My Top 5 Productivity Apps That Survived Years of Testing

I've tested hundreds of productivity apps [music] over the past decade. Today, I'm sharing the only five that survived, the ones I literally use every single day [music] without fail. But here's the twist. One of these, the most recent one, completely [music] changed how I interact with all the others. You'll see me using it through all the [music] other apps. I wonder if you can guess what it is. Let's count down from 5 to 1. Starting at number five [music] with email. I know what you're thinking. Email is broken. But what if you could reach inbox zero in minutes instead of endless hours? That's why I use Superhum. It turned email for me from really my biggest source of anxiety into something I, believe it or not, actually look forward to. So for every email, there's really only three options that I'm considering. Either I archive it, I capture it as a task, or I capture it as a note. There is one more option for what to do with your emails, which is to actually reply to them. [laughter] I do sometimes reply to emails. So, I might get caught up on this thread and then chime in here by hitting return, which is reply all. And then I'm going to hold the function key right here on my keyboard and say, "Happy to hear that we got this figured out, and that will be promoting your upcoming book. Please let us know if there's anything else we can support you on. And there you go. What's nice about this is not only is it faster and more efficient, of course, and the communication that comes through is very natural, very intuitive, and of course sounds like my voice because it is my voice. My favorite productivity app number four is Obsidian for notes. Why did I start using Obsidian? I found that for basic note capture and organization, Evernote still works great because it really just minimizes the friction to get ideas from my head onto the screen. But what I found is that for certain projects, my most complex longestterm projects, I need more powerful capabilities. For example, for the book I'm writing, I'm drawing on hundreds of sources, tracking probably thousands of individual pieces of information and details from inception to completion over the course of years. Obsidian isn't just where I store information. It's where all those ideas related to this project can collide and intermix and evolve. For example, I can click this idea if I want to use it as part of my book, and it will take me all the way back to where it comes from, which is this book right here called The Power of Appreciative Inquiry. And once I click through a couple times, I can see who wrote it, what category it's in, the different highlights I've taken. I also really like that because all of the information in your notes is stored locally on your device, not in the cloud, that search is extremely fast. You can see it's practically instantaneous. So, for example, if I want to search for commonplace books, it will show me every single time that that word occurs. And if I click the toggle, it will tell me within the note where exactly it shows up. I really consider the notes app the core of a second brain. But there's one thing that notes apps really are not well suited to, which is tasks. And that leads us to my favorite app number three, which is Things. I've tried every task manager out there. To-d Doist, ClickUp, Monday, you name it, I've tried it. But Things is different. It doesn't try to slowly take over your entire digital life like so many apps these days. Let me show you why simplicity beats complexity in this situation. Here is my Things app on the screen. The thing I want to most highlight is how crucial it is that you can quickly and frictionlessly capture new open loops. Whatever I'm doing, I could be in my email, I could be browsing the web, I could be watching a YouTube video. This is where the control spacebar shortcut, which brings up a quick capture window is just honestly kind of life-changing. I can hold down the function key and say pick up dry cleaning at the laundromat and then hit return and that's saved. Sometimes a whole group, a whole surge of open loops pops into your head all at once. And the ability to just quickly and seamlessly get them off your head and into a trusted system is in my opinion the most important part of a task manager. And that's something that things really excels at. My favorite productivity app number two might surprise you. It's Claude AI. Here's why. Claude doesn't just answer questions. It really can become a thinking partner or as a kind of collaborator where you can bounce ideas off of it or them and work through the implications or the consequences or the the subtler, deeper layers of those ideas. When you speak instead of typing, it encourages you to give the AI much much more context than you would otherwise. So, let me give you an example. I'm going to hold down the function key here and say, I'm thinking about my next book, Life in Perspective, and I want to be sure and connect the ideas and themes in that book, to all my previous work. Can you give me a list of suggestions for how I can build bridges from the building a second brain book, from the Parah Method book, from all my work with emergence and productivity generally and my YouTube channel and uh unlocking your creative potential. basically give me a comprehensive list of how everything that I've done in the past in terms of my work is still relevant and is connected to the themes in the new book coming out this year. So, if you look at this prompt, it's longer, more extensive, more detailed than anything I would type. Because I've mentioned various examples of my previous work, it has a clue. It has an entry point to then go and do research. It will do research by looking up other chats that I've done with it. It will look into my projects, my cloud projects. It will even do web research to find out more information, for example, about my books. Every little bit of context that I've given it in this prompt that I've spoken gives it starting points and little trails to go down in order to give me a response that is way more informed and contextaware. My number one favorite productivity app and this is the game changer is Whisper Flow for voice dictation. Voice recognition has only recently like in the past 6 months or year crossed 99% accuracy. Voice isn't just faster. Yeah, the time savings are great, but it's also more natural. It's more intuitive. It's more human. When you speak your thoughts instead of typing them, you stop editing yourself, critiquing yourself, and you start expressing yourself at the speed of thought, not the speed of typing. I want you to notice that the five productivity apps that we've covered, they form a complete system. What I recommend is that you start with just one, master it, [music] then add another. The goal isn't to add more apps. It's to create that system [music] where the technology just kind of disappears. and your best thinking and ideas and work emerges. Which one will you try first? Let me know in the comments below and keep building that second brain. Thanks to Whisper Flow for sponsoring this video. [music]

I tested hundreds of productivity apps over the past decade, but only five survived daily use. Here's what makes them different: they work together as one system, amplified by voice dictation that breaks the 10X typing bottleneck. In this video, I walk you through my favorite apps for email, notes, tasks, AI, and voice dictation - showing you exactly how each connects to the others. 🗣️ Download Wispr Flow for free here: http://ref.wisprflow.ai/tiagoforte #wisprflow CHAPTERS: 0:00 Introduction 0:24 The Email Transformation 1:37 Where Ideas Collide 3:20 The Simplicity Principle 4:32 Your Thinking Partner 6:24 The Missing Link ----------------------- 💌 Join our weekly newsletter for more tips and resources: https://fortelabs.com/subscribe/