Most weeks, that isn’t what I need to do. I need to check the stock. If we have enough books, I order nothing. If the new-hire classes are larger than normal around nurse graduation months, I may need to place an extra order.

I used to look at the stock, decide we were fine, then stare at a task that still said Order books.

Checking it off felt wrong because I hadn’t ordered anything. Leaving it open was also wrong because I had done the work the reminder was supposed to trigger.

The problem wasn’t how I completed the task. The task was named wrong.

Name the part that actually repeats

The order doesn’t repeat every Monday. The inventory check does.

So the more accurate task is:

Check book inventory and order if needed

Now the checkbox tells the truth every time. If I check the stock and place an order, the task is complete. If I check the stock and decide we have enough, the task is still complete.

The result changed. The obligation didn’t.

This distinction matters for more than office supplies. A task called Restock medicine assumes something needs to be purchased every week. Check medicine supply and restock if needed gives me the same reminder without pretending the same outcome happens each time.

The pattern is simple:

Check or review the condition, then act if needed.

That is the recurring work. The possible action is only one result.

Let the checkbox and the comment do different jobs

Todoist already keeps recurring tasks moving. When I complete one, it records the completion and shifts the task to its next scheduled occurrence.

That record tells me I handled the reminder. It doesn’t tell me what happened.

A short comment can.

For the book task, I could leave one of these before completing it:

No order needed. We have enough books for the next class.

Or:

Ordered books for the next class.

The comment has its own date and stays attached to the task, so the recurring task becomes a small running log. The checkbox means I checked. The comment means this was the result.

That gives me more useful information than a label such as Ordered. A label describes the task as it exists now. A comment records what happened on one occurrence without changing the meaning of future occurrences.

Do not turn every repeating task into paperwork

When I audited my Todoist account, I found 72 active recurring tasks. Thirteen already started with a verb such as Check or Review. Seventeen were basically links without a verb telling me what opening the link was supposed to accomplish.

That doesn’t mean all 72 need a comment every time.

Take medicine is complete when I take it. Take trash out is complete when the trash is out. Adding a comment would create work without adding useful information.

I plan to use comments on certain weekly tasks where the result changes and the history may help later. The book task is one. A recurring review that can end in several decisions might be another.

The test is whether I will care about the answer later. If I won’t, the checkbox is enough.

Match the schedule to the kind of work

Todoist also gives recurring tasks two different clocks.

every month keeps the task tied to its scheduled cycle. every! month schedules the next occurrence from the day I actually complete it. Todoist documents the difference here.

I use the first kind for a check that belongs on a fixed day. For example, if I set an inventory check for the first Monday of each month, doing it late shouldn’t permanently move every future check.

The completion-based version makes more sense for maintenance. If I change an air filter on the 18th and want three months of use before the next change, the next date should be calculated from the 18th.

The wording and the schedule should agree. One defines what done means. The other defines when I need to think about it again.

The cost is a few more seconds

This isn’t free. Typing a comment takes longer than tapping a checkbox, especially on a phone.

If I demand a comment on every recurring task, I will eventually stop doing it. That is why I’m not building a universal rule. I’m choosing a small group of tasks where the history is worth the friction.

That is how I build most of my productivity system. I borrow the parts that work, ignore the parts that don’t and change the rule when my real life proves it wrong.

A recurring task is a reminder to return to a responsibility. Name that responsibility honestly. Let the checkbox record that you showed up, and use a comment when the outcome is worth remembering.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

If I could just stop wasting time on projects I know are only a play thing, I would finally write more.

The play thing is South Fork Apps. I’ve put something like 250 small web apps on that site. Timers, converters, calculators, little single-purpose tools. I’ve written about the three I actually use. The site has earned me exactly zero dollars.

So there’s the case against it. Lots of hours, no revenue, and a newsletter that keeps not getting written.

The standard I invented after the fact

Ask me why I started building them and the honest answer has nothing to do with money. It was fun to see what AI tools could actually create. That was it. That is why I started building the site. I was building tools and decided I might as well make somewhere to put them.

I never sat down and projected revenue. I never picked app ideas because they’d convert. There was no business plan, because it wasn’t a business, it was me finding out what the tools could do.

And then I turned around and graded it on revenue.

Read that again, because I think a lot of people do this and don’t notice. I set out to do something for fun, succeeded at doing it for fun, and then measured the result against a goal I’d never set. Of course it failed. It was never trying to pass.

That’s not an honest assessment. That’s a standard applied backwards to justify a feeling I already had.

Below the line: what 250 apps with no revenue actually bought me, the one question that settled whether the project was ever the problem, and the reason I pick building over writing every single time.

Disclosure: This article contains no affiliate links, but does include links to other sites that I own and manage.

Two of them were about writing articles. One was posting to social. I tapped through all four in maybe six seconds, the app made that little completion pop sound each time (I love that sound), and my archive of finished work grew by four things that do not exist.

Here’s the part that took me a while to say out loud: I didn’t fail those tasks. I decided against them. Work got heavy, the kids had school things, and a newsletter loses to both of those every time. That was the right call and I’d make it again tomorrow.

But when I went to close out a task I had deliberately decided not to do, Todoist gave me two options and neither one was true.

Complete or delete, pick a lie

Delete loses it. Some of those ideas are good and I want them back when the week is calmer. Deleting a task is how an idea quietly stops existing.

Complete keeps it. The task moves to the archive, nothing vanishes, I can search for it later. It’s also false.

So I complete them. I’ve been doing it for years without ever really looking at it. It is the cheapest way to keep something without losing it, and the price is that my record of finished work is now mixed in with things I walked away from.

Both options destroy information. One destroys the task, the other destroys the truth about the task.

The notebook already solved this

I write my tasks out by hand every morning in a paper notebook, which I’ve written about before. When I decide not to do something there, I don’t erase it and I don’t check it off.

I strike through it.

The line stays on the page. I can still read what it said. And I can tell at a glance that it was dropped instead of finished, because a struck-out line and a checked box look nothing alike.

I didn’t invent that. It’s in Ryder Carroll’s original Bullet Journal notation: an X for complete, a right arrow for migrated to a later day, and a strikethrough for a task that’s no longer relevant. Three states, on paper, sitting in a notebook that cost me a few bucks.

My task manager only has two.

Why this actually costs you something

If it were only about tidiness I wouldn’t care. It isn’t.

Your completed list is evidence. It’s the thing you look at when you’re trying to work out whether you had a productive month or you just felt busy. It’s what you check when you’re wondering why a project never moves. When “done” means both “I finished this” and “I gave up on this,” that evidence is worthless, and you won’t notice it’s worthless because it still looks like a list of accomplishments.

I only caught mine because I sat down and compared my completed tasks against articles that actually published. Four completions, zero articles.

And honestly, nothing would have caught it earlier. There’s no alert for this. The app can’t tell the difference because I never told it there was a difference. That’s the whole problem: the information was lost at the moment I tapped the checkbox, and no amount of reviewing afterward brings it back.

So the fix isn’t a better audit. It’s better notation, at the moment you decide.

Give your list a third state

You need somewhere to put “I decided not to do this” that isn’t the graveyard and isn’t the trophy case. Whatever app you use, one of these will work:

A label. Make one called Dropped or Abandoned. Apply it, then complete the task. The completion still happens (the app insists) but now it’s tagged, and you can filter your archive to exclude it or search it on purpose.

A project called Someday. Move the task there instead of completing it. This is the better option if you actually intend to revisit the idea.

A section inside the project. Drag it to a section named Not Doing. It stays visible in context, next to the work you did do, which is uncomfortable in a useful way.

None of these are clever. They just require you to spend three extra seconds being honest with yourself at the exact moment you’d rather not be.

That’s the catch. The checkbox is fast because it ends the discomfort immediately. A strikethrough leaves the discomfort on the page where you have to look at it again tomorrow.

I think that’s the point.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

That wasn’t a collapse. Work got heavy and the kids had school things, and I chose those over writing. I’d choose them again. The reason I’m not beating myself up about it is that I wasn’t actually deciding anything on those evenings. I’d already decided, months ago, sitting somewhere calm with a cup of coffee, that if a week ever forced the issue, this is what would go.

The decision you make while exhausted is almost never the one you’d make rested, so don’t make it while exhausted.

Tired people protect the wrong thing

Sort priorities in the middle of a bad week and it goes like this.

You’ve been up since five, work ran long, something at home needed you, and now it’s 8:40pm and you have maybe ninety minutes before you’re useless. You look at what’s left. One item is hard, requires real thought, and matters. Another is easy, takes twenty minutes, and doesn’t matter much at all.

