Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place? This particular blog is more like a series of essays I wanted to get out. I also have another blog which is more like an online journal of my life. I was never able to have an actual journal on paper or use apps like Day One. But when it’s online, and other people can see it, I get an incentive to share more, even though I still mostly write for myself.

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

What originally started as a way to group tasks with various contexts eventually became a small productivity framework I use across different apps. I mentioned this approach in an earlier post about task managers but I wanted to write about it specifically.

I don’t have a very good memory. That’s why I’m writing down everything I need to care about, including work and personal matters. This allows me to offload things from my brain. Then, as long as I check my task manager, I won’t miss the issues that need to be taken care of.

Your task manager is a list of things you don’t want to forget. Especially if you’re a manager, your job isn’t about jumping on every little thing – it’s about focusing on the right things. Choose the problems you want to tackle today. Tomorrow your priorities might change and you’d jump on the thing you left out today. You’re managing a waterfall, not trying to drink the entire thing.

Ok, so you wrote down everything. Does it seem overwhelming? Probably. One of the ways to deal with this is by categorizing tasks in terms of the actions required from you.

I’ve been working remotely for 8+ years and now running a team distributed at least across five countries. It’s challenging, but it’s also very likely the best work environment that can help you attract talented people no matter where they live.

When I decided to improve our processes, I read all the guides on remote management I could find. Companies like Gitlab, Todoist, Buffer, Basecamp, and many others, have produced countless pieces on this. One of their shortcomings is that most are targeted at teams that are quite large, at least 50 people and more. So I wanted to describe my own experience, which might be relevant for smaller teams.

Async first

The PARA method, developed by Tiago Forte, is probably the most universal productivity technic you could use. It’s very flexible and can be recreated in any app, whether it’s Notion, Workflowy, Apple Notes, Things 3, Roam Research, Evernote, Todoist, etc. This makes it different from Getting Things Done, Bullet Journal or any other specialized methodology. PARA doesn’t force you to use any particular app.

But the best thing about PARA is that it immediately clarifies where to put stuff and how to find it later.

There are other advantages as well:

I’ve been working remotely for nine years now. I wouldn’t say it’s everyone’s future. There are pros and cons. For me personally, the advantages far outweigh the problems. If you ended up in a remote work arrangement, you might find these tips helpful.

Choose the Right Company

Some people dislike remote work altogether. Others have never tried it properly. First of all, you need to be in the right environment. In a team that actually understands how to work remotely and what this entails: shift to async operations, focus on written communication, etc. The worst scenario is when a company just moves everything they did at an office online, and everyone is stuck in endless Zoom meetings. This is what many experienced in 2020 when businesses had to shift towards remote work rapidly. This isn’t how it’s supposed to look like.

Read–later apps are simultaneously popular and outdated. A lot of people use them. They’re now embedded right in our browsers and there's a couple of age-old names, but if you’re still using any of these options you should reconsider.

Safari introduced Reading List back in iOS 5. It has barely seen any updates. Chrome is still to offer a consistent user experience on different platforms – try syncing your saved pages to Chrome on iOS.

Pocket and Instapaper have been household names in that space and have practically created it. Pocket was bought by Mozilla in 2017, Marco Arment sold Instapaper in 2013. Both apps haven’t been improved in any major way in recent years, yet still want to charge a subscription to access locked features.

Reading all those discussions about the updates to Instagram and how people are turning disillusioned with the app, I began thinking: what would an ideal anti-Instagram service look like?

Let's look at the most common complaints and try to find an alternative. Some of them are specific to the way Instagram works right now, some are true about any social network.

At last, we will try to figure out a potential business model that might work for this product and still onboard all of your friends.

Social networks incentivize people to take on radical positions as that brings engagement and followers. Yet in most areas, a reasonable centrist take is usually the right one (there are exceptions of course).

Crypto is certainly one of the most divisive topics both on Twitter and in real life.

In one corner of this ring, you have an army of anonymous accounts with NFTs for their profile pictures along with venture capitalists who earned a ton of money from their investments in crypto, such as Mark Andreessen and Chris Dixon. The opposite corner is taken by professional skeptics like Liron Shapira and most web2 people when they’re asked about this or feel they have to comment on a particularly pessimistic event.

One of the most recent public exercises is arguing about crypto use cases and defining what success would actually mean. Liron likes to collect these and comment on them.

Time and time again, I’m getting back to WorkFlowy as my primary system for notes and knowledge storage.

It is truly a bicycle for the mind that helps you structure your thoughts while providing unparalleled flexibility.

A lot of people write down their tasks and notes in plain text because it’s an easier input system that gives them flexibility unmatched by task managers like Todoist or Things 3. I’ve seen people using anything from Apple Notes and Google Keep to a draft email in their Gmail web interface.

Despite my interest in certain genres of music throughout my life, I’ve slowly realized that I don’t really like listening to music much. I do listen to it in the car, but generally, I prefer music in social contexts, enjoying some beats with my friends, whether we’re in my living room or at a 25,000 people rave. But I don’t really listen to it when I work or when I relax.

