Ever since I read “Digital Minimalism” and “Work Clean” a number of years ago, I have tried to be as intentional as possible about the digital tools that I use. The joint argument from both of these books, is knowing the tools you use incredibly well and having a clean workspace (both digital and physical) is vital to do your best work.
I try and live my life by the premise of having fewer but higher quality items, and I see no reason as to why that ethos can’t be shared in our digital environments as well as our physical ones.
I enjoy using and trying new apps, however I am purposeful about introducing them into my digital stack as I understand the overhead of going back through the amount of time it takes to master a new tool.
The following therefore is a list of the tools I use most regularly, for my personal work. I refer to it as my “thinking” stack, the tools that are in my tool belt that allow me to do the best work possible as an engineer, as a people leader and as a writer.
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Obsidian is a markdown editor, and the majority of what I write about in The Thinkers Club. I have been using it for over five years now and still remain confident that it is the best at what it does in a competitive space.
For a text editor, it is incredibly versatile with a large amount of potential to tackle different jobs.
I use Obsidian for journalling, goal setting, content notes, research, learning, writing articles, writing documentation for work and more. The main selling point is the ability to build connections between notes (the graph in the lower right corner of the screenshot is connected notes), helping with your writing and thinking.
If you are reading this you are probably already pilled on the idea of Obsidian as a tool so I will bore you no further. It is simply the best option for achieving all of the above tasks, and now is in a great place to work well with AI tooling.
Raycast
I first downloaded Raycast purely to replace my Macs native Spotlight for navigating around different applications (which is not great), but have stayed a long time user for the rich ecosystem of different functionality.
My predominant use-cases outside of shortcuts & clipboard history is the Raycast Notes and Focus features. These make up a big portion of my usage outside of shortcuts in particular.
Raycast Notes has become my default way of keeping on top of to-do’s. I prefer this over to-do apps, as primarily I think the majority of them are way too complex and bloated for actually getting shit done, but also I like the fact that as a window it persists at the side of my screen, so I will keep it open for the majority of the time I am on my computer capturing things as I go. I wrote about this process in the article “How To Get Things Done”.
Raycast Focus I use as a Pomodoro timer, it has the ability to close off access to apps when in a focus session, which is incredibly useful! I typically run this in either 30 minutes or hour long sessions, depending on the goal and the timing.
MyMind
I was an early adopter of MyMind and as a thinking tool I strongly believe it has done neglected by many.
It is simply a place to collect things you find around the internet that you may want to come back to later on. There is no folder structure and it is fairly light on organisation structure for that matter (other than spaces & tagging) but it uses AI to search your hoard.
I stay with MyMind over alternatives like Cosmos, as it is entirely void of social features, which is exactly the sort of thing I want. Cosmos leans me towards “curating” a collection as others are going to see it. I dump anything useful into MyMind without little care for who will see it.
A few nice features:
It recognises and auto groups a whole range of different media types, from images, to Spotify tracks/playlists, to screenshots and writing snippets.
Serendipity allows you to view random parts of your mind and decide whether to swipe left or right. This is a really nice way of pruning your collection - often times there are old screenshots that serve no purpose anymore, but also its a really nice practice to dive down some old rabbit holes and rediscover things you saved from a long time ago, especially older articles.
Same Vibe allows you to pick a piece of content and then find anything similar in your mind. This is great for things like UI inspiration, branding work and linking images with similar aesthetics.
Claude, Codex, Cursor, Ghostty
For coding and working with AI, I use these four tools.
The default apps for Claude and Codex are as good as any other tools that I have tried, and they are continuously updating and being improved upon which is really nice.
I am still very much a fan of seeing the code that I am working with, so tend to open Cursors IDE with the agent sidebar, rather than their new view.
Ghostty is my terminal of choice. It is simple and extensible. I have tried multiple others, but many offer too many bells and whistles for my needs. I don’t spend an extensive amount of time working directly in the terminal, so the times I do use it I want it to be as fast as possible.
Granola
Granola is a meeting note taking tool. As a engineering manager I have to attend my fair share of meetings and this thing keeps me sane.
I turned to it a couple of years ago frustrated with the user experience of having to add a bot to a call for it to take notes, and Granola was one of the view that was doing it at the time.
