The Productive Magpie

What you get

Free emails, whenever something’s worth writing about. Each one is a thing I actually use, tested long enough to know whether it survives a real week: a tool, a workflow, a book that changed something, or a system I abandoned and what it cost me.

Paid readers occasionally get a deeper piece: the templates, the config files, the full build. Five dollars a month or fifty a year. The free emails stay free forever.

Recent subjects: running local LLMs on Apple Silicon, why I copy my tasks by hand every morning even though Todoist already has them, Obsidian Bases, n8n against Zapier for one person, and what happened when I canceled four projects at once.

Who writes it

I am Tucker Chastain. I work full time as a Creative Media Specialist in Northeast Tennessee, I have four kids, and I have been writing online for over a decade.

My setup is not pretty and it is not screenshot ready. It works on the days I am tired, which is most of them.

Why a magpie

A magpie does not follow a blueprint.

It finds something that works, takes it, and arranges it into a chaotic pile that somehow functions. That is the whole method. I respect Getting Things Done and the Bullet Journal and every system that came after them, and I have never once made it through a year inside one of them.

No single system holds all the answers. So I take the parts that hold up and leave the rest, and I write down which was which. If that sounds like how you already work, the free emails are for you.