As soon as I hit “publish” on this draft, it is immediately out of date as my setup evolves. The main point I want you to take away from this is the nuance between productivity and efficiency:
| Productivity (noun) | Efficiency (noun) |
|---|---|
| Quantity of output per unit, e.g. money or time | Maximising output by doing things the best possible way |
My productivity, or rather efficiency system, aims to optimize resources such as time, money, physical energy, and mental energy (stress). One stipulation that changed in June 2024 is that it must adhere to my Threat Model of privacy and security.
The Computermen
“Most of the chance improvements in human motions that eliminate unnecessary movement and reduce fatigue have been hit upon […] by men who were lazy—so lazy that every needless step counted.”
— Frank B. Gilbreth, 1920
Prior to June 2024, I was heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, with an Apple Watch, iPhone, Mac Studio, and MacBook. The justification was my admiration for Silicon Valley’s underdogs and my laziness when it came to sensible defaults. I was taught that Apple products “just work” out of the box.
Since Apple became more and more evil and my iOS 16.3 Dopamine Jailbreak stopped working, I sold everything and put on my Linux hat. Now, I have a Framework Laptop 13 AMD Edition running EndeavourOS, a Google Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS and a cheap-ass Fossil watch.
🌐 The Browser: LibreWolf
Why not Chrome/Edge/Vivaldi/Opera/Arc/Brave? Because they use Chromium, which means mandatory Manifest V3, which means no uBlock Origin. That’s about the only reason. I was very happy with the Arc browser until Google decided to screw over most browser users.
Firefox is a good alternative with some tweaks I’ll list below. LibreWolf, like ArkenFox and Mullvad is just a de-Mozzillafied fork of Firefox. That means, no telemetry, tracking, or suggestions out of the box. Another browser that’s caught my attention is the Zen Browser, but I’ll wait for it to enter beta before I test it. So far, I’m able to achieve a similar looking UX to the Arc and Zen browser by combining Firefox-UI-Fix and Sidebery.
I use StartPage and Perplexity as my search engines. For SearXNG users, I’m not much of a self-hosted guy, as I prefer to spend my time elsewhere.
Essential Extensions
| Extension Name | Use Case |
|---|---|
| uBlock Origin | Blocks trackers and ads |
| Bypass Paywalls Clean | Self-explanatory |
| CanvasBlocker | Blocks HTML Canvas fingerprinting |
| ClearURLs | Cleans tracking/search/attribution URL parameters |
| I still don’t care about cookies | Blocks cookie popups |
| LibRedirect | Redirects YouTube and Reddit to FreeTube and Redlib |
| Bitwarden | Password Manager |
⌨️ Text Editor: Zed w/ LunarVim Configuration
Steve Simkins convinced me to leave LunarVim for Zed. I was already looking at NVChad as an alternative since the LunarVim project was abandoned. However, I’m no longer a fan of spending countless hours trying to get my editor to work. Zed’s “batteries included” approach and the built-in Vim Mode are appealing to me.
I have not yet completely migrated from LunarVim, but I am in the process of doing so. One thing I still need to bind to a shortcut is my LazyGit popup. I can’t remember the last time I did a normal git operation; that’s how good LazyGit is.
In my terminal, Kitty, I browse folders with Zoxide and Yazi, my primary file explorer. Outside of these few use cases, I only use the terminal to install packages with Pacseek.
📂 File Management
I back up my system configuration with Timeshift and don’t keep any documents locally. All important documents are stored in Filen (because I’m a sucker for Mega alternatives). All spreadsheets are stored in Teable because it’s the same as Airtable except it has a dark mode. Also, VLOOKUP in Excel or Google Sheets isn’t as good as joins in SQLite.
✅ Task Management
When I was on Mac. I was a religious Things 3 user. However, since moving to Linux, I’ve reluctantly adopted Todoist as the cheapest, highest quality alternative. It has an ugly electron app, but it makes up for it in the mobile app.
For events, I still use Google Calendar because it’s easier to invite users and look up locations than Posteo’s calendar. However, the frontend sucks, so I use Notion Calendar on both web and mobile.
I also don’t like Gmail, so I use Mailspring, which is decent. Why not Proton Mail or Proton Calendar? Because it’s too expensive and it doesn’t support IMAP/SMTP yet.
The Disillusioned iPhone User
As mentioned earlier, I use a Google Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS. The only tradeoff, which is quite minimal, is the lack of tap-to-pay support. Google Wallet still works, but not for NFC-enabled cards.
It would be accurate to say that my phone contributes to my system’s efficiency by a small margin. This is only shown with KDE connect. Otherwise, I try to avoid using my phone whenever possible.