On Tools & Fake Productivity

2026

I hate Notion and the whole genre of build-it-yourself productivity apps. Don’t get me wrong, they are well-engineered products. But the problem is that they give us the dopamine of making progress towards a goal that we mistake for real work, leaving us spending the entire evening managing goals rather than finishing them.

I used to live for this. I used to customize everything. As a kid, I modded every game and ran an unhealthy amount of Rainmeter on Windows. I even went down the Emacs rabbit hole and learned Lisp just to write configs before I moved to VS Code for its simplicity and how it let me focus on my work. This was the moment I stopped treating every tool as a project.

A tool should get you from point A to B. You shouldn’t have to pave a new road just to reach a destination. Too many productivity apps begin with homework; Before you can do your work, you have to design how you’ll work. Notion is notorious for this; it calls itself a productivity app, yet it manufactures extra work before you can even start your original goal. If a system requires you to manage its infrastructure, it is actively failing at its job.

Customization should stem from curiosity, not necessity. My setup today includes Ghostty, Zed, and Claude Code; they get this balance right. They work out of the box, but are still highly customizable.

At the end of the day, we should spend less time managing infrastructure, and more time shipping.