I am trying my best this summer to become more productive. I’m not a serial doomscroller or anything, but I like making small, incremental improvements.
I figure I’m going to start keeping a timeline of my systems and routines to
see how things change over time (some of this is backfilled; I
started this in July of 2025).
timeline
#You can click on the tools/systems/etc. below to see my thoughts on them. Any date that doesn’t have an end means I’m still using it.
Tock (February 2026)
Apart from classes and meetings, I wanted a way to track how I spent my “working” time, so I’ve started using
Tock, a time-tracking CLI (it’s open-source, as most of my tools are). Does it make me more productive? I think so, because I always feel a little bad doing something other than Task X while the timer for Task X is running. You can also probably glean good insights from the data, but I haven’t really tried that yet.
Itsypad (February 2026)
The daily markdown file wasn’t really my jam because there was just too much friction to use it. I stumbled upon
Itsypad which is basically a perfect replacement. You can pull up the notepad with a hotkey, it uses very little energy, and it has clipboard history! Highly recommend.
Leechblock (November 2025)
Inspired by
Matt Might, I’m now using
Leechblock to block all social media on my computer for the majority of the day. It’s definitely
annoying, but helps me stay on task quite well.
Daily Markdown File (October 2025-February 2026)
After being tired of not having a place to collect all my random thoughts, I created a simple vim remap (<leader>tod) to take me to a daily.md file and dump any idea/long-term todo I have. (I call it daily.md because I can insert a daily heading with <leader>date!) So far it seems mildly useful, though I haven’t been using it every day. Doing so is my next goal.
Update February 2026: it was always just a bit too much time to get this file pulled up, so I’ve switched to using Itsypad (see above).
VimTeX (September 2025)
I setup VimTeX in the style of Gilles Castelle following Elijan Mastnak’s guide. There’s a pretty strong learning curve, but it’s great once you start to memorize your snippets.
Update January 2026: I initially used the Skim PDF reader but I found it annoying as when the PDF was in the “single-page continuous” view mode, it would flash black upon the LaTeX re-rendering on save. I just switched to Sioyek to avoid this issue and highly recommend it.
FlashSpace (July 2025)
I am now using
FlashSpace to manage spaces. I initially set up Aerospace but found it a bit clunky for my liking. I’m more of a one screen, one task guy, so I didn’t care at all about tiling and just wanted the space control. FlashSpace does this faster and more efficiently.
Social Media Blocking (July 2025)
It was becoming way to easy for me to just open twitter or reddit and doomscroll, so I’ve setup ublock to block the home screen for both of these apps (also youtube). I can still search for a youtube video or specific subreddits, but the algorithms are now effectively moot.
Grayscale Phone (June 2025)
Right when school ended for the 2024-2025 academic year, I finally committed to grayscaling my phone. At first it definitely made using it less appealing, but I think the only reason I’ve kept it around is because now the full color mode has become straining to look at. (The purpose of doing this right as school ended was to promote a summer lock-in, and I think I mostly succeeded!)
Mapping Ctrl + H/L to Mac Spaces Navigation (June 2025–July 2025)
This was because I was sick of using the trackpad to move between spaces. It was still a bit too slow for me, which is why I’ve since switched to FlashSpace.
Todoist (March 2025)
I had used Todoist for a bit before, but I tried to make it very low friction to use and it finally stuck this try. I absolutely love the natural language syntax.
ScreenZen (September 2024)
This is probably the single best decision I’ve ever made. Thank you Drew Gooden. My limit is 5 opens/app, 7 minutes each (for all social media).
After a year, I usually don’t even reach 1 open for each app.
Neovim (May 2024)
After using vanilla vim for a few months, neovim was a nice upgrade. I still use the same base (kickstart) config to this day. I try my best to keep my config files clean and keep my config minimal.
Vim (March 2024–May 2024)
It was recommended by my professor for Systems Programming I. Glad I stuck with it.
Meditation (January–March 2024)
I started meditating daily in January of 2024, but stopped by March. Don’t have a great explanation for why other than it became less of a priority. (Vim became my meditation.)