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.