The Productivity Stack: Apps and Tools We Actually Use Every Day

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Proctivity Show podcast where we believe that people like you can get the important things done without sacrificing your health, family, and things that matter to you. It fits your first time listening. Welcome to the show, I'm Tan Fam founder of Asian efficiency coming to you all the way from Austin, Texas. And I'm joined today with my co-host, Brooks Duncan from Vancouver, Canada. How are you today, Brooks? I'm pretty good. Let's go on in Austin these days. Austin is booming still. I would call it the second capital of AI and also the second capital of paddle to my favorite things right now, AI and paddle. So I'm feeling like Austin is always growing and there's a lot of people still moving here. And the weather's good, the people are nice. I was actually thinking about coming to Vancouver at some point, potentially later in the summer. So if I do, I would love to see you there. Because that's the only time of the year. I will likely ever be in Vancouver because I can't handle the cold up north. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And do it after the world cup too, when things calm down a little bit. Yeah, when it's a lot more affordable, at least I hope. I have a friend who is from Vancouver. He came to visit recently here in Austin. And he was showing me how Vancouver Island is so beautiful. And if you take the ferry and then kind of like dry, further into the island, there's so much nature and beach side that I thought, oh my gosh, this would be great for like a retreat or a mastermind. So thinking of like, you know, how, if you think about getting maybe six, seven, eight people together at a wooden cabin up in Vancouver Island, that sounds like a pretty good trip to me. Absolutely, I grew up in the, basically in the middle of Vancouver Island. So I am a, I'm a big fan of the island. And that's where a friend of the show, Mike Farty lives too. That's right. So we'll have to get Mike included. But today on the productivity show, we're talking about apps and the stuff that we are using day to day and that we're liking right now. And if you've been a fan of the productivity show, you know, we love talking about apps and tools. We also talk about strategies and ways for you to be more productive. And if you're new to the show, first of foremost, welcome. We're basically known for three philosophies around productivity. One is happy people are productive people. Two, one tweak a week is all it takes and a massive productivity gains over time. And then three, we want everything to be simple and actual including today's episode. And we also like to kick things off where there are top three favorite resources. So Brooks, I have three of them here today. And I figured since we're talking about apps, we might as well include a bunch of apps that I'm loving right now. And the first one is Whisper Flow. So Whisper Flow is a smarter dictation app that you can use on your desktop, laptop, any platform and also on your phone as well. So the main difference between normal dictation versus say Whisper Flow is that assuming you use the app, it's kind of like the difference between using text expander versus the auto dictation that happens on your phone or on your computer. It's just better, it's faster, it's a little smarter. And I rarely type emails anymore. I actually dictate all of my emails nowadays. And I've gotten so far off the deep end that I bought a footrest by El Gato that allow me to kind of like tap my foot and then dictate what I'm doing. That's how far I've gone Brooks. And so loving Whisper Flow, first recommendation here. The second one is a note taking and a meeting bot app called Granola. So you probably heard of Granola. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend it. So what's different about Granola versus say, Auto or Fireflies or Fathom, is that typically these kind of meeting scribors they join your meeting and they kind of like have their own profile picture right when you're on the meeting itself. So it's great because people know it's being recorded and so on. What's different about Granola is that it actually records your audio in the background. So it doesn't join your meeting, it doesn't join it as a bot. And because it's recording your computer audio, it actually can get the full transcript of the meeting still without joining the meeting itself. So this is where things get a little bit interesting because technically if Brooks and I are recording 101, I could have Granola running and it's recording the whole thing, but nobody would ever know. So there's like pros and cons to each. I've been loving it just because it's super easy to use. They have an API, they have an MCP server. So you can easily connect to your AI agents to it. So a great workflow you can build with that is as soon as the meeting is done, draft a follow-up email stored in a particular folder and then it's easily indexable whenever you want to search for something. So a lot of cool things you can do with that. And then the third one is my favorite AI platform and tool of choice right now is Claude. So if you're not using Claude, yeah, to highly recommend you check it out. What's different about Claude versus something like a chat UBT is that Claude is actually really good at not just telling you what to do, but also doing it for you. So when you use your advanced features like co-work or even code, it can actually build a lot of things for you and actually execute on your hard drives and create files and read them. That chat UBT is kind of missing right now. So go check out Claude if you haven't yet. - For the record, I believe this episode is being sponsored by Claude, but Tan did not know that when he did his top three resources. So even though this episode is sponsored by a traffic, that is a completely organic, organic list. And it's so funny that you say that about the Elgado pedal because Elgado pedal has been around for a while. I always eye it, but I'm like, "Ah, I don't really have a use case for it." But I've been hearing of people do exactly what you just described. I didn't know you were doing it is using it basically as a trigger to start and stop dictation. And I think that's such a, not that it's that hard to hit a keyboard shortcut or whatever, but it's just such a good use case for that pedal. - Yeah, I mean, I first saw it because someone else was promoting it on social media. But their use case was they had a baby in their hand and they're working behind a computer. And so being able to carry a baby and then use your foot to kind of trigger stuff to do stuff was like, "Oh, that's interesting." So I was imagining myself drinking matcha and holding a cookie in my other hand and just like using my footrest to drive agents to do work. So that was my vision and I could tell you, it takes a little bit of getting used to because it's a little unnatural for me to use my foot to trigger something. But after about four or five days, I was starting to get used to it and now I can go back and forth. I'll use my keyboard sometimes to trigger it or use my foot. So now I have two ways to just trigger a voice dictation. And I think this is only going to get better and when I'm say only getting better, meaning a lot of apps and tools will eventually have a voice interface, I think, where we can actually drive what's happening on our computer screen as well. I think that's where things are going to be going. So Brooks, that is obviously relevant to the topic of today, which is all about apps and tools. Before we start sharing about the different apps and tools that we like, I'm curious, I have a particular take on this, where as AI is getting better, a lot of apps and tools I think are gonna lose steam or are going to lose market share or even become extinct because the AI tools are becoming so powerful that they actually take over a lot of things that dedicated apps were built upon. And the classic example I have for you here is, I used to be a religious My Fitness Pal user where I would take a photo of the item that I ate, it wouldn't be able to guess the calories or anything, but then I would have to manually guess the calories myself looking at different labels and everything and then enter it. And this is a very manual process that I would do to count my calories. And now with AI, I literally just open up chat, you be take a photo of it and say, hey, guesstimate the calories here in the macros. And then I just keep going back to that same chat and we'll just keep a log for me of what I ate that day and how many calories and then give me a cues about next day and so on. And I just keep one running chat inside of a project. And so why would I need My Fitness Pal or pay 50 bucks a year for it when I could just do this? - Yeah, and so funny that you say that because I was thinking about this the other day because I don't use My Fitness Pal, but I use an app called Lose It and mainly the main reason why is this 'cause I've used it forever. And it does have that feature where it can snap a picture and estimate the calories, but it's not very good. And it's, so what I tended to do is exactly what you said. I would fire up the chat to you, and be out, take a picture of the plate and get the calories. And then I was even asking Chatcha, "Hey, is there a way that I could send this information into Lose It so that I don't have to then go to Lose It and enter it?" And he was like, "No, not really." And I was even thinking about that the other day. I'm like, maybe I don't even need to bother with that second step. Maybe I should do what you're already doing. I didn't know you were doing that. And I think you're right that aside from the specific calorie counter example, I think you might be right about seeing a shift in the way that apps work and maybe seeing less niche apps for two reasons. Number one, like you said, a lot of this stuff that we maybe needed an app for, wanted an app for, was just so comfortable being in Claude in Chatcha, G-B-T, in Gemini, that that is kind of like almost the default place that a lot of us are living in these days. So just make sense to, you know, just to be. and they're doing things. So that's one thing. And number two, because vibe coding, you know, you could just fire it cloud code or whatever and just basically for especially for these knee shops, like you're not going to do an ERP this way, but for these kind of like knee shops, instead of paying somebody to do something and getting ads or having to like fit your stuff into their vision, you can just pretty easily vibe code up an easy app that does exactly what you want and no more and then just kind of like go from there. So it kind of like from two different perspectives, I think the LLM world are eating all these knee shops up there. You know, as you were saying that what it reminded me of was when I first started getting my first MacBook, I remember this is like 2009 is when I first got it. And one of the things that really captured me was the fact that a lot of apps in the Mac ecosystem were vertically integrated. So meaning I could use omnifocus and the Apple calendar kind of seamlessly together. And in the Microsoft ecosystem back then, that was very difficult to do unless you were fully bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, where you use outlook for email and calendar, but then you had like a terrible to do list where there was no way to kind of like integrate them worse. That will ecosystem you can have three different apps for three different vendors, complete different companies that are building things, but then they all kind of work together very nicely. And so my favorite thing was always omnifocus and the Google calendar together. I could like climb my task, allocate time for it's kind of plan my week and was a really seamless process. And now with this whole AI movement going on, the integration of different apps and tools, I think is becoming even more important and powerful. And it's also becoming kind of like a edge for apps to say relevant because if they're being siloed, then there's no need for AI to kind of come in and be helpful. So the perfect example is I stop using omnifocus because it doesn't allow you to have different apps and tools to connect to it. Like there's no way for me to have chat to be to your cloud connect to it and organize my projects for me in there. When I maybe still like the omnifocus interface, but maybe the backend could be empowered by some AI tool as well. So for example, I would love for a cloud to go in there and say, Hey, here's my omnifocus. It's a little disorganized. Could you help me organize it for me and then do it. But now it can't. And so there's no need for me to now use omnifocus when in fact, if I just tell cloud, Hey, let's set up a to do list system inside of cloud inside of a project, it would work just as well. Yeah, it's actually very surprising to me that omnie hasn't released and maybe they have I just don't know about it, but hasn't released at the very least an mcp. There's lots of third party ones out there and I actually do use one and I actually kind of do what you were just describing with omnifocus because I am still using omnifocus. I am doing something like you describe like, Hey, give me a list of all the tasks I did yesterday. Any overdue deferred tasks like move forward to today, you know, like all that organization stuff. I do do with these third party mcp's, but it's a little, it would be better if omnifocus itself just had that integration because you just never know when something's going to break with these third party ones or I mean, who knows what the people are doing? You know, I don't have anything like super private in my omnifocus. I don't not that worried, but I can't imagine I would do the same thing with say my email or something like that. I'd want that direct integration. And so yeah, it's very shocking to me that omnie hasn't come out with something yet to allow you to do that. Otherwise, you're going to see what exactly what you described people moving off of these legacy apps that even maybe they've used forever, but because the ability to work in their AI system is more important than their, than, you know, their memorized keyboard shortcuts. I think you're going to see a lot more defections like that. Well, it's one of the reasons, well, it's one of the reasons I started moving over to to do is because to do is has a beautiful API. And so because they have the web interface and the desktop interface and the mobile interface, because you could connect it to Lindy, Claude, chat, GPT, whatever, because it has an API interface, you can have the AI power combined with your task management system. So for example, a really powerful thing in such a simple workflow was let's say you and I had a meeting, I took the transcript, I put it in Claude and say, Hey, here's the transcript of the meeting. I just had, can you find me all the action items that I have to do and then put it in my task manager. And because it could talk to to do is you could then put it in a specific folder in my to do is and organize it for me and then set the due dates for me as well. This is something that I used to have to do manually to then, you know, take meeting notes, right? And then or even somebody on the team would take meeting notes, then I would copy it over, put it in my, you know, task manager app, assign to due dates, like, why would I do that when I have an AI doing that for me now? So this is one of the reasons I think Atlassian is kind of like doing a really good job because they're stocked was down for a while, but now it's like rallying back up because they fully embrace the AI movement where now you have MCP servers, they're making their API even more robust so that you can, for example, integrate Claude with it's like, for example, I was showing Mary the other day how I'm brainstorming all these like topic ideas for newsletters and the podcast and I created like a little skill that allowed to when I'm it ideating with Claude to then say, hey, add this to the back lock on our Gera board in this particular board and it just did that on the spot. And so now I don't have to like open up a browser, click on my bookmarks to go to Gera, you click on, you know, a little plus icon, add a title, a description, and it's like, no, I did all the research already. It had great talking points. 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So by now you probably know is that AI seeps into pretty much every episode of the productivity show these days and the reason for that is simple. Tan and I keep finding workflows that make us faster and better with AI. We can focus on making our overall jobs better by taking stuff off our plates. A recent example for me I had an annoying and mind humming workflow taking information at a JIRA updating PowerPoint slides updating as page and HubSpot. I finally said that's it and I use Claude to take the JIRA information, figure out where to update it in PowerPoint and fix any formatting issues that pop up. It's so great and it saves me so much time and mental energy. So speaking of Claude, Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you whether you're a debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. That PowerPoint example I gave earlier is such a good example because the old workflow wasn't hard, you know, I could do it. But now Claude does it for me and I can start looking at the inputs and outputs and focus on making them better and more effective. Claude co-works, professional outputs are impressive, creates polished documents, spreadsheets with working formulas, and presentations directly in your file system. And now co-work lets you set up workflows that run on a schedule. So daily reports, weekly summaries, recurring data polls, no need to do coding and set up weird crime jobs or anything like that, co-work handles it. For problems we're solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai/tps. That's Claude.ai/tps and check out Claude Pro which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. That's Claude.ai/tps. Yeah, it's interesting. I had a similar experience with the Jura a while ago where I had this like list of things I wanted to do and So I sat down to Jira and I didn't have it connected to Claude at the time, but I do right now. But I sat down at Jira and I was about to start breaking it into sub-tas. You know how we always did it and I was just thinking to myself, like, "I just don't feel like setting up all these sub-tas." And then I remember that Elassian has whatever they call it, "Rolvo," I think. Like their own built-in LLM, which I know gets mixed reviews, but I decided to just try it. I just hit the