925: Scott & CJ’s Fave Productivity Apps & Web Apps

Scott and CJ go full productivity nerd, swapping notes on their favorite web apps for writing, coding, planning, and more. From terminals to to-do lists to dumb phones, it’s a deep dive into the tools powering their workflows. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:35 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 01:56 Text to speech or speech to text. 02:20 Superwhisper. 08:29 Kiro. 16:16 CJ’s current editor preference. 17:59 Finding the right editor. 18:47 Terminals. 20:22 Ghostty. 24:16 Note-taking. 26:32 Obsidian. 30:24 Logseq. 31:03 Todo lists. 31:08 Tweek.so 34:42 Trello. 37:25 Notion Calendar. 38:55 Email. 43:21 FairEmail. 43:43 Dumb phones. 45:10 Olauncher 47:39 Audio Bookshelf. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we are talking about some of our favorite productivity apps and just generally apps that we use around our computer to get stuff done. I'm a big fan of this, and as you are about to hear, CJ has a different position. It's going to be a lot of fun. I have a lot of cool stuff to share, and there's a brand-new text editor, IDE, whatever, on the table that I have absolutely been loving that we will get deep into. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. And with me is CJ. Hello. CJ, also a developer from Denver. And before we get started with this, let's talk about productivity. Now, one thing that I hate is spending a lot of time trying to

• 0:43Scott Tolinski?

  figure out why something went wrong. There's a lot of reasons why it's hard to figure out. You get into situations where the error doesn't really lead you to exactly where the problem is. It gives you maybe some clues. Maybe it just gives you a bunch of junk. Or maybe perhaps you don't even know the error is happening because you just don't have that type of visibility. And this is where a tool like Sentry comes into play. Sentry is the best tool for finding bugs, fixing bugs, making sure that you're able to see what happens. And with their new Seer platform, you're able to really get to the core issue of anything that's going on regardless of what's happening. It has been fantastic

• 1:26Scott Tolinski?

  to use, and honestly, it's the thing I'm most stoked about in Sentry these days. Well, not these days. There's a lot of stuff I'm still stoked about. Thank you to Sentry for bringing Syntax to you. So, let's get into it. I have a bunch of different classifications of apps. Things like note-taking, our terminals, our text editors, maybe some AI tools, to-do lists, all kinds of stuff, stuff that we're using, text-to-speech. So, I am a big text-to-speech person on my phone. I'm always using the Apple dictation, which...

• 2:04Scott Tolinski?

  Isn't always great. It's kind of not good, but any other solution is much harder to use. And there is, I will talk about the, what I'm using on the desktop here in just a second. But the version of this on the phone is much more difficult. I'm, I've been using Super Whisper for this and Wes talked about it a few shows back. And at the time I hadn't really heard of it. I had just been mostly using the Apple dictation. And I didn't really think there was something worth moving off of that for. But I have found Super Whisper and it's so good. I hold down the function key and then I just talk into my microphone, which is always here. And it does a really great job of getting everything absolutely correct.

• 2:48Scott Tolinski?

  And it should get the word sentry correct, which Apple does not. Yes, look, it says sentry right there. It actually got it. I was a little concerned about not seeing it type out as I spoke. Cause that's the one thing that the Apple one does really well.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03Scott Tolinski?

  But it gets it correct. It gets it, it's more accurate every single time. So I gotta love that. The reason why it got sentry correct is because I was able to have an auto change here from the word sentry to sentry, because that's always what it hears when you say it. And you can add these kinds of things anywhere like Tolinski. These things always screw up my last name, so I will add one for Tolinski. And I gotta say, it's been so nice to use this thing. You can do push to, to talk, you can toggle, you, you can customize this thing really, really well. As for pricing though, it, it isn't free necessarily. It is, like he says, I have 12 minutes of pro left.

• 3:47Scott Tolinski?

  And after using this for, it says only three minutes. That's total talk time, because I've been using this a lot. And it says I've only used three minutes. So I've done three minutes total of talk time. For that, yeah, you can expect to pay eight bucks a month. Although it is free for unlimited use of small voice models. So I don't think you have to pay for this. This is a tool. That I'm really liking enough that I feel like I want to pay for it, which is a feeling that I get with good software. And I've tried a couple other voiced texts out and a lot of them are more expensive than this. So I found the pricing to be very reasonable.

• 4:29Scott Tolinski?

  I have really enjoyed using this and as somebody who uses text to speech all the time, I've been really loving it, especially CJ. Have you gotten into this to use text to speech in your AI coding sessions?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I have not. I'll talk on it after you finish with the tool, but I don't really use text to speech much at all.

• 4:47Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Yeah. I gotta say, there's something really magical about using text to speech with an agent and you're talking to it. Because you can give it a lot more context, yeah, more easily than typing. And I'm a fast typist. It's more or less like I'm able to, I'm a, I'm a better talker. Talking is a skill of mine. So for me, it, it feels really nice to be able to just talk at the thing and then hit go or whatever. So Super Whisper is my pick for text to speech.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Nice. That makes sense. Yeah. I, I guess I, I've never came around to talking to my computer. I, I don't know if I'm just stuck in my old ways, but I just remember the models and the apps being so bad and getting things wrong. And I also like, don't like talking in public, so I wouldn't talk to my phone in public. I realize at home, I'm just in my office, so I could do that. But yeah, I am, I'm kind of stuck in my ways. I don't really use text to speech much at all.

• 5:43Scott Tolinski?