You do the easy one because everybody does the easy one. Then you feel a little better because you finished something, and the hard thing rolls to tomorrow, where the exact same math will play out again.

That isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a decision-making problem, and it’s happening at the worst possible moment to be making decisions. David Sparks put it about as plainly as anyone: make the hard decisions “the night before or in the morning” and you get a productive day, and if you don’t, “you’re going to feel defeated.” Make them at 8:40pm and you get whatever your tired brain finds soothing. Defeated is the right word, and it turns up whether or not the day was actually wasted.

So the move is to stop deciding in the moment entirely. Write the order down once, when nothing is on fire, and then just read it when the week goes sideways.

The hard part isn’t writing the list. It’s what the list tells you about yourself.

Below the line: my own order, written out, the one question I use when two things sit at the same level, and the check that tells you whether you have a priority problem or a capacity problem. They are not the same thing and only one of them is fixable by trying harder.

There were these things to do.

I first read Hatchet in elementary school. Back then, I loved the survival story. A kid, Brian, alone in the Canadian wilderness with a hatchet seemed impossibly cool. It fed every idea I had about becoming a rugged outdoorsman, despite having no evidence that I’d be any good at it.

I’ve reread the book what feels like a thousand times.

As an adult, I read those six words differently. Brian has work to do because the work keeps him alive. He needs food, fire, shelter and tools. Gary Paulsen returns to the sentence as Brian stops waiting for rescue to solve everything and starts dealing with what is in front of him.

The tasks occupy him. They also move him forward.

My version is smaller and safer

I’m not comparing an exhausting evening at home to a teenager surviving a plane crash. The danger isn’t remotely the same, but the connection is the frame.

Some evenings I come home from work already tired and find a second shift waiting. There’s food to make, a house that needs attention and people who need help. After the house gets quiet, the projects I want to build are still sitting on the computer.

I handle the immediate need, then the next one. Eventually I run out of time.

That last part matters because I don’t reach the bottom of the list and feel satisfied. The clock stops me. Whatever is left still feels like failure, even when I handled the work that mattered most.

There were these things to do.

The sentence gives me no finish line. It tells me to keep moving.

A survival list is not a productivity system

I use Todoist and Obsidian. Every morning I pull a few tasks onto the handwritten page that runs my day. I have enough systems to sort, schedule and remember more work than I could finish in a month.

Brian doesn’t need a better system. His order is obvious because necessity keeps making the decision. Tend the fire. Find food. Improve the shelter. Make a tool, discover that it doesn’t work and make a better one.

Ordinary life is less clear, but the principle still helps me. The whole list can turn into one heavy object if I stare at it long enough. The quote breaks it apart. There is this thing to do. Then there is another.

The wording is important. Paulsen doesn’t write that there was everything to do. There were these things. A real set of work in front of Brian, not every possible problem at once.

I need that distinction more than I need another method for ranking tasks.

The part I have not solved

The line keeps me from stalling. That’s why it’s on my phone, where I’ll see it whether I’m ready for another task or not. I look at the words, start moving and do what comes next.

But there’s a cost to treating motion as survival. If doing is what keeps me going, stopping can feel dangerous. Rest starts to look like neglect. An unfinished task feels less like a scheduling problem and more like proof that I failed.

I don’t have a clean answer for that. Too often, I keep working until time makes the decision for me. Pretending otherwise would turn a useful sentence into another tidy productivity rule that falls apart on a real night.

Brian never gets to clear a list. His work keeps changing because staying alive keeps producing new work. He survives by returning to the next job.

I understand that in the book more easily than I accept it in my own life.

Why I keep rereading it

As a student, I wanted to know whether Brian would make it. As an adult, I notice how he makes it from one moment to the next.

Effort doesn’t always feel good in this book, and the work keeps coming. That is why the sentence helps on nights when my obligations arrive faster than my energy.

If you haven’t read Hatchet since school, you can find it through my Bookshop.org shop. The survival story still works. The six-word sentence inside it works differently once you have a life full of people, work and unfinished plans.

My wallpaper gives me no guarantee that everything will work out. It gives me somewhere to point when the whole list starts looking like one impossible thing.

There were these things to do.

I pick one and keep going.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

I’d built it to replace Shelf, the book tracker I already used. The Stacks read over 500 media notes from my vault, tracked television episodes and had a whole retro video-rental-store design. I kept opening Shelf instead of my new project, The Stacks.

The Stacks also had a maintenance job scheduled for 5:00 every morning. Its last recorded result was a failure. The log file I expected wasn’t there. While I was preparing to write about clearing four projects, a computer was still keeping appointments for one I didn’t use.

The decisions were easy enough

During my project review, I canceled Food Coach, Backtime, my Mojito fork and the Shelf-to-Stacks migration. They’d seemed useful when I started them. Looking at what I actually used made the decisions fairly obvious.

Food Coach was supposed to make food logging easier. I built the app, then never finished the account setup. Backtime worked backward from a deadline to tell me when to start each step. I installed Whendy on my phone instead. With Mojito, I built custom emoji shortcodes into my own version of an existing Mac app, then never tested the feature. The original Mojito already did enough.

The Stacks was the biggest build. Canceling the migration was still easy to explain: I didn’t use it. This was the same overlap I’d written about in The Great App Consolidation: What Happens When You Actually Cut Your Stack, except this time I had built the unnecessary alternative myself.

But I gave the decision soft edges. I canceled the migration while leaving The Stacks available and running as-is, with no further work planned. When I checked my dashboard on Sunday, two canceled projects were still marked “Waiting.”

I canceled four commitments and turned off zero things.

What I actually gained

I didn’t recover hours. I wasn’t spending hours on these projects anymore. What changed was how many directions I felt obliged to face at once. My attention narrowed toward the events site and this newsletter, although the events site’s progress had started before the review. I can’t credit the cancellation for work already underway.

Removing those commitments mattered. Closing them out was unfinished. I wrote seven checks from the loose ends I found, and none of the four projects passes all seven yet. This is the checklist I’m taking into my next review. I haven’t used it to finish closing one yet.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

I know how that sounds.

For years I refused to do it. I wouldn’t always have paper on me, so paper felt unreliable, and I put everything in my phone instead. Calendar, tasks, notes, all of it. What I ended up with was an overloaded system I couldn’t see the bottom of, a lot of things that never got finished, and this specific frustration: the things I did finish disappeared. Checked off, gone from the list. At the end of a long day I’d look at my phone and it looked like I hadn’t done anything at all.

I haven’t missed a day of writing the page since May.

What the page actually looks like

One page per day. Down the left side, an hour spine running from 8 to 22 (that’s 10pm, a habit from a job I had years ago that I never shook). Events go in their hour slot. Under that, the must-do tasks for the day.

The notation is straight bullet journal:

• A dot is a task

• An X over the dot means it’s done

• An arrow over the dot means I moved it to tomorrow

• A line through the whole thing means I decided I’m not doing it

The hour column runs both directions, which is the part I didn’t expect to like. In the morning it’s a plan. By the afternoon it’s a log, because I write down what I actually did in that hour as the hour goes by. I don’t fill in every one. I keep up with the general shape of the day and that’s enough.

Two passes, not one

The morning pass at my desk is calendar events plus the tasks I already know have to happen. Five minutes, maybe less.

The second pass happens when I get to work. I open Todoist and my email, and I keep all my work notes in Notion, so anything from those that has to be done today gets added to the page. Work tasks show up in Todoist with an action date, and that’s a suggestion, not a verdict. If it has to be done today, it goes on the page. If not, I push it a day and it stays in the app.

That’s the whole filter. Does this have to happen today? If yes, it gets handwritten. If no, it stays digital.

Which means most of my Todoist list never touches paper. I’ve got a long tail of tasks in there I like checking off: read music news, listen to whatever Apple curated this week, vacuum the house, replace the burned-out bulb in the ceiling fan. Those are real tasks. They just don’t have to happen on any particular day, so they don’t earn the page. Nothing goes into the notebook that isn’t already in my calendar, Todoist, or Notion. That stack is the one I’ve been assembling piece by piece for years, and I’ve written about how I scavenged it together before.

The notebook is the last mile. Calendar, Todoist and Notion store the work. The page is what forces me to do it.

The part that makes it work is that it’s annoying

Every morning I also review the day before. I fill in gaps I missed and I migrate anything that didn’t get done.

Migrating means physically writing the task out again, in my own handwriting, on a fresh page. It bugs me every time. That annoyance is the entire mechanism. Rewriting the same unfinished task for the second morning in a row is irritating enough that I’d rather just go do it than write it a third time.

