The next few posts will revolve around my recent experiments with productivity apps and various other musings on the subject. Heads up, this is stream of consciousness stuff!

I’ve avoided going too deep into this issue in recent years because my life just doesn’t warrant anything more complicated than a simple to-do list, somewhere to store random musings and the occasional office suite for more complex work. All accessible wherever I am, of course. Very boring, but it works.

It took me a while to accept this. I’m no CEO, no stressed out office worker, no manic parent to five kids. I don’t need to be super organised, but having something in place helps fend off procrastination and indiscipline, all very important when it comes to writing.

So, what is my current system? Simplenote and the Google’s office suite. That’s it.

Simplenote covers all my note taking needs and any to-do lists I need to track. It is, as its name suggests, simple and on point. By that I mean it doesn’t try to do anything else. Note taking is its purpose, pure and simple. I don’t feel like I’m only using half it’s features, as is typically the case with other apps.

For anything else that requires more depth - a formatted document or number crunching in a spreadsheet - I have Google. Again, its purpose is clear.

So, if I’m so content with my system, why have I been dabbling in other tools?

I’ve not fallen off the productivity wagon, discovered my tools aren’t fit for purpose, or any of the other reasons given for why people migrate to different setups. I simply saw a new app that looked cool, experimented with it during some free time, and it snowballed from there (the app in question is called Notion).

Most of those apps have since been removed and accounts deleted. Though they often provided something different - a way of arranging a project, or organising notes - none fulfilled my needs any better, apart from when it came to managing tasks (I’ll discuss that in a future post).

This has made me realise that perhaps the problem isn’t always because the tools aren’t right for our purposes or we need to reset our GTD system or whatever. It’s simply that people crave novelty. Sometimes we just want a change. There’s a lot of task and project management apps out there to play around with and new ones are always coming out. There’s a reason for that. I wonder what a psychologist would make of it?