Podcasts, on the other hand – I do love podcasts, whether I’m walking my dog, doing some exercises, or cleaning the dishes. Without them, most of those menial tasks feel empty as if I’m just wasting my time when I could learn something. I subscribe to shows covering technology, my hobbies, such as racing and F1, and reviews of all kinds of brand-new media content ranging from TV series to video games.

But recently I’ve started feeling that constantly putting on AirPods and pumping spoken words into my ears might be too much. First, there’s nothing wrong with being bored and enjoying the silence for a bit. But most importantly, it feels like both music and podcasts tune off my inner voice, that intra-cranial conversation people have where we get ideas and inspiration. I can recount so many times when I was working on a particular problem, couldn’t crack it at the desk but suddenly realized the mistakes I made while simply walking on the street.

Social media might add to that. It’s just something so antagonistic to meditation and active thinking. Nothing wrong with being connected with your friends and people you’re interested in. But it’s also the most affordable and attainable dopamine you can get. Blindly scrolling through a seemingly endless feed doesn’t mean you stop thinking. Yet I do think it blocks your inner dialogue from going into more interesting places.

I’ve updated my guide to Workflowy, the king of outliners, that I wrote almost two years ago. Since then, Workflowy has added many great features, including rich media support and backlinks, which made the previous iteration feel incomplete.

If you want to know what is an outliner, I wrote about that too.

An outliner is a text editor that organizes information in a hierarchy, allowing users to control the level of detail and reorganize according to the structure. In outliners, the bullet item is the atomic unit of information.

Basically, it’s a text editor where everything is a bullet point, you can create tree-based structures out of them and collapse or expand any specific bullets. Workflowy is a great web-based outliner with generous free limits and a paid plan that doesn’t aim to lock you in for all eternity.

I’ve always been interested in learning all the various ways and workflows people have for their notes and tasks. There’s a reason why software in this particular field is so diverse – people are just very different. There’s simply no single workflow that appeals to everyone.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t work like that with teams. When you’re working with others it’s hard to be exotic. You and your coworkers have to agree on some common denominator like Asana or Notion, which ensures these apps would be more grounded.

At the end of the day, what matters is having a system. Seems that most people utilize one of the following options to run their lives:

I’ve always been into watches and for the last 5 years, since Series 2, I’ve been almost exclusively wearing an Apple Watch. Recently I pulled a trigger on a mechanical timepiece I wanted a long time ago and have been enjoying it since. There’s a lot of people who went in the opposite direction but I haven’t seen too many people who got out. In the end, mechanical watch movements are an obsolete technology and a basic quartz watch can challenge Rolex for its accuracy, while an Apple Watch can provide you with unique complications and features, such as notifications, weather, or calendar alerts.

But first, why wear a watch in the first place? We all have precise atomic time on our phones. Well, to me that’s simply not enough, I want to be able to just glance and get a feeling of time. Not sure how you can be punctual without that. Therefore, I need a watch.

Apple Watch has some amazing capabilities for a $400 device. Let’s start with easily-accessible powerful complications with a user-friendly interface like timers, stopwatches, and alarms. And then there are unique complications you won’t find on any other watch: weather, calendar, notifications from your phone. Yet, in the end, I wasn’t compelled.

Below are five reasons one might prefer a classic watch instead.

Mailbrew is an app that aims to offer you a healthy information diet. It allows you to receive news and content from the web in the form of regular digests. The idea behind it is to avoid the anxiety and guilt caused by endless feeds in social apps by doing bulk delivery of content at a pre-defined time throughout the day. If you commit to it you don't just open the email, Twitter, a news app, and YouTube throughout the day to check if there's something new – you know it will just come to you.

If you think about it, apps that actually care about you "completing" everything inside them like email are designed very differently from Twitter's native app or Instagram. Gmail organizes everything into narrow lines, shows unread email and you can archive them to achieve "Inbox Zero". Imagine if you had such an interface for Twitter? Mailbrew is like that.

I've been looking for something like this for years, even before Mailbrew itself existed. I'm a long-time user of RSS but most RSS readers don't process too much content well enough. If you try subscribing to high-frequency feeds like Hacker News, you will soon be overloaded with new entries in them. You might even get something similar to banner blindness where you subconsciously try to scroll through them as quickly as possible missing the gems hidden in plain sight.

I've always felt you can solve it by creating automated digests for the most notable entries instead of making the users read through it all. I searched for these exact keywords and all kinds of permutations. IFTTT digests are cumbersome and ugly. Zapier requires a paid tier for digests and that's not reasonable for personal use. I didn't really expect anyone to build it until a found a predecessor to Mailbrew.

I’ve always been one of the people who religiously live by their task manager – I can’t survive without one. That’s why I’m always surprised when I see someone get by without one. For a lot of people task managers only cause anxiety and end up abandoned and forgotten.

What if I told you that you were just using it wrong?