An app doesn’t do this. Todoist reschedules a task with two taps and no friction at all, which is exactly why I have tasks in there that have rolled forward for weeks and never once cost me anything.

I’ve written before that you don’t need more discipline, you need less friction. I still believe that for the capture side. Adding a task should be nearly free, and it is: I hold the Action Button on my iPhone and a Todoist task exists three seconds later, wherever I am.

But the doing side is different. The doing side needs a little friction pointed in the right direction, and rewriting a task by hand is about the right amount. That’s the bullet journal migration idea, and it’s the same thing James Clear is doing in Atomic Habits when he talks about making a habit harder or easier on purpose. Make the good thing obvious, make the avoidance cost something.

What I’m not going to oversell

I don’t always have the notebook on me at home. My workday hours are filled in properly and then things get thin after 5, and if the evening doesn’t get written I fill it in the next morning or I let it go. I don’t stress about it.

The page keeps me honest. It isn’t a compliance system, and it’s nowhere near the kind of bullet journal spread that ends up on Instagram (the photo up there is about as good as mine get). Mine has a Lochby pocket-size dot grid living inside a Lochby pocket journal cover with a pen, and it goes everywhere with me during the workday. That’s it. There’s no key, no index, no monthly log, no habit tracker.

I’m also not going to pretend the notebook made me organized. Todoist did that, about a decade ago. I’ve completed over 54,000 tasks in it, and I could not tell you the year I started, which is sort of the point: capturing everything in one place for that long is what stopped me dropping things. The handwritten page didn’t replace any of that. It got me from organized to actually finishing, which turned out to be a different problem than I thought it was.

If you’re skeptical

You should be. I was, for years, and my objection (I won’t always have it with me) was correct. I still don’t always have it with me.

Try it for a week anyway. Four or five tasks, written by hand, pulled out of whatever app you already trust. Physically writing them out helps me remember them, and more than that, it makes me pick them. Choosing something and writing it down is a different act than letting an app tell me what’s due.

And at the end of the week you get the thing no app has ever given me: a stack of pages with everything you actually did still visible on them.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

It’s a small thing. The episode sits in the queue for three weeks, I know I’m not getting to it, and eventually I swipe it away and pretend that’s fine. It isn’t fine. I subscribed to that show because I wanted what was in it, and deleting it unplayed means I got nothing. So I stopped trying to keep up.

The morning I couldn’t remember the name of an app

A few weeks ago I was driving and listening to an AppStories+ episode where Federico and John went through email clients. They compared a bunch of them. One of them sounded like exactly what I wanted, and I made the mistake every driver makes, which is telling myself I’d remember it later.

I did not remember it later.

So I went to the show page for the episode. It has a list of every app mentioned: Spark, Shortwave, Airmail, SaneBox, MimeStream, Hay. That list told me nothing. Six clients with similar names, no indication of which one was the one that made me perk up in the car, and no way to tell without listening to the episode again.

Then I remembered I had my own note for that episode. I opened it, went to the Products section, and there it was:

Spark — The speakers discuss using Spark for organizing emails and managing folders during specific events like WWDC. Also noted for its CLI capabilities that map the app’s UI hierarchy, offering features beyond a typical Gmail CLI.

That was the one. The CLI part is what caught me in the car. The show page gave me a name. My note gave me the name plus the reason it came up, which is the only part I actually needed.

I didn’t write that note. My Mac did, at nine in the morning, while I was at work.

What actually happens every morning

At 7:00 a.m. a script checks the RSS feeds for the shows I follow and downloads anything new.

At 9:00 a.m. a second script picks up whatever downloaded, transcribes it locally with Whisper, sends the transcript to a language model running on my own machine, and writes a markdown note into my Obsidian vault. Then it deletes the audio file, because I don’t need a 90MB MP3 sitting around once the text exists (as well as I don’t listen to the episode from the computer).

The note has four parts. An overview of the episode in a few sentences. A list of key points. A list of every product, app, book, or tool that the hosts actually discussed, each one linked, each one with a sentence explaining why it came up. I also have the link to the show notes in case the LLM gets something wrong.

Nothing leaves my house. No API key, no subscription, no per-minute transcription bill. If you want the background on getting a model running on your own Mac in the first place, I wrote that up in Running LLMs locally on Apple Silicon. The model runs on hardware I already owned locally. I also do not post or share these anywhere, this is a system built for me and only me, but I’m going to show you what to steal.

Why I trust it

This is the part where I’m supposed to hedge and tell you the summaries are a rough approximation and you should really listen to the episode.

I’m not going to do that, because it isn’t how I use it.

For a show like The Rest Is History, I often have no idea what the topic even is. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook will do six parts on Elizabeth I and the Catholic plots, and I genuinely don’t know going in whether that’s something I want four hours of. The summary tells me what the episode is about in a paragraph. Sometimes that’s enough and I move on. Sometimes it makes me want the whole thing, and I go listen to all four hours.

Either way I got something. Before, an episode I skipped was just gone.

It’s either the summary or nothing. Those are the real options, and once you see it that way the accuracy bar stops being “as good as listening” and starts being “better than deleting it unplayed.”

For the record, the summaries have been right about what was actually said. My complaint list is short and petty. Whisper heard “Claude Code” as “cloud code” in this episode, so the overview claims something launched in February 2025 that didn’t, and the product list picked up the misheard version as if it were a separate app.

I deleted that line. Took about four seconds, because the note is a plain markdown file in a folder I own. That’s the part I’d defend hardest if someone tried to sell me a hosted version of this: when the model gets something wrong, I fix it and it stays fixed.

If you want to build one

The rest of this post is the whole build, and I’ll tell you up front that the architecture is the easy part. It’s three scripts and a scheduler. I could describe it in a paragraph and you’d still lose a Saturday, because none of what breaks is in the design.

It’s in the details. A transcript that repeats one sentence forty times and quietly ruins an hour of processing. A run that transcribes an episode perfectly for 33 minutes and then throws all of it away over a single malformed bracket. A product list where the top three entries are the ads you were trying to skip.

I hit six of those. Every one cost me a morning.

Below is the prompt I’d hand someone to build this from scratch, with all six already written into it as requirements, plus which model you actually need for the summarizing and what to do the first time it breaks anyway. You paste it into a coding agent, answer four questions about your setup, and it writes the pipeline against your folders and your feeds.

At the end of March 2026, I was still selecting a month’s worth of daily journal notes in Apple Notes and moving them into a folder by hand. It was the last remaining chore in a process I had already tried to automate twice.

That little monthly job sent me down the Obsidian rabbit hole. I wanted Claude and Codex to see the same folders I saw and handle the boring file moves with one instruction.

Apple Notes could store my notes. Obsidian gave me plain files an LLM could work on. That was the actual reason I moved.

The monthly job I wanted to stop doing

My daily journal showed me the problem first. In Apple Notes, I started by building the page each morning. Then I made a template and copied it into a new note. Eventually I spent time building and testing a Shortcut to make the daily note for me.

The Shortcut helped, but it did not remove the maintenance job. At the end of every month, I still had to select every daily note and move it into a monthly folder. I would occasionally miss one. Then the journal was not actually where I expected it to be.

In Obsidian, I open the app and it opens today’s note. During my monthly review, I tell Claude or Codex to move the month’s daily notes into the new monthly folder. One sentence replaces the selecting and filing I used to do by hand. I glance at the folder structure afterward and it is where it should be.

That is a small task. It is also the kind of small task that quietly makes a system feel like work. I did not need another clever Shortcut. I wanted the files to be available to an assistant that could handle a bounded, boring job while I decided what mattered.

I wrote about the larger version of this in Agentic Obsidian. This is the less exciting version, and honestly the one I notice more often. A folder gets cleaned up without me selecting notes one by one.

What file access changed

The journal is the clearest example, but it is not the only one. Because the notes are files, I can ask Claude or Codex to group related ideas, sort rough notes into an article draft, or reorganize folders while I sleep. When I come back, the result is sitting in the same folder tree I already use.

I keep the judgment. An LLM can arrange the material I captured and handle the first pass. I still decide what the idea means, whether the article is worth writing and what I am willing to publish under my name.

What matters is that AI can work in the place where the rest of my information already lives. I do not have to copy notes into a chatbot, paste the answer back into another app and then remember where I put it. The source and the result can stay together.

I did not migrate my whole life

I started with three folders: Inbox, Journal and Thoughts. I did not import years of Apple Notes and spend a weekend assigning everything a new home. I set up a daily note and started using it every day.

I think in folders, not tags. I want 00_INBOX at the top and visible areas for Journal, People, Books and Health underneath it. Someone who naturally thinks in tags may build this differently. I want to glance at the sidebar and know whether the filing happened.