  But you were one of those Bluetooth microphone guys in a business suit, talking really loud all the time?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  No, and I, I actually don't like it when people are on the phone in public.

• 5:52Scott Tolinski?

  I hate it. I hate it.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  And I guess I, I, now that I think about it, like, if you are doing this in public, people might just assume you're on the phone because people are just talking to themselves all the time.

• 6:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think I need to spend a week trying out tools like this and maybe I'll get around to it. Because personally, I just, I just type, I just type my stuff. And for recording videos, sometimes I like to get like a semblance of a script or a semblance of what I want to say out. And I have used Apple's text to speech for that. And, and that works just fine, but I'm not using it all the time. So I haven't really found the scenarios where it's not working. I will say the idea of talking to an AI sounds really cool. I tested out. The new Gemini voice model that came out a few months ago. And they had a whole flow where you basically just talk to it and you can choose the voice that it responds with. And so that was a pretty interesting experience. I haven't tried it again after that, but like you were saying, it's somewhat magical just to be able to.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  It's like you're talking to someone and they're giving you ideas and being able to play off of what you say. So. I might, I might give it a try. I might give it a try after hearing how much you like Super Whisperer.

• 6:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's a nice experience. For me, I just locked it as a hold the function key to talk and it's really easy to get on and off. And yeah, I gotta tell you something about people being on the phone. We were at a fancy dinner recently on our vacation. And first of all, I don't really know what was going on with this couple, but they were, they were both a little rough in terms of manners or whatever. And this guy, the way he talked to the waiter was like really disturbing me where he'd be like. I'm gonna get the steak. The way he said it was so much more aggressive, like, oh, could I order the steak or could I get the steak or whatever? He's like, I'm gonna get the steak. Like it sounded so like, yeah, give me the steak. Yeah.

• 7:42Scott Tolinski?

  It was pretty much, that's what it, that's how it came across. But he was treating the waiter really poorly the whole time. So that it was just like aggressive. But at one point at this fancy dress up restaurant, this man starts FaceTiming his buddy. Who's also at a nice dinner date with his date at a different restaurant. And I can only assume that both of, well, the, the, the woman he was with was like so checked out. And I can only assume the other date was also checked out at that point. Cause I was just like. Who is just gonna, and it was like a, I would say it's a good 10 minute FaceTime at dinner with his buddy at another dinner. And these were fancy dinners. So yeah, woof.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  This sounds like a modern Seinfeld episode.

• 8:27Scott Tolinski?

  No kidding, right? I had to sit next to this guy. All right. Let's bring on to the next one, which is Kiro. Kiro, you may have seen at some point here. It was recently announced. It's a new agent, tech IDE in the realm of something like Cursor or Windsurf. It is VS Code based, like all of these are, and it is from the folks at Amazon. Just that little description might turn you off because I know for me, when I was like, okay, everybody's got one of these now. It's just their version of Cursor or Windsurf. But Kiro does quite a bit that's novel. And what they have done is they kind of have set back and waited for all these other agents

• 9:12Scott Tolinski?

  or like even workflows that we've all discovered that are really necessary workflows for getting good things out of AI. And it's one of the reasons why people like Claude Code, because it does set you up with more of a plan. This is built in to this app in a way that is just really lovely. It is obviously VS Code, nothing too crazy there. And I think it has all the normal VS Code stuff. I just have my sidebar turned off and all that, you know? I turn off all the unnecessary stuff. They have done enough customizing this thing to make it look decent. They have a vibe code more or a spec coding more. And this one really, really speaks to me.

• 9:56Scott Tolinski?

  Being able to use the plan first, then build, create requirements and design before coding starts. And all you have to do is you click to create a new spec and then you tell it what your spec could be. I could even use my text to speech here to say, create a theme mode for this to give us dark light themes, but also maybe some fun themes too, like Christmas. This isn't the spec. So what I just told it isn't the spec. It's then going to use AI to create the spec for you, uh, which is a detailed plan in Markdown.

• 10:36Scott Tolinski?

  That explains exactly the feature. It even gives it in multiple steps, kind of says, goes through exactly what needs to do. So it says, "This feature will implement a comprehensive theme system for the Svelte kit application." I didn't even tell it Svelte. Edge was able to accrue that on its own. "Different themes and designs, dark mode, seasonal, fun themes, like Christmas."

• 10:58Scott Tolinski?

  "The theme system should persist in user preferences." So it was able to take my simple request and turn it into a deep document with requirements, including acceptance criteria. So it gives it a markdown where it has requirements, acceptance criteria, "requirement number two: As a user, I want access to fun seasonal themes. Acceptance criteria: When the user selects a Christmas tree, then the application shall display with festive colors, decorations, and holiday theme styling." Like, awesome. " requirement number three: I want an intuitive theme selector interface," which I didn't say I needed, but this thing was able to infer that if you had themes, it would absolutely need

• 11:39Scott Tolinski?

  that as well. And so it built out this entire document. You read through it, and you say, "All right, this is exactly what I want this feature to look." So then you can click, like, "Move to Design Phase." And when you move to Design Phase, it creates the document, it reads your things, and it starts to decide how exactly it's going to do the thing that you've asked it to do. So the Kiro tab here now has a spec that says "Theme Mode." So it's given this the spec that existed, and this spec is now creating exactly what it should be doing here. It's reading my files. It's checking everything out. It's reading

• 12:19Scott Tolinski?

  the files. It now will create a comprehensive design document, and then it created a design document, of which you can explore and read through it, which is so phenomenal, because like, really what this is doing is it's creating all this deep planning for you, because many people, the big thing they have with AI is they say it's veering too far off course, or it's changing things it's not supposed to be doing. And a lot of those problems can be solved with these documents. And in the past, I've had to create these documents by myself or try to get AI to create them. And AI is like, you want tailwind in this thing? No, I don't have it in my my repo. You know everything about my repo. I didn't ask for that.

