What I Spend My Time Doing: Top 3 Personal Tools
Maximizing Productivity: My Go-To Tools for Daily Life
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Disponible la versión en español aquí.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve written on this blog. But I refuse to think that it is due to lack of time. Chances are, I’m giving more priority to other things, like trying to follow the current trend of all online content being audio-visual (my Twitch channel, Youtube channel, or even my clumsy attempts to create content on Tiktok).
With these new projects I had almost forgotten the pleasant feeling of sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper to collect my thoughts, empty my soul and share my conclusions with the world.
As I say, it is not a question of lack of time. Everyone decides what they spend their time on. Our time is our greatest treasure, something that advances inexorably never to return, so that having the feeling of wasting time is one of the greatest misfortunes that a human being can suffer.
That’s why I’ve decided to write again here on my blog, to share with you (or myself) a few lines about what I spend my time on.
I mean, of course, the time I have for myself. We all have the same time, but we must dedicate it to different things, many of them unavoidable: the hours of work, those of commuting to your place of work and back, those of getting food, feeding yourself, and if it is the case, feeding others, taking care of your loved ones, those of sleeping (yes, you have to sleep, is much more important than we think), etc.
We can be tempted to think that among all these things we have no time left for ourselves. But that’s a big mistake. Just look at your phone’s stats, which will tell you how many hours you’ve spent on social media during the day. I’m sure it’s much more than you imagined. That’s time you’ve dedicated exclusively to yourself. Then if you want you can ask yourself if that’s the best way you could have spent all that time.
But today, specifically, I want to talk to you about what I call pR+D. “Personal R+D”. Time that you dedicate to researching and developing (or if you prefer, implementing) things that serve you in your personal development.
I’m going to give you an example:
You have a day of little work at the office, and you have an hour or two of absolutely no urgent responsibility ahead of you.
You have a choice in front of you, to spend that time scrolling down one of your favorite social networks, or you can spend that time researching something that will serve you in your life. Some small project that you have come up with that could be done and would be good for anything, but that requires some research and orderly implementation work.
It can be anything, that Excel file that would help you organize your expenses, that Youtube tutorial that will teach you how to do that pending botch at home, anything. It’s not browsing social networks aimlessly, it’s heading towards a port, grabbing the helm and facing the immensity of the internet to reach your destination. It’s very, very different.
Don’t get me wrong, I also spend endless hours a week (outside of working hours, don’t get me wrong) drifting around the internet, with no other direction than the one proposed by the algorithm of the social network in which I am immersed, but I try to dedicate most of the time I have for myself to that pR+D.
And what do I spend my quality time, personal R+D? Well, sometimes it’s hard for me to understand that I’m really doing something productive, to be honest, because there are so many things that can be useful to me, to which I can dedicate my time, that I don’t know what to do. But as Feynam’s Technique says, the best way to understand something yourself is to try to explain it to others. So I’m going to try to explain here the things I do with my time to implement improvements in my life and that of others.
Remember that R+D is not only Research, which would be the easiest, but also Development (some include an i at the end, R+D+i, as “innovation”), that is, it is not enough to read 5 books or 200 articles on a topic, although that is very good, but you have to start implementing things.
And after giving it a few turns on how to talk to you about this, I think I’m finally going to use the hackneyed (although useful) technique of talking about the top 3 tools I use. The podium of my pR+D. The three things in which I would recommend everyone to “waste their time”, because they are the ones that have been most useful to me in my life.
Deciding on just three tools is a really difficult task, and it doesn’t mean that they are the only ones I spend my time on. But after a lot of thinking about it, I think they are the three that I think can give you more satisfactory results for your life, in terms of the time you dedicate to them.
So… let’s go!
First of all, disclaimer: of course this list is personal and subject to opinions, it is a list that works well for me, but that still does not suit you, and surely you would change some other things. You can use the comments section to propose, criticize, or whatever it takes, I would love to see your proposals.
And, on the other hand, I have to say that this list is not ordered, these three tools are so useful to me that I can’t say which one to choose before the others. It has cost me enough suffering to stay with only three, because many others have been left out and could be on the list.
Top 3 Tools
1. Note-taking tools
Oh, the art of note-taking. We use it since we were little, our teachers teach us (well, not much, actually, if they taught it well another rooster would crow for us), and it accompanies us all our lives. We take notes for everything, to write down the most important things in a class and then review it in our studio, for the shopping list, so as not to forget this or that, to send the damn summary of a meeting indicating what the next steps are, to organize our vacation and not miss anything interesting… for everything.
