Maria Antoniak



My Organizational Toolkit: Updates for 2024

A list of tools I’ve been using and my opinions about them.

Posts from past years:

This year, I was really inspired by other people, and especially by Mimansa Jaiswal’s post about the software she uses. I always pick up a lot of tips from my coworkers and from social media, and I love hearing what people are using.

I also finally had time, after an intensely busy year on the job market, to take stock and try some new things. I ended up changing the bulk of my workflow with only stalwarts like Are.na, Paperpile, and Google Drive surviving. I hope this will all set me up with a good foundation for starting faculty life in the summer and that there won’t be many more big changes in the coming year.

Disclaimer: As usual, if you are not excited by and enjoy reading about productivity and organization stuff, I advise you to skip this post. I find this all fun and relaxing, but I realize this could be stressful for others, especially someone starting out. You don’t need any of this stuff, and if you have a workflow that’s working for you, stick with that.


Some context about my preferences

My preferences might not be your preferences, but my choices will make more sense if you have some context.

I work on a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad. Everything needs to be compatible across Apple products.

Design matters to me. I like cute colors, light themes, and a minimal aesthetic. I want to feel cheerful and calm in my work environment. But also, there is a limit to how much time and efficiency I can sacrifice to making things look perfect.

Privacy and portability matter a lot to me, but I will make practical decisions when needed. I don’t want to be slowed down, but I will go out of my way to try tools that support encryption or let me easily export my data.

I like some AI integrations and can’t stand others. Just depends on the specific application and the cost/benefit tradeoff of whether I actually would use AI in that setting and how much privacy I’m sacrificing.

For all of these apps except one, I don’t discuss price. I use these tools every single work day, and I deeply appreciate the effort that went into building them.


Search: Kagi

Surprise, turns out that we don’t need Google anymore for search. I’ve been using Google nearly since I started using the internet; the last time I regularly used a different search engine, that search engine was Ask Jeeves. But times have changed and there’s just no reason to put up with the ads, the LLM-generated hallucinations, and the surveillance that Google thinks we need.

I was really skeptical going in, but after seeing multiple people recommend Kagi highly, including Vicki Boykis, I had to try.

Pros

Cons


Email: Apple Mail

I got a new job and with that came a new email address. Not so exciting was realizing that this new address was completely locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, with no ability to forward mail to another address. I could go on forever about how much I hate Outlook and the various security settings required by IT, but you probably already get it.

I went searching for ANY alternative that would play well with Microsoft and Apple Mail seemed like the only viable option. I’m not happy about any of this, but this is what I’m currently using. (Someone save me.)

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Code: VS Code

I’ve been using VS Code since my first Microsoft internship when one of the amazing engineers on our team told me to use it. He was 100% right, and I haven’t really tried anything else since. Maybe there are better options now? But this still works for me.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Terminal: Warp

I’d been using iTerm2 with Oh My Zsh for way too long, but since it was working, it wasn’t a priority for me to look into other options. I knew I needed a change, but it wasn’t until Mimansa Jaiswal posted about Warp that I suddenly dove in. I’m so glad I did! I feel like I’ve joined the modern world, and working in the terminal is fun again.

I haven’t fully explored Warp yet and I likely have a lot more to learn. But so far, very good.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Notes: Obsidian

You were all right about this one. It’s really good.

This is probably my biggest change of the year, along with my email/calendar changes. I was OBSESSED with Notion for two years (built so many templates, wrote so many notes, customized everything, spent days building my own tools to integrate with other apps), but I finally had to admit what I’ve known for a while… Notion was just not working for me the way I needed it to.

First, I just don’t like the way Notion looks. There’s limited customization, and I never felt good sitting in my Notion screen. Everything looked bloated and slow and weird. I hate the required internet connection, I hate how everything is geared towards teams instead of individuals, I hate how cluttered databases look, I hate the AI integration. I have zero trust in Notion the company as it’s clear from everything from pricing to design that I’m not their target user. And I’m never going to use Notion as a team; I wouldn’t make my students do that, and it’s too hard to collaborate with non-Notion users when you’re using Notion.

I did really love the project templates and workflows I created, but I was never using them because almost all of my projects now involve big collaborations and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides is infinitely easier and more accessible for all collaborators. Early in my PhD when I was doing more solo projects, this probably would have worked better, but definitely it’s not working for me as a collaborator and manager.

I finally realized that my previous workflow with Evernote+Things3, which I used for more than a decade before Notion, was better. I started going back to Evernote but remembered why I left (tl;dr still feels like it’s dying) and decided to finally try Obsidian.

I had some inaccurate perceptions of Obsidian. Something about its branding and marketing made me think it was some clunky Mastodon-like tool for people who don’t value design. And it DOES have a bit of that (the network visualizations makes me cringe, sorry not sorry). But it turns out you can easily escape this, and there are people building and customizing all kinds of cute and friendly wrappers.