• 13:03Scott Tolinski?

  So this one is that reading your files and then creating that document. You can see exactly like what it's going to add it. I can see the colors for the Christmas theme, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can move to implementation plan. So this is like a very structured way to work with AI. And to me, this is such a killer feature for this app. Because there's nothing that you necessarily can't do in other coding flows here. But the interface, the structure of it all, the ease of it all, to me, it is very good. And I've been enjoying this. This is definitely going to take over my cursor usage right now.

• 13:45Scott Tolinski?

  Just because in the short time that I've been using this thing, I gotta say it's fantastic. And again, it's VS Code based. So all your extensions, themes, whatever, they move right over.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is so anybody listening to the pod, audio only, the the interface initially is kind of like three columns. You've got your typical chat window. And I guess from what I what I understand now is like you go from very vague, high level requirements to some very detailed specs and plans. And then from there, it's kind of like your traditional VS Code layout where you have like your file tree and then like the the documents that are opened up. But to me, it kind of seems like a merge between cursor and Claude code, which I've just finished learning about and using. Because that's one of the things I really liked about Claude code is how well it sticks to the plan that it creates.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Because with cursor, you already described like what I've tried to do before, like create a plan dot M D. And then Go through each phase of the plan, but for whatever reason, Cursor just keeps veering off the plan. It'll like go down rabbit holes or won't listen to like what you told it to do. But this seems like it's built in to keep it aligned. And probably part of their system prompt or whatever else as your as your coding makes it make sure that it keeps checking back for that spec it generated and for those tasks. So yeah, I like this. I'm definitely going to give it a try. Yeah.

• 15:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, this this kind of thing, people underestimate just how much of an impact this type of document has, or these types of documents, because it's created a task document, it's created a few different things. These things really make a big difference. And you can then give it again, generate steering docs, again, guide agent behavior and responses, automate repetitive automate repetitive tasks with smart triggers. And there's even a connect external tools and data sources. So you get a UI for MCP servers that's more integrated. And you know what? They added rounded corners, folks. So it doesn't look like a Windows app anymore. And no, I this is so stupid. But the rounded

• 15:55Scott Tolinski?

  corners kind of get me. I it's like the dumbest thing in the whole world. I fall for it. I'm swooned by it. Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  I like I like their icon, too. It's a little ghosty.

• 16:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's a little ghosty. The more icons I can have that have ghosts on them, the better. I have another tool with a ghost on it, which maybe would be good to get into next. So what are you doing for editor experience right now, CJ?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like I mentioned, I'm really just using Cursor. And then I've dabbled into Claude Code now. But I in using Claude Code and seeing how good it was at constructing plans, I wanted that inside of Cursor. So I haven't used them yet, but I'm starting to do some research because people have actually built out MCP servers that can keep Cursor aligned.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  With a plan and with like a checklist of to-dos. So essentially, you set up the tool, the MCP server, and then it will keep checking back in with it after it finishes tasks, very similar to what Claude Code does. So I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna see if I can get a similar experience inside of Cursor by using like a planning and task management MCP server. And I'd say ultimately, like adding MCP servers to Cursor really just make it that much better. So like adding the Context 7 MCP server, which gives you automatic documentation. There's the Playwrite MCP server. This is what I was using with Claude Code, but you can use it with Cursor too. It literally launches the web browser. It can click around on things and then read from the terminal and basically

• 17:27Speaker 01

  do developer testing like we do whenever we're building out the website. So ultimately, my editing experience with Cursor is enhanced by all these MCP tools. I'm excited to try Kiro, but I don't know if they have something unique enough that can't necessarily just be added later in Cursor with MCP tools. But looking into Kiro, it is free to try right now. It's in preview, and so they don't have any pricing just yet. And you get to use, you get a certain number of credits for Claude Sonnet. So that is a reason to potentially bounce between these editors is you get some free credits as well.

• 17:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And you know, ultimately, you're not trying to find the best editor. You're trying to find the best editor for you. And that very well may be just some sort of dumb shit editor that doesn't do anything. You know, like that could, that could be your ideal workflow. I don't ever understand why people get so upset about other people's choices in these regards, like, "Why not use Vim?" Because I don't want to. It doesn't, it doesn't speak to me, you know? I can use Vim just fine, don't want to do it. I like having more UI. I'm a UI guy. Like I said, I'm getting swooned by rounded corners. Do you think I have patience to use Vim?

• 18:42Scott Tolinski?

  If you get swooned by rounded corners, you're not gonna use Vim, that's for sure. Okay, let's talk terminals. Uh, which terminal are you using currently CJ?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yep, so I use iTerm2 and I have been using it for like at least 10 years now. I haven't switched.

