Favorite Productivity Tools
By Jasongoldberg · September 12, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Favorite Productivity Tools
When I'm not commercing, I'm thinking about how to be more efficient at commercing.
I've been a productivity nerd since I found David Allen's Getting Things Done in 2001. I live on a Mac, and like most of us I run a pile of tools. But there's a short list that gives me actual joy every time I touch them. Usually because they took the friction out of something I do fifty times a day, or because they solved a problem I hadn't consciously registered as a problem.
Six of them:
• Raycast. My Spotlight replacement, and the app I use most in a normal day. Launcher, file search, window manager, clipboard history, text snippets, and now the front end for most of my quick AI queries. I was on Alfred for years and loved it. Raycast's pace of development is what moved me.
• CleanShot X. Every screenshot I take, and I take a lot of them. Hotkeys for each capture type, full scrolling page captures, annotation, video. I used Snagit for a decade. CleanShot does the same work with a fraction of the bloat.
• 1Password. I honestly do not know a single one of my passwords. It also holds my two-factor codes and passkeys, so they follow me to every device instead of being stranded on one phone. It's the first thing I install on any new machine.
• PopClip. Tiny utility, enormous daily payoff. Highlight text anywhere on the Mac and it offers the thing you probably want to do with it: search it, open the URL, change the case, drop the address into Maps. I constantly forget it isn't part of the operating system.
• Readwise Reader. My archive for everything I read. One hotkey saves the article, the original link, and my tags. Excellent search. It also has an MCP connection, so my AI agent can search my own reading history as a primary source when I start a new project. That part genuinely changed how I work.
• Mylio Photos. Roughly 60,000 photos of stores, shelves, and retail experiences from a career of fieldwork. Mylio keeps all of it synced across my devices, stored locally, with no cloud requirement if you don't want one.
One thing two of these have in common: Raycast and Mylio talk to their users constantly and then ship what those users asked for. Which, I'll admit, makes me a little resentful of a few legacy apps I'm stuck using every day.
I wrote the longer version, with the actual reasoning behind each pick which is linked in the comments below.
I'm less interested in whether you like my list and more interested in what's missing from it. What's the tool you'd have expected to see, or the one that gives you the most joy? Mylio Raycast Readwise 1Password Steve Holden Kelly Goetsch