I’m sitting on my desk right now with 11 different productivity apps open.
Notion for systems and content tracking. Claude for writing and operations. Figma for graphics mockups. Gmail for mail. Slack for team communication. Discord for community. Stripe for payments. Airtable for data. Linear for issues. Chrome for research. And a text editor for things I need to think through alone.
None of these are accidents. All of them are things I’ve tested, abandoned, and come back to because they actually work for how my brain works.
Not sure where your money's leaking? Take the free 5-question scorecard and I'll show you the first system to plug it.
Take the free scorecard →But I’ve also bought a lot of things that promised to solve the problem and instead just added complexity.
The tools I bought and quit (and why)
Superhuman (fancy email client): I heard it was supposed to save hours every week. The pitch was great. The onboarding was intense (they have a literal human teach you the shortcuts).
I used it for two weeks and went back to Gmail.
Why? It was optimized for people who get 300 emails a day and need to triage fast. I get maybe 40-50, and I actually read them. Superhuman was overhead for my situation. It’s a perfect tool for an agency owner. It’s theater for me.
Cost me: $30/month for two weeks before I realized.
Asana (project management): The promise: we’ll organize all your projects and tasks in one place.
The reality: I have 7 agents doing work. They’re not all in Asana. Some are in Linear, some are updating Discord, some are responding to Slack. Asana became another dashboard I had to check instead of a system that actually worked.
The problem wasn’t Asana. It was my operation. I couldn’t use it properly until I centralized where work lives. Which I haven’t done because my agents live in different systems.
Cost me: $95/month for four months of confusion before I just used Discord issues instead.
Motion (AI scheduling): The pitch: it learns your priorities and automatically schedules your calendar.
The reality: I rejected like 60% of its suggestions because it didn’t understand my actual constraints. It wanted to schedule deep work at times I’m already committed. It wanted to schedule calls during client time.
It was trying to be smarter than me about my calendar. It wasn’t.
Cost me: $19/month for six weeks before I went back to manual scheduling.
The tools that actually work (and why)
I’m biased toward tools that are:
- Fast (I can do in seconds what would take minutes in something else).
- Transparent (I can see the system, not get magic-boxed into what the tool thinks).
- Defaulting to my way instead of forcing me to adopt the tool’s way.
Notion: I use Notion for EVERYTHING that needs to stay alive. Systems docs, content tracker, product specs, sales tracking, brand reference.
Why it works: I can customize the schema to match how I actually think. I’m not forcing my brain into Asana’s or Monday’s or Airtable’s structure. I’m building a structure that matches my mental model.
It’s also fast once you learn it. A database query that would take me 10 minutes in email takes 30 seconds in Notion.
The downside: you can customize yourself into paralysis. I’ve spent $300/year on Notion and probably $400 in human hours designing databases that I then didn’t use.
So here’s the rule: one year to use it before redesigning it. If I’m constantly redesigning, it’s not serving me.
Linear: I use Linear for bug tracking and task tracking for software-adjacent work.
Why it works: it’s fast. Issue tracking is the most boring part of my job and I resent using tools that make it slower. Linear is streamlined. Tickets are atomic. The comment thread is clean.
Is it necessary? No. I could use Notion for this.
But the five seconds I save per ticket, times dozens of tickets per week, adds up. I’m not worth $120/year for five seconds a ticket if that time doesn’t go somewhere else.
But it does. That time goes to thinking or building, not to learning UI.
Figma: I use Figma for literally every visual I make. Graphics, mockups, layout thinking, color testing.
Why it works: the canvas is infinite. I can throw a thousand things at it and organize them later. It doesn’t force me into templates or grids before I know what I’m building.
I tried Canva (too many constraints, too templated). I tried Adobe XD (good but slower). Figma wins because it’s fast and gets out of my way.
Claude: I could write here about why Claude is essential, but I’ll keep it brief: I use it for thinking, drafting, code, operations, strategy, and writing. It’s my second brain for work that matters.
Why it works: I don’t have to context-switch tools. I can ask it to do the thinking, show me the logic, and iterate. It doesn’t make me feel stupid for changing my mind. It’s not waiting for me to be perfect.
The downside: I’m paying per token and I’m aware of cost. So I’m conscious about when I’m being efficient versus when I’m being lazy with my prompts.
That consciousness is actually healthy.
Stripe: I use Stripe for payments on the landing pages and product sales. It handles checkout, fraud, refunds, reconciliation, analytics.
Why it works: it just works. There’s no better infrastructure for payments at this scale. I’m not checking daily, it’s not a tool I have to learn constantly, it just sits there and handles the jobs.
When something breaks, the support is good. When something needs to scale, Stripe scales.
I don’t think about Stripe except when I’m integrating something new or reviewing revenue.
The pattern
The tools that work share something:
They’re boring.
The tools that don’t work are usually solving a problem I don’t have or solving it in a way that doesn’t match how I work.
Superhuman is fancy. It solves a problem I don’t have. Motion is smart. It’s trying to be smarter than me in a domain where I don’t want help. Asana is powerful. It’s powerful for teams that commit to being in Asana. I’m not that team.
The winners are the tools that are fast, transparent, and happy to be boring because boring means they’re getting out of the way.
I don’t want a productivity tool that makes me feel productive. I want a productivity tool that makes me productive, even if I don’t notice it.
What I’m testing now
I’m currently evaluating Claude’s agent system for more of my ops. I built seven agents to handle content, design, operations, ads, and sales.
Why? Because the pattern works: define the work clearly, give the tool the constraint, let it execute, check the results.
It’s boring execution. It’s also eliminating 20 hours of my week that would otherwise go to management and coordination.
I’m not looking for a flashy new tool. I’m looking for boring infrastructure that compounds.
That’s where the time actually comes from.
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