• 18:59Scott Tolinski?

  iTerm2 version 3?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Uh, something like that. It's the like the alternative terminal for Mac and it works just fine for me like. I, I will say this, I have used the uh, terminal feature inside of Cursor. Cause recently I figured out that you can actually prompt and then it will come up with the CLI command like. It's really good for things like, uh, I'm trying to come up with an FFmpeg command for converting a file so I can describe it in plain English. That passes it to an LLM and then it comes back with the actual terminal command that you can use. So. I will admit that was nice inside of Cursor. But I still just type out my commands by hand inside of iTerm2. I haven't uh, evolved into using anything like that.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Um, I will say iTerm2 has AI integration, like you can add an OpenAI API key and it can actually. You can prompt it and have it generate commands for you, but yeah, I keep it super simple. I'm not using any of the fancy new terminals. I've been using iTerm2 for a long time. I like it.

• 20:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I gotta say, um. I'd been using iTerm2 version 3 for a long time. I always thought that was very funny. The reason I'm even make that joke is that.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:10Scott Tolinski?

  Instead of naming it iTerm3, it was like, here's version 3 of iTerm2 and it's got all these crazy new features. And I was just like, why don't you just call it iTerm3 if it's that much more impressive? I have fallen into the world of using Ghosty. Ghosty, again, another cute ghost. What a world we live in. I used to work for a company Ghostly International, another cute ghost as a logo. Uh, Ghosty is a fast feature-rich cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration. Basically, it's main thing is just that it's a fast terminal. It looks nice. It's got. It's kind of like no nonsense in terms of its additional features.

• 20:51Scott Tolinski?

  Like, oh, there's a color theme. You can add color themes. That's one of their listed features, right? So it's, it's what you're not getting is you're not getting something like Warp. Um, I have been using Warp for a long time. That always really upsets people because it requires a login. And they're like, why do you need a login for a terminal? Sure, fine. Why do you? But at the, at the end of the day. Doesn't really affect me that much. I can, you know, sign up with some dummy email and whatever. And it's, it's not like they're gonna, you know, uh, come hunt me down or something. But ghosty, um, here's my ghosty. I haven't really found my perfect theme for this yet. Hey, I, I like ghosty. It is, uh, it's one of those ones that people like talk about as, as being like, oh, this, this hot new,

• 21:35Scott Tolinski?

  fast terminal. And what I like about it, it is, it's relatively no nonsense. Like kind of what I was getting irritated with, with warp sometimes is like, oh, you have these blocks and these blocks. Now I'm not even in that same line and it's selecting things weird and there's all this, there's all these great things about it. Like you can use your mouse, which I occasionally like to do. Kill me. But having a no nonsense term like I term two, version three, or even just the Apple terminal, terminal. It, it's, it's where I've always worked and thrived. So, uh, coming back to this feels like more like a home than, than anything else. No nonsense.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  What would you say it does better than I term two? Or what are some of the reasons you might use it over I term two?

• 22:19Scott Tolinski?

  It's, it's just, it's, it's more minimalist than I term two. There are less features. What it does better is that it uses, I believe, plat, uh, GPU acceleration, which I don't think I term two does. I want to see though.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 22:35Scott Tolinski?

  Starting in I term two, version three point two. Okay. Text may be drawn with GPU acceleration. So, okay. Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And I guess what are some scenarios where you need that? Like, uh, when you're like looking at logs or like fast text scrolling across the screen, that kind of thing?

• 22:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, your term is generating a lot of text. Do I know, I got a fast computer. So does it, doesn't really impact my life in any way? No, but it's got a cute ghost logo and it's a no nonsense, uh, nice and easy terminal that I, I tend to like. So.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Nice. Does it have AI features that you use as well?

• 23:10Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, which is a plus for me because sometimes I'm like with warp, it's like trying to do AI when I didn't ask it to. Other times it's nice when it when I cannot remember that specific command that I don't use often. Like, man, I used to have all the tarball flags memorized by heart, use them like without thinking twice. And I haven't done a tarball in so long now that I I, you know, I CZ, you know, I cannot remember the the exact uh, flags I always use for things. And because of that, I would use that type of situation. I have never gotten into using the terminal inside of a text editor.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Hmm. Same.

• 23:52Scott Tolinski?

  I like it separate.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do too. And I like and I'm okay with like window swapping or window switching. But the cursor one somewhat entices me. I the thing is, I haven't made it a habit yet, so I don't don't always reach for it. Really, only if it's like I'm starting if I go off to Google to figure out a command, I'm like, oh, yeah. AI could probably figure this out. So then I might use the one inside of cursor. But yeah, I like it as a separate app as well.

• 24:16Scott Tolinski?

  Let's talk about let's stay on the text note for a little bit. Let's talk about note taking. How much note taking do you do these days?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  A lot, I guess. But like with all of these categories, I keep it very low tech. And I've been trying to think of better ways to do this for probably like three years now, but I keep going back to it. I use Sublime Text.

• 24:41Scott Tolinski?

  Hell, yeah. Cool.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  And all what I would all do is if I need to take a new note, I'll open a new tab in Sublime Text. I'll take that note and then I don't ever save this as files. I'm basically using the like in memory cache of Sublime Text. So anytime I need a new note. If it's not categorized, I'll open a new tab, add it there. It's like a When I take care of that thing, I'll just delete the note. And then I also have like a long running tab of stuff that I need to keep track of for like longer. And so then if I, if that's ever the case, then I'll move it from its own tab into that file or into that tab. So it's literally just text and I use that exact same thing for

• 25:21Speaker 01

  my to do list. So I have a text list of things that I need to do. And because it's text, I can literally move them around in that list if I needed to change their priority. And when they're done, I just delete them. And I have been doing that for years now. I will say, I, I combine that with calendar, right? So if I need to definitely get a notification of something to happen, that's in my calendar. But if it's just like general unstructured things, that's literally just text for me.

