There’s this special breed of insanity that creeps up on you when productivity apps take over your life.

With me, it started nice and innocent, like a fluffy bunny that promises you clarity, decluttering your mind, and finally getting you to actually do shit.

But after a week, maybe two, and suddenly I was spiraling back into madness, tweaking nested tags and building automation chains that would make Skynet horny, and I was obsessively updating notes that only an algorithm could truly appreciate.

And next thing I know, my “productivity system” has devoured all of my time, my soul, and also my sanity.

I had crafted an elaborate masterpiece of procrastination, an impressive monument to my delusion, built from markdown files, Zapier triggers, and digital sticky notes that look pretty but accomplish jack shit.

Yeah, been there, done that, and got the overpriced subscription receipts to prove it.

And then, recently, I did something radical.

Something so outrageously simple, that productivity bros everywhere would choke on their Latte’s, I nuked every single darn it “productivity” app from my devices.

All I kept were the original gangsters, the pre-installed apps that come on my computer and phone: Apple Notes, Reminders, Safari, Pages, and that Safari reading list thingy for articles I’ll never actually get around to.

Basic as fuck.

They sit quietly on my dock, not flashy nor demanding my credit card every ten seconds, just existing, and patiently waiting for me to use them.

And here’s the thing I discovered (brace yourselves, nerds), my productivity absolutely skyrocketed.

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Now, I’m talking leaps so stupidly significant that it actually hurts my pride, that were forcing me to acknowledge just how many months – nay, years – I pissed away by trying to optimize my system instead of actually doing stuff.

My former system: How I research a new topic for an article – an intro to my personal knowledge management System | LinkedIn

Now, every day I churn out 5,000–10,000 words, keep my social media chaos to a minimum, pitch ideas, help people out, and read a ton for inspiration and for ze knowledge, and all-o-that without worrying about Obsidian plugins or tagging metadata until my eyeballs bleed.

Hard truth incoming! Productivity app optimization is a freaking distraction, and it is the ultimate mindfuck. It seduces you into thinking that you are “making progress”, when all the while you’re actually circling the drain in productivity purgatory. I found myself endlessly tweaking my workflows between apps in Zapier like a crackhead chasing that perfect high.

You know, deliberating half a day over picking Roam or Obsidian won’t give you a purpose in life, dude, it’ll just waste another afternoon you’ll never get back.

Ouch.

I can already hear the sarcastic “told you so” remark from @DreesMarc who’s pinnacle of tech is limited to a kugelschreiber and his tweakings are the disability settings in Windows.

The irony here is brutal.

These tools swear that they are here to save you time, but they are actually a sinister vortex of complexity. They lure us into constant maintenance by relentlessly having to tweak, and, worst of all, the dopamine-fueled delusion of having achieved something meaningful.

Lemme tell ya. Your “perfect setup” means nothing if all you’ve got to show for it is an empty checklist and chronic anxiety.

My new workflow is so laughably simple, that ol’ Marc-y-Marc would approve. An idea hits, boom, into Notes it goes, typed like an idiot without spellcheck. And when a task or a deadline is looming, I just chuck it in Reminders and forget it until it pings. Articles that I swear I’ll read later (but probably won’t), I move them to safari’s reading list graveyard. And anything longer than that. . . Pages.

That’s it.

No hacks, no shortcuts, no integrations. Like Marc, scribbling with a crayon on a napkin. Ugly, but effective as hell.

And the relief, the sweet, beautiful relief, is tangible.

Less stress, less chaos.

When you’ve got a million apps open, you are mentally getting pulled apart by conflicting demands. But now, everything’s in one place.

There’s nowhere to hide.

No clever excuses.

Just plain ol’ brutal simplicity. Just getting shit done.

Sure, if you’re running a multinational conglomerate, maybe this barebones shit won’t cut it. But heck, when you’re up that high, you’ll have hordes of assistants to do your bidding.

But for most of us mere mortals, freelancers, creatives, knowledge workers just trying to avoid losing our minds, this minimalist setup is-more-than-enough. We don’t need AI-powered dashboards counting how many Pomodoros we have wasted doomscrolling Twitter, we just need somewhere to dump our ideas, a place to track tasks, and enough willpower to actually do the damn work.

Everything else is bullshit.

And speaking of bullshit, productivity tools are expensive as f⋂ck. Five bucks here, twenty bucks there, fifty to a hundred for some dumbass “pro” subscription that you’ll never fully exploit. Have you ever seen my cc statements? Yeah, you guessed it. . . death by a thousand microtransactions.

Sticking to default apps spares my sanity, and it spares my freaking wallet too. Apple Notes is more than capable of recording my random brain farts. No monthly payments required.

Here’s the lil’ secret that nobody wants to tell you, but I hard to find out the hard way, productivity is all about mindset, not about the overpriced digital trinkets you surround yourself with. You can build the most elaborate Notion dashboard ever, but if you’re a lazy, and procrastinating f⋂ck, you’re still screwed. Meanwhile, the totally bald, blue and disciplined bastard who is armed only with a kugelschreiber and a Windows 7 machine can outperform your beautifully engineered productivity porn.

If your app-obsession has your productivity spiraling, take a page from my blunt-force trauma method. . .

Delete everything.

Burn your digital shrine to the ground.

Stop chasing trendy productivity bullshit, and ask yourself one damn question, “what is the simplest way to just get shit done”?

And then just fcuking do it.

Signing off from my new Windows 7 terminal.

Marco

Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?

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I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s worst PR nightmare.

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