I’m revisiting some of my everyday tools as we head into 2026. Why? Because… reasons…
Mostly, I’m thinking about how I move through my days and how I combine analog and digital tools to keep my monkey brain moving and productive.
Tool 1: I’ve moved away from Google Search. Face it, friends: it’s trash. Whether beset by so many ads you can’t find actual sites or that actual, worthwhile sites are pushed further and further down the page because of the ongoing enshittification of Google and other services, I’ve switched to Kagi.
I won’t go into all the details of why here (soon), but suffice it to say that Kagi just works like a good search engine should. Yes, I now pay for the privilege of decent web searches. Or, I ask ChatGPT for an awful lot of things before I try any searches at all.
Tool 2: I’m abandoning Notion for all but one thing, and that’s tracking my reading. I’ve got a database for all my books (read, TBR, and want to buy) in a Notion database and using a tool called NotionReads, I can easily add books to the database, pulling necessary data for each book.
I thought about just using a Google Sheet for this purpose, but Notion works well for this process. For my daily note capture and digital Zettelkasten, I’m moving to Obsidian. I’ve had it for a few years but initially went with Notion for note-taking. However, after dealing with more software bloat than I wanted and only seeing more of it on the horizon for Notion – why do we always want a tool to do everything rather than just doing one thing really well? – I’m jumping ship to Obsidian.
I’m still using Readwise to capture highlights from the web and the few remaining Kindle books I’ve yet to read – more on my shift from digital to physical books soon – and I can import those highlights seamlessly into Obsidian. I’m using Steph Ango’s usage strategy for setting up my Obsidian vault since it makes the most sense to my seeing-all-things-as-an-interconnected-web brain. More on how that progresses soon, too.
Pulling into the final year of my dissertation journey, there’s more to come from me this year. Besides, this year marks 20 years of publishing web content, so we’ll see what that brings.
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