• 25:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do love using scheduling things on the calendar and stuff. I'll talk a little bit about my to do and a setup, but folks, you might be realizing CJ is pretty minimalist in his setup overall.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  I never thought about it like this. It's just like, I don't, I don't, I use what works.

• 26:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you don't like to use a lot of apps. And I understand that a lot of people would feel that way too, because oftentimes people be like, why are we installing so many apps? But like, yeah, like I said, I'm a sucker for a good UI. I got some crazy hair going on and sticking up. I got like a little alfalfa thing. Sorry that my camera keeps seeming to glitch, folks. Hopefully our editor cuts around that if you are noticing that. My apologies. I use Obsidian. Obsidian is a really fantastic text editor of Markdown files. It is a UI on top of Markdown and it uses Markdown to do a whole bunch of stuff. There's a billion plugins. If you're the type of person, there's a lot of community themes, you can change everything. And the only

• 26:52Scott Tolinski?

  thing I dislike about Obsidian is that there's no off the shelf, easy multiplayer mode. Or else I would really love to use this in place of something like Notion, which also Notion is definitely has its database tech. It can feel slow sometimes. It's trying to shove features that you may not be using. And this is much more simplistic than that. The community plugins are bountiful. There's just an endless amount of them. They do all kinds of stuff from Styling your code, linting your code, there's a day planner, just all kinds of stuff. That if you wanted to like, do a full-time study of Obsidian,

• 27:37Scott Tolinski?

  you could probably make a living off of being some kind of Obsidian expert, because it is very deep. Another cool thing about Obsidian is that I have a feature set in here that makes a daily note. So automatically, every time I open the app, it's automatically created a daily note for me. And you might know it's just Markdown, but there is some UI here. Like when you are entering FrontMatter, if I do the three dashes for FrontMatter, you can see that it gives me some very, a few different things here that I've created. Like I created a tag system and that tag system allows you to browse and find notes based on tags. So anytime we have meetings, I'm taking my own personal note, I'm tagging it syntax meeting,

• 28:21Scott Tolinski?

  or I'm tagging it, you know, CJ meeting or whatever. And I can take my notes in here that I can go back and look at. Even like give it a created at date, which is less important for these daily notes. I do love this system. You can even create tables with a plugin, Advanced Tables toolbar. Again, countless features, you can see things in a graph. Again, today's daily note, there's a command palette. You can create templates and then reuse those things. I use this way more minimalist than I do installing a whole bunch of stuff. I pretty much mostly use this for adding notes, adding like notes to myself for later. Or if like there's a process that I want to remember, I will put it in here and then be able to look it up later.

• 29:06Scott Tolinski?

  And a recipe here and there. And I just like it because it's Markdown. And yeah, you can, you can have your Obsidian Vault with all of your settings and all those things. You can use their paid syncing platform of this thing. But ultimately, I sync it with the Apple files and it's just Markdown. And then I could just take it with me. You could publish this as a blog if you want. You can publish, you can write your whole blog. One folder of this thing and publish that. I mean, there's a lot you can do with it because it is again just markdown. It outputs front matter. And you know, one of the things that people like about this is that it does allow you to create links between files. You just do double brackets here.

• 29:48Scott Tolinski?

  And if this link doesn't exist, I can click to create it and then start typing and this will create that connected link for me. So cool. You can click around files and stuff. Yeah, it's great.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that it's markdown based or markdown backed. I've tried Obsidian before. I think the the main reason I kept going back to Sublime Text is just how fast it launches like it'll, I can launch Sublime Text like in under 100 milliseconds versus like if I try to load VS Code or Obsidian or some of these other apps. It's a few seconds before they start up.

• 30:19Scott Tolinski?

  Especially if you have a ton of files. Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so I have tried Obsidian. I will mention, I also tried a tool called LogSeq, L O G S E Q. And it's very similar to Obsidian in that it's markdown backed and it has like a community ecosystem of plugins. But it has that idea of a daily journal. It calls it journals. So every time you open the app, it has a specific file for today's date. Again, I bounced between that and Sublime Text. I feel like if things need to be stored longer term, I'll open up LogSeq. But most of my short term notes are just all inside of Sublime Text.

• 30:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I don't take many short. I guess I do take like note taking during meetings. But it's mostly things that I want to reference later that I'm putting in here.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 31:03Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. As for to do's, I'm a big to do guy, a big, big to do guy. I have really loved this app now for a little while and I feel like it's flown under the radar. I feel like nobody talks about it but me. And it is tweak dot S O, T W E E K dot S O. And it puts your to do's inside of like, what looks like kind of like a daily task list calendar kind of thing. And then there's a sub one for someday, or you can make your own additional. Like if if this one isn't enough for you, you can keep adding additional like videos I want to do or something like that. Right? And it's very minimalist.

• 31:43Scott Tolinski?

  Because it is just a list of things. If you click on any of these, you can add some extra notes. If you add some extra notes, you can add subtasks. I tend to not do that. I tend to just use this as like, this is the thing I'm doing today. And then that way I can see very clearly what I'm doing every day. If I can't do it today, I'll drag it to another day. And I'll use colors for things like yellow color for if it's syntax or anything like that. And overall, as far as like apps go, it is fast. It does use local data as its data source, so it loads instantly. I've like never had any issues with how fast it loads. It's just very nice. And you can log in with anything. I do pay for this app because again,

• 32:27Scott Tolinski?