button and I said, "Hey, create this task and break it into relevant sub-tas." And it just chunked through and did it. And I was like, "Hey, this is great. Like, taking the. This is what I think these AI features about all of these tools is so great for. It's just doing those annoying things that we've. Like the grant work of working with all these apps just like eliminated. It's so great." So with all of this in mind now, has this changed your app stack and tool stack and like your overall system now? So if we're talking about, you know, the trifecta here, right? The calendar, your email, your task manager app, what are they today? And how has this maybe even changed with AI going on here? Yeah, it's the actual apps I've been using isn't too different than what it has been in the sense that it's, I still use Gmail for my email. I still use Fantastic Hell for my calendar. I still use OmniFocus for my tasks. However, what is different is I don't think of them as much as separate things that I do anymore because I. And this is the most surprising part of this is I've really started to use Obsidian. Almost as my. Not so much a note taking app, but it's kind of like my central organization tool for all of these like skills and markdown files and stuff like that that kind of becomes the connector that I have hooked up to CloudCore. And I bring that up because now a lot of what I do kind of is generated from Cloud. So I said I use Fantastic Hell, which I do. However, I have the Fantastic Hell MCP connected. So that's how I like interact with my calendar and be like, "Hey, what's what I have going on today?" You know, that type of thing. Same with tasks, like I said, you know, finding out, getting summaries of my tasks, moving things around. I don't have it hooked up to email yet, but I think that's going to be my next step is basically having it connected to my email and be like, "This is my thinking. You can tell me a different way to do it, but this is my thinking. If I'm looking at an email and I want it to take some sort of action, maybe give it a label and then when that happens, you know, Cloud just does its thing and turns through it, something like that. So I'll also say, at least as of right now, all of the apps I use is pretty similar to what it has been, but the way I use them is very different now. Oh man, I didn't even know Fantastic Hell had an MCP, okay. Interesting. Yeah, it's helpful for me because I, and I know a lot of our listeners are in this situation because we've received questions about this forever and there's never been a great answer, is that I have like calendars on different platforms that I need to be on top of. So I have my personal calendar for Google, a calendar Google, other calendars like Outlook, and so I have like Microsoft 365. So I have calendars on all these different platforms and that's one nice thing if you're a Mac user. That's one nice thing about Fantastic Hell is you can connect all these things to it. So it becomes my like single source of truth. So I don't have to connect Cloud to Microsoft 365. I don't have to connect it to Google calendar, all that sort of stuff. I just have my Fantastic Hell setup and kind of roll with that. Oh, I mean, this is a real problem for a lot of people because to your point, I get so many questions about this too where you go, Hey, I have an Outlook calendar. I have an Apple calendar. I have a Google calendar. Now use this particular app to kind of like sync them all together, which is great. But then when I try to check them all and sync them together, like a lot of things get lost and there's a lot of mistakes and double checking that has to happen. But if you use Cloud and it's connecting this case to Fantastic Hell that can oversee everything that can do all the heavy lifting and thinking because then you can just say, Hey, and especially if you connected to your email, right? Someone might go in and say, Hey, Brooks, are you free on Friday at two o'clock to have like a late lunch? Normally, you would probably check all of your calendars like, Oh, hey, let me just make sure that that is okay. But now with an MCP like this, Clotch should technically be able to then look at all your calendars through your fantastical MCP and go, Hey, let me see, Brooks is actually free at two o'clock across like two or three different calendars and that's the case to make that recommendation, if not, you know, suggest a bunch of other things then. That should be technically possible. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think so. And I said Fantastic Hell for Mac, but I forgot they did release Fantastic Hell for Windows. I don't know if they've kept it up. I haven't really paid attention, but I know at one point they did release a Windows version of Fantastic Hell. So I guess I'll have to check it into this after and see if that that still exists because that so that could be an option if you're not somebody who uses a Mac. Oh, man, this is really powerful. And I'm sure a lot of listeners are going to are going to love this. It's funny to see your stack because my stack, I think email, I've like fully delegated to my AI to just like handle my email, tell me what you need me to reply to pre-drafts every single email. And then it's also connected to my calendar. So that kind of knows when my availability is what's actually possible. My task manager used to be omnifocus, then I moved to to do list. And now funny enough, I kind of moved everything over to air table. And air table is not designed. I will tell you right now as a to-do list app, whatsoever. It's really designed as a database. Think of it as like an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet with just a bunch of more functions. That's really what it is designed for. But the only reason I moved over to that is originally because I have so many meetings, I start moving all of my meeting notes and ingestion of data from meetings into air table. So I would always know like, oh, you know, I can tell how many meetings I had with books. I can tell how many meetings I had with x, y and z. What the meeting notes were, the transcript, it would have a link to the transcript file that's somewhere in my Google drive. So it would be kind of like a source of truth for