No, I am not talking about the iTerm or oh-my-zsh setup, or IntelliJ. Although I do use them.
I am noting down those items I have found very useful to organize myself (and my work), plan better and kill entropy.
Emails
I am one of those who created a gmail account when it was freshly brewed. I still use it everyday. But the Spams, promotions etc., are well, nothing less than crazy. And it almost runs at 99% capacity.
Also, every person that shares my name, probably assumes they share my email too. This has led me to go for a paid Google Workspace, with my own domain.
Yeah it costs. But much better! And I love gmail.
Other emails that I use: protonmail, tutamail among others. Absolutely love both of them for their privacy features. Also the email alias feature from Proton!
The key is to split up the external comms across various emails at random. And never share the critical ones for random subscription or RSS feeds.
Notes
I write a lot of notes. And I like notes with markdown features. I started with EverNote which I loved, but they got too greedy and restricted the users to just 50 notes. That too without notice.
I found Notion quite nice. Although there are limitations on how much free content it can have, but I guess when I hit that limit, will switch to something else like Coda. None of the apps have unlimited notes as far as I can tell.
Planning
While Notion is pretty good with planning, calendar and such, sometimes I require to share it with others. And for that, I found Microsoft To Do, and Google Keep pretty handy.
Other items that I use time to time: YouTrack and Trello.
Password Managers
With hundreds of sites and apps to login, its risky to use the same password at many places. I used LastPass for a while, till they suffered a security breach. These days I am using better privacy and encryption providers: ProtonPass and BitWarden. Super useful!
Storage
I need more data to store my random useless pictures and PDF files. I am paying a minimal for a 200GB plan from Apple iCloud. I use it only because it is well integrated with my phone.
I also use Google Drive extensively and the paid plan (Google Workspaces) come with 30G per license.
Of late, I have started using some private encrypted storage, and I use mega, koofr, Filen and NordLocker.
VPN
Not a regular user of VPN. But if I do, I use ProtonVPN. There are some good European providers such as NordVPN. But haven’t found the need of it yet.
File Shares / Pastes
There are some very nice tools around these. I found wormhole and paste.ec particularly interesting.
Messaging
I don’t like WhatsApp much. But unfortunately thats what most people use. So, I am kind of stuck with it.
Given a choice, I prefer Signal over WhatsApp, as it doesn’t require you to add contacts by phone numbers.
I recently discovered Simplex. That’s another level of anonymity, but I doubt I will use it anytime soon.