  I actually really enjoy supporting this app's progress and the developer here. And it's an app that saves my bacon. As somebody who's hyperactive, being able to have my list in front of me is an essential thing for me to get anything done in a focused manner. And this is the one, the thing I hate about, sorry, to do apps. The worst thing about them is they always start simple. They always start very simple, like height or to doist. And then they just start adding nonstop unnecessary features that complicate the UI or in general like are just trying to do too much. And in the case of height, they were like, you know what would be great?

• 33:10Scott Tolinski?

  If we tried to make linear, like what if we just made linear? Well, linear already exists. Why you make it linear? Your to do app was really good and minimalist. And then they made linear and then they had to close because they spent all this money building this linear clone. When it's like, you're not going to beat them at their own game. It's clearly like a great app.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like this UI that you're showing me here. It reminds me of those printed schedule journals that people used to use. It's like super minimal. It's got each day in a column. Yeah, I like it.

• 33:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's nice. And it only gives you one week at a time. So you're not seeing this endless amount of things. And that is like a thing for me is when I set up systems, if I'm not maintaining and watering those systems, they rot really quickly. And the thing I like about Tweak is that it doesn't let that happen necessarily. You can probably get to Into your system, have it be too much to maintain and then have it rot. But it is so simple that it tends to just be like, what am I doing today? What am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing this week? And I have a task that I do like first thing on Mondays is just like write out my to do's for the week.

• 34:26Scott Tolinski?

  So that way I kind of know what's going on. I know what I'm spending my time on. And then if I don't get to everything, I can actually move things around, et cetera, et cetera. So Tweak, one of my favorite apps that I feel like people don't necessarily talk about.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  That seems great. That's another one I think I'll give a try because I like the minimal layout. I mentioned it earlier, but I literally just have a text list for my to do's. I'll also mention that like I use Trello as well. So I have like a, for my personal life, I have a Trello of like work that needs to be done around the house. Or like all my side projects and stuff like that. The only thing is I don't check in on it as often. I guess the stuff on there isn't important because I haven't opened it in like two months. But I know it's there. So if I need it, it's like my list of things to do, things in progress.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  So yeah, I might reach for Trello for things like that. But again, I just have a list of text items and they don't, I guess I don't think of them in terms of due dates. Right? I guess if something really needs to be due, I'll just put it on my Google Calendar. Cause that syncs with my phone and so that will alert me when things need to happen. But for anything that doesn't have a specific due date, it's literally just a list of markdown text items.

• 35:37Scott Tolinski?

  I totally get that. I totally understand that because to me that makes so much sense.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I'd be curious, have you looked for or seen extensions for Obsidian that give you like a to do list? Or?

• 35:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's tons of stuff like that. Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Like one of the things that, I mean, you were even talking about it where like these to do apps like just get bloated with features. It feels like there's a lot of overlap because I feel like a lot of people might actually use Notion for their to do lists or for note taking.

• 36:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I guess I'm curious. Have you seen things in these other apps and like, maybe, why do you prefer a tweak over all of those?

• 36:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I tend to like apps that are singular focused on things, because again, I don't know, I've probably said this 1000 times, because I, my form of ADHD makes it so, one, if there's too much going on, I get really like, I don't know where to look. And it sounds so stupid if there's like, all my Notion stuff and my to-do list and whatever. I get so oddly overwhelmed. It's very odd. I can't, it's like a paralysis or something. But then also, like, for me, like, having a single source that all it is, is the stuff I gotta do, it's way more easy for me to really utilize it. And I'm the type of person, I kid you not, I'm like Ron Burgundy.

• 36:56Scott Tolinski?

  If it is in my calendar, or if it's in my to-do list, I will do it. And if it's not, honestly, I won't even think about it. Like, and so I know that if my wife ever asks me to do anything, like, oh, hey, this, this got broken, or something, can you, you know, see what you can do to fix it? I'll be like, yeah. And then like, a week later, hey, did you ever get around? Hmm, no. Let me put it in my to-do list right now, because then I'll actually get it done.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I do use, I will say, I do use Notion Calendar, which is an app for calendar. I like this app. I'm sad that it's Notion Calendar, because it used to be an app called Kron. And Kron was really beautiful and a minimalist and very, very just nice in general. But now they're like integrating with Notion. I suppose that's fine. It is very Notion-y now. They haven't really changed a massive amount about it, but there was something nice about it just being Kron. It was a nice free calendar app. So it's, you know, no wonder Notion wanted to buy it,

• 38:06Scott Tolinski?

  because they didn't have a full-featured calendar app. I still use it as Notion Calendar, and I tend to like it very much, at least for the time being.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  So is it integrated into the Notion UI, or it is a separate app?

• 38:19Scott Tolinski?

  It's a separate app. Yeah. They can speak together, and I do not integrate it with Notion at all.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Even though I'm sure that would be useful, I'm sure there's a lot of things that would be nice. But like, I just, I just like it as a calendar.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 38:35Scott Tolinski?

  And you said you use Google Calendar, but are you just using Google Calendar?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. So I use Google Calendar on my personal Gmail and then Google Calendar at work. Yeah, it works for what I need. I like that it's integrated with email. So a lot of times you'll get an email about an event you're attending, or you buy tickets to something and then Gmail just automatically adds it to the calendar, which is nice.

• 38:56Scott Tolinski?

  All right, let's move to email then.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:58Scott Tolinski?

