7 Tools for Productivity, Inspiration and Creativity

Ideas are central to creativity. But the infrastructure we use to build and transform them is also an important part of the design process.

Tools are not the sexy part, but unavoidably, we spend hours jumping between many of them throughout the day. Some are fun to use, some are plain but get the job done, and some of them, you feel you just can’t live without.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the tools I use, just a small selection of some favorites that I’m using a lot lately:

Still from “Weathering with You” - Director: Makoto Shinkai (2019)

Airr:

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Not only for entertainment but because in many cases I’m curious to learn about the topics they are talking about. Since I’m mostly listening to them on the go (on the bus, walking, or moving somewhere) it’s hard to take notes.

Airr is a podcast player app where you can highlight audio clips and create notes about episodes. When you hear something great, you can save it with one tap.

I’m not a big fan of their “sharing to social media” options, but it’s a great tool to clip valuable quotes, references, and concepts that I would otherwise forget.

Currently available for iOS only.

Readwise

Readwise is an app that helps you integrate and revisit your reading highlights.

While I’m reading a physical book I can take a picture of what I want to highlight and it automatically converts it into text, so I can have easily accessible notes without having to scribble in the pages of the book (I’m that sort of person—books are almost sacred to me).

This way, I have the best of both worlds: heavy notes and the tactility and beauty of experiencing and preserving physical books or magazines.

I also like their review feature, which resurfaces quotes you’ve highlighted in the past so you can revisit ideas and knowledge.

Personal highlight of “Designing Design” - Kenya Hara (2007)

Notion

My personal wiki and basically my second brain. I use Notion to collect ideas for my newsletter, notes from courses, spontaneous recommendations, and also to track goals.

I also send my reading highlights from Readwise, Instapaper, and my Kindle to Notion so I have everything in one place.

There’s so much you can do with it because it works through customizable blocks. I’m not an advanced user, but it already helps me achieve a lot.

If you want to learn tips on how to use it, you can check out Daniel Canosa’s or August Bradley’s Youtube channels.

Screenshot of one of my pages: my book notes library.

Forest app

Looking too much at my phone is a bad habit that I want to break. Forest is a mobile app that helps me gamify that.

Whenever you want to stay focused, you plant a tree. If you exit the app to go anywhere else: Twitter, your e-mail, or watching puppy pictures on Instagram, the tree dies.

As simple as that.

I find it satisfying to see the trees I’ve grown during the day (I use different species of trees and tags to visualize different activities: work, reading, etc.).

And once you reach a certain amount of points while growing virtual trees you get a real one planted for your efforts :)

Flim

A cool tool for iconographic search.

It’s an online database where you can find images from sources like films, documentaries, music videos, and ads, which is great for brainstorming, finding visual references, and embellishing presentations.

Supported by AI, you can search through filters like genre, color, year of release, and format. There’s still room for improvement, but the concept of making visual culture searchable is pretty exciting.

Mural

Mural is a digital workspace for brainstorming and visual collaboration.

You can create virtual canvases, and add sticky notes, drawings, diagrams, links, and images. It’s quite intuitive to use.

I’ve been using it a lot collaboratively at work (to map frameworks, and strategies) but I also create my own private Murals for the divergent stage of research, to compile key concepts and references. This way, I can see patterns and put ideas in order in a visual way.

Another similar tool (that I haven’t used but I’ve heard good things about is Miro).

A Mural of an ongoing research project.

Connected papers

Connected papers is a visual tool to help professionals and students find and explore relevant papers to their field of work.

Starting from one paper of your interest, you get a graph of other papers related to the original one. The similarity metric is based on the concepts of “Co-citation” and “Bibliographic Coupling”. According to this, two papers that have highly overlapping citations and references have a higher chance of being connected.

A wonderful research tool.

Do you use any of the tools I mentioned? Which ones do you frequently use and enjoy? There’s a universe of great tools growing daily, and I’m curious to hear from you.

Please let me know in the comments or via Twitter DMs :)

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Why Small Pleasures Matter

We often drive ourselves in pursuit of large pleasures: traveling to a foreign country, shipping a disruptive project, going to a once-in-a-lifetime music event.