everything. And then I thought, okay, well, every meeting generates five to 10 action items. So I might as well put them in air table as well. And then I was trying to figure out, okay, how do I then organize my own projects and my own things then. And funny enough, I just, because I use open claw and I use this other agent called Hermes or some people call Hermes, I have these like two AI agents working at all times. And they kind of help me surface all the action items. But they also take action on the action items themselves. So for example, they have permission to do research on certain things. So a classic example was a client who I'm implementing AI for as, hey, I would love to be able to read all the Slack messages in every single Slack room that we have. And then create like a digest or summary of what actually happens on Slack. And the reason for that is they have multiple locations and every location is its own Slack room. And so for him to be on top of what's going on in every location, he would have to manually go to every single Slack room, kind of read what's going on there. And then figure out, okay, what do I do with this information? But now obviously with AI, you can have it scan all your Slack rooms. And I was trying to figure out how to do this. And the meeting essentially created an action item says, hey, research how to scan in the digest all Slack rooms. And because these AI agents, they check the board every hour or so. They pick up research tasks, because they have permissions to do research. So when I log into the board, in this case, air table, I can go sometimes already see that the research task is marked as done. And then they'll put the artifact or the deliverable in air table. So now when I'm looking at a task, I can go, hey, it's already done. I just have to read the digest of it and then move forward with that. So I didn't have to do the research already did it for me. So that's been a major unlock. And the thing I feel like I'm still a bit of a dinosaur on this while have this amazing AI stuff going on. I feel like my notes, I'm still stuck with every note where I'm like, okay, this is like, I'm waiting for bending spoons to do something revolutionary. I've been waiting for the latest version. It came out, still hasn't drastically changed anything the way I do stuff. So I might make it over to the obsidian camp at some point where I just go full on text only and just have the LLM's kind of like ingest everything, make a kind of like what do you call an indexable search for stuff and just go from there. I think that's probably where I'm going to end up with. You're not the first person that I've heard say that they've actually just kind of moved away from task management apps period. You need somewhere to put the things that you need to do. So in your case, it's air table. I've heard other people are using obsidian for this and just a markdown file for each task or whatever. And as long as you have somewhere to collect this stuff, they're like, why do I bother having a task management app and like tick things off and that type of thing. When I can just like, like you said, have the LLM do the heavy lifting and be like, "Hey, what should I work on today? What are the important things? What's due soon? You need a way to know what it's due, of course." And just like again, again with the theme, they're not even bothering with this concept of checklists and tutelists like we've all think of, it's just working through the LLM and having the LLM be your interface to the things you need to do. And I'm not there yet. I still use omnipocus, but I definitely get what you're saying, which is maybe we don't need task management as much as we did in the past, which is a pretty crazy thing for us to be saying on the productivity show. But it seems to be going that way. Yeah, I mean, I changed my mind every few weeks on AI, future of work and apps and tools. If you asked me a few months ago, I was like, "Okay, SaaS is going to be dead. AI is taking everything over." Now I'm like, you know, I think SaaS is still going to be valuable, especially when you have distribution and lots of partners. And it can be a great place for like a network effect of certain things. But so many niche apps and tools I think are going to go away. So for example, we talked about the Cali tracking app, right? Like one of my favorite apps that I like that I still use today is called Solver, SOULVR Solver. And the sole purpose of solver is that you can do kind of like napkin math in a nap. That's basically the whole purpose of it. And that's the only function that serves is like you type in five X is 80 cents each, broccoli is a dollar or two. You know, I want to buy some apples. Each apple is 80 cents, multiply that times three. And it will tell you right away like in a running log of like what things cost. And it's a beautiful interface. It's very nice to use. And it's the sole function of it. But like that is going to go away at some point too, where you just have a scratch pat AI that can do that plus a bunch of other things in real time, right? 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So even open AI, like recently released, I think it's called real-time OSS, where when you have a web app that you made, you can literally just talk to it and it will change stuff on the website as you're talking to it. So you can check boxes off, update meeting notes, a bunch of different things real-time, which I think is where things are going to be going and I'm playing around with it myself. And so it's going to change our apps and tools and tech stack. Now one of the things that I think doesn't change, which I'm still a huge fan of, I'm curious what you are using Brooks is. The password manager is still one of my most used apps, but here's the cool thing. Your AI agents, as they need to log into stuff for you, can now use one password as well. So one password has been smart enough to be able to allow, for example, AI agents to get a one-time login to, like let's say a website, to be able to log into a website for you on your behalf using the terminal or CLI to do stuff for you. And so they've been kind of embracing it, which is cool to see because I'm definitely more in the camp of any app and tool I'm using