want to cook, my bucket list, and more. As a bonus, I get it to help me whenever I am working on an outline: I can quickly draft an outline in Workflowy, sort things around, then export it into another tool. Do I use it for any form of planning? I certainly do, since it is great for that too.
- Simplenote and Joplin: these two tools are complimentary. Simplenote I use as my personal note-taking app, and Joplin I use for work note-taking (though I have started to use Microsoft OneNote). I used to use only Evernote, but as it got more difficult to use, I switched to Joplin. However I like Simplenote for personal items, especially recipes. My Simplenote is filled with recipes. And much much more. (Shout out to Quick Draft. Like Workflowy and Simplenote and Joplin, it has an iPhone version and a desktop version, so when I do updates on my phone, they automatically replicate to my desktop, and vice versa. I use Quickdraft to take random notes, like a scratchpad.)
- BOX / Google Drive / OneDrive: I use these three (and occasionally Dropbox, though less and less) for all my cloud storage needs. BOX and OneDrive are where work files go and Google Drive is where personal files get backed up. I have a custom python script to keep files on my different laptops in sync using those three storage services.
- bbedit: this tool is my text editor of choice. Very powerful, very dependable. A workhorse tool.
- IFTTT: I use IFTTT for some home automation my life. I don’t use it as much as I used to…maybe I need to reconsider that.
- Ccleaner and JDisk Report: maybe some day I will get a massive hard disk for my Mac, but for now mine is relatively small, so I use ccleaner to clean out files I don’t need and give me free disk space. When I need to find out what is on my Mac that is still taking up all that space, I use JDisk Report.
- ollama: ollama is a nice tool that allows me to run LLMs (large language models) on my Mac. I use this for work when I want to test various LLMs to see how they respond. But I have also found that with ollama and the LLM GPT-OSS-20B, I get the capability of SaaS tools like Claude or ChatGPT and the comfort in knowing my question is not being used as input for future training. Plus I just like the format of the response. If you have a Mac or a Windows machine with GPUs, I think ollama plus that LLM is a nice thing to use as your own personal AI.
- Visual Studio (VS) code + Roo Code / IBM Bob: most of my work these days is done using AI tools like Roo Code within VS Code or IBM Bob. Both of them are powerful interfaces to Claude Sonnet, the LLM that provides them the smarts they need. Both of them have many similarities. These AI tools have revolutionized how I do my work.
Shout out to Google Chrome which is so indispensable I don’t even think of it as a separate tool. Same goes for Terminal, which I have on the go constantly. Same for Outlook and Mail and Word and Slack. Do I use Teams? I do. Do I like Teams? I prefer Slack for messaging, but Teams is useful for meetings.
Smart People I Know 