What are some good productivity tools you use ? and How did the tool help you get better ?

I just started using Notion, and holy shit is it amazing. It's everything I've ever wanted in a document manager.

Documents in Notion are composed of "blocks" that can be whatever you want — paragraphs, headers, databases, to-do lists, calendars, spreadsheets, other Notion docs, whatever. As a result, it allows me to put together documents that best fit the form of what I'm trying to accomplish, rather than having to either (a) make crappier documents than I'd like to, or (b) use a hodgepodge of various special-purpose tools that don't play well together.

Just started using Ultraworking-Lights, it's pretty awesome. I set it as my new tab homepage on my browser so that I can always keep my goals and crucal actions in the front of my mind. So far its working wonderfully.

The two main productivity tools I use are Evernote and Harvest.

I use Evernote to create weekly and daily to-do lists. I have a tendency to jump from one task to another (dev work to marketing work within the same hour), so writing these lists out helps me prioritize the work and tell myself that I need to finish one task before I start another.

I use Harvest for tracking how much time I spend on those activities (and seeing if I’m being inefficient with my time).

Looking at both the Harvest data and my daily to-do lists on Evernote ultimately helps me understand why I don’t/can’t always finish everything on my to-do lists. Over time,

1. I’ve learned to make better estimates of what I can complete in a day and week
2. I’ve gotten better at getting into a state of “deep work” (where I focus on one task for 3+ hours without getting distracted). I think having the Harvest timer running in the background also helps me keep myself accountable - I feel guilty if I’m not actually doing what I set out to do.

Hope that helps somewhat!