  A lot of focus. I use Superhuman. We just had them on the show. It's a fast app. It is a nice working app. It was just purchased by somebody, oh, Grammarly. Not a huge fan of that. I've really liked, you know, I, as somebody who had a beloved podcast that was purchased by a company and then they didn't screw it up, they just, you know, helped us to make it better.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:26Scott Tolinski?

  You know, not every acquisition is going to be a disaster. Our acquisition went really, really well. But it's hard not to be pessimistic when it is a company like Grammarly that I feel like is fine, but I always thought their pricing was pretty predatory. And now, granted, Superhuman's pricing is also pretty predatory, so maybe that's a match made in heaven, but the app is really great. So I use Superhuman. I get to inbox zero every single day, no matter what. So it helps me. And the way I stay on top of things is I snooze to the day that I can actually, like if I can't answer an email right now, I will snooze it to the day I can't answer it. And get rid of everything else.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Nice. So I try to get to inbox zero too, but not every day. It's like a weird system, I guess, if I could describe it, because and the idea of inbox zero is like you try to have nothing visible in your inbox. And with Gmail, you can do that via like archiving emails or deleting emails or snoozing them. But I just use heavy, I make heavy use of archiving or deleting. And recently I've gotten in the habit, probably started this about a year ago, of deleting absolutely everything unless I'm going to need it later, because I was approaching my my storage limit on my Gmail account and I just had thousands and thousands of unread emails. So I went through and just did searches for like password reset emails, which like you typically never delete.

• 40:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there's like thousands of them or like new account notifications or Amazon shipping notifications or all these things that you fill up your inbox that you don't really need, except for when you read them once. I went through and deleted all of that. And now I get in the habit of if an email like that comes in, I just delete it immediately. It immediately goes to the trash. And then if there's something I want to hang on to, I archive it. And now that I'm thinking about it, I kind of use my inbox as a to do list as well.

• 41:20Scott Tolinski?

  I do too, yes.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  So instead of getting to full inbox zero, I'll have just the emails that I need to respond to or that I that actually need my attention. And those will just sit in my inbox. So I know that that's stuff that needs to be taken care of. If it's something that is like a month away or whatever else, I will snooze it. But anything that is with needs to be taken care of within like the next week or so, I just leave it as unread in my inbox. So I can see it once I've, you know, deleted the things or archived the things that I don't need to worry about right now.

• 41:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I will say that for me, if it is in my inbox and it is visible, that says I have to do it right now. And the way I approach email is that I take care of every bit of email that exists. First thing in the morning, I come into my office, unless I have like some crazy urgent meeting or something. The very first thing I do is get to inbox zero for all of my email addresses. And the way I do it is I archive, or I guess I should be deleting, but I archive anything that doesn't need to be taken care of. I take care of the things that can be taken care of right now. And then I snooze everything else to a time in which I can take care of it.

• 42:38Scott Tolinski?

  And then that way it gets me to inbox zero and then I close my email and I do not open it again until tomorrow. That's how I take care of email once every morning. That's it.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 42:48Scott Tolinski?

  Because if people need to get ahold of me, Slack, we got Team Slack, we got text messages. So yeah, I actually hate talking over iMessage too. I lose track of that stuff so fast.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  And then one more thing is the mobile app that I use for email. So like I mentioned, I use Gmail, but if you're on Android or if you use Gmail at all, you might know that it literally inserts ads into your inbox. So like you might be scrolling and all of a sudden you see an ad in your inbox. So I hated that. And so I found an Android app. It's open source. It's called a Fair Email. And it's, it's super minimal, but it doesn't show you ads and it can actually just integrate directly with the Gmail SMTP servers. So on my Android phone, I just use Fair Email. And then on desktop, I will use the Gmail app. But Fair Email works pretty well for me on Android.

• 43:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Let's talk about your dumb phone productivity. You'd mentioned to me that you are like going pretty minimalist on your phone. I cannot get there. I am maximalist. I got all my video games and stuff like that on there. I got all kinds of stuff on my phone. And by video games, I mean Risk. I play a lot of Risk or Settlers of Catan.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Like multiplayer online with other people?

• 44:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fun. That's awesome.

• 44:07Scott Tolinski?

  I do really enjoy Risk. I'm a big strategist in that regard. So what is your setup for your dumb phone?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Sure. So I'll walk you through.

• 44:17Scott Tolinski?

  It's not actually a dumb phone. You have a foldable phone. Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's the thing is so like if you, if you've seen, it's been a bit of a trend, right? Like if you see there's like YouTube videos people have made about it where they talk about how they're trying to like detox or trying to basically not be addicted to doom scrolling or not being addicted to like all these social apps anymore. So there are certain phones that are purposefully like. dumbed it down where like they only support certain apps or they may use e Ink screens. So they're like super locked down. So you can basically just use them as a phone and maybe for sending messages. I didn't want to go that far. So I've just done everything I can to basically uninstall every app on my phone that I doom scroll in, or that was getting my attention too much, or that was like sending notifications. I installed every single one

• 45:04Speaker 01

  of those apps and then I installed a dumb launcher. So on Android, there's quite a few different like simple launchers you can look for. But one of the one that I liked and I found is called O Launcher, like the letter O Launcher. And it's super minimal. It's literally just text. So it's the text name of these apps. I think that's another thing that like our brain likes is like colors and icons. And so when you open up your phone and you see those icons, you want to click on them and like waste time on your phone. But now, when I open my phone, it's literally just a list of text of the app, the eight apps that I use the most. And like I said, I already uninstalled like Reddit and Instagram and anything else that I could be scrolling all the time. So it's fairly minimal in that way. But I still get access to like my email client if I want to handle things on the go

• 45:49Speaker 01

  or Signal Messenger, which is what I use to keep in touch with people. So I can still use all those modern Android apps, but I keep my phone dumbed down. And then one more trick that I started doing, which has helped me use my phone less as well, is in Android settings, you can go into color correction and you can turn your entire phone grayscale. So throughout the day, if I pick up my phone, it's actually surprising how much less enticing it is to get lost in apps when everything is black and white. I think that's why some of these dumb phones that use like the e Ink screens, like that's why it helps some people. But this is something you can try on Android if you already have it. Just go into Settings, Color Correction, and then choose like black and white.