right now. If it's allowing MCP, API, or like a CLI tool for the AI agents to help you do stuff, that's the app and tool I'm going to pick right now over other things. Oh, that's so interesting. I actually didn't know that about one password, but it does make sense. Like if you think about it, when I first joined AE, AE was on last pass, I think, right? If I remember. And the sole reason for that is because there was team members where that you wanted to be able to log in to different tools and apps or whatever, but perhaps didn't want necessarily to share the password with. And so the password manager allowed that to happen. And employee could still get their job done, but you don't have the security risk of having a password out there somewhere. And I never thought about that with with these AI agents and stuff like that. It's such a needed thing to do something very similar. And so it's great to know that is a thing with these password managers. I didn't know that. So Brooks, if you look at your own stack, right, where AI has been coming in, you're using Clod more. What are still some tried and true apps that you're using to this day? And what are some new things that have been recently, maybe the like last few months, have made it into your stack and system? I think tried and true for my journaling and weekly review and stuff like that. I still use day one. Now that is something I've been thinking about to this topic that we've been having that I'm like, now that I'm more in on Obsidian, why am I using day one for this stuff when I could do it just as easily in Obsidian. And that opens all that up to not to my to Clod and stuff like that. So day one is an app I still use, but I am actually on the bubble because of this topic we've been talking about of moving over. So that's I would say that's one that that I've been sticking with at least so far even through this. How about you? Do you have any that are like that are sticking with you, even though maybe hasn't made the full move over to AI world? I mean, every no for me is definitely the number one and I'm actively trying to move away from that because I think yeah, it's just not going to be there forever. Other tried and true text expander is still extremely valuable to me just because yes, I'm still typing sometimes even though I'm using whisper flow for many things because there's a template responses that are really helpful. And whisper flow you can actually have template responses as well. So for example, if I say my address, it will actually put in the full address of my address as I'm verbally saying stuff and then dictating it on screen. So that's been super helpful. Although you have to be a little bit more mindful about what you do inside of whisper flow because I don't always wanted to showcase my address when I'm saying my address. So there's a little bit of a learning curve there trying to figure out how that works. Other tried and true for me is Spotify. I think still I've been using it since 2009, 2010. So if you look at the LTV for what I pay for Spotify, I got to be one of their top customers at this point. I remember streaming Spotify through a VPN because I liked it so much when they were restricted for only two particular countries and I still use it to this day. So still love that. Hasikao, still there, my main calendar system with Google in the background. A new app and tool that is super powerful that I've been using is TailScale. So TailScale allows you to set up a private VPN. And so the use case for me is I have like four different desktop machines at home, like two Macb me niece, a Mac studio, and then like an ASUS GX10, which is a Linux box, all for different AI agents and kind of like AI work that I'm doing. And I only have one monitor. So what I do oftentimes is I will remotely log into the different machines and then I actually do work on there because they have no monitor. And the way you can do that is if you use TailScale and you install it on every single machine, you can add every machine to a private network. So they all have their own IP address. But if I give that IP address to you Brooks, it wouldn't exist because it's in a virtual private network. It's only existing in that network, that particular IP address. And so you can only be part of that network if you're part of the TailScale sort of accounts, if that makes sense. And so it's a really easy way to secure your own network and put your machines in that network that are only maybe sort of quote unquote visible or connectable if you're part of that network. And so that's been super helpful and I think it's very underrated. And this has been even more powerful when I was in Mexico City two weeks ago for a wedding. And I was logging into my machines at home. And so I used a VPN like NordVPN is what I used to for my basic VPN use. And then I would because I'm logged into TailScale, I had NordVPN log into TailScale, which is my private VPN, to then be able to log into my computers at home and then continue to do the work. So it's like double level of security. And it gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing that things are secure that way. So that's something I recommend people use. I also think the Mac screen sharing app, something I start using a lot more now, simply because I have these machines at home and I need to log into them and do stuff. So I know Brooks, you can see this, but some people can't because we do an audio only podcast here is I think I might have mentioned I upgraded to a 49 inch curve monitor. And now I have upgraded to a 52 inch Dell monitor, which is semi curve and it's massive. Like, I know you can look at me, Brooks, but like I can look at the corners and the corners feel far away. That's how big it is. So I can have like four by four rows of apps and full screen essentially doing work and do stuff. And so the reason I bring this up is I only want monitor before machines. I virtually log into every single machine. So I have like screen sharing apps open on different parts of my monitors. So they're all like doing their own like sort of AI work on there instead of having potentially four monitors for computers. So been loving that. And then similar screen sharing app is called jump desktop, which is something I've been