Almost everyone has a todo list but not everyone uses a task manager. Some people prefer paper, and even invent elaborate workflow and notations like Bullet Journal to supercharge it. Some of the busiest people I know put all their todos into a giant list in a note or a draft email somewhere. The basic notion is that if you’re what’s called a “knowledge worker” there’s probably enough things to remember to not trust your memory alone. That’s what a todo list is – a system of record where you can offload items from your brains and stop thinking about everything at once.

Being able to keep a record of things to do is important, but a plain list might become overwhelming especially as it gets large enough. That alone can negatively affect your performance, but most task manager apps out there actively add up to your anxiety with their UI choices. If so many people resort to plain lists instead of specialized apps there’s probably something wrong with them, isn’t it? I think so. First, they focus too much on deadlines. They shout at you, making your tasks red, showing badges for the things that are “overdue”. And then, in case that starts happening regularly enough, people get something similar to ad blindness – their mind actively avoids the idea that they’re late for something and the thing just keeps getting rolled over.

I had periods in my life when I was a news junkie signed up to hundreds of websites and moments when I’d delete all news and social media apps from my phone. If there’s one fundamental principle I believe and tend to apply to everything is that both sides of any spectrum are usually pretty bad and having some balance is the key. Also, for the past few years being immersed in the news became a core necessity for my job. 

As I accepted it I began looking for a way to merely optimize my content consumption. It’s one thing to read a lot, it’s another to spend hours jumping between apps trying to get a dopamine hit and then getting caught in them. You open an email client to read some great newsletters (and a lot of good authors only send out newsletters without a corresponding blog), begin to think about work, start reading some marketing emails, then go to Twitter which always tries to put out some tweets you missed. That can go for hours. And every news website out there wants you to install their own app and put it right on the first home screen.

The solution I found was simple – I need a single app for all of that. Then I found Feedbin. It’s an RSS reader and a pretty advanced one. I knew about RSS long before, mostly to follow news websites and blogs. I usually used Feedly paired with some third-party readers, like Reeder or lire.

I think the lack of sideloading has been a tremendous advantage for iOS and Apple’s ecosystem overall. I also need Apple should open it up.

The fact you can only install apps from the AppStore on iOS gives users, developers, and Apple itself tremendous benefits. Users can install any app with no fear for their wallet or data (hm, most of the time). In turn, developers get more revenue because users are willing to install and buy new apps. Developers also don’t have to worry about piracy – it doesn’t exist. That’s different on Android, where I can go to an online forum full of cracked .apk files visited by 30 million people a month. Google even offers special anti-piracy protection to developers. I think it’s more than just about the lost share of their revenue. This status quo has likely affected the very business model of thousands of apps on Google Play Store, pushing developers to advertising or from developing an Android app in the first place.

Our browsers are astoundingly outdated and their developers seem to be oblivious to that. We went from basic Hacker-News-style HTML pages sprinkled with a little bit of Javascript to running full-scale applications like Figma or Descript – something you wouldn’t believe to be even possible in a browser ten years ago. The whole definition of the web browser changed – it’s not just something you use to “surf the web”, it’s where people often do all of their work: email, calendars, documents, design, even code with things like Github Codespaces or Replit.

Now, look at this Chrome from 2008 or so.

Probably, one of my most controversial opinions is that online ads are actually great for the society and the public narrative shifting to paid subscription software, services and content might prevent a lot of people from accessing them in the first place.

You see people in tech being very vocal on the topic of monetization models of Google and Facebook. Some claim they’d prefer to have a paid ad-free experience and ready to pay however. As of September 2020 the ARPU for Facebook is almost $12 per month and it’s mostly driven up by the US and Western Europe – that’s how much they’d have to pay. Tech Twitter welcomed Hey, a paid email service that costs at least $99 a month, as well as a number of other apps and services. That effect is accelerated by the whole industry of apps switching from one-time purchases to subscriptions – a whole different question. And paid premium software is getting way more expensive, something I covered before.

It’s one thing to live in San Francisco, work at a tech incumbent or even a startup, and have enough resources to throw some for an exclusive email service. Or you can live in Utah. Or maybe in a small village in Italy. The average dollar-adjusted income varies in different developed countries but it’s still high compared to the rest of the world.

Despite all kinds of productivity startups bidding for the same query in Google, there’s a glaring hole of opportunity in the productivity space. I’m talking about the app that would excel as both a personal and team task management tool.

In all the teams I worked, we used different tools for project management: from Asana to Notion and Todoist Business. When choosing something for our team at MA Family the last time I also checked out all the other household names, such as Monday, Trello, Flow, Taskade, and others. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a tool that would let me throw away a separate personal task manager. There are always small things to remember, ideas that suddenly came to you, and these large apps aren’t a great fit for that.

Personal and team productivity software differs in multiple ways. Some of these differences are inherent, like the need to support multiple users, others became an industry norm but I can’t agree they are necessary. The sad part is that personal task managers have nailed that a long time ago.

Most team-focused apps show the following traits: