Some of my favourite tools
And how I use them as a solopreneur
Obligatory note: this is not a sponsored post and I have no relationship with these companies. I just really like these tools and want to share them with you.
One of the best things about being a solopreneur in 2025 is the sheer number of tools and apps you can use to be productive without hiring more people. This is great. It saves money, keeps your operations simpler, and lets you get to know your own business more deeply before the time comes to delegate.
In this post, I wanted to highlight some of favourite tools. This isn't a full list of tools I rely on in my business, which is a heck of a lot longer! These are just the tools I’m most excited about, either because they've recently solved a pressing problem or because they’ve proven to be steady workhorses over the years.
Here they are.
OmniFocus
If I had to pick one tool that I can’t live without, it’s OmniFocus. I’ve been using it for a decade now. It’s easily one of the biggest contributors to my success, sanity, and happiness.
But you can’t talk about OmniFocus without talking about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) framework. What makes OmniFocus so great is that it is the tool that lets you implement GTD in the digital age.
When you first encounter GTD, it can appear rigid and overcomplicated. But once you internalize it, it’s the opposite: it’s freeing. It clears the mental clutter and anxiety, so your attention is available for deep, creative work. It also builds trust that everything that needs to get done will get done. When unexpected crises pop up, you can attend to them in the moment, knowing that everything is parked safely and waiting for you. When you go on vacation, you can switch off completely, because you know that diving back into the work when you get back won’t be painful.
I use the OmniFocus Inbox to capture everything that needs to be done as I encounter it or think of it during the day (either directly in the app, or I can also send emails to it, or share to it from other apps). Roughly once a day, I go through the inbox and move each task to a project or area of focus. I also check the timeline view to make sure nothing is overdue, and to have a feel for what’s coming due soon.
Every Monday morning, I do my weekly review, which is a separate OmniFocus view. I review each project and area of focus, and make sure the actions in each make sense given the larger goals. I make sure that each project or area of focus is either on hold or has at least one next action flagged. I also check to make sure nothing is overdue.
I then go to the view that allows me to see all flagged next actions and defer them according to which day I plan to work on them that week. Then, when each day comes, I have a set of tasks I plan to do for that day, marked according to priority and context, with everything else hidden from view and not causing me anxiety.
One of OmniFocus’ powerful features is the different views that separate capturing what needs to be done, processing when it needs to be done, and doing it. You can also create your own custom views. I separate out personal and work views for example. You can also filter tasks by customized contexts, like “errands” or “computer” or “low energy”, so you work on what makes sense at a given time.
The other powerful feature is that it makes a distinction between “defer” dates and “due” dates. When something is due, that’s a serious thing. But sometimes you just want to defer something to start working on next week even though it’s not due for a month. Without this distinction, people tend to use due dates to defer when they plan to start working on a tak, which then devalues the seriousness of real due dates.
The most meaningful consequence of doing all of the above is that I can give myself whole days or even blocks of several days where I can ignore OmniFocus and just do creative work driven by my own curiosity and motivation, and know that nothing is going to fall off my radar, because it is safety stored in a system I trust. I think David Allen calls this “mind like water”.
But you can’t deny that it’s complicated (at least before it becomes second nature), and OmniFocus is what made GTD workable for me. At the same time, GTD is what makes OmniFocus worth it. The two are inseparable in my mind.
So while I highly recommend OmniFocus, I only recommend it if you’re willing to adopt some version of GTD as your productivity/sanity framework.
MyMind
GTD already helped me solve most of my organizational challenges. Resources that are related to projects or areas of focus get stored in folders in my computer. Tasks that are related to projects or areas of focus live in OmniFocus. But where do I put the random, interesting things I come across that might be useful later, but don’t fit neatly into a project or area of focus?
I tried bookmarks. I tried saving files. I tried storing things in OmniFocus. I tried apps like are.na (which is great for other things, but not this). None of it worked. It was all too messy with too much overhead. I struggled with this for years until I discovered MyMind about four months ago. Now I finally feel like my system is complete.
I guess you can kind of think of MyMind as similar to Pinterest, but it’s not a social media. There is no algorithm. It’s just yours. And the interface is beautiful.
You can store everything in it: personal notes, documents, photos (I frequently take snapshots of passages from physical books I read), links, quotes, etc. You can save items from your browser, either by storing the full link or just highlighted text or other media like images. The most important thing for me is to not have to think about how I want to categorize something when I come across it. I just want the lowest friction way to capture it. MyMind is perfect for that.
The second most important thing for me is that I want to be able to engage with the stuff I captured in a meaningful way. In MyMind, it all gets displayed on a simple, beautiful visual board. You don’t have to organize it, because the search is good, but you can add tags and notes if you want. You can create “spaces” which are like smart folders that collect things based on predefined Boolean search terms. And there’s a “serendipity mode” that surfaces random items you’ve saved, letting you either keep or delete them.
I love serendipity mode. It scratches the same itch as scrolling social media, but without the baggage. Sometimes I rediscover something inspiring and dive into it. Sometimes I just feel done after a few minutes. It also lets you curate the collection in an enjoyable way, so you don’t feel like you’re just collecting junk in the long run.
I haven’t tried yet, but apparently there is a way to export all the data if you want to leave, which is important as well.
Airtable
I first encountered Airtable when I was at IBM. It felt like a colourful, heavier version of Excel. I was a bit nervous using it at first, because my first encounters were on shared bases (Airtable projects) and I was scared I would break something someone else had built. But once I started building my own things, I realized how awesome it is.
