I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to optimize, pare down, add more to the stack, pare down, optimize. I’ve learned a few things.
Everyone is Different. This one was huge for me. I’d read posts on forums/sites about subscriptions being the bane of someone’s existence, or the fact an app increased its price by $5 to be an insult to the world. I would get angry, raise a fist and go “yeah! What he said!, I’m cancelling my sub!”. Then a few days later I would realize that I really, really, really missed said app. Followed later by the realization my wife and I both have good incomes, so $5 a year or $5 a month was not going to break the bank. And more often than not, the process of learning a new app or process vs using an app I could use in the dark with my phone off; not worth the hassle. I am the John Coffey of tech forums. I absorb everyone’s pain and it exhausts me
Every Household Budget is Different. $75 a year for an app might be a major decision for some people, while for others, it accounts for a very small dent in their annual budget. Only you can decide what is a fair price for you.
I spent way too much time tinkering. I’ll admit it. When work is difficult and I can’t decide what to work on next, or when I need to capture something, my first instinct isn’t “just do the thing”. It’s “oh, um…what app should I put this in? Is this a good place to put it? What would the people at MPU Talk say about this? Should I automate this? Is it backed up? Is this cloud service trustworthy?”. I would go on hours-long spirals.
Reviewing my “stack” and talking about apps on here leads me to be less productive, not more. The people who are getting work done are the ones who - when asked what task manager they use - say “I just have a note pad beside my desk. I write down 3 things each morning. That’s it – I mean, I never really thought about it”. Spending hours with ChatGPT and on forums trying to come up with an elaborate system – it’s not for me. It may work well for others, but I can’t.
This one may be controversial but workflows can’t always be set up like an assembly line. It’s not A–>B–>C–>D every time; a process that can be locked down. Work and real life are messy. Sometimes A turns into C and someone throws a P or an R in there. Trying to be 100% efficient and have every single app and detail mapped out to perfection isn’t possible. Is it worth creating a text expander whatchamccallit to quickly write out a paragraph you often use in an email? I’d say yes. Spending hours and hours coming up with shortcuts that move information between apps when a single app could work – maybe not.
Everyone is different and what works for one might not work for another. I cast no judgement. I’m just saying for me, personally; the tinkering and bouncing around and constant reviews are not healthy for me and I think we often overthink, over-engineer, and over-solve our problems because doing so lets us not work on what’s important.
Some thoughtful points in your post. I’ve often considered your conclusion too; like, how much time do you spend learning and implementing “efficiency tools” before you defeat the whole concept of efficiency?
“I listened to the reviews of the Dumblezorp app, then I installed it, subscribed to it, took an online class for it, then adjusted my workflow to accomodate it; just think of all the time I’m now saving on proofreading the text expansion scheduler for automations to my system monitor menus!”
On the other hand, for some of us nerds (well, me anyway) I’ve found that sometimes all that tinkering is actually an end in itself. Not necessarily the end result of what the app / shortcut / hack is intended to do, but the whole process of playing around with it in the first place. I think that’s at least part of it for me.
“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.” I’m not sure if that was McCarthy’s intent with that line, but that’s sure what I get out of it.
I’m on a different road than half the forum. I also cast no judgment. Indecision about what tools to use almost always means I don’t know what I actually want to be doing. I.e., “should I be using Ulysses” is really “should I be spending time trying to write longform?” Once that question is answered, tools come together easily because, well, I’m either good at choosing them or lucky avoiding bugs/pitfalls. Probably both.
The big change in 2025 that I’ll continue in 2026 is incorporating my own software. For example, I spend 20-30 hours a week reading code. I wrote an app to make this better and it’s really helping me. In 2026, I’ll probably write a similar app to make it easier to review changes to blocks in automated test suites. Since I’m a developer, developing an app is an opportunity to target skills I wanted to learn, and fits into my planed work hours. We are in such a cool era right now where developers have time to make software as quickly as someone used to make a useful spreadsheet. Some non-developers can do this, too.
Writing is still a bit in flux. DEVONthink 4 still doesn’t look beautiful, but it let me customize the writing environment enough to feel expressive in it. Most of my writing is between a couple paragraphs and a page. iA Presenter makes minimal and engaging presentations out of this writing.
For Mac/iOS apps, OF4 keeps working swimmingly. I think we’ve cracked the code with family documents and DEVONthink this year. The new mobile app should boost that in 2026.
Hey apps continue to enforce much-needed email minimalism.
For feeds, continuing with Castro and NNW. The Castro developer is doing a great job, and with Brent Simmons having recently retired, I think NNW is going to continue to be well maintained.
I tried many task tools and methodologies in my life and none ever became habitual before Things. Twelve years later, I refuse to consider alternatives - Things fit fine.
I have been down the KonMari route for household items and it once helped my family and I get rid of 60 boxes of excess stuff.
