2022-02-10

My tech stack: What helps me being productive

In this article I want to tell you what software and hardware I use to be more productive and have an efficient workflow. As I find it helpful to see what others use to adapt some things, I’d like to share my stack as well. I’ll keep this as a living document as things change regularly.

Hardware I use

Smartphone

Xiaomi Poco F2 Pro

Computers & desk setup

Macbook Pro 16” 2019, 2,6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 32 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB (soon: MB Pro 16” M1 Max, 32GB)
Monitors @ home desk: Two LG 27UL650-W 27” 4K and one AOC G2460PF 24” FHD. Mounted on a HFTEK FY138DB for 3 displays
My absolute favorite mouse is a Logitech G502 (with cable, without). It’s super helpful because of its many buttons which you can program to do certain tasks e.g. switching desktops or controlling music.
My keyboard is a Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad
My chair is a Robas Lund DX Racer 1

Other stuff

In-Ear Headphones: RHA T20i and NuFlo - Soundproof ANC Wireless Earbuds (no recommenendation for the latter one though).
Over-Ear Headphones: Audio Technica ATH-M50x. Great headphones but I use my in-ears most of the time.
Amazon Echo Dot: Handy gadget which helps me with different things like controlling my music, putting things on my grocery list, adding todos to my todo list, wake me up and controlling my lights (these are the features I mostly use).

Software and tools I use

This list could be really long, because there is a huge amount of tools I use. I’ll try to focus on the ones I find most helpful regarding my personal workflow and skip most which are business related.

1Password

It’s the best password manager in my opinion. I use it to store my private passwords as well as the passwords for all my companies. Every site has a unique password and I only need to remember one. There are apps for smartphones as well. Nice extra: it has an integration with haveibeenpwned.com and can warn you if one of your passwords was compromised.

Alfred

Alfred is a nice alternative for the macOS Spotlight Search and speeds up my workflow a lot. The main features I use are: calculator, open files and folders super fast, snippets, sometimes clipboard history if Paste (see below) didn’t work and some workflows like translating words, restarting my touchbar if it stopped working, restart apps, get some special char symbols and some other stuff. As it is easily extendable the possibilities are endless.

Backblaze

Unlimited Backup. I use it as a second backup next to my external SSD with TimeMachine.

Brain.fm

Functional music to improve focus, relaxing and sleep. I use it mainly for working focused and it really helps me getting in the zone (flow state). Get 1 month free here

Evernote

Evernote stores all my documents I have. Every single document and letter I get is digitalized and stored in Evernote. This way I’m able to get every single document I need where ever I am.

Fantastical

Beautiful calendar app for macOS.

Google Docs & Sheets

Every spreadsheet I need is created and stored in Google Sheets and Google Docs is used for collaboratively working on documents. This way everything is centralized and I don’t need to think about where I stored these things.

Hidden Bar

Let’s me cleanup my menu bar so I only see the information and icons I really need or want. Less distractions.

iTerm

Terminal replacement. Nice and handy features.

Outbank

Awesome banking software which let’s me check all my accounts in one central place. I can use it to search in all my accounts at once and also be able to access all my previous transactions. One of my accounts e.g. is at the Postbank which only let’s me search the past 3 months of transactions. With Outbank I can search all of them (since I started to use it).

Path Finder

Finder alternative for macOS. It has a lot more features and lets me work faster.

Paste

Clipboard history and manager. This is probably one of the most useful things on this list. I use it all the time. As I copy things all the time it can happen that I overwrite something in my clipboard which i still needed. With paste this is no problem because I can access everything I had in my clipboard in the last weeks. This is a huge time saver. Alfred also has this functionality but I find Paste is nicer to use. So I use Alfreds functionality only as backup if Paste didn’t start or crashed and I didn’t notice it.

shottr + Droplr + Vidyard

shottr: Create + annotate screenshots. Best tool & free. Droplr: Sharing screenshots + files Vidyard: Sharing screenrecordings

Sketch + Figma

Awesome apps to work with vector files like SVGs or create layouts or other graphical designs.

Best instant messenger available and way better than WhatsApp (although this isn’t hard to accomplish). Some of the main features I like are unlimited storage for sent files, same history on all devices, and my favorite feature: being able to create and use bots. For example Voicy is a bot to transcribe voicemails so it’s possible to use the search to search in voicemails or read them when you can’t listen them. I also created some bots for myself which help me with some tasks like daily notification about upcoming events in my calendar, forwarding of SMS (so I can copy & paste on my laptop), notifications for orders on Amazon, new calendar entries in shared calendars or PayPal payments just to count a few.