Unlike Excel or Google sheets, which are spreadsheet applications, Airtable is a relational database like SQL. But rather than interacting with the database through queries, Airtable feels like a spreadsheet application. The super intuitive interface makes it much easier to interact with the data. The cool thing is that after using it for a while, I developed a practical feel for databases, which later made it easier to work with tools like Supabase, which do use queries, since I had the right schema in my head.
At IBM, I used Airtable for various projects that required collecting and sharing information with different people (like collecting and consolidating all quantum computing demos that were being developed across multiple divisions and making that available to different stakeholders who wanted different levels of detail).
In the last year, in my own business, I've used Airtable to:
build and run my own lightweight QuickBooks clone for bookkeeping
manage a CRM (I recently started using HubSpot for that, but it's more than I need, so I think I will go back to my custom Airtable one)
maintain my personal database of the quantum tech ecosystem
collect workshop feedback through Airtable forms
manage community memberships for Academics in the Wild
prototype social media content calendars for clients
Airtable is really good for organizing and managing data, but it's also really good for presenting and interacting with that data. It has really powerful filtering options and different kinds of views, dashboard, and integrations like maps etc. I think it's super flexible and my default tool when I need to make some kind of custom app that manages data.
LeadDelta
LeadDelta is a sidebar that sits on top of LinkedIn. So to motivate LeadDelta, I need to talk about LinkedIn first.
I use LinkedIn a lot. Yes, it’s cringe. Yes, I have a lot of the same bad feelings about it as you do. But I also probably have some good feelings about it that you might not have.
For me, it’s where I share what I’m excited about, showcase my work, get feedback on that work, start conversations, and get feedback on incomplete lines of thought. I know you can do that on other socials, but somehow I haven’t had success building an audience on other platforms, while on LinkedIn I have enough of an audience that it makes it fun to post.
The other way I use LinkedIn is as a place to meet new and interesting people, which follows on from the way I use the platform as discussed above. When I post certain things, it attracts people who are interested in similar things, and often we connect and get to know each other. It also lets me seek out interesting people through their filtered search function. People are more likely to accept my requests to connect and chat when they check out my profile and see that our interest are aligned. I also use it to stay in touch with new and interesting people I meet in person.
While LinkedIn is really great at helping you find new and interesting people, it isn’t very good at helping you keep track of why you thought they were interesting in the first place. I meet a lot of people and I often find myself either wanting to introduce people to each other, or people reach out to me asking if I know someone looking for a job or looking to hire in a particular area, or people ask me to give a talk or go on a panel and when I can’t do it, I try to suggest an alternative person. Usually this relies on my memory, and therefore suffers from recency bias (if we spoke in the last week, you’re more likely to get recommended).
This is where LeadDelta comes in. It lets you attach metadata to people’s LinkedIn profiles, which is then stored in your LeadDelta account. Whenever you go back to the LinkedIn profile, the metadata is there in the sidebar. It also lets you do that to profiles you’re not connected with. That metadata is in the form of notes, tags, and tasks, which you can filter or search through. This is great when you want to remember how you met someone or something else about them, whether they’re in a certain industry, technical or not, or looking for work, or if you want to reach out to them later.
You could, in theory, manage this in your CRM. But that would have more of an overhead. Actually, I think LeadDelta positions itself as a CRM, but I don’t quite use it that way. Also, I like keeping a distinction between people I think of as clients/potential clients, which I keep in my CRM, and the broader group of interesting people I don’t want to lose track of, which I flag in LeadDelta.
RescueTime
RescueTime is my tool for keeping track of what I actually do with my work time. It runs in the background on my computer and, when I want, I can open the interface and review the breakdown.
I think the main use case for RescueTime is supposed to be enhancing productivity. So it categorizes things into focused work, social media, procrastination, etc, and tells you how you did that day. I can see that being useful. But I don’t really use it for that.
The way that I mainly use it is to track how much time I spend on projects for clients. I know you can technically just do that with a spreadsheet or on paper, but I think that works best when you plan to be spending the next half hour or whatever on a task. The way I work is a lot more fluid and context-driven, so I find it much better to just work on what makes sense at any given time and then go back at the end of the day and categorize.
The way I do that is using RescueTime’s TimeSheets feature, which has a daily timeline where you can see everything you’ve worked on at any given time of the day. It’s split into 15 minute blocks, but you can click on it and drill down further if you need to. The information it displays is either the local app + filename or the browser + website you were actively using at any given time. This is detailed enough that you can quickly tell what project you were working on and assign a block to a client or whatever. Then, whenever you like, you can generate a report for some time span, say a month, for a given project or client.
That’s super useful for me. It makes reporting very easy for clients where I am tracking hours. But even for project-based clients, where the pricing is value-based, knowing how much “hands-on” work a project took is still important as a sanity check.
It also helps me take stock of how much time I spend on internal work versus client work, which is also worth knowing.
A note on note-taking apps
You might notice I haven’t listed any note-taking apps here. That’s because I’ve never found a single one that does everything I want. I know people swear by Notion, but after giving it three solid tries, I still didn’t fall in love with it.
Eventually I stopped looking for one perfect app. Instead, I use different apps for different contexts. This works perfectly for me. I have a whole philosophy about this, so I’ll write about it in a separate post on note-taking apps and how I use them (here it is).
What about you?
What are your favourite apps that you can’t live or work without?
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Looking forward to the post on note-taking. (I feel the "not falling in love with Notion" part.) :)
A really worthy post.