Tools That I Can't Be Without

Tools I can't work without

Everyone wants to talk about the exciting stuff, new plugins, the latest feature drop, whatever AI announcement dropped this week. Nobody talks about the boring version of the same tools, the ones you open on autopilot and forget are doing any work at all.

Here are a few:

A paper notebook
Not an app. Not a digital sketchbook. A physical notebook I write in with an actual pen. Something about the friction of paper forces me to think before I commit to an idea, instead of endlessly shuffling shapes around a canvas.

Half my best UX solutions started as a messy diagram in the corner of a page, not a Figma frame.

Version history
Nobody posts about version history. It's not a tool you show off in a portfolio. But knowing I can always go back means I can push further in the moment, try the weird layout, break the grid, see what happens.

Good work needs room to fail quietly before it succeeds loudly. Version history is what makes that room safe.

Notion
Every project, every client, every UX audit tier, every guinea pig-themed productivity system I've built to trick myself into working, all of it lives in one place. Not glamorous. Just the thing that means nothing important is one browser tab I forgot to bookmark.

If Notion went down for a week I'd lose more than a to-do list. I'd lose the actual shape of how the studio runs. Notion is for organising the mess before it becomes a project.

Some more quick mentions: Figma for everything spatial. Procreate when I need to think with my hands. ChatGPT for pressure-testing an idea before it's ready to show anyone. Claude for turning a jumbled brain dump into an actual sentence, this post included. iLovePDF for the unglamorous, constant job of merging, compressing, and converting files that client work generates by the dozen.

These aren't exciting answers, but they're honest ones. I've tried dozens of apps over the years. I keep coming back to these because they stay out of the way.