Being productive and discovering the secret to productivity has always been quite an obsession of mine. If you can’t tell, I have written this How I Became More Productive Again and this Here's What I Learned From Over 7 Years of Unyielding Productivity Obsession over the course of 6 years I am on Hive. From student to now, an all-over the place person, I keep updating my knowledge on it. I am obviously not always a productive person, there are days when life gets the best of me and my stress is at its all-time-high. I have days where I resort to doing nothing and forgetting the idea of productivity.

But when I am productive, I am always at my best and even during the so-called doing nothing, I still incorporate with a few productivity tricks and tips that I love to use such as the tomato timer ideas or Pomodoro. Now that I am switching to another operating system, I have the need to search for tools that might help me stay productive. I tested a few and I came to the conclusion that these top 3 helped me so much in running my day, keeping me active, motivated, and staying on top of my current goals. Not to mention, the apps I mention provide valid data to evaluate my progress and soon, if you use it, you can use it to track your life too.

Focus To-do

My experience with Focus To do has been stellar. There are many pomodoro apps out there and even the open source ones that you can check here Top 3 Productivity Open Source Tools I use
. But Focus To-do remains on top of the list. Not only does it have a complete report, progress tracking,it also has a full screen focus tab that has white noise which really works great especially if you’re working from home and looking to spice things up a bit. With pomodoro you can also decide how many minutes you can focus on a task before taking a break. For someone who often gets distracted from the outside, I find pomodoro really helps. So, if I get a call, I would only accept it after I finish the session and I would not stop midway before the pomodoro timer is over. It helps so much with getting things done in ways you probably could never imagine especially if you often have problems with focusing.

Evernote

I am a longtime fan of Evernote. They just work for my brain that hates clutter and hates excessive options. I love sleek designs and though Notion has the aesthetics and it’s what people use, Evernote still wins me over. So, even when I migrate to another operating system, I am very relieved that I don’t have to install a third party to even use it. Since if you’re on another OS, you can use Tusk to run Evernote. It has dark mode and is just so simple and easy on my eyes.

Spreadsheet

This might be weird to say spreadsheet is an app that helps me the most. But somehow it’s true! I’ve been enjoying tracking everything on spreadsheet apps and I was seeing quite an improvement on my overall life. This has never been into my consideration but ever since I am learning SQL and more excel functions, it’s simply works. They also help me get the cold facts that I might need to improve on.

So, that being said, over the course of years the software and application I am using isn’t that different but I am certainly adding new things on my list, such as Spreadsheet that I’ve come to enjoy using recently. Even when I switch to another OS, I am certainly going to be using these tools in which perhaps, the concept is the same but they differ in terms of app name.