My Toolset for a productive 2023

A few days before christmas, the fine folks at Superhuman wanted to know:

And I know that they ask this question primarily to get attention and replies on Twitter, but that's fine, as it got me thinking about what I am using and how that works for me. So here's my list of tools I use on a regular and daily basis:

Superhuman - this is by far the best and fastest client for Email that I've tried so far. And I have tried many, starting with PINE when the Internet was still black and white. And then Eudora, which was fantastic. And then Gmail came around the corner, a total life-changer and much better than the self-hosted stuff on Linux I had been using until then. I still think that Gmail has a pretty decent UX/UI, but I want more than just decent and Superhuman is really blazingly fast, works with keystrokes instead of the mouse and helps me cruise through my mails in no time.

Sidekick Browser is a great replacement for Chrome while still acting a lot like Chrome, just a lot faster. All the extensions work and in addition to tabs Sidekick has not only a sidebar with the most-used apps, but also understands the concept of different workspaces for different projects, which makes it really simple to switch between different setups. If you want to try it out, and you should, get Sidekick here!

Vimcal - I fundamentally like Google Calendar, but the UX/UI is a bit slow and old-fashioned. So I have been using Vimcal for quite a while and it makes lots of tasks real simple, including quickly copy&pasting free timeslots including a Zoom-Link, something I do regularly. What I also like to do is something that's called time-travel and which shows my calendar in a different time zone real quick so I can easily schedule calls with people around the world. You can get Vimcal here !

Slack is the glue that holds everything together, here we discuss things with our team, we connect with our startups and we share relevant stuff with our community. It really reminds me of the good old IRC days, just with a prettier user-interface and nice hooks for other tools.

Notion is slowly becoming the place where we hold all relevant information for our company. We move more and more stuff from Google Docs and I really like the simplicity of Notion. And sometimes I hate it, like when I realize I just cannot color columns in a table differently. Why? It's 2023! Anyhow, it's a really great tool to combine text and tables and get different views on your data. Also, our website nma.vc runs on Notion by way of Super.so , which was simple to set up, but hard to make it look good.

Zoom is my preferred platform for videocalls. It just works. I truly loath Teams as it always slows down my MacBook Pro and it feels as if I need to reinstall everything from scratch after using Teams. And Zoom is just starting quickly, has great video and audio quality and integrates nicely with Slack. Nevertheless I truly hope that I will use Zooms less than in the last three years and have more meetings in real life again.

Pitch is by far the best way to create slides. It is web-based, it is collaborative and it is fast and easy. I just love it. Also I don't have to send out PDF anymore, I can just quickly send out the link to a presentation and track who is reading it (and fix typos without anyone noticing). Pitch also has a wonderful set of shortcuts which makes creating great slides so much easier. Check it out!

Todoist is something I just tried to try out again this year as part of my New Year's Resolution: I want to get better at remembering and doing my tasks. Most to-do list apps overwhelm me with features and workflow, but Todoist seems to do the trick for me, although I probably only utilize about 10% of all the features. Which is really all I wanted. I still would like to have an automagic reminder in my Vimcal, but that is probably to easy so that nobody thinks of it...

Feedly is my feedreader which I use to read all those blogs and magazines out there that have an RSS-Feed. It's where I do most of my reading - and also lots of skimming as I don't want to read everything in great detail, sometimes I just need a headline and an abstract to find out what's interesting for me. Since I work with startups and innovative companies, I have to (and want to) read about what's going on in tech and culture to figure out how that influences our industry.

Pocket is the place where I store all the articles I read and want to keep for later, for whatever reasons. One reason is obviously to feed the recommendation algorithm at Pocket itself. I also connect Pocket to Refind in order to get even more recommendations to articles I'd otherwise miss.

Substack is where I write my weekly newsletter Five Things and were I also read lots of interesting newsletters. So in a sense it has become my companion app to Feedly and Pocket. I tried out lots of newsletter tools over the last years and while we still use Mailchimp for our NMA Newsletter , I find Substack much better suited for my personal newsletter writing. It is really simple to setup up and write your own newsletter - just do it!

I think this more or less my daily tool setup. And no, most of the apps aren't free and yes, I do pay for them, because I value them and use them on a daily basis.

What does your setup look like? What am I missing?

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