My vault has grown, but the logic has not changed. I use numbered sections for the categories I care about. It is still messy on the edges (I haven’t set an icon for my media log yet), and I am fine with that. I can make it prettier when I have time. The important part is getting the data out of my head and into a place where I can find it again.

The numbers are not a productivity method. They keep the sidebar in an order that makes sense to me. They also make the result of an LLM file move easy to check. I do not inspect every note after a monthly cleanup. I glance at the folder tree, see the month where it belongs and move on.

AI access got me interested. Portability made the switch easier to trust. My Apple Notes were tied to an Apple account and awkward for me to export. In Obsidian, I have named folders and plain files. If I change tools later, my archive does not depend on one notes app coming with me.

This fits the rule I used in The Great App Consolidation: What Happens When You Actually Cut Your Stack: each app gets a clear job. Apple Notes had become an easy capture box followed by a manual filing job. Obsidian became the place where my notes lived and where I could ask for help organizing them.

Apple Notes still wins at one thing

Apple Notes still wins the capture moment on an Apple device. I miss that. It gets out of the way fast, even if I still think the yellow is horrible.

Obsidian wins what happens afterward in my setup. Everything lands in Inbox, so I do not have to choose the final folder while the thought is still forming. I sort it later when I have time, or I ask an LLM to do the first pass.

That is the part I would keep even if I used a different notes app. A capture system that demands a folder choice at the moment of an idea is asking too much from someone trying to get out the door, finish a meeting or save a thought before it disappears. Inbox lets me capture first and make the filing decision at a calmer time.

The rule that stopped me from bouncing off Obsidian again

I tried Obsidian at least three times before this stuck. Each time, I made the same mistake: I started installing plugins and building a complicated system before I had used the basic app long enough to know what I needed.

Do not install any plugins on day one. Learn the basic functions. Use a few simple folders. Then limit yourself to one new plugin a week.

Obsidian can become a hobby very quickly. That is useful if the hobby is what you want. It is a bad trade if you only need a place for your notes to land and stay findable.

If I were starting again, my first week would be boring. I would create Inbox, Journal and Thoughts, set up the daily note and stop. I would learn how to create, move, find and link notes before installing anything. When a real problem kept showing up, I would add one plugin that solved it. Then I would wait another week.

My three failed attempts came from making Obsidian complicated before I had a problem worth solving. The version that finally stuck started with one job: open today’s note and give everything else an obvious place to land.

At the end of the month, I open my review, give Claude or Codex one sentence and glance at the folder tree when it finishes. I do not miss selecting every journal note by hand.

I do something a little dumb with my to-do list. If I finish something that was never on it (empty the dishwasher, answer an email, swap the air filter) I’ll write it down after the fact just so I can check it off. The task is already done. I’m not tracking anything. I just want the little click of marking it complete.

I felt slightly ridiculous about this until I read about a guy and his paper clips.

The jar

In 1993, a 23-year-old stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid started each day at a bank desk in Abbotsford, outside Vancouver, with two jars in front of him. One held 120 paper clips. The other was empty. Every time he finished a sales call he moved one clip to the empty jar, and he kept dialing until the first jar was empty.

Eighteen months later he was bringing in $5 million for the firm. James Clear, who tells this story on his site, says Dyrsmid was making around $75,000 a year by 24. He didn’t use an app or have a streak counter. A dollar of office supplies and a rule he wouldn’t break.

That’s the same click I’m chasing when I log a finished chore just to cross it out. So the concept works, but I want to be careful here, because the internet loves to turn a story like this into “do this one weird trick and your life changes,” and that’s not true. It works for certain things and it’s useless for most.

Why it works when it works

Three reasons, and none of them are complicated.

1. You can see it. The clips pile up on the desk, in real time, whether or not you open your phone. Most habit apps bury your progress behind a lock screen and a tap.

2. Moving the clip is its own small reward. That’s the click I keep coming back to. It’s a tiny hit of “done” that’s separate from whether the call went well or the chore was fun.

3. An empty jar is a finishable goal. “Make more calls” is a wish. “Move all 120 clips” is either done or it isn’t, and you know the second you look.

The part most people get wrong

Here’s the distinction that matters, and it took me a minute to see it clearly. A paper clip is a completed-rep counter. The clip moves because you did something and that’s not the same as measuring something.

I wear a Dexcom because I’m a type 2 diabetic, and my blood sugar sits on my phone all day. It’s useful, but it’s a different tool. The number changes on its own. I didn’t finish a task to make it move. When I first tried to fit that into the paper clip idea as an example for this newsletter, it fell apart. Reading a number is feedback. Moving a clip is a rep. If you blur those two together you’ll try to “paper clip” things that can’t be counted, and you’ll quit when it doesn’t work.

So the test is simple. Can you point at a single, finished action and say “that’s one”? If yes, the jar can help. If you’re measuring a state (mood, weight, energy, how present you were with your kids) the jar has nothing to grab.

Where I actually use it

I’ve never owned the literal jar. That’s the whole magpie move: I stole what works and left the rest. The part worth taking is a counter for finished reps. The part I skipped is a jar of paper clips cluttering my desk. What I have instead is a Todoist project called Recurring, and it does the same job.

Restart the Mac mini once a month, change my razor every two weeks, swap out the air filter. One of them (drain the water heater) only happens once a year, and without the checkbox I would absolutely never remember it exists.Each one is a rep I check off, and the check is the point. None of them are exciting, and that’s exactly why the little completion marker keeps me doing them.

The one that matters most looks a lot like Dyrsmid’s calls. I have a task that repeats every single day: post one Note and reply to a few other writers to slowly grow this newsletter. On its own, any single day of that feels like nothing. Checking it off, day after day, is what keeps me showing up when the results are slow. I want people to learn and grow, by talking with others daily, I’m growing relationships and hopefully helping people out.

This is the same reason I keep my task units tiny, which I wrote about in The 5-Minute Task System for Busy People. A small rep is one you’ll actually finish, and a finished rep is one you get to count. If you want the “do it because it’s easier than avoiding it” version of this, that’s You Don’t Need More Discipline, You Need Less Friction.

The honest caveat

It’s not a catch-all, and I’d be lying if I sold it that way.

It only works for things you can reduce to one clean, countable rep. And there’s a failure mode I’ve walked straight into: the check can become the goal. When I write down a chore I already did just to mark it done, that’s harmless, but push it far enough and you’re optimizing for boxes instead of the actual work. The clip is supposed to follow the rep, not replace it. If you use Todoist, a recurring task is basically a paper clip you never have to buy.

But for the boring, repeatable things you keep dropping? A visible count of finished reps is the cheapest fix I know. Two jars, a fistful of clips, one rule you don’t break. Or a recurring task and the small satisfaction of the check. Just don’t ask it to measure anything.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Six months ago I pulled a 32-billion-parameter AI model onto my Mac Studio and ran it locally for the first time. No API. No subscription. No data leaving my machine (and no little billing meter ticking in the corner). It worked. I now have qwen2.5:32b installed locally. It takes 19GB before runtime overhead, which is not nothing, but it has been worth keeping around.

I’ve been using local models alongside Claude ever since. Honestly, Claude is still better at most tasks. Local models earn their spot because they are free, private and always available for the jobs that do not need the best model.

So why bother?

Because if you have a Mac with Apple Silicon and at least 16GB of unified memory, you can do this today. Here’s what you actually need to know.

Why Apple Silicon changed this

Before Apple Silicon, running a large language model locally required a dedicated NVIDIA GPU, a Windows or Linux machine, and a fair amount of configuration. It was hobbyist territory.

Apple Silicon changed two things. First, unified memory means the CPU and GPU share the same memory pool, which gives large quantized models room to run. You still need headroom for macOS, the model runner, and context/KV cache. Second, Apple Silicon is fast at the matrix math LLMs need.

The result: you can run serious models on a Mac mini. Not the fastest inference in the world, but usable for real work.

What you can run on what hardware

Conservative ranges based on what I’ve tested, plus the current Ollama model sizes. “Usable” means fast enough that you’re not watching a loading bar between sentences.

