David Millard

After 25 years of professional life, after trying what feels like every productivity tool ever created, I think I may have finally found a setup that actually works. And by “works,” I don’t just mean that it helps me get stuff done – I mean it helps me get the right stuff done.

This isn’t going to be another evangelical post about the One True Productivity System (if you want to scratch that itch then Toolfinder is a lovely place to while away the hours). These are simply the tools that stuck for me, and the reasons why they did. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but I hope there’s something useful here for anyone still searching for their own perfect setup.

The Elusive Perfect System

As someone who’s been interested in note-taking tools, todo applications, and productivity software for decades, I’ve been through… well, let’s just say a lot of different applications. Most of them work brilliantly – for while. Then something changes – a new project, a busy period, a slightly different workflow – and suddenly you’re back to sticky notes and your email inbox as a (hauntingly long) todo list.

But over the last few years, something clicked. I found a combination of tools that not only survived my various productivity crises but actually made them less likely to happen in the first place. These applications now form the core of what I use every day. Lets start.

Things 3: Anti-Procrastination

I’ve tried quite a few todo apps over the years. Things 2 was my workhorse for ages, then I had a brief flirtation with Todoist, before settling back into Things 3. Todo apps are brilliant at getting things todone – I think adopting Things 2 and the GTD process back in the day probably doubled the amount of work I was able to manage in a given time period – but the problem was that I ended up doing all of those urgent but unimportant tasks, the big things just seemed to get lost. The secret wasn’t finding the perfect app, it was finding the perfect practice.

Things 3 excels at something that you might not expect would be useful: it hides stuff from you. That might sound counterproductive (Todoist in contrast wallows in fancy views and cuts of your data), but it’s actually brilliant. With the minimum amount of discipline you can dump all of your todos, action items, and random thoughts into Things, and it will only show you what you need to see right now. Everything else gets tucked away until the appropriate time. The cognitive relief is enormous.

I organise Things around areas (Research, Teaching, Home, etc.) and projects (anything with a finite lifetime – from “Write conference paper” to “Decorate the Lounge”). But the real game-changer was implementing a weekly review. Every Monday, a recurring task pops up that forces me to clean my email inbox, categorise everything in Things, and plan my week. It takes about an hour. But it’s a commitment that is worth it.

Here’s where I categorise tasks by size: Small (a few minutes), Medium (30 minutes to an hour), and Large (anything bigger). These all get allocated to particular days, but only Large items get time blocked in my actual calendar. This simple system prevents me from kidding myself about how much I can actually accomplish in a day, but it doesn’t require any detailed hour by hour planning – and gives me enough space on a day to day basis to feel like a human being rather than a task-machine.

The weekly review solved a problem I didn’t even realize I had. I was incredibly productive with Things 2, but I was being productive for other people. The urgent-but-not-important tasks were crowding out the stuff that actually mattered to me. The weekly review gives me a moment to step back and ask: “What do I actually need to accomplish this week?” If you’ve tried todo apps or GTD but have bounced off them, then maybe the weekly review is the thing that you need to make it work. The key that unlocks the whole system.

Obsidian: Hypertext by Any Other Name

After cycling through Evernote, Bear, and a brief romance with Notion, I landed on Obsidian as my primary note taking app a couple of years ago. The killer feature isn’t the two way linking or the graph view (although those are nice) – it’s that everything is stored locally in simple markdown files.

This matters more than you might think. When you’re recording meeting notes with students or sensitive research information, you simply can’t put it on third-party servers (Notion Im looking at you). Obsidian solves this by keeping everything on your own machine.

I have designed my setup in a different way to many people: as a structured journal with smart indexing. This makes note taking super easy – instead of agonising over where each note should go, I just write everything in today’s journal entry. Need to jot something down? Today’s note. Meeting notes? Today’s note. Random idea? Today’s note.

The structure is then imposed on top from a simple tagging system I embed in the pages. I mark sections as being about Research, Teaching, or Home projects. Then I created index pages that query across all my journal entries and pull out everything relevant to each area. So I get the best of both worlds: frictionless capture (everything just goes in today’s note) but structured retrieval (I can see all my research notes, and clicking on any entry takes me back to the full context of that day).

It’s like having a personal assistant who remembers not just what you wrote, but when and why you wrote it.

Zotero: The Reference Manager That Clicked

I understand this one is quite specific to researchers, but this was a breakthrough for me. You see, I’ve been trying to use reference managers for years. The promise was always compelling: easy capture of sources, automatic formatting, never lose a paper again. But I always bounced off. I loved how easy it was to get material into these systems, but could never figure out how to organize it once it was there.

With Zotero, something finally clicked. The secret was using Collections for projects and Tags for topics. This might sound obvious, but most people do it the other way around, organizing by topic in folders and using tags for status.

My approach gives me a workspace for each writing project where I can gather sources, organize them into sections, and triage them as I work. But because everything is also tagged by topic, I can later go into my full library and select combinations of tags to find interesting intersections – papers about “ethnography” AND “museums,” for example.

These little serendipitous overlaps are just a joy. I was so pleased with myself that I wrote a whole article about it.

Arc: One Trick Wonder

Arc is the only web browser I’ve encountered that fundamentally changed how I use the web. The reason is beautifully simple: Arc doesn’t distinguish between bookmarks and tabs.

Instead of tabs across the top, you get a sidebar where you can organize your active pages into folders. All my Google Docs, Overleaf projects, and web sources live in organized spaces. When I need to revisit something, I click on it in the same place – it doesn’t open as a random new tab, only to be lost in the tab storm that rages across the windows of most browsers. Seriously, who knew that this simple blending of two ideas would be so transformative.

The other brilliant feature is that Arc cleans up after you. Tabs that you haven’t organized into your structure accumulate during the day, and then periodically (you can configure this, but mine does this every night) they get automatically cleared away. Every morning I start with a fresh, tidy workspace. Its lovely.

Arc has lots of other features (and its based on Chromium so its robust and supports a wide set of plugins), but for me the killer feature is this organizational approach. Tabs and bookmarks shouldn’t be different things, and Arc just got that right.

A Note About the Future: The Browser Company recently announced they’re working on an AI-powered browser called Dia. They’re not abandoning Arc (it still gets updates) but its no longer getting any feature updayes. If Dia incorporates Arc’s organizational features (tabs are bookmarks, and I’ll fight you if you say otherwise) then I’ll probably switch. There’s also an open-source alternative called Zen Browser waiting in the wings just in case that all changes. I’ve tried some AI browsers (including Perplexity’s Comet) but haven’t found them compelling yet. For now, a traditional browser with a chat client on the side works just as well.

What I’ve learned

The real insight from my productivity journey isn’t about any of these specific tools – it’s about finding systems that work for you and sticking with them long enough to develop good practices around them.

Each of these tools survived not because they were perfect, but because they were flexible enough to adapt when life got complicated. Things 3 works even when I abandon it for weeks during crunch periods. Obsidian doesn’t care if I forget to organize my notes properly. Zotero accommodates my frantic research process. Arc cleans up my digital messes automatically.

The best productivity tools don’t make you more disciplined – they work around your existing habits and make them more effective. I’ve written about how hypertext is an existentialist technology in that it empowers people and gives them agency over their digital lives, and I appreciate the same ethos in my everyday apps.

You owe it to yourself to think carefully about your toolkit. Try different things, refine what works, and don’t be afraid to change when something isn’t serving you anymore. These are the tools that stuck for me – I hope you find yours.