In my explanation of how I use this tool I am going to leave out, although I think it is a very important part of it, the method of personal organization that I use so that those notes are not loose pieces of paper that are blown away by the wind (real or imaginary, if they are digital notes) but that they become reminders, tasks, ideas for new projects, etc.
Just comment that I have tried a thousand different organization methods, and I am left with something similar (I say similar, because I have adapted it to my needs) with the GTD method, or “Getting Things Done”, which I have talked about a lot on Youtube here (Spanish only).
What I want to do is go into the detail of what apps I use to take notes. Since there are as many apps as there are people, the first thing to do to select the one (or apps) you’re going to use is to know what kind of person you are taking notes, “Librarian,” “Gardener,” or “Architect.”
Let me explain.
This classification of the different types of note-takers is phenomenally explained in this article that I awkwardly tried to explain in this Youtube video (Spanish only).
But summing up a lot,
- Librarians enjoy collecting, creating a catalog of resources, and they need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily retrieve their ideas.
- Gardeners enjoy exploring, connecting thoughts, and they need a tool that allows them to grow their ideas easily, connecting with each other.
- Architects enjoy planning and designing the structure of notes, and they need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily structure their ideas.
The tools that each of them will use have different functionalities:
- Librarians will use applications that can be used to easily save, sort, and find what is needed, whether it be book notes, web pages, meeting notes, or recipes. Its functionalities will include web snipping, rich formatting, attachments, tagging, search and filtering tools, etc.
- Gardeners will use non-linear notes, avoiding a rigid structure of folders, to be able to see connections between notes and between ideas, connections that may not have been established in advance. Its functionalities will include two-way links, markdown formatting, focusing information in small blocks, graphical visualization of connections between notes, flexible labeling, etc.
- Architects will use a hierarchical structure, based on pages and categories, which requires design and structure, and decide whether a new idea requires its own category, its own page, or simply its own block of content. Once you’ve made that effort, you can reuse your templates for new notes. The functionalities of the applications you will use include custom views based on categories, tags or properties, customizable templates, metadata, reusable content blocks, advanced search, and more.
Well, and after this intense internal work of sorting through your type of note-taker, you’ll be able to go down to the next level, that of the tools you’re going to use.
To make a long story short, and because I said that I’m going to talk about what I spend my time on, I have to say that I’m clearly a Gardener, and that even though I’ve tried Librarian apps like Evernote, or Architect apps like Notion, I’ve finally found my ideal type of app, the Gardener’s app.
Before entering the top3 applications for Gardeners, a brief stop at the method.
Gardeners also have a structure, not everything is chaos, and although we do not like hierarchical structures, we always use them, even if it is at the top level. To order what they call my “Second Brain” or my “Digital Garden” (the latter metaphor fits more with the concept of Gardener, but they are very similar) I have ended up using, even partially, the so-called PARA Method (Project, Area, Resources, Archive).
Each of these concepts is a wonderful rabbit hole through which to introduce yourself like Alice to investigate, but let’s get to the point:
Top 3 Gardener Tools:
1. Notes apps with two-way links:
TiddlyWiki / Obsidian / LogSeq
As I say, I leave Notion and Evernote, because they are not gardener’s. I also leave RoamResearch, which seems to be the most recommended for this type of note-taking, but it is paid.
There are small differences between them, and to make up your mind I recommend that you take a look at their similarities and differences, as I did, but I have stayed with TiddlyWiki for my work, in which I have created a fully bidirectional database of clients and contacts, Wikipedia style, and Obsidian to create my PARA method knowledge file.
2. Bookmark Save App While Browsing
Diigo (formerly Google bookmars or Google Notebook)
Secondly, I put an application for the management of favorites or online bookmarks.
Actually, this should be the same application as note-taking, and have it all integrated, but I haven’t got it yet. For me it is important to have an easy way to save things while browsing the internet, and for that I use a different application, which includes a browser extension (a simple button to save what you want in your note), similar to how you do when you save a favorite in the browser.
And why don’t I use my computer’s favorites directly? Well, easy, because as soon as you have a few dozen favorites (not to mention hundreds, as I have) the favorites folder is a real chaos, and it is impossible to find anything. That happens to me with the browser I use exclusively for work things, where I have so many pages saved in favorites that looking for one is a headache. Well, that and that the intranet of companies is usually hell to find something…
Instead, I do the same, but with the Diigo app, and I simply add one or two tags to the page I’m saving, and if I work hard a little description. The app sorts my notes into a cloud of tags, and it’s much easier for me to find things.
