Get one weekly email with the best picks for smarter work. We test countless tools so you don’t have to.
Share
🧰 Finally Organize Your Ideas & Notes Efficiently
Published about 2 months ago • 5 min read
🧰 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.
If your brain feels like a browser with way too many tabs open, I have something for you.
This week, I'm sharing three tools I've been testing to bring some sanity back to my digital life and build a "second brain."
Here's my problem (maybe you can relate): I have notes scattered across Drive, ChatGPT folders, Chrome bookmarks, internal wikis… plus all the YouTube videos, podcast episodes, and articles I save on my phone.
Finding anything feels like archaeology.
Each tool I'll show you takes a different approach to solving this chaos. Let's dive in.
Know someone who’d love this newsletter? 5,000+ readers already do (thanks 🙌). Share it with friends & colleagues so they can join too Join for free here.
OUR SPONSOR
HostPapa’s Optimized WordPress Hosting makes it easy to grow your website without the technical stress. Your WordPress site comes pre-installed and ready to use out the gate. With 24/7 access to our expert PapaSquad support team, you’ll always have help when you need it, so you can stay focused on building your business. Plus, we’ll migrate your site for free and back everything with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Some knowledge management apps feel intimidating; I get it. Instead, you might want to try mymind, “the extension for your mind,” which is designed for capturing ideas with almost zero friction. It does offer fewer advanced features than tools like Obsidian or Tana, though.
It’s an AI-powered tool where you can toss in anything: text snippets, images, articles, product links and so on, and its AI automatically categorizes everything for you. It recognizes text in images, identifies brands, and understands context. Instead of you organizing your notes, Mymind does it for you, allowing you to find things later with a natural language search.
I love its minimalist, visual‑first design, and it’s incredibly easy to use. While, like any AI‑powered tool, it can be hit‑or‑miss at times, it’s generally an excellent way to keep your knowledge organized in one place.
🛠️ Alternative to: Raindrop.io, Apple Notes, Evernote
What if an AI could become an expert on your own information? That’s the promise of NotebookLM, a free tool from Google.
Instead of searching the entire internet, NotebookLM grounds its AI in the sources you provide, like PDFs, Google Docs, text files, or website and YouTube URLs. You upload your research, and it becomes a private, personalized AI assistant that can summarize documents, answer complex questions, generate outlines, and even create a study guide or a podcast script from your notes.
Because it only uses your sources, the answers are accurate and come with citations, so you always know where the information came from. It’s less of a general note-taker and more of a powerful research assistant for making sense of dense material.
I love the Voice Overview feature: it turns my sources into a personalized AI podcast. I can even ask the “hosts” follow‑up questions to clarify points or steer the conversation in a new direction. I use it all the time to learn about new AI tools while hiking with my dog.
🛠️ Alternative to: ChatGPT (with custom GPTs), Claude, Perplexity
If you're looking for a tool that can connect all your thoughts, Obsidian is a powerful contender. It’s like a personal wiki for your brain.
Its killer feature is the graph view, which visually maps the connections between your notes, helping you discover relationships you might have missed. You can link notes, ideas, and sources together, creating a web of knowledge. It’s incredibly flexible, and you can also add plugins to enhance its functionality – from calendars, to note importers from databases like Airtable.
I've wanted to test Obsidian for a while now. While I love the concept of a totally private, customizable knowledge base, the learning curve is steep. Finding the right workflow can be a project in itself.
Want to dive deep into AI image and video generation? Then you have to check out ComfyUI – if you are a bit geeky.
This isn’t your typical point-and-click AI tool. It’s a free, open-source project that gives you a node-based interface to build completely custom workflows – think n8n to create videos. This gives you total control over the entire creative process, something you just can't get with simpler tools.
While ComfyUI itself is free, you need a powerful computer with a good graphics card to run video generation models. So many users opt for cloud versions or pay for API calls to run complex models like Google’s Veo or Stable Diffusion.
It's definitely a nerd tool 🤓, but if you're serious about creating unique AI art or video and want to be on the cutting edge of what's possible, ComfyUI is the place to be.
💰 Comfy Cloud starts at $20 a month | Free and open-source version
⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
This week’s hack is about matching your work to your natural energy peaks. Instead of forcing yourself to focus when you feel drained, you can align your most important tasks with the time of day you feel sharpest.
I used to wake up crazy early (I still do), sometimes around 5 am, and go out with my dog, Lluna, for a run. But I realized I was wasting my best mental energy. After a coffee, my head is clear and sharpish at that time.
So I experimented. I now use that 5 am slot for deep work – like writing this newsletter. Then, around 8:30 or 9 am, when my creative energy starts to dip, I take a break, and we go for our run.
Try tracking your energy levels for a week to find your own peak window. You could do this:
For one week, briefly rate your energy (1–5) every few hours throughout the day.
At the end of the week, review your notes and highlight the times when your energy was consistently highest.
Block those high-energy windows and dedicate them to deep, demanding work.
List your lighter, admin-style tasks and move them into your usual low-energy periods.
Run this setup for another week and tweak your schedule.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Today a bit of a sensitive topic 🙈
In a jaw-dropping data breach, hackers reportedly accessed some 200 million records from Pornhub’s premium users. The data included highly sensitive information: viewing history, search queries, and even their emails.
According to a report in The Guardian, the hackers used the trove of data, which dated back a few years, to extort the site, demanding a Bitcoin ransom to prevent them from dumping it all online.
Pornhub stated that the information came from an old partner’s analytics system and that crucial data like passwords and financial details were not exposed.
I guess using protection is important both online and offline – excuse the bad joke.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll explore the best tools for working remotely and collaborating with your team, no matter where they are.
🧰 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: useful AI tools you probably didn’t know existed. Yes, we all know how helpful tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or even our favorite AI image generators are. But some smaller, lesser-known AI apps are the real deal for productivity. I just love some of the clever ideas behind them. This week, I’m sharing...
🧰 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: learning tools, both AI and human-powered. Learning has always been a hobby of mine, even if it takes up a lot of time. I often find myself reading books on topics I’ll probably never really have a practical use for – at the moment I am reading 'Why Nations Fail' by Daron Acemoglu and James A, and I am...
🧰 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: AI video tools that are turning text into cinematic-quality footage. Video is king, but creating it is time-consuming and expensive. Professional-looking videos used to require a whole team, fancy equipment, and hours of editing. Now, AI is changing the game, allowing creators to generate stunning videos...