8GB unified memory (base M1/M2/M3 Mac):

• 1B-4B models are the sane target (Qwen3 4B is listed at 2.5GB)

• 7B-8B models can run, but you need modest context and patience

• Skip 14B+ unless you enjoy proving a point

16GB unified memory:

• 7B-8B models run well (Qwen3 8B is listed at 5.2GB)

• 14B is the upper practical range (Qwen3 14B is listed at 9.3GB)

• Sweet spot for a general-purpose local assistant that does not need heavy coding or long-context work

32GB unified memory:

• 26B-32B models make sense here: Gemma 4 26B is listed at 18GB, Qwen3 30B at 19GB, and Qwen3/Qwen2.5 32B at about 20GB

• Qwen 2.5 32B is my installed baseline right now, not the only current recommendation

• 70B-class models are technically possible, practically frustrating

64GB+ (M2/M3 Max, M2/M3 Ultra):

• 30B/32B models have real breathing room for longer context and normal multitasking

• 70B-class models become plausible if you use quantized builds and accept the slower pace

• This is where local AI starts to feel like a workstation setup instead of a party trick

192GB (Mac Studio M2 Ultra, my setup):

• Most consumer-sized model experiments fit without thinking about RAM first

• I currently have qwen2.5:32b installed locally at 19GB, with room to test larger Qwen3 and Gemma 4 models

• Even huge models are not magic: Qwen3 235B is listed at 142GB before runtime overhead, so storage, context length and heat still matter

The two tools you need

Ollama is the simplest way to get started. It’s a command-line tool (and optional menu bar app) that downloads, manages and serves local models. One command pulls a model and starts a local API server compatible with most AI tools. Free and open source.

ollama pull qwen2.5:32b
ollama run qwen2.5:32b

That’s it. You now have a 32B model running locally.

Open WebUI is a browser-based chat interface that connects to Ollama. If you want something that feels like ChatGPT but runs entirely on your own machine, this is it. Also free and open source.

For running models on Apple Silicon specifically, MLX is Apple’s own machine learning framework and produces faster inference on Apple Silicon than Ollama for some models. The Ternary Bonsai models I covered in a recent post run via MLX.

What local models are actually good for

Local models are not as capable as frontier models. Qwen 2.5 32B is good. Claude Opus is better. The tradeoff you’re making is quality for cost, speed, and privacy.

Where local models earn their place:

Bulk processing is the obvious use. Summarizing 50 podcast transcripts overnight doesn’t require frontier-model quality. It requires something good enough, running for free, without burning through API credits. My podcast pipeline uses Ollama for exactly this. I run transcripts of my favorite podcasts basically for free. While popular podcast apps like Overcast and Pocket Casts now support transcripts, I like having my own that I can ask questions about or point AI models to. For example, I have it check episodes of Mac Power Users for links to products that are mentioned.

Private data is next. Notes you don’t want leaving your machine like old journal entries, personal health data, really anything where you’d rather not send it to a third-party server even with privacy promises. I have Obsidian journal entries and health notes that I do not want to send to Claude or OpenAI. A local model can answer a questions like when I went to the doctor and point me back to the exact file where I wrote about it.

Fast iteration matters when you’re testing prompts, building automation workflows or changing the same thing six times in a row. A local model with no network round trip and no per-call bill is often better than a remote API, even if the quality is lower.

Offline work is boring until it matters. Planes, coffee shops with bad wifi, or just not wanting to depend on an internet connection. While this might not be too relevant for my Mac Studio, if you have a high end MacBook, a portable local AI can be really helpful.

The honest tradeoffs

The quality ceiling is real. Local models top out lower than frontier models. For writing, reasoning and complex instructions, Claude or GPT-4 class models still win. Don’t try to replace your best AI tool with a local one. Use it for the jobs that don’t require the best.

Setup takes a little time. Not complicated, but not instant. Getting Ollama running takes twenty minutes. Getting Open WebUI set up takes another twenty. Getting the right model downloaded for your hardware takes however long your internet connection needs.

And fan noise and heat show up, which is useful if you happen to need a hand warmer. Running a large model at full utilization gets warm and loud. On a Mac mini this is tolerable. On a MacBook Pro it’s noticeable.

Where to start

Local model advice ages fast. Check the latest builds to see what is compatible with your machine.

1. Install Ollama (download the Mac app or the CLI)

2. Run ollama pull qwen3:4b if you have 8GB, ollama pull qwen3:14b if you have 16GB, or ollama pull qwen3:30b if you have 32GB+

3. Run ollama run [model-name] to chat with it in the terminal

4. Install Open WebUI for a browser interface

The model that surprised me most: Qwen 2.5 32B. It handles structured tasks, follows complex instructions, and runs fast enough on my Mac Studio that I forget it’s local. That’s the one I use as my default local model for everything that doesn’t need Claude.

The open-source models I reference in my piece Four Open Models Just Made Frontier AI Free all run locally via Ollama or MLX. That post has the specific commands for each one if you want to run them.

The longer version is more complicated, because Zapier is genuinely better at some things. This is an honest comparison from someone who’s used both in production, not a listicle with made-up scores.

What Each One Is

Zapier is a hosted automation platform. You connect apps, define triggers and actions, and Zapier runs your workflows on their servers. You pay per task (each action that runs counts as one task) on a monthly subscription. There’s a free tier (100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps only), and paid plans start around $30/month (the Starter tier) and scale up quickly if you have volume.

n8n is open-source workflow automation software you can self-host. It has the same basic model of triggers, nodes, connections but runs on infrastructure you control. There’s a cloud-hosted version with pricing similar to Zapier, but most people who choose n8n do it specifically to self-host.

Where Zapier Wins

App coverage. As of this writing, Zapier describes its platform as no-code automation across 9,000+ apps. n8n’s integrations page lists 1,933 integrations, with HTTP and webhook nodes covering most of the rest. If you need to connect two obscure SaaS apps, Zapier probably has a pre-built connector. n8n might require you to build an HTTP request manually.

Setup speed. You can have a working Zapier workflow in fifteen minutes. You can have a working n8n workflow in fifteen minutes too, but that assumes you’ve already set up your n8n instance, which takes longer.

Support and reliability. Zapier is a mature company with SLAs, support tickets, and status pages. If something breaks, there’s someone to call. With self-hosted n8n, you’re the support.

Non-technical users. Zapier’s UI is polished and approachable. n8n is also approachable but more technical-feeling. For automations you’re handing off to someone else, Zapier is usually the better choice.

Where n8n Wins

Cost at any meaningful volume. Zapier’s pricing is built around task tiers. A workflow that processes thousands of items can push you up the pricing ladder fast. n8n’s hosted pricing is based on monthly workflow executions, and the self-hosted community edition has no per-task platform fee. My TANDOM content pipeline processes hundreds of articles per week. On self-hosted n8n, that costs me nothing beyond the Mac mini already running at home.

Code nodes. n8n has a JavaScript code node that lets you write arbitrary code inside a workflow. This is the thing that makes complex transformations possible without building a separate service. I use it constantly with string manipulation, conditional logic, formatting API responses. Zapier has a “Code” step but it’s more limited and locked to Python/JavaScript with restricted libraries.

AI integration depth. n8n has native LangChain-compatible AI nodes, built-in support for dozens of models, and agent workflow patterns. You can build a multi-step AI pipeline (retrieve documents, summarize, classify, write output) all inside one workflow without duct-taping separate tools together. This is where I’ve built my most useful automations, including the assistant system I run my whole vault through.

Privacy and data ownership. Your data doesn’t pass through Zapier’s servers. For workflows that touch personal notes, financial data, or anything sensitive, this matters.

Complexity ceiling. Zapier tops out at moderately complex automations. n8n can handle very complex, branching, looping, multi-agent workflows. If you hit a wall in Zapier, n8n can usually get you further.

What I Actually Use Each For

I don’t use Zapier anymore. I moved everything to n8n and haven’t looked back. But if I were starting fresh with zero self-hosting experience, I’d use Zapier for simple integrations (post to Twitter when I publish a blog, log sales to a spreadsheet) and n8n for anything involving AI, code, or volume.

My n8n setup on the Mac mini runs:

• Podcast feed monitoring and routing

• Periodic reports written to my Obsidian vault

None of that would be cost-effective at Zapier’s pricing. All of it runs reliably and for free.

The Actual Recommendation

Start with Zapier if: you need something working today, you’re connecting common SaaS apps, you’re not technical, or you’re building for someone else who needs to manage it.

Start with n8n if: you’re technical enough to run a server or a Docker container, you’re processing significant volume, you want to build AI workflows, or the recurring cost of Zapier bothers you.

Self-host n8n on a Mac mini if you have one sitting around. That’s what I do. It runs continuously in the background and costs nothing. Setup takes about two hours if you follow the official docs.

The automation category is one of the few places where the open-source, build-it-yourself option is genuinely competitive with the paid one.

If you want a working starting point, I packaged the content pipeline I use for The TANDOM as an n8n template. It includes RSS ingestion, dedupe, an AI editor gate, an AI writer prompt, and a WordPress publishing pattern. It is not a one-click business. It is a working workflow you can import, study, and adapt.