• 46:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. I was telling you before we recorded, I had that set up in an automation schedule at some point, and I found it did really work. But then at some point I turned it off and I have not turned it back on.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I added a quick setting in the pull down settings on Android, so I can just like toggle it on and off. It makes it pretty, pretty easy. And then with the idea of like spending less time on my phone, but also if I am spending time on my phone, trying to make it more quality time. So I have an ebook reader on there called Read Era, so I can find EPUBs of books and I can read them on my phone. But yeah, like Scott mentioned, I do have the, it's a pretty advanced phone for it to be dumb, because it opens up.

• 47:15Scott Tolinski?

  It's the most advanced dumb phone, yes.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Because yeah, it opens up and

• 47:19Scott Tolinski?

  It's a folding, it's a folding.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  It's a folding phone, but it's really great as an e-reader, because I can open it up, I can use my ebook app. And then also I get audiobooks and I use an app called Smart Audiobook Reader, so.

• 47:30Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, nice.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like using my phone less or using it for more quality makes me more productive in other areas, because I'm not like wasting my time on my phone or whatever else, so.

• 47:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do have an app to turn you on to if you like audiobooks. I use a self-hosted solution called Audiobookshelf, and it's kind of like an MB or a Plex for, for ebooks. I host it on my NAS, and then I just have all my ebooks on there. I don't read books. I do listen to a massive amount of books, like constantly. So having, finding this software to be able to self-host all my books instead of having to pay for Audible has been very nice. Where I acquire said books, who knows? But I have a lot of them, so.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Same. One more, like, I don't even know if this is like a life hack or whatever else, but what I've been doing is combining ebooks with audiobooks. Like, so it helps with retention for me. So I'll turn the audiobook on and I'll actually read along with the audiobook. Yeah, because I have ADHD too, but it helps with retention and can also be a partner activity. So my, my wife and I, actually, like, instead of watching TV in the evenings, we'll put on an audiobook, but then we both have the physical book or ebook that we're reading along to while the audiobook is on.

• 48:46Scott Tolinski?

  So you're, you're, you're cutting out TV. Meanwhile, I just watched one episode of Love Island per night for the past month or whatever, uh, which is just about the trashiest TV, uh, you can watch. Um, we're, we're out there setting up a projector in the backyard to watch this trashy ass TV. Uh, oh, it is fun. I, I think that my challenge is the dyslexia. It makes reading really tough. Uh, and, and that just is a big challenge. My wife is the other way around where she's like, I don't want to listen to a book. I'd rather just read it. I'm going to retain more. And I was like, ah, that sounds nice. Uh, yeah, I gotta have my headphones in. I gotta have phone around. Gotta have a computer.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. Speaking of TV though, one last thing is I disconnected my smart TV from the internet.

• 49:31Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, crazy, crazy.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Uninstalled all the streaming apps and everything. I, I still have streaming service subscriptions, but it's, there's more, there's a barrier to entry. I have to get out my computer, plug it into the HDMI.

• 49:44Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, you do. You're not Chromecast-ing or something. Okay. Cause it's not online. Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, yeah. My, my advice here is like, uninstall everything and make it harder for yourself to get lost in these, in these apps.

• 49:55Scott Tolinski?

  Or, or just completely embrace it and become, uh, me where you're just unable to focus on anything and you're just staring at apps and go, oh, you know? Um, cool. Uh, do you have anything else that you want to hit before we get out of here?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  No, I think this is it. I, I honestly appreciated seeing the apps that you use. I'm going to give some of these a try. Cause I'm a little bit low tech in some of these areas. So I'm inspired to at least explore some of these apps as well.

• 50:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Uh, and if you're out there, you're listening on audio, I know you can't see any of this stuff. I, I hope I did a good job describing it at least. And CJ helped out when I wasn't. But if you want to see some of these things, we were showing them on YouTube, youtube.com/atsyn-taxfm. We would love you to subscribe because you know what? We're doing really fun things. If you're not subscribed on YouTube, you're actually missing more than just the podcast because every Friday, we have been releasing some really fun videos where we do things like snake drafting our stacks. So we're building a snack via a snake. Big draft. They're a lot of fun. We do CSS battles, JavaScript competitions between the three of us.

• 51:01Scott Tolinski?

  We are, oh, the best one. We made really annoying captchas, which are hilarious. I was in tears. I couldn't even like, speak during Wes's. So if any of that sounds fun to you, check us out on YouTube. We're out there. We're doing fun stuff on there that be on just video podcasts, which we're doing as well. Well, that's all I got for you today, folks. Wes will be back next week or so. He's on vacation and we will catch you in the next one. Thanks CJ for joining me today.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Later.

• 51:32Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.