Tools keeping me productive in 2022

Productivity is critical to software engineers. When talking about productivity, my principle is to keep my tool set small and easy to use. That way it’s easier for me to focus on the real tasks rather than the feeling of being productive. In an uncertain year like 2022, the following tools really helped. I didn’t run into them right away so I also want to share some other similar tools I’ve tried and why I eventually picked one vs. another.

Notion: my central knowledge base

I started using Notion back in 2018 mostly because it provided good support for Markdown-like syntax. But the quality and the capability of the product keeps improving, especially its database. Notion has a pretty big community and some people even build their entire business (lucrative ones) on top of it, such as selling beautifully made templates, blog hosting front end, etc.

Notion is the ultimate knowledge base - for both “hot” (constantly changing and accessed) and “cold” (archived). My most common usage are:

A database to track daily work (with a kanban view and a calendar view)

A database for journal (calendar view)

A database for errands / personal projects (gallery view)

A database for archiving readings from various sources and highlights (see more about this later)

However, it only works well if you’re using built-in features or there is an existing integration to import your knowledge (data). It’s a hassle otherwise. For examples:

For privacy reasons and company policies, I cannot sync my Google Calendar to Notion. Even if I could, it would not seamlessly work with other GSuite products (e.g. email all meeting attendees from a calendar event).

With a smart watch and the right app, it’s just so much easier to track certain habit details (e.g. calories, steps, sleeping quality, exercises, meditation, etc.). I would never bother to manually input such data into Notion.

I’ve tried some other apps to be my knowledge base but I found they lack the versatility that Notion has:

Drafts - Some Youtubers really tried to promote this product. But I found it’s nothing more than a markdown note taking app and doesn’t provide the necessary views (e.g. kanban view) to track my work all at once. Even just for note taking, Notion provides much richer media types.

Things 3 and Todoist - They are pure TODO apps that are good at, well, being just TODO apps. But the kind of knowledge you keep in a TODO app is likely ephemeral, and the amount of knowledge you can keep in a TODO app is limited.

Obsidian - It’s the closest match. It seems the most shining feature in Obsidian is to visualize the connections between docs. But it turns out I don’t really care much about the connections.

Excalidraw: a swiss knife for illustration

It’s already great to see a clean diagram in a design doc that could instantly give you the high level idea. It would be refreshing to see a not-boring one! Excalidraw exactly provides that. The free version carried me a long way until one point I no longer wanted to manage my many drawings in my local files and upgraded to Excalidraw+.

The things I like about Excalidraw:

“Serious” or “casual”, you choice - The handwriting style gives a casual feeling and is great to make your drawing a little more interesting. I often use this style when sharing drafty ideas or make slides in presentations. But in design docs, where I want reviewers to view the system diagram clearly, I choose the non-handwriting style. Being able to use the same tool for different scenarios fits my principle to “keep tool set small”.

Rich libraries - There are already many excellent shapes, icons that you can directly import and use. E.g. I often draw diagrams with a lot of GCP services and OSS solutions icons. And there existing libraries already give me everything I need.

Custom libraries - If you can’t find anything you need in the existing libraries. You can create your own libraries. Although I believe you need Excalidraw+ to take your libraries to all your devices.

Embeddable in Notion :)

Excalidraw also supports real handwriting (e.g. with Apple Pencil on an iPad). Probably because it’s on a webpage, it’s definitely not the smoothest handwriting experience. I hope they can improve that.

Looking at some other drawing tools:

Google Draw - It just doesn’t draw things in a visually pleasant way. Sorry!

Lucidchart - Powerful. Maybe too powerful (and heavy) for me to use on a daily basis.

GoodNote - I still love it for doodling but my handwriting is too terrible for sharing any real info with anyone other than myself.

Readwise: a hub for highlights/notes

I discovered Readwise pretty late in 2022 but have been heavily using it ever after. There are a few things I really like about it that I haven’t seen in other reading apps:

It provides quite a few integrations to import highlights from popular sources. In addition to just highlighting on any webpages, it’s capable of importing highlights from your Kindle ebooks, Twitter bookmarks, etc. Especially for Kindle, the native ecosystem is pretty closed. Being able to import from Kindle makes my highlights/notes much more accessible.

It also provides integration to export highlights to popular note-taking apps. You know where I’m going - Notion again! As the highlights/notes being archived in Notion, I’m able to categorize and tag them, search and filter them with ease.

Producing daily digest of your highlights to help you remember is another main feature of Readwise, which I haven’t used enough. See some potential for sure.

Other than these, Readwise provides what most reading apps provide - save things to read later, subscribe RSS, etc. - mediocrely. There is a lot of room for improvement in the reading (e.g. support different themes/fonts) experience itself. Some import integrations don’t always work or take a long time to sync up.

Before Readwise, I tried:

Pocket - The reading experience is better than Readwise but there is no import/export integrations. Missing Kindle highlights is like missing half of what I read.

Notion (with iOS share and web clipper) - This is actually not bad if you already use Notion. But it’s a lot more work to hook up Notion with different highlight sources.

That’s it! My top 3 tools keeping me productive in 2022 and likely will stay with me for a while. What are some of the tools keeping you productive?