5 Productivity Tools I Absolutely Love in 2024

7 min readJul 16, 2024

I’ve been a sucker for productivity tools for years, and I felt like sharing a couple of my favorites in case anybody else finds them useful? Maybe? I don’t know.

It’s worth noting this was written at midnight without ChatGPT, so if you see any typos or weird sentences, I’m sorry. lol. I felt like writing about something for fun.

I̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶-̶e̶v̶o̶l̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶d̶u̶c̶t̶i̶v̶i̶t̶y̶, no…just no. I used to start my articles like that prior to ChatGPT anyway, so you can imagine how fun this is for me.

Back to the topic…

𝓗𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓪𝓻𝓮 𝓶𝔂 𝓯𝓪𝓿𝓸𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓽𝓸𝓸𝓵𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓹 𝓶𝓮 𝓭𝓸 𝓼𝓽𝓾𝓯𝓯 𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓷 𝓘’𝓭 𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓫𝓮 𝓼𝓵𝓮𝓮𝓹𝓲𝓷𝓰. ✨

Table of Contents
· 1. Groove — WFH Coworking Community
· 2. ChatGPT & Claude — LLMs
· 3. Daily Planner (Paper or iPad)
· 4. Google Calendar
· 5. Finch — Self Care App
· Other cool tools:
· Wrapping Up

1. Groove — WFH Coworking Community

I start and end many of my days with Groove; I spend a lot of my time on it. It’s a coworking community for folks who work from home, and it helps give my days more structure and a better sense of time since each session is about 1hr long.

Why I love it:

The people on Groove are one of a kind. Everyone is super sweet and welcoming, happy to hear what you’re working on, and willing to support you where they can.
Each Groove is 50 minutes long, so it’s easier for me to tell how long it takes me to get something done. It’s like doing Pomodoros (a time management method where you break up your time into chunks like 25 minutes of work and 5-minute breaks; do this over and over).
I started fencing 🤺 because I met an awesome fencer on this app who introduced me to my fencing coach.
It offers monthly goal-planning sessions where you meet with other Groovers to set and discuss your goals for the new month.
(this is new) Offers weekly accountability sessions to set goals for the week.
(this is new, too) There’s this thing called Recess where we meet for 15 minutes to do something fun.

PS: Groove came out of beta, so it’s no longer free. If you’re invited to the community by someone who’s already in it, you get about a month free or so. Helps you check if it’s something you’d like to invest money in or not.

2. ChatGPT & Claude — LLMs

Everybody uses ChatGPT at this point, so I won’t tell you what it is. Claude is also pretty cool. I use both, compare and pick the best between the two.

Why I love them:

I use them for brainstorming ideas.
Helps me debug code.
Helps me create first drafts and outlines for blog posts and other content forms that I can review and tweak.
I use them to summarize YouTube videos to have some context before spending 1hr+ on a video.
I use them to summarize very long text pieces like research papers and reports.
Content reviews. I ask it to provide suggestions on improving certain content forms, rank them on a scale of 0 to 10, and tell me how to get it to a 10. 😅

Honestly, I wanted to move from ChatGPT to Claude, but sometimes Claude doesn’t quite get what I’m looking for, and ChatGPT does (and vice versa), so I just use both.

I recently learned that Gemini is great if you want to find links to something. Perplexity is also nice for research because it shows you the links where it sourced the content from.

There are other tools I’d like to try, like Poe, Lex, etc.

Or you can use ChatGPT like this to be your language tutor with some rizz. ✨

3. Daily Planner (Paper or iPad)

After getting my iPad, you can imagine my confusion when I had to pick the best note-taking app for me.

There are so many options (Notability, Kilonotes — check out this YouTube short, Goodnotes, Microsoft OneNote [I loved OneNote as a teen, now I have a locked journal from 2014 and can’t remember the password loool]), and searching for YouTube videos about the best ones made things kind of worse, lol.

I stuck with Notability because it was recommended by agenomicsphd (a bioinformatician obsessed with tech and pink) and Tina Huang (a data scientist who makes videos on productivity and data science I really love) + it gives me what I’m looking for.

I’ve been using the blue paper planner on the right (in the image) for several months now (ordered from AliExpress) until I moved to digital notetaking (lots of inspo from HappyDownloads on YouTube).

I replicated the template in pink using Canva and write in it on Notability. I could add more stuff to the template, but right now, that format works. It’s simple — daily gratitude, and I can track what I eat because sometimes I don’t remember what I had for breakfast.

Why I love my planner:

I dump everything I need to do every day in my planner.
Daily gratitude without too many prompts.
Meal tracking

4. Google Calendar

Everything goes in my calendar: birthdays, time blocking, events, reminders, some to-dos, everything else. When it's out of the calendar, it's almost out of mind.

Why I love Google Calendar:

On my personal calendar, I get reminders 30mins + 10mins ahead of a call I’m supposed to have. I don’t know how people join meetings at the exact time of the call because the last time I tried it, I was several minutes late because I got carried away by a documentary. I typically join calls 10 minutes early.
It reminds me of birthdays and to order presents one week ahead — better than Facebook, really.
I can block hours and set reminders in the calendar for submitting applications, reviewing stuff, writing stuff, etc.

5. Finch — Self Care App

This is an app I recently fell in love with, and I wish I had it sooner!

Finch is a self-care app that allows you to take care of your virtual pet finch, which grows with you as you do things.

You can set goals and go on journeys. I used it over the weekend to help me get chores done, it was actually fun to gamify the process.

Today, I learned about the First Aid Kit within the app, and the Processing Grief exercise I tried this morning was actually helpful.

Here are some journeys you can try. I absolutely love the options within the app. I wish I could give it 10 out 5 stars.

Other cool tools:

Glasp — PDF & Web Highlighter for researchers and learners
I Miss My Cafe — virtual cafe (sounds, to-do list, pomodoro clock)
Momentum Dash — Chrome extension for daily focus
Cofocus — virtual coworking
Focusmate — virtual coworking
DailyBean — simple journal to record how your day went (I love the widget), also available for Android
Grammarly — spellchecker and stuff.
YayText — unicode text magic, 🅻🅘🅺🅔 🅣🅷🅘🆂
Emojipedia — for emojis ✨
HTML Color picker — color contrast checker

Wrapping Up

If you like any of these tools or have any you’d like me to try, please let me know! I love trying out new apps that can help me improve how I do things.

Finally, I leave you with a reminder from Finch. See you in my next post!