Three Apps That Boosted My Productivity This Year

Take smarter notes, reduce context switching and build a better personal archive.

Once a year, I like to step away from the constant news cycle and focus on a different topic: productivity tools that use artificial intelligence and other innovations to enhance our work.

Note-taking apps don’t necessarily make us smarter. In essence, I discovered that software can’t automate your thinking. However, it can set the stage for better thinking by helping you make new connections, reducing the constant app-hopping, and organizing your reading for future use.

With that in mind, here are three apps I’ve started using since then:

 Capacities.

 Don’t just take notes—make them.

After writing last year that note-taking apps don’t make you smarter, many readers suggested I try new apps they had discovered. As a productivity enthusiast, I found myself particularly drawn to Capacities. It’s a "personal knowledge management" app similar to Roam, Obsidian, and Mem.

Like many productivity tools, my preference for Capacities is partly based on its aesthetics: I appreciate its clean white canvas, tagging and linking features, and the integrated AI assistant that helps explore and expand on topics.

Unlike a traditional note, Capacities allows you to create various types of objects, each with unique metadata and organizational tabs (such as Daily Notes, People, and Books). I use it to maintain detailed pages about important people and companies, keeping track of relevant information.

The real benefit of Capacities for me this year came from refining my workflow. Over nearly seven years of writing a newsletter, I accumulated numerous links with metadata. Initially, I thought a sophisticated database would automatically generate new insights, but I eventually realized a different approach was needed.

This led me to Zettelkasten, a method for organizing thoughts through active note-taking. Instead of standalone notes, I now create notes that structure my thinking around specific narratives.

For instance, as a beat reporter, tracking various big ideas relevant to your coverage. Those include topics like:

- The impact of 'Big Tech' on the open web

- The potential arrival of artificial general intelligence in the next decade

- The intricacies of Generative AI

Now, I combine my daily news reading with active note-making. If I come across a relevant story, I add it to a specific note, or “zettel,” and include a brief analysis.

These notes sometimes become columns or serve as valuable resources when revisiting a topic. They help me map out my current thinking, support it with new evidence, and gather material for reporting, analysis, and podcasting.

This Zettelkasten approach is particularly useful for those working with ideas—writers, students, academics, and communications professionals. However, any knowledge worker tracking ideas over time might find this method more effective than accumulating disposable notes.

I don’t want to overstate its impact: it hasn’t yet led to groundbreaking insights or major scoops, but it has helped me feel more in control of my work and increased my expertise on certain topics.

This is essentially what I’ve always sought from a note-taking process, and I look forward to continuing this exploration in the coming year.

Raycast.

Perform searches without leaving your current tab.

Raycast is a Mac launcher app reminiscent of Spotlight, the system-level search feature on macOS, or other advanced alternatives like Alfred or Quicksilver. 

To use it, you press a universal hotkey like ⌘+space, which brings up the Raycast launcher on your screen. From there, you can execute a wide range of tasks without ever leaving the keyboard. You can use Raycast daily for tasks such as opening apps, searching for files, resizing windows, and controlling Spotify.

What I appreciate most about Raycast is its ability to handle non-critical web searches while you stay focused on your current activity. For instance, if you're watching a YouTube video and need to look up something a creator said, find a word definition, or check a trivia fact, you can do so with just a few keystrokes. Additionally, a paid add-on allows access to the latest AI models from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mistral, depending on your choice.

Raycast also lets you ask follow-up questions to AI responses, all without leaving your browser tab. This reduces the amount of context-switching and minimizes the risk of getting distracted or forgetting your original task. It suggests a future where web search seamlessly integrates into your work tools.

This approach is a significant improvement over my previous method, which involved opening a new browser tab, performing a Google search, clicking a link, and searching for information there. (The old workflow was also more beneficial to web developers, a topic I discussed with mixed feelings last year.)

While generative AI search engines can sometimes produce inaccurate information, making them unsuitable for rigorous fact-checking, Raycast handles most of my everyday searches effectively.

Readwise.

Generative AI can act as a highly effective librarian.

For those who regularly face challenges such as:

- Recalling a paper from last year but not remembering its details.

- Locating a specific paper from the previous year that you can’t seem to find.

- Tackling a 330-page court decision with only 90 minutes before my deadline.

- Understanding a complex scientific paper before interviewing its authors.

Readwise has been incredibly helpful with these issues. When you receive a lengthy court decision, you upload the PDF to Readwise and use its AI-powered “Ghostreader” feature to ask questions about it. 

While you will need to read the relevant sections eventually, Ghostreader often helps by suggesting where to begin or by finding specific information within the document. And if you need to reference the article or PDF later, Readwise’s search functionality makes it easy to locate.

Readwise is designed to store virtually any type of content you can read or watch, including articles, emails, videos, and even full books. It also has a built-in RSS reader, which you can start using more often than the algorithmic feeds on Threads.

One caveat is that it’s less useful if you keep adding material you never actually read. As expert note-taker Andy Matuschak points out, “Collecting material feels more useful than it usually is.”

However, if you need a tool to help you quickly digest large amounts of information or find things you partially remember, Readwise is an excellent choice. It has definitely increased my productivity.

Free option: Google’s NotebookLM experiment allows you to save PDFs into virtual notebooks and ask collective questions about them. You can also upload PDFs to Anthropic’s Claude and other chatbots, though they lack the robust organizational features of Readwise.

To become a better thinker, you’d need to spend more time engaging deeply with what you find. While generative AI has had its share of overpromises, the apps I’ve discussed have proven to be valuable tools in this process.