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⤴.