I use Obisidian in most of the same ways that I used Notion and Evernote. I save my meeting notes (but not collaboration meeting notes, those all go in shared Google Docs), talk notes, brainstorming ideas, a rolodex of people I meet, a list of my professional goals, etc. I don’t use Obsidian for tasks as I prefer using Things3.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Papers: Paperpile

See my posts from past years. Still the best of bad options. They had some big updates this year, with a complete overhaul of the main app, a new Firefox browser extension, and more updates incoming, including a new iPad app.

I did play around with Zotero again, and I decided again that I don’t like it. Looks bad, code is messy and hard to work with if you want to build.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Bookmarks: Are.na

See posts from previous years. I LOVE ARE.NA! It’s like Pinterest, but good. I have probably 100+ boards for every topic and use Are.na as a combined Pinterest/bookmarks/web clipper.

One udpate is that you can now create shareable links even for private boards. This has made it a lot easier for me to use these boards for collaboration, e.g., to share papers or project inspiration.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Social Network: Bluesky

I love Bluesky, and I cannot stand Elon Musk and what he has done to Twitter. This feels like an absolute no brainer to me, and I’ve written before about why I think everyone should move, and why I like it more than hopeless Mastodon. LinkedIn (shudder) and Threads do not deserve critique.

I’ve listed somes cons but I just really cannot imagine these as dealbreakers, given the current landscape of alternatives.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Collaboration: Google Docs + Slack

They just work. When working with a team across multiple institutions, we need a way to keep in touch, ask quick questions, reference meeting notes, annotate data together, etc. These are the simplest and most accessible solutions.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Tasks: Things3

I’d used Things3 for a long time before switching to Notion and creating a custom Notion database for my tasks lists. When I realized that wasn’t working for me (see the section above about Obsidian), I went back to Things3.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Browser: Arc

I think I have my Ai2 colleague Luca Soldaini to thank for this browser change. Arc has been my first permanent browser switch away from Chrome since Chrome existed, and I’ve really enjoyed it despite some obvious flaws. However, it is no longer being actively maintained, and I’m not sure I can recommend it to new users. I anticipate switching away from Arc at some point in the coming year.

Overall, I’d rather be using Firefox, but every time I try to switch to Firefox, it’s slow and my extensions don’t work and it proves to be too frustrating. Still hopeful for the future though because I’m very ready to leave Chrome-based browsers behind.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Calendar: Fantastical

As described above, I’ve been trapped into using Microsoft for my email and calendar, after previously always using Google. I would go back to Google in a heartbeat if I could, but since I can’t, and since Outlook is terrible (see above), I was curious to try an alternative calendar that would integrate with Microsoft, work on Mac, and be pleasant to use.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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Scheduling: Cal.com

When people ask me for a meeting, I almost always respond with one of my Cal.com links. These links are set up by me ahead of time with different availability, time slots, Zoom links, and information, and they’re synced with my calendar and allow the recipient to book any available time that they prefer.

I so strongly recommend this tool, especially for people who are mentoring or managing and have a lot of one-off meetings that can’t be scheduled through shared corporate calendars. It saves everyone so much time, especially when time zones are involved. Bonus it can also be used just to show people when you’re available, even if they don’t schedule a meeting through the link.

I was using Calendly and was happy to support their company. But Cal.com has many more features and flexibility, and in particular, I wanted to set up mentoring meetings that automatically max out every day and week so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I’ve been using Cal.com for about six months now and don’t regret the switch at all.

But a mini rant goes here about academia and the non-use of calendars. If everyone would just use the university calendar system and share calendars with one another, it would save so much time. when2meet and similar meeting polls make me want to scratch my eyes out.

Pros

Cons

A glimpse into my workflow

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AI Chat: Claude

Yep I am paying a monthly fee for access to Claude. Couldn’t stomach paying OpenAI and heard many rave reviews about Claude so here I am. I like it and use it for very specific work stuff.

It’s good to be open about how we are all actually using these tools, so here’s what I’m using Claude for: programming and system questions, brainstorming paper titles, checking my emails for my tone, checking my social media posts for typos and clarity, brainstorming emojis for social media posts (I am silly), generating first drafts of talk abstracts and bios, reformatting lists of texts and numbers, occasionally for personal physical healthcare questions and research.

I do NOT use Claude for any private data for my research studies, I don’t have personal conversations about my relationships or mental health, and I try to also avoid physical healthcare but that’s harder given the hopeless state of the US healthcare system and the mysterious and incurable diseases faced by people close to me.

Pros

Cons


Other Tools


Physical Tools



December 31, 2024