Productivity apps that I use every day

Every day I use several apps and workflows to empower my work.

Bear app is the master of everything. I store all notes and project files there. I organize all notes into nested tags, e.g. `#worldskills/2019/competition-week`, `#inspirations/typography`. A note can belong to different tags. This is a many-to-many structure alongside the 1-to-many structure between nested tags. This flexibility allows my notes to grow without losing control or losing focus on specific items.

I use Things to manage my tasks. These include work todos and project milestones. The subsection headings within projects allows me to divide a project into many small groups of tasks. That helps me a lot to focus on one aspect at a time to conquer the project.

While I may take quick text notes in Bear, iA Writer is my go-to app for long essays and books writing. Its typography and color syntax creates a joyful writing experience that’s similar to coding syntax highlight. 

I do a lot of quick inputs to capture my fresh ideas along the day. The ideas are either in visual form or text form. 

I use Dictate & Share workflow to quickly turn my speech into text and then I save the text into Bear for further editing and processing. Sometimes it is a speech to Things todo for quick capturing important tasks before I forget it. 

For visual ideas, I use Memopad to scratch and save to Bear app. It is not like other drawing tools that let you organize sketches into folders. It is so minimal that you draw and it saves to photo library. That’s all. Every time you launch the app, it creates a blank canvas for you to draw. This is useful to capture my ideas in a very short time.

Sometimes I draw several sketches on the same topic, which I often merge them together into a single image before saving them as a Bear note. I use the Combine Images workflow to auto combine these visual ideas.

These are the apps that I use to empower my productivity days.