This little exercise was inspired by Rafal Pastuzak who was inspired by Chris Coyer, who was inspired by Matt, who was inspired by Tracy Durnell and the HomeBrew Website Club.
Talking about what tools and software you use is something that has become more popular on the indie web. I think it'll be fun to make another list like this in 5 years or so. For now, I'm only including things that are relevant to me at this time.
Defaults
📨 Mail Client and Server: Outlook
📝 Notes: Obsidian for long-form notes, Google Keep for quick notes
✅ To-Do: Google Keep. Simple and easy to share with my partner.
📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 17
🎨 Photo Editing: Affinity suite
🏗️ UX (wireframing, prototyping): Figma
📹 Video Editing: Davinci Resolve, the free version is perfect for simple vlogs
✍🏼 Journaling: Obsidian and this specific physical notebook
🧘🏽 Meditation: Insight Timer, sometimes a guided meditation on YouTube, or nothing at all
📆 Calendar: Google Calendar
📁 Cloud File Storage: A confusing mix of Antagonist, Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud
📖 RSS: Don't have one yet!
🌐 Browser: Firefox
💬 Chat: WhatsApp
🔖 Bookmarks: A weird combination of Are.na, Google Keep, and my bookmarks page
📑 Read It Later: Goodreads, but not happy about it
📜 Word Processing: Obsidian for notes and drafts, Microsoft Word for formal documents
📈 Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel
📊 Presentations: Microsoft Powerpoint
🛒 Shopping Lists: Google Keep
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: I used to be a BIG fan of YNAB, which is a platform with the approach of envelope-based budgeting, but because of the pricing and how few of the features I need, I moved to Actual Budget. An open-source variant that does all the things I need. I track manually, and check my custom reports every month.
📰 News: N/A
🎵 Music and Podcasts: Spotify
📚 Reading: Pocketbook Touch HD3
🧑💻 Code Editor: IntelliJ IDEA
Conclusions
- I have some very annoying mixes of platforms that I use for things, which I want to consolidate into a clear way of doing things.
- My focus is on the services that allow me to save things (related is to save or not to save), which includes cloud file storage and apps that I use for bookmarking.
- I also want to look more into checking out which software I want to keep on using in the context of American vs Europe-based software that complies more with privacy and security measures.
Template
Here you can find the template.