The summaries are very accurate, and it does a fantastic job of capturing actions. It also has a rich ecosystem of “recipes” which use prompts alongside your meeting notes to help you achieve certain outcomes. My main use is to coach me after meeting facilitations - what could have gone better etc.
Because it transcribes any audio it hears, rather than just using it to take meeting notes, I have found that it’s actually a pretty versatile tool. I have used it to take notes on long videos that I have watched, take notes on podcasts as well as take notes on recorded meetings that I have to catch up on.
Wispr Flow
This is a great dictation tool, that I use for a variety of different scenarios.
I often will speak things into Obsidian - especially if I am watching a video and can speak a few lines as the video is playing rather than type along. I have found this helps with my focus and avoiding distractions.
It seems to be popular to vibe-code open source versions of these, but I have yet to play around with any alternatives to Wispr yet. It is on my list to do, but as my team were all on Wispr it has built up a fairly large dictionary of specific jargon that is relevant to us and this has been hard to move away from!
Notebook
Ok ok, not a digital tool at all. But I couldn’t discuss my thinking stack without mentioning my notebook.
I was for a long time strictly paper only, and writing in my notebook is still something I do as almost a daily practice.
It differs a little bit from my Obsidian notes. Typically whatever goes in here is much more personal and around self-discovery. A few people have asked me about not wanting to put anything too personal in their Obsidian vault and use it with AI, and I agree with this sentiment, so I use paper for this instead.
I do a mixture of morning pages as well as various journalling prompts when I come across any that interest me. I also tend to do much more rough brainstorming, including mind maps in here. Much of this discovery work ends up making it’s way into the Polaris folder on my Obsidian vault.
Tools I am considering/experimenting with!
Sublime
I have been meaning to give Sublime a proper go for the longest time. I have been a fan of Sari’s writing since I first noticed Sublime, and we share a lot of the same values regarding Creativity > Productivity as well as Taste.
This is more of a social way of building a collection of snippets from around the web, and when announced was labelled a “communal second brain”.
There is some crossover with MyMind for me, which is why I have been hesitant about diving deep.
HOWEVER
Sublime Canvas looks like exactly the sort of thing I find myself craving. I am a very visual thinker, so the idea that I can layout my resources in this way is very appealing. When I have some time and space I am going to give this a proper go and see how it works as a research tool for my writing.
Eden
Eden is a tool by Dan Koe, and in it’s premise I think it is incredibly interesting. It is sold as a way of building and then monetising a second brain.
The social research aspect is what intrigues me, and I think this is a massively powerful tool purely for this functionality.
In short, it lets you look across social media posts and see what is trending and what has done well. This works for every platform (including Substack), and lets you get really specific around defining your niche/timelines so you can see what is doing well as inspiration for your own content. For example, I could look at the posts across every social platform for “Obsidian” over the last three weeks, and see what topics are trending. For anyone posting on socials with the intention of growth, this is incredibly useful.
You can look at specific creators content and see what has done best for them. My own feed below:
There is then a course builder and a newsletter platform on top of this. This is infinitely less interesting to me, and unfortunately you pay for the privilege of it - to get all of the social research features and HAVE to also pay for the monetisation tooling. It’s not cheap either.
I have also found the app to be particularly buggy which is incredibly off-putting for me and would be enough to stop me using the tool. Sure it is early days and I have no doubt it will be improved as time goes on. Something
A lot of crossover here! I use Wispr Flow for meetings as well rather than a separate app, cause I don't indulge in too many of them luckily. Have been interested in giving Eden a try as well, if it can help with the volume of idea suggestions for content, cause that's something I don't think I move fast enough on a lot of the time.
Cheers!
I used to have Obsidian, but found it needed a lot of fiddling to make it work and a grind to keep the different areas up to date if I made any changes.
Instead, I use remry (https://github.com/remry-ai/remry) to manage the massive onslaught of information I have to consume daily. Next step is to connect it to apps like granola and whispr flow so that can be captured and automatically attributed also.
(Disclaimer - I built it)
There's a couple tools I havent heard of - Eden looks particularly promising.
Thanks for sharing!