2024 and what I'm using
📨 Mail Client: Mail.app Canary (free) + Outlook (work)
I struggled to find a mail app I liked to use that does the simple things right. I don’t need 100 automations or AI summaries - I want a search that works and finds the email from 6 months ago. Canary does that really well. The interface is simple and easy to use, it has the right functions I want, and I’ve been able to get away with the free plan so far.
✅ To-Do: Obsidian & Things
I’ve spent this year trying to get my shit together and have honestly found most apps wanting. I’ve got a decent thing going in Obsidian, but I did a big GTD dump into Things during the year and I love how it’s all organised. That said, I spent soooo much time in Obsidian that having to go into a different app to manage that seems to get in the way. I’ve found a few plugins recently that might help, as I love the workflow I’ve got in Obsidian at the moment and just need a couple of simple functions for it to be my full-time organisational app.
📖 RSS: Readwise
📑 Read It Later: Pocket, Omnivore Readwise
I’m going to lump these two together, and I decided to dump some $s down for Readwise. I’d started the year using Omnivore and enjoyed the annotation features and syncing - and then they shut it down. After a couple of tests, I figured Readwise did everything right - in particular, having an option to voice-generate the article for me.
📜 Word Processing: Obsidian and Word
Obsidian has gobbled up word processing for me. I might do a copy and paste into Word at the end, but in terms of writing - Obsidian, hands down.
📊 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets Excel
I haven’t opened any Google tools for the past year. It’s odd, as Google Docs was a previous mainstay, but I guess when you don’t need to collaborate as much or your organisation has shifted to whatever Microsoft offers (Shitpoint?), you don’t need it.
🖥️ Presentations: Powerpoint iA Presenter
A big plus for me this year was going in on iA Presenter. This markdown presentation tool fits my way of working to a tee, allowing me to create, develop and write up my talks quickly and easily. I’ve usually had to swap out to PowerPoint for the delivery format (conferences now lock down the computers to use to avoid all the tech woes), but this, too is pretty simple.
🍴 Meal Planning: Reminders.app
Reminders for a couple of interesting updates this year, one was the ability to create Kanban boards. Creating a simple Backlog and days of the week was easy and a nice way to do this planning.
Hardware
No significant changes, but I have to give an Honorable Mention to my AirPods Pro 2s, which received quite the workout over the last year. See my Podcast Diet and add a healthy dose of audiobooks and plane travel. These bad boys have outperformed anything I’ve ever owned: sound quality and noise cancellation far beyond what you reasonably could expect from such a small package. I hope the next version adds some of the Smart Case features that the Jabra models have, allowing you to plug into a plane's entertainment system and stream the audio to your Pods. Also, I’ve never really got great feedback from the sound quality of calls from my end - I can hear them fine, but sometimes they can’t hear me particularly well would love some control over that.