Productivity Tools — Part 1

I have always been a fan of productivity tools. Tools that help me remember things, prioritize or even things that help me view “things”… in perspective. So even a blank sheet of paper and pencil make a great pair of productivity tools for me. I think we are one of the luckiest generations which has witnessed the transition from ecosystems — from note-books to web and then to smart-phone apps. It gave us a perspective on what works and what doesn’t work in each system. In the smart-phone era, I tried so many productivity tools over the years that I am pretty sure I have an account on most of them now. Evernote, Asana, To-do-ist, Trello, TickTick, OneNote, Toggl, Pocket etc. Each of them had different objectives and USPs. As someone who always admired “good design”, I got into this habit of trying a new tool and checking if it is really is better than the ones I already knew or used till then. In the process, I picked up new tools and discarded some, if the functionality and design wasn’t really novel and intuitive enough. But a few of them stuck longer however — like Wunderlist, OneNote and TickTick.

And then, one fine day, Apple Pencil happened. Now, no matter the magnitude of digital leaps I took, I always remained firmly connected to some of the old school things like hand-written notes. As someone with a decent fountain pen collection (and also suffering from an irrational and obtuse habit of judging people by their handwriting), I valued hand-written notes tremendously and a significant part of my note-taking work happened through hand-written notes in notebooks (i also have a fascination for notebooks; but I digress). But when I saw the perfect marriage of old school method and a new technology i.e., the amazing pairing between an iPad and an Apple pencil, I couldn’t resist the desire to adopt this couple. And it worked like a charm. Using OneNote (or even Apple Notes) on iPad with a Pencil just changed the game for me. It helped me move away from pure linear thinking patterns, which form while typing up sentence of sentence, into more of fluid, free canvas thinking patterns. It allowed me to scribble a bullet point and establish its connection to, say, point# 10 by just drawing an arrow between them in a different color — thereby making my mind to view those 2 points as a bunch — a push for some holistic views in some situations. This OneNote and Pencil set became an integral part of my productivity ecosystem, which continued to inhabited by few other tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft To-Do and TickTick. While I was happy that there are these accessible tools that are working for me, there has always been a tinge of dissatisfaction — that it is still a set of few (multiple) tools which I need to look into constantly, to get stuff done.

And then, there came one tool that changed it all for me.

to be continued…