Capture, Navigate, Communicate - Tools That Get Out of Your Way
My go-to productivity stack for Mac and Windows. These tools sync across devices and feel like an extension of yourself - capture ideas, navigate apps, and communicate visually, all in seconds.
The best tools are the ones you stop noticing. They sync across your phone and computer, respond instantly, and never make you think about how to use them. They just work - like another limb.
Here's my toolkit for flying on the keyboard.
Quick Reference
| Category | Mac | Windows | Cross-Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launcher | Raycast | Flow Launcher | - |
| Screenshot & Annotation | Shottr | ShareX | - |
| Calendar & Tasks | - | - | TickTick on Google Calendar |
| Voice Capture | - | - | Voicenotes |
| Quick Capture | - | - | TickTick |
| Permanent Capture | - | - | Notion |
| LLM Access | - | - | Claude desktop app (was T3.chat, deprecated) |
The Details
Launcher
Mac: Raycast
Windows: Flow Launcher
Stop clicking through folders or hunting for apps. A launcher lets you open anything with a few keystrokes. Type, enter, done. Once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one.
Screenshot & Annotation
Visual communication is faster than explaining with words. Capture, annotate, share - all in under 5 seconds. No clunky menus, no unnecessary clicks. Just quick, clean annotations that get the point across.
Calendar & Task Management
My choice: TickTick on top of Google Calendar
Whether you use one app or separate ones, the key is time-boxing - blocking time for tasks directly in your calendar. It turns vague to-do lists into committed time slots. TickTick does both in one place, which keeps things simple.
Google Calendar is the infrastructure underneath: it holds the events and syncs with everyone else's calendars. But about 90% of the time I look at it through TickTick, so tasks and time blocks sit on the same screen.
Voice Capture
My choice: Voicenotes
Sometimes you're walking, driving, or just feel like talking instead of typing. Voicenotes is reliable and handles multiple languages in a single recording - it transcribes correctly even when you switch mid-sentence.
Quick Capture vs. Permanent Capture
Quick capture: TickTick
Permanent capture: Notion
These serve different purposes:
- Quick capture is dump-and-go. One keyboard shortcut, get the thought out of your head, hit enter, move on. Don't overthink it.
- Permanent capture is structured storage. Things you'll reference later, manipulate, or build upon. Notion works well for this - organized, searchable, flexible.
LLM Access
My choice now: Claude, with the desktop app as my harness
The harness turned out to matter more than the model. The desktop app works on my files, runs tools, and connects to TickTick, Google Calendar and Notion. It sits inside the same stack as everything else on this page, not in a browser tab next to it.
Deprecated: T3.chat (my pick until March 2026)
T3 put popular models under one affordable payment. GPT-4, Claude and others, without juggling subscriptions. Good pricing, simple interface.
That's the stack. The goal isn't to have the most tools - it's to have tools that disappear into your workflow. When everything is one shortcut away, you stop thinking about the tools and start thinking about the work.
Fly on your keyboard.