🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: a calm productivity setup for busy online doers.

For me, productivity tools are only interesting when they reduce noise. Not when they add another dashboard, another inbox, or another place where tasks go to feel important, only to be quietly ignored.

So today's stack is about moving faster without turning your day into a software circus.

Plus: a trend‑spotting tool, quicker publishing from Canva, and a peek at the SaaS future – spoiler: some business models won’t make the cut.

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Raycast

Keyboard productivity

If your workday starts with five apps, three browser tabs, and a small sigh, Raycast is worth a look. It turns your keyboard into a fast command center for opening apps, searching files, checking clipboard history, managing windows, running snippets, and automating everyday tasks - all without breaking your flow.

Raycast really shines if you prefer working from your keyboard. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a good shortcut? With AI features, extensions, notes, and cloud sync, it has plenty of room to grow. And it’s no longer just for Apple users, thanks to a new Windows beta.

I find myself using Raycast constantly: for quick calculations, tracking flights, picking colors, and even grabbing screenshots. It quietly replaces a bunch of tiny tools and browser tabs with one fast command center on your keyboard.

🛠️ Alternative to: Alfred, Spotlight, LaunchBar
👉 Visit: raycast.com
💰 From $8/month | Free plan available

Gumloop

AI automation

Gumloop is for the repetitive work that sits awkwardly between "I should automate this" and "I do not want to build a whole internal tool." It lets you create AI agents and workflows visually, connecting apps, models, documents, and repeatable steps without having to start from code.

Gumloop isn’t just another chatbot wrapper; it turns messy, repetitive tasks into reusable, AI‑powered systems. It feels simpler and more visual than n8n, though n8n still wins on power and integrations.

You can also build lightweight agents instead of traditional workflows, similar in spirit to tools like Codex, Claude Code, or OpenClaw, but in a less intimidating, easier‑to‑use (and slightly more limited) package.

🛠️ Alternative to: Zapier, Hermes Agent, n8n
👉 Visit: gumloop.com
💰 From $37/month | Free plan available

Sunsama

Task and calendar planning

Some productivity apps make you feel productive because there are 47 views to organize. Sunsama takes the opposite approach: it tries to make your day feel calmer by combining tasks, calendars, and planning into a guided daily routine.

You can pull in work from tools like Asana, Trello, Jira, GitHub, Gmail, Outlook, Notion, and Google Calendar, then decide what realistically fits into the day. The appeal is less about "maximum output" and more about ending the day with fewer loose ends. That can be especially useful when client work, content, and admin all compete for the same calendar.

The obvious catch is that Sunsama works best if you actually enjoy a daily planning ritual. There is no forever-free plan, so it has to earn its place.

🛠️ Alternative to: Trello, Akiflow, Motion
👉 Visit: sunsama.com
💰 From $17/month | No free plan available

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is not a daily planner, but it fits the "work smarter" theme nicely. Instead of asking what is already popular, it helps you spot topics, products, startups, and markets that are starting to grow before they are completely obvious.

The tool tracks a huge trend database and organizes ideas by category, growth curve, and timing. That makes it useful for content planning, SEO ideas, startup research, product inspiration, and those "is this niche actually moving?" moments.

It is not magic, of course. A rising chart does not mean you should build a business around it tomorrow. You still need judgment, search-intent checks, and a feel for whether the trend matches your audience. And at a starting price of $39 a month, it’s not the cheapest.

🛠️ Alternative to: Google Trends, Glimpse, Semrush Trends
👉 Visit: explodingtopics.com
💰 From $39/month | Free tools and trial available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

Exporting, downloading, renaming, and re-uploading final assets is one of those tiny workflows that feels harmless until you do it 200 times.

So this week's hack is simple: publish directly from Canva when the final destination is already supported.

Canva's February 2026 update added new Publish apps, including LinkedIn, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Mailchimp, and Simplebooklet. That means you can design, preview, and send more assets from the same place (inside Canva) instead of doing the classic download-folder-reupload dance.

Good uses:

Social graphics that are ready for LinkedIn
Newsletter visuals going into Mailchimp
Campaign assets handled through Hootsuite or Sprout Social
Simple PDF-style content you want to turn into a Simplebooklet

Still check crops, links, and platform-specific copy before publishing. But for repeat assets, this can remove a surprisingly annoying bit of admin.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

The weird future of productivity might not be "which SaaS app has the best dashboard?"

It might be: Does anyone need the dashboard at all?

Gartner says up to $234B in enterprise application software spend could be exposed to "agentic arbitrage" by 2030. In plain English: if AI agents can complete work across multiple systems, companies may need fewer people clicking around software interfaces and fewer seats in traditional tools.

For creators and small teams, the lesson is simple: the best setup may not be the one with the most apps, but the one where the boring work gets done with the fewest clicks. If AI agents can move between tools for us, the real advantage will be in designing smoother workflows, not collecting more dashboards.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll look at ways to document your business knowledge.

Cheers,

Josep

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