I used to pride myself on being a great multi-tasker. Not anymore.
I’ve learned that doing multiple tasks simultaneously can compromise the quality of your work. You can’t really be everything, everywhere all at once before you start wearing yourself thin. But how does one remain productive with so many tasks at hand, especially when you have to wear multiple hats running a company—albeit small the company may be?
I found my answer in the productivity apps I choose to use.
Every journey brings us a little closer to ourselves—and the right tools help light the way.
The Two That Stuck
I’ve tried many productivity apps over the past 20 years, and I’ve discovered there have only been two that have stuck with me the longest: Things and Notion.
Even while using these two apps, I was still constantly searching for something better to save seconds in my workflow. I watched countless YouTube videos on various productivity apps, and each and every time, I kept falling back to these two.
Why Things Works for Me
What I love about Things is its streamlined user interface and accessibility, which many other apps have followed over the years. With just a single click on my mobile, I can add any tasks, thoughts, or ideas. Recurring tasks and reminders are easy to set up—there’s hardly any friction.
Notion can do it too, but it’s just too clunky and not as quick as Things.
The Notion Revelation
However, Notion excels at one thing: building databases.
But that’s not how I initially saw Notion—as a database system. Rather, I viewed it as a place to store all my content and information: write-ups, PDFs, images, videos, and online bookmarks, all in one place. I’ve been with Notion since it first started because I genuinely love the building block concept, which reminded me of Lego. You build your Notion system the way you want it—full autonomy.
Notion just released its latest version, Notion 3.0, with the introduction of a marquee feature that makes me love Notion even more: Notion AI Agent. The ability to build your database system and tasks using AI, with the option to choose your AI model of choice—like Claude or OpenAI—as well as create multiple versions of AI Agents to serve different roles and “personalities,” makes me question whether I should stop my Claude subscription.
The AI Integration Journey
Speaking of AI, the past two years have seen me trying various AI tools: Perplexity, OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, and Google AI Studio, to name a few.
Like every tool, there’s always a learning curve involved, but with these AI tools, there’s hardly any. But I beg to differ. To get the most from these AI tools, you need to be able to prompt effectively. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but the more I “trained” myself to use them, the more refined my prompting became, and the better the responses I received.
Finding My AI Favorites
It’s challenging keeping track of the progress and development of these AI tools, but at some point, you have to make a choice.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed my usage of Google search has reduced significantly in favor of Perplexity. Perplexity has become my go-to resource for anything I need to know, and at times, it goes beyond the usual search. I started with OpenAI’s ChatGPT like most people do, but even that has seen less use nowadays. Instead, it’s been Claude that has captured my attention, for which I’ve signed up for an annual subscription. Aside from its quality output, I love its interface and the philosophy behind its mission.
In the end, productivity isn’t about the systems we build—it’s about understanding how we work, what we need, and having the courage to choose tools that honor that truth rather than chase what’s trending.
My Current Productivity Arsenal
Perplexity and Claude have now been added to my productivity arsenal alongside Things and Notion.
This makes me wonder: What tools are my friends and clients using? Do they also use Notion as much as I do? What’s their reason for whichever productivity tools they stick with? And how about AI? Have they embraced AI as much as I have? Which ones do they use? Is it confined just to work, or more?
I wonder.
