The year 2019 is already more than a month old. In fact, my daily work routine is still full of tasks, notes, emails, chats, appointments, contacts, and bookmarks in the new year as well. Who would have thought 🙂 Productivity remains a core topic in the new year, and I need tools to keep all the balls in the air in everyday life. For years, I’ve relied on a more or less constant toolbox.
My Favorite Tools
For me personally: Apple’s Mail, Contacts, Calendar, plus Slack (communication), OmniFocus (todos), Ulysses (Markdown), and Delicious (bookmarks).
In the publishing house, I use Airtable (for all things tabular and board-like), Confluence (for knowledge management), Jira (for ticketing), Mindmeister (for mind maps).
Zapier helps me connect one service with another. And of course, I often use and like the Microsoft, Adobe, and Google tools.
As I said, this tool composition has a certain consistency. It’s clear why; I’m a heavy user in each tool, and it’s always a big effort to switch from one tool to another.
But now there’s movement in this world. The year 2019 has already brought me some hot tools that certainly have the potential to enter my personal Hall of Fame.
Notion
notion.so is a tool for knowledge management. Not unlike a wiki. But a bit more sophisticated. Because it allows, among other things, to build real functional tables and databases into a document. So basically everything you can do with Airtable, but around it, there’s also a potent wiki.
Notion’s editor is top-notch; it’s a pleasure to work in it. Notion is also well represented on mobile devices and can be integrated with various other tools. In short: I can store everything in Notion from anywhere. Pure knowledge management! Here’s just a small selection of tools available on one page. 
Those who know me know that Evernote has fallen out of my above app list. After using Evernote intensively for many years, I dislike the current non-strategy of the product. There’s no movement to be felt anymore, long-standing annoyances are simply not being addressed. And no: OneNote is not an alternative for me. It’s too structured for me and has no tags. And the synchronization takes forever. I tried it and soon gave up again.
Notion now gives me hope again. It could become the legitimate successor to Evernote. I’m sticking with it.
Clickup
The number of project management tools that have recently seen the light of day seems striking to me. They can all do roughly the same thing, look pretty similar, all function web-based, and can be integrated with hundreds of other apps. There’s Zenkit, Monday, Awork, but of course also well-known ones like Meistertask, Trello, and Asana, which are constantly evolving. They all allow different views of the same tasks: sometimes as a Kanban board, sometimes as a todo list, sometimes as a Gantt chart, sometimes as a simple calendar.
And now my friend Haeme has introduced me to an all-in-one, all-round happy package that you can also get for little money and that looks good too: Clickup.
I mean: just look at the feature list! This thing can do everything! It almost makes you suspicious 🙂 But it’s proving itself in practice. I’m still testing, I think Team Haeme is too. So far, I’m pretty convinced, and I could well imagine using Clickup, for example, for planning around the publishing blog.
