PRODUCTIVITY APPS
Notion has quickly become a favourite for people taking lots of notes. There are lots of options for complex structuring, organising and writing. Notion lets you do pretty much anything you want with words and writing things down. Depending on what you want to use it for, there can be a slightly steep learning curve. If you literally just want to take some quick notes, you can probably use something else.
With file storage, the 2 main choices are Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive. The reason I like Google Drive more is because there is a built-in Google Docs editor. If your main choice of email is Gmail then this is even better. Google Drive also gives you the largest amount of free storage (15GB). One drive does however have better integration with Windows and Samsung though.
I have tried a few password managers and Bitwarden seems to be the best one for stability, features and availability on devices. I used to use Lastpass but the autofill on mobile just never worked. So I switched to Bitwarden and it seems much better to me so far. The free plan also gives you everything you need compared to LastPass.
Google Calendar is my choice of calendar mainly because of its functionality, ease of use, ability to subscribe to other calendars and ability to share and collaborate. Google Calendar is also great for custom notifications and integration with Google Maps etc.
Mainly just based on using the Google ecosystem, I like to use tasks. It seems like most task apps have paywalls for very basic features these days – like daily reminders. So I ended up just using Google Tasks for simplicity and I cannot complain about anything. It does what I want and can send reminders and daily tasks at specific times.
Asana and Trello are very similar in what they do and how they work. Both are great, however Asana is my chosen one because it links better with Google Drive and other external apps.
Brave browser is based on Chromium so it still works with the large amount of extensions for Chrome. The reason I use it is because extremely private and the controls are amazing. Brave is also a very fast browser. Brave has a very powerful ad blocker which most services do not detect and that will not be phased out by Google as it is built into the browser code, not the Chromium base.
2-factor authentication is very important if you are at all concerned about privacy or keeping your accounts safe from hackers. I chose 2FAS because it is open-source, it syncs to Google Drive for backup, it looks cool, and most importantly, it can connect to a browser extension so that you can autofill 2FA codes within your browser.
If you work on a computer or any kind of screen in the night time, the blue light that it emits ruins your circadian rhythm by tricking your brain into thinking that the sun is up and that you should be awake. This can interrupt your sleep cycle and you can find it hard to go to bed. F.lux is good because it gradually decreases the amount of blue light and replicates the sun cycle – helping aid a better night of sleep.
ShareX is very good for helping quickly take screenshots and sending them to people or doing whatever you want with the photo.