using as well. Man, I'm just as you're talking. I'm sitting here looking at my 30 inch monitor and just thinking, wow, 50 something monitor inch monitor would be amazing. It's pretty tempting, but sounds pretty expensive too. Yeah, it's I only upgraded because I ran into real limitations where with the 49 inch, I could have four windows open like side by side by side by side, which was great. It was a huge upgrade. But then I found the needs for having like a second row. And it was like, I mean, these are all first world problems again, me wrong. Like, I felt the need to have like a different apps open to be able to monitor stuff to see these AI agents coding and building and researching and doing stuff. And so it was a natural fit to kind of like upgrade and made sense for me, but I would never upgrade from a 30 inch to a 52 that would be too crazy. One other app that I've just started using that I've been enjoying is called home control. So we've talked in a previous episode about automation, home automation. And I said I've pretty much decided that I'm not doing anything unless it works with home kit slash Apple home, whatever it's called these days. And yeah, you can you can do control centers and stuff like that from your Mac or your device to control these things. But there's a third party app called home control. And what it does is it puts a menu bar icon where you can then control all of your home automation devices right from your menu bar. But also it can generate a little internal URL for each device, which you can then use with Apple shortcuts with a stream deck with keyboard mice are like any any kind of automation you're doing, you can then like send a URL to one of your devices to turn it on and off or do whatever you want with it. And so it's just like another level of automation for Apple home automation. Now, if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, it's not going to do you much good. But if you are and you find yourself wanting to control things from your computer a lot versus grabbing your phone, home control is a nice interface for doing that. Are you still using bartender kind of like set up like older little apps that are included with set up? Yep, definitely use set up and that is usually the place I go to first. If there's something I want to do, I will usually go to set up and check and see if they have something that will do it. So yeah, I use bartender still still a little flaky for me for some reason. I don't know if something on my computer or what, but it's probably the best tool out there for that sort of thing. Okay, what about like drop zone? I know you were a fan of that right like screenshotting apps like what are you using for that nowadays? Yeah, so I am a big drop zone user. So drop zone for those who don't know is kind of like the type of app it's called is a shelf which it goes on your menu bar. And if you're working with a file and that type of thing and maybe you want to like have a temporary place to put it before you do something else with it, you can drag a file up to that shelf. It sits there and then when you're in another folder, you can like drag it off to copy it or move it. So that's one thing it can do. You can also set up different actions. So if you maybe have a FTP site that you upload things to or AWS or if you have like certain folders, you can set those up in your drop zone as well. So you just drag the icon up there and then drop it on the location you want it to go for those frequently used locations. You can also do automations and this is actually something I've been doing with cloud cloud a little more is is if there's these certain like little things I do all the time because I use drop zone I'll go to cloud and say, Hey, I want to make a drop zone action that will always resize these images to 300 or I want a drop zone action that will automatically split up my banking download file per account. You know that like these little things and then I put make them into drop zone. So now I just need if say I have that banking download, I just drag it onto the icon in drop zone and it will automatically take that kind of action. So I've never got around to learning how to create those things, those actions, but now I don't need to. I can just go to use LLM and have it make it for me. Oh, that is so smart. Yeah. As you were saying that I can see a lot of different use cases for that. But then also one of the barriers for me don't keep automating a lot of things on my computer was those Apple scripts because I don't know how to write code in Apple script. But now that I think about it, why not tell cloud to create these like automations for you with Apple script? That's so easy to do. Or in fact, if you really want to take it a step further, cloud now has computer use as well, where if you talk to it, it will actually take over your screen. So you'll see it like using your mouse and your monitor kind of gets orangely tinted. And so that's when you know when cloud is working and we'll take over your mouse and click around and do stuff. And I'm a big fan of cloud. I will say codex, which is kind of like originally started off as a coding agent for open AI or chat GBT codex is kind of like the advanced version of chat GBT. It's a desktop app. It's also available in the terminal. And I've been really loving it too. It's still early to tell how much better it is. I think it's on par with cloud in many ways, but I've been using cloud for just so much longer. So I kind of know how good it is, how powerful it is, what it can do, what it cannot do. So codex is really, really impressive. And I've been tinkering about how to use both of them at the same time because they're very similar in many ways, but have their own strengths and weaknesses and computer use in codex is actually even better than in cloud and even faster as well. Because once you give a permission to your computer, you can start off by saying, hey, you know, I'm thinking about my planning my day. Oh, by the way, could you send this text message to Brooks? And then we'll open up messages and just send you a text message right away. It can do stuff like that from like the codex, quote unquote command center, a lot of us treat cloud right now as a command center where you