3 Productivity Apps I Can’t Live Without

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Now, whether by intention or by complete accident, I don’t know how I’ve gotten to this place, but I think a lot of people look at my brand and they think, oh, Anthony, he’s a productivity guru. And the truth is, I don’t feel like a productivity guru. I don’t feel terribly productive most days, mainly because I’ve learn to decouple the quantity of output from the quality of output. And so these days, I don’t really feel like I get a lot done, but I do get the things that mean a lot done. So I guess in that sense, if productivity is increasing your output per unit of input, then, yeah, I’ve gotten pretty good. I guess I am a pretty productive person. But one of the consequences of being kind of labeled as a productivity person is that people are always coming to me and asking me for my systems, my secrets, the apps that I use, what software, what tools, what resources do I rely on on a daily basis to manage my productivity? And it’s kind of embarrassing at this point how little I actually use tools and apps and resources and things.

I used to be very much into it when I was younger, for sure, trying to experiment and figure out my systems and what works for me. And over the years, I’ve just found that the simplest systems tend to be the most effective. And so a lot of times my daily productivity system is just a notebook and a Sharpie. I started using a Sharpie last year and it’s really stuck. I’ve loved it. Just the idea of writing in big, broad strokes that you can’t erase, and just like it forces you to distill onto the piece of paper. What are the most important things that you should be working on? Because you don’t have the ability to write very finely with a fat Sharpie. So I found that to be very valuable.

But I did get the question the other day from somebody who slid into my dms asking, what are my favorite apps or productivity apps on my phone? And again, the truth is, I don’t have a lot of apps on my phone. I’ve talked about this in a past newsletter and in one of the videos that we did on the main YouTube channel. I can’t remember exactly which one. That would have been where we talked about how to turn your phone into a dumb phone or how to dumb down your smartphone. I think I did a podcast episode on this, too, so I’d recommend go check that out because I talk a lot about how I put my phone into Grayscale. And then I reduce the number of apps that I have on my home screen to as few as humanly possible. But the truth is, I just don’t have very many apps on my phone. I don’t have any games.

I don’t have anything entertaining on here. Everything that I have is some form of utility, like Google Maps and that type of stuff. But overall, I don’t really have anything super fancy. But I do want to share with you, I guess the three apps I use the most that I use on a daily basis that do help me be more productive. In the past episode, I talked about Asana and notion. I’m not going to talk about those two in this episode. I just want to talk about some really basic tools because I think, again, let’s try and simplify and get down to the like, what is the simplest system to have the maximum effect? And here are the three apps that I use on a daily basis that have the biggest impact on my productivity. So number one is this app called Brain FM.

I’ve talked about this a lot in the past. I need to control for my environment. One of the ways that my ADHD manifests itself is through noise. So if I hear something in the other room, I can get off track very easily. I can get distracted. And so controlling for what types of noise enter into my brain is critical. So I always have my noise canceling headphones within arm’s reach. I pretty much wear those, like safety ear muffs that a child would wear pretty much every hour of the day.
It’s starting to create a dent in my skull because of it. But that’s one way that I control the external noise coming in. It’s noise canceling headphones. The other is then turning on brain FM, which is just binaural beats. You could also use a white noise machine. I used white noise for years. That was very effective. I just like the binaural beats.

I find them to be, I don’t know, a little bit more soothing than the white noise. I also use that app when I sleep. So I use that app every single day. It’s probably the most used app on my phone. If you looked at it per hour of usage, if you count to sleep into it, then I use that thing a lot. It’s very, very helpful. The next app that I use a whole lot is superhuman. So superhuman is an email service that helps kind of gamify your email process and makes everything so that you don’t have to rely on a mouse.

If you think about using a mouse to navigate your inbox. There’s a lot of clicking and then having to take your hand off the mouse to go to your keyboard to type messages. So the whole approach with superhuman is to use shortcuts that keep your hands on your keyboard so that you can blitz through your emails as quickly as possible. I like that app because it’s very clean, it’s very beautiful. It makes me very effective in getting through my inbox really quickly. And as a result, I get to inbox zero every single day. And I have for 60 ish weeks in a row. Yeah.

So pretty much every single day, I end with my inbox at zero, thanks to superhuman and the helps of my assistant, which should not go underrated. So, superhuman. The downside of it is that it’s like $30 a month as a subscription, which for a lot of people who are used to getting free email, that’s going to be a lot. Totally understand. If you’re not an email power user, it’s probably not going to be necessary. But if you do get a lot of emails on a day to day basis and you want a better system for managing it, superhuman might be one of the best apps I’ve ever used. It’s awesome. It’s amazing.

So highly recommend that the third app that I use on a daily basis, and this is not anything special, this is literally just the stopwatch function on my phone. Now. I also have a timer. Where did it go? It was just here on my desk. It disappeared on me. Oh, here it is. It’s hiding behind my desk. Okay.

So I use this Pomodoro timer because I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro method, where you do 25 minutes of work, then five minutes of rest. So I like having a timer in front of me because it’s a way of seeing the game score in real time. But I don’t always have my Pomodoro timer with me, so I am always timing myself and doing things throughout my day. Whether I’m lifting, I’m in the kitchen, I always turn on the timer, and I live and breathe by this thing. So it’s nothing fancy. This is literally just the timer that comes on your phone. But just timing how long things takes is an effective technique for me, at least in improving how much I get done in that period of time. Because as Parkinson’s law says, work expands to fill the time allotted.

So if you allot a lot of time to doing a task, then you’re going to fill all that time. If you give yourself 2 hours to respond to your emails. It will take you 2 hours. If you give yourself 15 minutes, then it will take 15 minutes. And so I’m a big fan of always setting timers and being very clear about how long I want something to take. And then having that physical reminder in front of me with the numbers ticking down is very, very incredibly helpful. So those are the three apps that I find myself using. The most brain fm, superhuman email, and the stopwatch function on my phone.

So I told you I’m not anything. Not using any power user tools over here. Nothing crazy. So if that’s you, if that’s what you’re looking for, then you came to the wrong place. But hopefully, hopefully this helps you maybe reframe in your own mind the complexity of system needed for you to be truly productive. You really don’t need to overthink this. You just need a system that’s simple, repeatable and effective that you will actually use. And that’s maybe the most important part is will you actually use it.

So I hope this brings you some value. As always, thank you for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.