Productivity
My productivity workflow is simple, and consists of email client, calendar app, todo list manager, and notes app. But my productivity workhorse is Raycast with the pro plan (not required). I historically, been a productivity apps junky, and I tried a suite of free, paid and self hosted apps.
Of note, all my devices are well within the Apple ecosystem, and I take full advantage of that.
My email app of choice used to be Spark mail. However, becoming increasingly security and privacy aware, I moved my work emails (all microsoft 365) to Outlook. My personal emails live between Apple mail, but I am actively switching all my personal emails to Proton mail. I am still within the Apple mail ecosystem due to using heavily Hide-my-email feature.
I have experimented with Hey and even the expensive Superhuman, I don’t really see the gains in productivity, unless you receive 100s of emails, that actually require your attention every day.
Calendar
My calendar app for many many years is Fantastical. I’ve always loved the natural language processing features, and how it handles all my calendar accounts seamlessly. Similar to emails, I have several accounts, and shokingly not many apps handle this poorly.
Todos
I rely on TickTick for my todos. I love the Eisenhower feature, and the quick entry. I am considering switching to Apple’s Reminders as it has been gaining many useful features, and great intergrations with the system.
Notes
I tried Obsidian, Reflect, Roam Research, Logseq, Craft, Mem, Capacities, and a few others. I know!
However, I stick with a very simple Apple notes setup. It does the job really well, and the search is better than in any other tool I tried that doesn’t cost over 10USD/month. I tried the second brain setup, but I found that I spend more time working for my notes, rather than the other way around. It’s a dumb idea, for me.
Raycast
Raycast is an app launcher, quick note capture, small automation (quicklinks) engine, AI queries (quick AI). It’s my productivity workhorse. I dumped my window manager, clipboard manager, and snippets apps in favour of Raycast’s build in features. And the interesting thing is that it does it just as well or better, and for a smaller CPU and memory footprint.
I have also set of quicklinks that help me “quickly” look up genes, variants, and other useful things. See: https://ray.so/quicklinks/science
References/litterature
To manage my references, I switched in 2025 to use Readcube Papers from Paperpile. Paperpile became slower, and buggier in the last 2 years, and even referencing and other basic features that used to make Paperpile fantastic, aren’t working as they used to. And while Papers is a bit more expensive, it comes with Readcube as the default PDF reader, with many excellent reading features, where it enhances the reading experience, and pulls a lot of really useful information. Such as the ability to quickly look at the figures with the legends, add the cited references directly to my library without leaving the PDF I’m reading, and pulling the citation and Altmetrics directly besides each manuscript.
Others
Outside of these tools, I rely on VS Code for code editing and IDE. It is setup to work with all my data science workflow, with plugings to format and edit CSV/TSV files. And to work seamlessly with R my data science language of choice. I also rely on VS Code to connect to all the remote machines, and HPCs I work on.