can do a lot of things because once you connect it to your apps and tools, it can do a lot of things, but it's mostly limited to web based stuff. Whereas with codex, codex can do web based stuff, but it can also do stuff on your computer much more efficiently. So it can open up Spotify on your computer and play different music. It can send the text message. It can open up your grid and all that pull in a meeting note from there, even though there's an MCP server for it as well. So there's a lot of things it could be doing that I think is making automation even simpler now. And like if you created a new automation playbook or even a course, if you may well, you could literally just focus on codex and it could like automate the whole thing on your computer. So I've been really excited diving deeper into this and I maybe we can do a whole episode on just like computer automation with these AI tools because there's a lot of cool things you could be doing other than just having it organize your downloads folder, which for a lot of people who are already mind blowing when you showed them that in in co work or even your desktop, but there's like so much more you could be doing. Yeah, and hey, the more competition the better the more the more tools there are that do all these things the better all of them will get so Claude open AI perplexity, Gemini like, you know, bring it on. Let's let's have them all get better make each other better. Okay, fun question before we wrap it up here, Brooks, what is an app or tool that maybe you want to make yourself or you wish existed but doesn't exist yet. Because I think we all as we use more apps and tools there's always like, I wish this existed or I kind of want to make this now it's kind of technically possible nowadays, but a lot of things. So I'm curious, but what's on your mind there? Oh, good question. I think it would be nice to have an app that like there's a lot of there's a lot of CSB manipulation I do and I've I've had Claude to you know drinking game mentioned Claude again do a lot of it for me, but I think if I was to have time I would sit down and have it make a actual app that again I do. I don't wouldn't need to like do things from the command center just like create one and and just I draw I drop it on on the app and it was exactly what needs to be done and it goes off and does it. And again, this is all possible like you said right now doing all this stuff through the through the interface and stuff like that, but it wouldn't be nice to have like an actual real app that does it. How about you what's your dream that comes to mind right away, you know, because I've been so head deep with all this stuff I've been building a lot of things that just don't exist and one of my favorite apps is I called a mission control, but basically when I go to my mission control, which technically is a web app. It allows me to see all the meetings I had in the past few days and also today and then all the transcripts related to them because it will pull the transcripts on the meetings and then it will create like a list of action items that are in there on the same screen. And so when I go to a particular meeting, I can exactly see what the meeting was about what we talked about and then also a list of action items that are part of the meeting. But then if I want I can mark them as done so I can say this is done, but the other cool thing is that I can also have a bundle that's like a little robot icon if I click on that it will fire off. Claude or code X or one of my agents to then execute the task so then it will actually do for me so I'm just like firing off an agent to execute this task on my behalf that has been my favorite thing that build. So that every time I'm going to my mission control, I just go, okay, what agents can I fire off that to just do to work for me instead of me doing it. And it could be as simple as like, hey, drafting email as a follow up today's or hey create a proposal for this particular prospect or you said, hey, let's touch, let's touch base and again in about two months and see where we're at. Like that would be like a little thing I would always make somewhere else to do like a reminder system somewhere here and there, but now if I just clicked up on it will just create the reminder for me and then remind me again in two months. So like I've been working on this like little bridges here and there of just making that work and that's been really fun and making my life a lot easier so I can just kind of get a sense of where I'm at what meetings I had what action items need to be done. And then on the dashboard that will kind of show me also the task that I didn't finish out where the due dates are so past and then I can decide, okay, do I market done delete it, you know, the for or again, fire off an agent to do this like imagine having omnifocus open and you just say, hey, Claude, go do this. And it would just do it for you right that's kind of like what I built myself so I'm really enjoying that's and if a listener has an app or tool idea that you want to see created let us know you must have podcasted Asian fish and see calm we will left to hear from you. And as always like to end our episodes with an action item so what I like to think about for this week is what is an app or tool that you could be integrating with your AI platform that you're using because if you can combine the tool you absolutely love and use already with an AI tool that you're also using and they can then start talking to each other. You start to unlock this whole new world of leverage that didn't exist prior that I think is extremely powerful so I for example didn't know that fantastical had an mcp today and now I do and now I'm already excited thinking about all the ways we can actually create leverage here so what's an app or tool that you're using a lot and figure out hey, do to have an mcp server do to have an API if so tell it to your chat to be to your claw to integrate it with what you're using and I think you'll be surprised what it can do so that is your actions that for this week. Thank you again for listening to the pro tip to show really appreciate you leave us a review on apple podcasts or Spotify helps us grow the show and that we'll see you again next week.