However, my domestic excess reduction zealotry became a case of the “Irresistible Force Paradox”. My ongoing ”force“ to reduce waste and downscale household items, hit the ”immovable object” of women’s fashion ie my wife and daughters’s wardrobe, where every random cloth, hairclip and accessory is deemed essential. So the paradox wasn’t proven - I lost….
I now content myself deleting apps and trying to reduce my gadgets…life’s simple pleasures.
@bmosbacker. Your iPad focused approach has greatest appeal for me.
However, having the 13” and 11” and MBA does still sit slightly uncomfortably for me from an “excess” perspective even though I have the luxury.
My interim solution is to consider the 13” my work device, the 11” a travel/relaxation device and the MBA a backup, as you are considering.
When I stop working I can potentially retire the 13”. This two iPad approach also has the benefit of work/life segregation as I find it all too easy to slip from relaxing to working… (the justification one makes to keep many devices 。
Perhaps in the future when one iPad is declared retired by Apple and no longer receives security updates, I will see if I can live without replacing it. Time will tell.
Nice! Her book got us unstuck on some organizing as well. Some clothing discussions are likewise difficult. We’ve ended with more and appropriately sized storage for our individual and family priorities, though.
I feel similarly about digital; think about what’s important to you, and then don’t be afraid to learn and re-arrange so you can do a lot of that with however much of your life you want to spend on screens. There’s not the same physical stuff pressure to figure out digital priorities as a family, so our communal solutions lag behind my individual solutions. More opportunity to practice contentment.
Nice to see that somebody else has alighted on a couple of applications that I’ve also chosen: BetterBird as a replacement for MailMaven and Softmaker Office NX Home for Microsoft Office.
The driver wasn’t cost per se but more of a desire to “consciously decouple” from major US tech companies, and that means moving more to apps that aren’t macOS / Windows only. I really didn’t worry about this until the Microsoft ICC fandango, which seemed to instigate a steady drip of stories about Google, Apple and Microsoft cancelling accounts without an effect means of challenging the decision. I realised that I need better control over who holds things like my family photos.
I think this depends very much on how your work and personal life is integrated, and the relative proportion of scheduled vs unscheduled tasks in each (by scheduled I mean things that you don’t need reminding of e.g. Monday morning is always “time to review X”).
I’ve tried both all in Reminders and all in Things, but have settled into using both but for a different split to you. For me, Things is where I put tasks. Reminders is where I put what I would call “running lists” i.e. not projects but lists with no defined end point. Examples are the supermarket shopping list, books I want to read, a list of online order deliveries I’m expecting.
I guess so. My daughter has an amazing ability to designate plastic junk from primary school as a treasure. And I guess to her it is. Each to there own as they say…
This is so true and I’ve been weeding out apps right and left. As I embark on my Solstice review and set up I am looking at another major clean out. My big issue right now is the niggling bits and drabs of data that is still in old apps I never use. I am setting up projects to convert and move all that stuff out into my current set of apps. Work on that has been slowed by some critical AnimalTrakker® work that has to get done and deployed by 5 January.
My desired app stack (after the conversion and clean-up I’ve already identified) will be:
Apple Apps
Terminal
Messages
Text Edit
Contacts (But linked to Obsidian)
Calendar (But all my calendars are on my CalDAV server not in Apple)
iMovie
Music
General Apps
Firefox - Browser
Chrome - Browser only to test AnimalTrakker stuff
Safari - Browser only on sites I can’t use Firefox for
Thunderbird - email
Obsidian - task and project management, reference, notes, web clipping
Strongbox - password management
Libre Office - spreadsheets, word processing and presentations
Preview - minimal photo processing
PDF Expert
Google Earth Pro
Zotero 6
Software Development Apps
Android Studio
Android File Transfer
PyCharm
GitKraken
SQLite Manager
DB Browser for SQLite
Slack
Zoom
ZeroTier
Utilities
NameChanger
Fetch
BarCuts
Shortcuts
CarbonCopy Cloner
iMazing
Hazel - I may get rid of this it is not handling the move and rename tasks at all well for me so I end up doing most of them by hand now anyway.
Calibre - DeDRM of electronic documents
Keyboard Maestro - Just playing with it not sure if it will stick or not.
Photo and Video Processing, scanning and cataloging
PhotoSync Companion - sync my iPhone photos to my own location I do not use apple photos
LightRoom
PhotoShop
A Better Finder Rename
A Better Finder Attributes
SlideSnap Pro Auto Cropper
BatchCrop
VuewScan
ExactScan Pro
ScanSnap
Fun Stuff
Reunion
Silhouette Studio
TypeFu - learning how to type using Dvorak
Update, Don’t know how I missed adding Fetch. I use it daily!
Indecision about what tools to use almost always means I don’t know what I actually want to be doing. I.e., “should I be using Ulysses” is really “should I be spending time trying to write longform?” Once that question is answered, tools come together easily because, well, I’m either good at choosing them or lucky avoiding bugs/pitfalls. Probably both.