Get the AI Content Pipeline template

This post links to my own product; I earn product revenue from it.

I found the weekly review template while looking for something else.

It was too good for its own good. Six sections. Reflection questions. A this-week / next-week split. A scoring system I probably thought would reveal my “real priorities” if I was honest enough with it.

I built it eighteen months ago. I have used it only four times!

The stupid part is that I still feel it sitting there. Not every second. Not dramatically. More like a tab left open in the back of my head. I feel it on Sunday afternoon when the week starts closing in. I feel it when I could “reset the system” but what I want is a shower, food, and silence. I feel it when I open Obsidian and see the template sitting there like a polite accusation.

Nobody asked me to make that template. Nobody is waiting for it. My life will not collapse if I never fill it out again. And yet the undone thing still has weight.

That is a phantom obligation: the guilt of a promise nobody assigned you, including the version of you currently living with it.

The Contract You Forgot You Signed

You read something useful. You watch somebody explain their weekly planning routine. You have a rare clean hour and think, “This would solve a lot of problems if I did it every week.” So you build the template, create the recurring task, make the folder, and write the rule into your system while you are clear, optimistic, and slightly dishonest about your future energy.

Then real life comes back. The kids need something. Work spills over. You sleep badly. Sunday disappears. The task rolls forward. Nothing explodes, so you do not fix it. You also do not revoke it.

That is the part that creates the weight.

A missed task is not the problem. An unrevoked commitment is.

Systems Turn Ideas Into Moral Debt

A thought in your head can fade. A note in your system looks official. A recurring task looks like a commitment. A template looks like a standard you are failing to meet.

I have done this everywhere: Obsidian templates, review checklists, capture processes, habit logs, task-manager rituals, morning routines, and evening routines. The individual pieces are reasonable. The total system is fiction. Stack enough reasonable commitments on top of a real life and you build a fake life beside it.

That is why I keep coming back to friction. I wrote about this from another angle in You Don’t Need More Discipline, You Need Less Friction. A lot of failure is not a character problem. It is a system fit problem.

Phantom obligation is what happens when the system does not fit, but the promise stays alive.

The Most Dangerous Word Is “Should”

The obvious ones are easy: unused templates, recurring tasks you keep rescheduling, trackers with a perfect first three days and nothing after that.

The harder ones hide behind “should.” I should review my week. I should process these notes. I should keep my task manager cleaner. I should use the system I already built.

Sometimes “should” points at something real. But most of the time, in my systems, it means an old commitment is trying to survive without being questioned.

The better question is, “Am I actually choosing this now?”

If the answer is no, then keeping it half-alive is not discipline. It is clutter.

Do a Release Audit

The fix is not to delete your whole system and start over. That is just another dramatic productivity loop, and I have already ridden that one plenty of times. The fix is to audit the promises.

Open the places where your systems live: your task manager, notes app, templates folder, calendar, habit tracker, and saved routines. Do not look for mess. Look for old contracts.

For each one, ask four questions:

1. Did I choose this, or did I inherit it from a moment of ambition?

2. Have I actually used it in the last month?

3. Does it fit the time and energy I really have?

4. If I saw this for the first time today, would I add it?

That fourth question is brutal. It cuts through nostalgia fast.

If the answer is no, release it clearly. Archive the template. Remove the recurring task. Move the habit tracker out of sight. Rename the folder so it stops pretending to be active.

Do not leave it in the system as a little monument to the person you thought you were going to become.

A Magpie system should stay useful because it keeps stealing what works and dropping what does not. I wrote the bigger version of that principle in Steal What Works, Leave the Rest. The “leave the rest” part matters just as much as the stealing.

Paid member resource

I made a companion Phantom Obligation Release Checklist for paid subscribers. It includes a keep/shrink/archive/drop worksheet, release-note template, cleanup checklist, Claude prompt, and worked example for putting down self-assigned commitments that no longer fit. Use it to decide what to keep, shrink, archive, or drop.

Get the release checklist

Shrink the Promise Before You Keep It

Some obligations should not be dropped. They should be made honest.

My weekly review template was too big. It assumed a Sunday version of me with quiet time, open space, and a noble interest in reflection. That guy appears sometimes. He is not reliable enough to build a system around.

The smaller version is a ten-minute scan:

• What is already fixed on the calendar?

• What has to happen this week?

• What is stuck?

• What can be dropped?

That is less impressive than the template. It also has a chance of happening.

This is the move I trust now: before I recommit to anything, I shrink it until it fits a bad week. If it only works during a clean, quiet, high-energy week, it is not a system that works, it’s just a fantasy with checkboxes.

Put It Down on Purpose

The real relief comes from making the release official. Not dramatic. Not ceremonial. Just explicit.

“I am not doing this weekly review template anymore.”
“This routine was a good idea, but it does not fit my life right now.”

Write that down if you need to. Add a small note to the archived file. Change the task title to include “retired.” Move the template somewhere it cannot keep staring at you.

The point is simple: keep ambition current.

The weight was not assigned to you. You picked it up and forgot to put it back down. You are allowed to look at it now and say, clearly, “No, I am not carrying this anymore.”

Paid member resource

I made a companion checklist for paid subscribers. It includes a keep/shrink/archive/drop worksheet, release-note template, cleanup checklist, Claude prompt, and worked example for putting down self-assigned commitments that no longer fit.

Use it to turn the guilt into a decision.

Get the release checklist.

A checklist for finding and releasing commitments you created for yourself but no longer actually serve. Use it when a template, workflow, habit, recurring task, or project keeps creating background guilt even though nobody else is waiting on it.

A commitment that only exists in your head still needs a decision. If you do not decide, it becom…

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For two years I’ve kept Notion open on my Mac Studio. Not because I love Notion. Because I needed somewhere to put structured data. A table of books with status columns, a simple project tracker with dates, a list of apps I’ve tried with ratings. Obsidian is where I think. Notion is where I organize things that need columns.

That split has always bothered me. Two tools means two mental contexts, two syncing systems, two places something might be. So when Obsidian introduced Bases publicly in version 1.9.10, I paid attention.

What Bases Actually Is

Bases adds database-like views directly inside your Obsidian vault. You can create a table, a card view, or a list view that pulls from your notes using filters and sorts. If you’ve used Notion’s database feature, the concept is familiar. The key difference is that Bases works on your actual markdown files. It’s reading properties from your notes’ YAML frontmatter and surfacing them in a structured view.

In practice this means you can create a file called Books.base, point it at your /Books folder, and instantly get a filterable, sortable table of every book note you’ve created: title, author, status, rating, whatever properties you’ve been adding to your notes.

Reorganize your vault without relying on an external database or a separate app.

Where It Works Well

For personal use cases, Bases is genuinely good. I set up three views in the first week:

A reading tracker. My book notes already had frontmatter properties for author, status, and rating. Bases surfaced them as a clean table in about three minutes. I can filter by status (reading / finished / abandoned) and sort by rating.

A content pipeline. Each article draft in my folder has a status property. Now I have one view that shows everything in draft, in review, or scheduled for the week. No more opening five folders to remember where things stand.

An app log. I keep notes on apps I’ve tried. Bases turned this into a searchable grid with columns for category, verdict, and whether I’m still using it.

For these kinds of personal organization tasks (the ones where you want to see your notes in a grid instead of a list) Bases works cleanly.

Where It Falls Short

This is not Notion. Not yet.

There are no relations between databases. In Notion, you can link a project record to a list of tasks, and the tasks know which project they belong to. In Bases, each view is a flat surface. You can filter and sort, but you can’t create relationships between different sets of notes.

There are no Notion-style relational rollups. Bases has formulas and summaries inside a view, but you can’t create a formula that counts tasks in a linked database or sums values across related records.

There’s no collaboration. If you’re working with other people, Bases doesn’t help as this is just a personal-use feature and the views are still early. The filtering is functional but limited, and there are edge cases where Bases doesn’t pick up frontmatter the way you’d expect.

Whether It Closes the Gap

For me, it closes about 80% of it.

The use cases that kept Notion open in my dock were personal organization tasks: tracking reading, managing content, logging things with status fields. Bases handles all of those. I deleted my Notion workspace last week and I haven’t missed it.

If you need relational databases, collaborative docs, or Notion’s web publishing features, Bases is not a replacement. But if you’re using Notion as a personal organizer while keeping your actual thinking in Obsidian, you might be surprised how much you can move back.

The one-brain-one-tool ideal I’ve been chasing for years is finally possible. That’s worth paying attention to.