3. Application to Save what I read online (articles, news)
This is undoubtedly the tool, free of charge, that I use the most and recommend the most. I dedicated a post to it on this same blog, and although it was years ago, my method is still very similar.
Well, I still have to update the diagrams, because I haven’t used Facebook, Evernote or Scoop It for a long time. But the idea is the same: everything I see that I’m interested in reading online I send to Pocket, where a copy is saved to read later. Many times it also serves to clean the page of advertising banners and other that distracts your reading, because it saves you a copy of simple text and only the photos of the article itself.
After reading, I decide if I’m going to save it for later, or if it’s not worth it. And that ties in with the second type of tool that I recommend to everyone to dedicate their pR+D time to:
2. Tools to automate processes
Seriously? Automate processes? And you’re not going to talk about AI?
Patience, my dear Padawan, trust in The Force. Don’t jump straight into researching Artificial Intelligence because you’ll be overwhelmed by the monumental changes we’re immersed in right now, and you’ll get vertigo.
My proposal is something closely related to AI, and that can be much more useful to you personally, at least at first. If you then want to direct your steps to that immense rabbit hole of AI, you will already be halfway there.
What I mean by automations is to perform several small consecutive tasks automatically, so that you save time.
I’m going to give a very simple example: you open your cupboard and see that you are short of rice; you know what you have to do so you don’t forget to buy it the next time you go to the supermarket; you hold your phone close to a small “RFID” tag (one of those used for mobile payment) that you have stuck in a corner of your fridge. That small gesture initiates a series of actions that in a couple of seconds open your task app, identifies the list of tasks called “Shopping List”, opens it, and opens a new note for you to simply indicate “Rice”.
It doesn’t sound like much, but process automation is a very powerful tool. Automation can be much more complicated, and save you a lot more time.
But doesn’t that imply knowing how to program? That’s very complicated, boss.
Well, yes and no. Knowing how to program is not the same as mastering a programming language, and automations are not complex computer programs (or they don’t have to be) so you can start with No-code tools and then go as deep as you want.
Of the ones I present to you here, I only master the first, the simplest, although I have tried all three. They are very similar, and depending on the use you want to give it (or if you are willing to pay for its pro versions) you will choose one or the other
Top3 tools to automate processes:
- IFTTT: Nothing is easier to understand in programming than this statement: If This, then That. If this happens, do that. It’s that simple. All programming languages have this instruction in one way or another. Of the three I propose, this is the simplest, focused on basic one-step automations, with a simple and easy-to-use interface. The most important thing about these apps is their integration with other online apps, as they offer a wide range of integrations with popular apps and services. This way you can make it so that when something happens in an application like Youtube (for example, you watch a music video that you like) the automation or “Applet” will look for the title of the video on Spotify, and if it finds it it will add it to your “New Songs” music playlist.
To this example, which may be a bit silly, you can add thousands of different online services, and multiple complexities, but it is usually very easy to automate your small repetitive things.
I’m going to give you another example of how I use it to link to the previous point of reading things with Pocket:
When I finish reading an article (which I had previously saved because I found it interesting) in Pocket, if I still think it’s worth saving, I mark it as “archived” in the Pocket app itself. The automation will then go to a Google Sheets file, and create a new line, with all the information from the article:
The tool extracts almost all the information I’m interested in saving: title, a summary, an image if available, and the url. From there I have added more columns and recently enriched it with the wonderful help of the AI, which reads the article and automatically creates several tags or hashtags that will serve me to link all these notes later, as we have seen above when I have talked about note-taking tools.
Is it or isn’t it wonderful? If every time I just read an interesting article I had to open the list and perform all these steps manually… I just wouldn’t, of course.
- Zapier: very similar to the previous one, but that allows you to create more complex workflows with multiple steps. It offers a slightly more complex but still intuitive interface, and as a main advantage it offers integrations with almost everything you can imagine (more than 5,000 online services).
Some examples of automations in Zapier would be:
- Automatic publication on social networks: automatically publish new content from a blog like this on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. It’s an efficient way to keep social media updated with the latest content.
- Save form responses in spreadsheets, linking form tools such as Typeform, Gravity Forms, or Webflow with Google Sheets. When someone fills out a form, the answers are automatically added as new rows in a Google Sheet.
- Create tasks from starred emails, turning important emails into tasks in project management apps. For example, you can create cards in Trello or tasks in Todoist from starred emails in Gmail. This helps keep track of important actions that arise from email communication.
- Make: It offers the most flexibility, allowing very advanced workflows, but also the greatest complexity. It provides a more advanced visual interface with a workflow editor, even allowing you to connect to any API. Its functions include loops, complex conditions, and data manipulation.
