The ONE Thing #10: My Productivity Stack, How To Be Successful, Crypto Use Cases, And More
Happy Friday, everyone.
Welcome to número 10 of The One Thing 🎉. I can't believe I made it this far.
Today At A Glance:
💻 My Productivity Software Stack
⏫ How To Be Successful
🔮 Use Cases For Crypto
🤓 A Podcast About Biographies
One Interesting Thing
I'm a productivity tool nerd. I like to test new tools, and I’m continually looking for ways to optimize my software stack. It's probably not very productive, but it's fun for me. 🤷♂️
A few weeks ago, I had a nerdy conversation about productivity tools with a friend. Since then, I've made some updates to my software stack. Here are the tools I'm currently using to get work done and stay on track:
📆 Google Calendar
This one is pretty simple. If you work with Gmail or Google Workspace, there is no better calendar tool than Google Calendar. At least, I haven't found one yet.
I somehow hate to admit it, but I'm a fan of Superhuman and will gladly pay $30/month for an email app. Weird, I know.
It's just a great piece of software. It's blazing fast, snippets and shortcuts make writing and managing emails super easy and quick, and the split inboxes help me keep my inboxes in order.
🔎 Raycast
This is my newest addition, and I already can't imagine working without it. Raycast is an extensible launcher, sort of like Mac Spotlight on steroids.
It allows you to launch, control, and browse applications, open bookmarks, perform many small tasks like calculations, or insert snippets.
It's so much fun to be able to do many things 10 times faster and with fewer clicks.
📝 Apple Notes
I love Apple Notes. It's not a fancy app for taking notes. And that's exactly why I like it. It has everything you need to jot down quick ideas, write drafts of articles, or share documents.
I've tried many apps for taking notes, and I've always come back to Apple Notes. For now, I'll stick with Apple Notes.
☑️ Todoist
Todoist is a very solid task manager. It has all the basic features I expect from a task list, and it allows for project sharing.
But I'm also not so strict about using Todoist and sometimes create a different list in Apple Notes or even on paper.
Similar to note-taking, I've tried many apps but have not found “the one” yet.
🎧 Endel
My secret weapon to focus and get into a flow during the workday. Whenever I need to focus, I start Endel and within seconds I'm in the zone and ready to do deep work.
The soundscapes are also great for unwinding after a long day at work.
🍅 Flow
Flow is a minimalist Pomodoro timer app (if you wonder what a tomato has to do with productivity, check out Pomodoro Technique).
The Pro version ($1/month) also lets you block apps or websites to avoid distractions when you're focused.
LanguageTool is a grammar, style, and spell checker.
The browser add-on works anywhere on the web, and there's also integration with apps like Google Docs.
I'm not great at typing and usually produce many typos. LanguageTool helps me avoid most of them.
📚 Matter
I recently switched to Matter as my go-to app for reading articles and newsletter issues I want to save for later (after using Pocket for nearly a decade).
Matter has a modern and clean interface, as well as incredibly well-done highlighting and annotation features. Most importantly, the quality of the text-to-speech feature is outstanding. I pretty much listen to all the articles, I save on Matter.
One Article
How To Be Successful - Sam Altman I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
I recently discovered this blog post in Sahil Bloom’s newsletter. The post is from 2019, but the ideas and insights are timeless. Some of my favorites:
Compound Yourself: You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.
Learn to think independently: Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.
Get Good at Sales: All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.
One Tweet
People like to dunk on crypto/Web3 right now and claim that there are no use cases for crypto. To be fair, there are good reasons for that. There are many stupid projects out there that have no real value and won't materialize. Furthermore, some of the most influential voices in crypto have not shined when trying to explain how crypto has real value beyond financial Ponzi schemes.
But that doesn't mean there aren't already some real-world use cases. Andreas has done a good job outlining some, and you can find more in the responses.
Yes, most of these use cases are still niche.
Yes, many of them may never become mainstream.
But no, there are not no relevant use cases for crypto.
Oh, and yes, I am an optimist. 😉
One Podcast
One of my latest obsessions is the Founders podcast. Every week, David Senra reads a biography of an influential person and shares his learnings on the podcast.
I'm a big fan of biographies, and I love learning through other people's stories and experiences.
This podcast helps me learn more about the lives of many great people and decide which biographies I want to read someday.
It is a paid podcast and the first and only podcast I have ever paid for. To me, it is worth every penny. Just last week I learned about the lives of Estée Lauder, Enzo Ferrari and Anthony Bourdain.
I know what you're thinking? Isn't that like Blinkist? Well, it is a little bit. The podcast focuses exclusively on biographies and is probably more subjective. This podcast and Blinkist are an unbeatable combination for curious people.
That’s it for this issue of The One Thing. Subscribe to receive fresh ideas and curated content every other Friday.
Until next time, friends. Keep learning!