If Bases makes you want to move more of your system into Obsidian, The Magpie Vault is the starter structure I use for that: folders, templates, assistant instructions, skills, and memory files for turning a vault into a working AI assistant system.

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate or product links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission or product revenue at no extra cost to you.

For about a year I told myself the same story every morning. I needed to be more disciplined. More consistent. The kind of person who just does the thing. I read the books, I made the promises, and I kept landing in the same place: doing the thing for four days and then quietly not doing it on the fifth.

The story was wrong. The problem was never my discipline. It was that I had designed my days so the right thing was hard to start and the wrong thing was easy.

Here is the reframe that actually changed something: most of what we call a willpower problem is a friction problem wearing a costume. You don’t rise to the level of your motivation. You fall to the level of how easy or hard you made the next step.

Friction is the real variable

Think about the last habit you dropped. You probably didn’t decide to quit. You just hit a small point of resistance over and over until stopping was easier than continuing.

The gym bag was in the other room. The app made you log in again. The document was three folders deep. The healthy food needed prep and the junk was already on the counter. None of those are willpower failures. They are friction, and friction compounds. Every extra step between you and the action is a tiny tax, and you pay it every single time.

The flip side is the part people skip. Friction works in both directions. If you can add resistance to the things you want to do less, the same mechanism that breaks good habits will break bad ones. The phone in another room. The app logged out. The snack in the basement instead of the pantry. You are not fighting yourself. You are editing the environment so the easy path and the right path are the same path.

The three points worth removing this week

You don’t need to redesign your whole life. You need to find the specific spots where you keep stalling and remove the resistance there. Start with three.

The starting step. Most things don’t fail in the middle. They fail at the start. The task that’s too big to begin is the one that sits untouched for a week. So shrink the entry point until it’s almost embarrassing. Not “write the article,” but “open the file and type one sentence.” Not “go for a run,” but “put the shoes on.” (I wrote a whole piece on this idea, The 5-Minute Task System for Busy People, because shrinking the starting step is the single highest-leverage move I’ve found.)

The setup tax. This is the work you have to do before the work. Finding the file, charging the thing, clearing the space, logging back in. Pay this cost once, in advance, so you don’t pay it every time. Lay the clothes out the night before. Pin the document. Leave the guitar on the stand instead of in the case. The goal is that when the moment comes, there is nothing between you and starting.

The decision. Every choice you have to make is a chance to choose wrong, or to choose nothing at all. So remove the choice. Same breakfast every day. Same time for the hard task. A default that runs without asking. I’m forgetful by nature, so I’ve stopped trusting myself to remember or decide in the moment. I build the decision into the system once and let it carry me. (That instinct runs through how I set up everything, including my whole scavenged productivity system.)

Why this beats trying harder

Discipline is a finite resource and a bad plan. It asks you to win the same fight every day, forever, on willpower alone. Some days you’ll have it. Plenty of days you won’t, and those are exactly the days the habit needs to survive.

Friction design is different because you only have to win once. You move the gym bag one time. You set the default one time. You shrink the starting step one time. After that, the easy choice and the right choice point in the same direction, and you stop spending energy on the fight entirely.

I even do this with my hands. I keep my keyboard shortcuts on the left side so my right hand never has to leave the mouse. Tiny thing. But it removes a hundred small moments of friction a day.

This isn’t perfect and it isn’t magic. Some habits really do need grit, and some friction is hard to remove. But before you decide you’re lazy or undisciplined, look at the path you’re actually walking and ask a cheaper question first: what would I have to change so that doing this took one less step?

Most of the time, that’s the whole fix. Not more discipline. Less friction.

Four places and none of them were reliable.

I knew what the problem was. I’d known for months. No single app was broken. I’d just accumulated a stack instead of choosing one. Each app had a logical reason for being there. Together they were a productivity liability.

Two of those apps were paid subscriptions doing overlapping jobs. That’s the part that should sting if you recognize yourself here: I was paying real money every month for the privilege of being confused about where my tasks lived. And the money was the smaller cost. The bigger one was time, two years of tweaking and re-tweaking systems instead of just using one.

The Audit

The consolidation started with an audit I’d been avoiding. I opened every app in my dock and asked three questions:

1. What is this for?

2. Do I check it every day?

3. Does anything else in my stack do the same job?

The answers were uncomfortable and obvious. I had two apps that both captured tasks. I had three apps that all held reference notes of some kind. I had two calendars that were supposed to sync and regularly didn’t.

The rule I set before starting: if two tools overlap in function and I can do the job in one of them without meaningful loss, one of them goes. No exceptions for “but I like the design” or “I’ve used this for three years.”

The Decisions (and the Grief)

TickTick was the hard one. I’d used it for a long time. The habit tracking feature was genuinely good. The calendar integration was smooth. But I was already paying for Todoist, and maintaining two task managers was adding switches without adding value. TickTick went.

I consolidated note types into Obsidian. Craft stayed for documents and writing, but reference notes, daily logs, and thinking work all moved to the vault.

The “stuff to do” note in Craft got deleted. The journal task section got deleted. One task manager, one source of truth for what I’m doing today.

You do feel something when you close an app you’ve opened every day for two years. It passed faster than I expected.

What the After-State Feels Like

What changed is the number of decisions I make before I start working. Before the consolidation, the first ten minutes of my day went to checking four places and reconstructing what I was supposed to do. Now I open one thing and the answer is there.

I also stopped losing things. I was never losing important things before, but there was a low-grade anxiety about which system was current, which one I’d updated last, whether the capture I’d made on my phone had synced to the version on my Mac. That anxiety is gone.

The stack I landed on: Todoist for tasks, Obsidian for notes and thinking, Craft for writing and documents, Google Calendar for time. Four tools, clear lanes, no overlap.

Staying Cut

Here’s the part most “I simplified my stack” posts skip. Cutting the apps was a weekend. Staying cut is the actual work, because in three months something shiny launches, gets a glowing review, and the old itch comes back. I’ve reinstalled TickTick once already since this. Lasted four days.

What keeps me from re-cluttering now is a single rule: a new app doesn’t get added, it has to replace. If I want to try something, it has to take over a job one of my four tools is already doing, and the old one comes off the phone the same day. No “let me run both for a while to compare.” Running both for a while is exactly how I ended up with four task inboxes in the first place.

The shiny new app isn’t the threat. The threat is keeping it and the old one.

The Three Questions for Your Own Audit

If you want to run the same process:

1. List every app you opened in the last week.

2. For each one: what specific job does it do that nothing else in your stack does?

3. For every overlap you find: which one would you choose if you could only keep one?

The answers tell you exactly what to cut. The audit is easy. The hard part is trusting what it tells you and actually closing the app. Let me know which apps you decided to cut!

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

I decided to find out which.

What Setapp Is

Setapp is a subscription service for Mac apps. You pay a monthly or annual fee and get access to a catalog of Mac and iOS apps. As of June 2026, Setapp lists the standard Mac plan at $15/month and an annual plan of either $19/month or $23/month if you need Setapp on multiple Macs. Annual rates are cheaper and there is an option to add more AI (skip this step as you won’t need the AI apps to start). You don’t own the apps, you’re licensed to use them as long as you’re subscribed. Stop paying, lose access.

The pitch is clear: instead of buying individual apps one at a time, you pay one flat fee and get access to a large catalog. If you use more than two or three apps from the catalog regularly, the math can work in your favor.

Apps I Actually Use from Setapp

This is the honest version and not the catalog browse, but the apps that have genuine daily or weekly presence in my workflow.

CleanMyMac. Mac maintenance, malware scanning, storage cleanup. I use it monthly. This is exactly the kind of utility I would otherwise put off buying until I needed it.

Bartender. Hides and organizes the Mac menu bar. This is the kind of app that, once you use it, you can’t go back.

iStatMenus. System monitoring in the menu bar. CPU, RAM, network, disk usage, temperature. I check this constantly with a quick glance up to the menu bar.

Mosaic. Window management. Clean and simple. Replaced a more complex tiling tool I was fighting with.

Timing. Automatic time tracking. It runs in the background and logs how long I spend in each app and on each project. I use this to review my week and make sure I’m actually spending time on what I think I’m spending time on.

PDF Squeezer. Compresses PDFs. Sounds niche. I use it more than I expected.

Apps I Tried and Abandoned

Ulysses. I used it for writing for a while. It’s a beautiful app but I choose to do my writing in Obsidian as it is much easier to write in markdown and have plugins to enhance the experience.

Archiver. For managing archives of old files. Good app, just not a workflow I maintained.

Various menu bar utilities. There are a lot of these in Setapp and I’ve tried most of them. I keep one or two. The rest are additions I didn’t sustain.