Some examples of automations in Make would be:
- Automating tasks with Google Sheets, automatically updating data in a spreadsheet based on information from other applications, or triggering actions when certain cells are modified.
- Integration with ChatGPT to improve business processes, for example for automatic content generation, customer responses, or data analysis.
In short, thousands of possibilities to automate tasks, do repetitive and laborious tasks that you would never do manually, multiply the impact of your online actions, and save you a lot of time that you can use on other things. And also to discover what AI can do for you, because as you can see the two things make a perfect combo.
3. Tools for personal finance management
And to finish the top3 personal tools, I would definitely recommend that you dedicate your pR+D time to learning how to use tools to manage your personal finances.
This is another personal skill that I think should be taught in school, from very early levels, but that surprisingly (or not) is left untaught and generates many problems for people who do not understand the importance of their personal finances. Managing your money is almost as important as managing your time. It’s not about buying a Lambo or a big house in the mountains, it’s about making ends meet or not, saving or living by asking for more and more credit, having to take a second job because you can’t make it to the end of the month or accumulating assets to be able to retire early because you have enough cushion to live a good retirement.
In this section honestly is the one in which I can give the least lessons about applications, because although I know that there are many and very good ones, my star application for this is Excel. But I can recommend some that look very good:
- Fintonic: offers very useful functionalities such as synchronization with all your bank accounts, a complete view of your financial situation, detailed analysis of transactions and movements, personalized financial advice, etc.
- Wallet: offers things like setting savings goals, payment reminders, spending control, credit management, plus connecting to your bank accounts and personalized notifications.
- Accounts in neobanks or investment platforms (Revolut, N26, Trade Republic). Finally, mention this possibility to improve your personal finances. These online banks offer numerous tools to manage your personal finances: real-time notifications and information on spending habits, tools for automatic tracking and categorization of expenses, investment options (stocks, ETFs or cryptocurrencies), automated savings or investment plans, etc, etc, etc.
Although for this section of personal finance, the most important thing is not the application you use, but the method. And in that I can give a couple of simple examples of how I manage to save. They’re so simple that they seem obvious, but they work.
1) Get the money out of your sight.
If your goal is to save it, get it out of front of you.
Very obvious, and very easy to do. Let’s suppose that on day 1 you receive 1,000 Euros, and that your goal is to save 200 at the end of the month. If you leave them in the account and you control your expenses, you will rarely be able to leave your account with a balance greater than 200 at the end of the month. Believe me. It is much better to have a second account, call it a “Savings Account” or whatever you like, to which on day 1 an amount of 200 Euros is automatically transferred. If for whatever reason before the end of the month you don’t get it (with money there are always unforeseen events), nothing happens, you make a transfer back to the main expense account. But if you manage to arrive with a positive balance at the end of the month, you will have saved 200 Euros. Try it and you’ll see how you reach your goal much more often.
For this, your bank simply has to allow you to open multiple accounts and make automatic transfers for free. If not, change banks.
2) Provision your non-monthly bills.
Many of your non-monthly bills are what destroy your savings capacity. Even if you already know that the annual car insurance, for example, is more than €300, the time will come to collect it and it will burn a hole in your expense account. Then you’ll have to go take it out of your savings account, and it will destroy your savings.
A very easy way is to provision it, with a very simple method: take this and the rest of the non-monthly direct debits, add the total, and divide it by 12; round up that amount (for example, if it is €175, round up to €200); Open a new account, direct debit all your non-monthly bills, and automatically transfer the amount you have calculated at the beginning of the month. So when any of those receipts arrive, you will already have the money ready.
Note: in this way of saving I do not include the forecast of monthly bills, because being monthly it is not strictly necessary to transfer them to a different account, but depending on your preferences you could also do it with all your bills, monthly or not.
In the example I have given, your income is €1,000, your savings goal is €200 and your non-monthly bills are €200. In other words, your available balance on day 1 is NOT €1,000, but €600. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you’ll improve your financial situation.
Then another day we talked about what you can do with the €2,400 per year that you have managed to save, which otherwise I will never finish.
And with this I end my top 3 tools to dedicate your time to, a quality time that belongs only to you, a time that you cannot afford to lose, a time to enjoy researching, developing ideas, implementing methods that will improve your life, a time that will ultimately give back much more than what you have dedicated to it. And now it’s your turn: how many of these tools do you know? How many do you currently use? Would you have chosen the same types of tools? Is there any missing that you consider essential? Spend a little time reflecting on it, and leave us your comments here. It will surely be worth it.