A cult of the exotic or unusual.

But there are other, many small pleasures lying around us that can bring us a wealth of joy, comfort, and creativity with little cost and effort.

“Small pleasures” as portrayed by the book of the same title written by The School of Life, are those things we enjoy but are currently underrated, or those we fail to pay enough attention to.

One fundamental issue with small pleasures is that we tend to get used to places, people, or activities, and things that are familiar lose their power to entice the imagination if we stop being aware.

Personal archive (2020)

“If anyone can have it, if it’s easy to come by at home, if it’s a pleasure that’s best repeated, then it can’t be important. Yet the fact is, many of the things that do give us satisfaction have just this character.”

— Small Pleasures (2016) p. 237

As a practice of noticing, after reading this book and also seeing Austin Kleon’s logbook, I started journaling random things or happenings on a daily basis, and here are some in no particular order:

1. Deep breaths

2. Feeling warm sunlight hitting you on a cold winter day

3. Flowers

4. Fresh bread

5. Long hugs

6. Sitting at a bench and people-watching

7. Old photos

8. Trying food ingredients or meals you have never tasted before (like nutritional yeast which I had never tried until recently but is amazing on popcorn)

9. Laughing loudly

10. A beautiful ceramic plate

11. Being awake at dawn

12. The voice of loved one

13. Going to a park

14. A glass of cold water

15. Guessing the exact word someone was going to say

16. A good night’s rest

17. Lighting candles

18. Fresh orange juice

19. A well-made bed

20. Lying on the grass

21. Long walks

22. Reading a book in one sitting

23. Gazing at the sky

24. Dancing

25. A good stretch

26. Twinkle lights

27. A bicycle ride

28. The sound of waves

29. Fresh herbs

30. A day with no plans

31. Walking barefoot

32. Nice stationery

33. Chocolate

34. A nap

35. Falling into research rabbit holes

36. A facial massage

37. Figs

38. Movie night

39. The farmers market

40. Learning a new word

41. Fixing something

42. Starting a conversation

43. Dressing up for no reason

44. Watering plants

45. A refillable fountain pen

46. Reading poetry

47. Essential oils

48. Music playlists

49. Observing trees

50. Discovering the work of someone inspiring

And the list could go on forever.

What is important is that we begin to map the things that bring us pleasure and enjoyment, no matter how small they are (step 1). The point isn’t simply to note them but to understand why we like them – which intensifies and deepens the satisfaction they offer.

The map of our personal delights probably speaks greatly about what we love, and ultimately, who we are.

These pleasures give us more creativity, happiness, and inspiration.

But we tend to leave the reality of experiencing them very much to chance. We need to make a consistent space for small pleasures in our daily life, making them part of our plans (step 2).

As pointed out in the book, “our collective model of a good life tends to focus on career progress and financial management”. Those are things we actively seek out. Why don’t we do the same for small pleasures?

Ideally, we’d schedule more appointments. We’d put it in our plans: Sunday 10 am, staring at the sky. We’d create rituals from them so we can experience them with more frequency when we work, play, and rest.

The normal attitude to small pleasures is to think that they are, individually, perfectly nice but that they are rather insignificant. They come at random into our lives. We savor them for a moment, and then they’re gone.

However, “small pleasures turn out not to be small at all: they are points of access to the great themes of our lives.” (p. 9)

@silviagilroldan

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References:

1. The School of Life Press. (2016) Small Pleasures.

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The Gap

I know that I’m not as good as I want to be in several areas of creative practice (drawing, public speaking, to name a few). It doesn’t mean that I do a bad job, it can serve its purposes well (and if it doesn't, then it's better to delegate it to someone else).

But it could be fantastic, because you can recognize fantastic work when it’s in front of you. And knowing that it’s not there yet secretly drives me crazy sometimes.

Can’t everyone see?

So I found great relief in the advice of This American Life’s host and producer Ira Glass, where he speaks precisely about this feeling:

Animation by David Shiyang Liu.

“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
”

It's easier to recognize beauty than it is to create it. 

When you find yourself in this frustrating limbo, the challenge is to never forget what got you there in the first place. You already have good taste. Go build work until it matches your ambitions. Close the gap.

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