The Honest Math

The apps I use regularly from Setapp, CleanMyMac, Bartender, iStatMenus, Timing, would cost real money to buy or subscribe to separately if I rebuilt the stack outside Setapp. The math shifts as plans and individual app pricing change, so I do not treat Setapp as automatically worth it. I treat it as a bundle that has to earn its place.

The real question fro me is whether the optionality is worth paying for. Setapp’s value isn’t just the apps you use, it’s the ability to try apps without committing to a purchase. I’ve discovered things I now rely on by downloading them with no risk. That has real value, even if it’s hard to quantify or justify to myself.

Who Should Subscribe

Setapp makes sense if you’re a Mac power user who regularly evaluates new apps, uses three or more apps from the catalog, or wants to avoid the ongoing cost of multiple individual subscriptions.

It probably doesn’t make sense if you run a stripped-down setup and already know exactly what tools you use. You’d be paying for optionality you won’t exercise.

For me, the answer is yes and the honest audit confirmed it rather than rattling it. I use enough of the catalog often enough that the subscription is earning its place.

If you want to run the same test, start with the apps you already use or would otherwise buy directly. If the list gets to three real apps, Setapp is worth trying. If it does not, skip it. The referral link is not a command to subscribe. It is a shortcut to run the same audit.

That’s the test worth running on any subscription: not “is this good?” but “is this earning its place?”

Disclosure: This article contains a referral link. If you subscribe through it, I may earn a small commission or account credit at no extra cost to you.

Impact-Site-Verification: fc96efbe-ff43-4af4-9b02-146703c4e3d0

That’s the whole point of the metaphor. It takes what catches its eye from wherever it finds it… a bit of wire, a scrap of foil, something shiny someone else dropped and builds something new with the pieces.

But there’s a craft to stealing well. Grab everything indiscriminately and you end up with a pile of junk instead of a nest. Steal nothing and you’re starting from scratch every time, ignoring the accumulated work of everyone who figured something out before you.

In Steal What Works, Leave the Rest, I laid out the philosophy. This is the operational version: how to actually evaluate what’s worth stealing and what to leave behind.

The Problem with Productivity Advice

Most productivity systems come packaged as complete answers. GTD says: here is how you process everything. PARA says: here is how you organize everything. Zettelkasten says: here is how you connect everything. Atomic Habits says: here is how you build everything.

These are good systems. They’re built by smart people who thought deeply about how they work. They’re also designed for a hypothetical person whose life and workflow resemble the author’s. That person is probably not you.

The impulse to adopt a system wholesale is understandable, it’s much easier than doing the work of evaluating each piece. But wholesale adoption means you get the parts that fit your life and the parts that don’t, welded together in a package you feel obligated to maintain completely.

The alternative is selective theft. Take the parts that solve a real problem in your actual workflow and leave the rest.

What Makes Something Worth Stealing

A piece of a system is worth stealing if it meets three criteria:

It solves a problem you actually have. Not a problem the author had, not a problem you might have someday, a problem you’re experiencing right now. If you don’t have a capture problem, you don’t need GTD’s inbox processing ritual. If you’re not managing multiple active projects, you don’t need PARA’s full folder structure.

It’s smaller than the system it came from. The best steals are atomic. Not “I’m adopting GTD” but “I’m adopting the two-minute rule.” Not “I’m going full PARA” but “I’m going to keep a Projects folder and an Archive folder.” Atomic steals integrate without forcing you to adopt the surrounding context.

You can evaluate it within two weeks. If a habit, tool, or practice doesn’t show a measurable result in two weeks, you’re either implementing it wrong or it doesn’t fit your workflow. Good steals produce feedback quickly. Systems that require months of faithful implementation before you can evaluate them are selling you faith, not method.

What to Leave Behind

The flip side is knowing what not to take.

Don’t steal what requires context you don’t have. Zettelkasten works beautifully for researchers and writers who are building arguments across hundreds of linked notes. If you’re a project manager who needs to track deliverables, the Zettelkasten linking workflow will feel like overhead without payoff. That’s not a failure of Zettelkasten. It’s a mismatch.

Don’t steal what solves someone else’s problem. The person who built a complex inbox zero ritual was drowning in email. If email isn’t your pain point, their ritual isn’t your solution, no matter how elegant it is.

Don’t steal what you admire but won’t use. There’s a category of productivity practice that I find intellectually interesting and would never actually do. A daily full review of all projects and commitments. Color-coded task labels. Manual time logging. I’ve tried all of these and abandoned all of them. I still think they’re good ideas. They’re just not my ideas.

The Actual Practice

When you encounter a system, tool, or practice that interests you, run it through the three-question filter before adopting it:

1. Do I have the problem this solves?

2. Can I take a piece of it without taking all of it?

3. Can I evaluate it in two weeks?

If yes to all three: steal it. Try the piece. Evaluate honestly. Keep or discard.

If no to any of them: appreciate it from a distance and move on.

The nest you’re building is yours. It should look like your life, not someone else’s framework installed wholesale and maintained out of obligation.

Last week I sat down to count them. I knew the number was high, but I’d never actually added it up. Two hundred and fifty. That’s how many small web apps I’ve built and put online at southforkapps.com, free and no login required. A BMI calculator. A cron expression builder. A guitar fretboard. A thing that turns text into Pig Latin. Two hundred and fifty of them.

Here’s the part nobody tells you about building a lot of small tools: you don’t use most of them. I built a resistor color code reader one night because I was curious whether I could. I have never once needed it since. I wouldn’t could that as a failure as it’s the whole point, and I wrote about why in Disposable Software. Most of these were built to scratch one itch on one afternoon and then left alone.

But three of them stuck. Three I actually open on purpose, more than once, because they solve a problem I keep having. Those three are worth talking about, because they tell you which tools are worth building in the first place.

1. Recipe Scaler

I cook for six people. Four kids, my wife, me. Almost every recipe online is written for four servings, sometimes two, and the math to scale it up is the kind of thing I will get wrong while standing at the counter with raw chicken on my hands.

So I built Recipe Scaler. You paste in the ingredient list, tell it you want 1.5x or double or two-thirds, and it rewrites the quantities. That’s it. No account, no saving, no “premium tier for unlimited recipes.” I open it on my phone while the pan is heating up.

It survives because it removes a specific friction at a specific moment. The recurring annoyance (bad mental math under time pressure) meets a tool that’s faster to open than it is to do the arithmetic.

2. Teleprompter

Part of my job is making videos. When you’re reading a script to camera, the choice is usually between memorizing it (slow, and I’ll fumble it anyway) or glancing off to a sheet of paper (which looks exactly like what it is). Professional teleprompter software is either expensive or bloated with features I don’t need.

So I built a Teleprompter that does one thing: scrolls text at a speed I set, full screen, big enough to read from a few feet back. I paste the script, set the pace, and record. It runs in a browser tab on whatever machine is closest.

I use this one at work, which is the real test. A tool you only use in your own free time is a hobby. A tool you reach for when the clock is running and someone’s waiting on the footage is actually useful.

3. Pomodoro Timer

I’m forgetful and I’m easily pulled off course. Left alone, I’ll start writing a newsletter, remember I need to send an invoice, open a browser tab to do it, see an email, and forty minutes later I’m somewhere I didn’t mean to be.

The Pomodoro Timer is the dumbest of the three and the one I lean on most. Twenty-five minutes on, five off. The only thing it does that the timer on my phone doesn’t is sit in a tab and not tempt me to pick up the phone, which is where the trouble starts. I run it during writing blocks and during the boring stretches of my second job, where having a clock counting down keeps me moving instead of drifting.

It’s not sophisticated. It doesn’t track my focus history or sync to a dashboard. I don’t want it to. The moment a focus timer needs me to focus on it, it has failed.

What the three have in common

I didn’t pick these on purpose. They earned their place by being the ones I kept coming back to. Looking at them together, the pattern is obvious:

• They solve a problem I have on a schedule, not once. Cooking, recording, focusing. Things that recur.

• They open faster than the problem takes to solve manually. Zero friction. No login, no setup.

• They do one thing. None of them try to be a platform. The recipe scaler will never have a social feed.

That’s the lesson hiding in 247 tools I don’t use. Building software got cheap enough that I can make a thing in an afternoon to solve a single annoyance, and most of the time that’s all it ever needs to do. The 247 weren’t wasted. They were the cost of finding the 3.

If you’ve got a recurring annoyance and a free afternoon, build the dumb little tool. Worst case, it joins the pile. Best case, it’s one of your three.

All 250 are free at southforkapps.com. Go steal the ones that solve a problem you actually have or use what I have already built for free.