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🧰 My New Productivity Stack for 2026
Published 4 days 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.
This week: productivity tools to regain your focus & time.
Productivity is tricky. With so many platforms, tasks, and side hustles to juggle, it can feel like you’re constantly busy but not actually moving forward.
It doesn’t help that the internet is designed to distract us. I’ll easily open a browser to look up one specific thing, and suddenly it’s three hours later, and I’m deep in a YouTube rabbit hole about AI automation.
This week, I’m sharing the tools I’m using to organize my brain, track my time, and actually block out the noise.
Plus: a robust tool to test LLMs (even if you are or aren’t a developer), a life-saving data recovery hack, and an AI culinary disaster.
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I’ve tried several note-taking apps in the last few years, but Tana is different. It’s less of a digital notebook and more of a “personal assistant” for your life and work. A bit like combining Notion and Trello and adding AI to bind it all together.
The magic lies in “supertags.” You can tag a bullet point as #task, #book, or #meeting, and Tana instantly structures that data, and lets you organize your notes, ideas, and processes the way you want.
I’ve been using the free plan for two weeks, and here is how I’m using it:
Daily Log: Capturing fleeting thoughts and tasks quickly.
Project Management: Tracking the moving parts of my new side projects.
Knowledge Base: Storing articles, videos, and other pieces of information I want to revisit at some point.
As mentioned, it has an integrated AI assistant. You can talk (or write) to it and describe what you need (e.g., planning a meeting). Then Tana will help by creating a summary of what you need, talking points for the call, and even an action plan – all of which you can adapt to your specific workflow.
It features a desktop and mobile app, though the browser version is plenty powerful on its own. For the type-A personalities who love structure, this is a dream.
🛠️ Alternative to: Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research
Recently, I thought about starting to offer AI Optimization services to clients, and I realized I would need to know exactly how much time I was spending per project to invoice them properly.
Clockify is the time tracking app I settled on. It’s intuitive, clean, and gets out of the way so you can work.
What stands out is the reporting breakdown. I can see exactly how many hours are billable versus non-billable, and the dashboard gives me a visual overview of where my week went – perfect for optimizing bottlenecks.
You can download a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and even Linux. Install their mobile app for Android and iOS, or use their Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browser extension.
The free plan is incredibly generous, but the paid tiers are affordable if you need more robust auditing features (e.g., time audit, invoicing, or QuickBooks integration).
Remember how I mentioned getting lost in YouTube holes? StayFocusd is the productivity bouncer that kicks you out of certain sites. It’s a browser extension that increases your productivity by limiting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.
You set a daily allowance for your "block list." Once you use up that time, those sites are inaccessible for the rest of the day – of course, you can bypass this, but the idea is that you don’t.
It’s highly configurable, but the most extreme feature is the "Nuclear Option". When you stick this on, it blocks sites immediately, and there is no way to cancel it (not even by restarting the browser). It forces you to get back to work.
If you struggle with self-control when checking news sites or socials on your computer, you need this installed.
Technically, this is a tool for developers, but even for non-coders, OpenRouter is a goldmine. It aggregates practically every major AI model (LLM) into one interface – GPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc.
I use it as a research tool to see what models people are actually using for specific use cases. For example, I can quickly see that a specific model (like GPT-5.2 or Claude 4.5 Sonnet) is ranking highest for SEO tasks or creative writing. This saves me hours of testing.
It’s also my default way to run my AI automations. I can change the "brain" of my chatbots or workflows in 2 or 3 clicks without setting up new accounts with OpenAI or Anthropic directly.
Best of all, you can chat with the models right on their site to evaluate them side-by-side. It’s perfect for seeing which one you prefer before committing.
This week, my colleague Paula had a moment of pure panic. She was working in our joint Google Sheet, tried to copy a comment, and accidentally deleted a couple of cells.
She couldn’t Ctrl+Z her way back. The cells were just… gone. You know s*** happens.
If this happens to you in Google Sheets (or Docs), don’t panic. You don’t need to rebuild everything from memory, and you definitely don’t need to tell your boss you messed up the quarterly expense finance sheet. You can travel back in time.
How to recover lost work in Drive:
Open your file (Sheet or Doc).
Click on File > Version history > See version history.
On the right sidebar, you will see timestamps. Click through them to see exactly what the document looked like at 10:00 AM, 9:00 AM, or even last month.
Once you find the clean version, click Restore this version.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to overwrite the current file, you can make a copy of the old version and manually copy-paste the missing data back in.
It turned a potential crisis into a 30-second fix.
Also, Google Drive does keep version history for both Google files (Docs, Sheets, Slides) and many non-Google files (like images, PDFs, Office docs, etc.) via the Manage versions option.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
We trust technology to be smart, but sometimes it lacks… taste buds.
CNN recently reported how health reporter Brenda Goodman spent five hours trying to make “chocolate acorns” from what looked like a normal Pinterest recipe, only to discover it likely came from a fake, AI-generated food blog. The result: misshapen, chocolate‑dunked Nutter Butter cookies that looked nothing like the photo and left an experienced baker completely stumped.
The twist is that the recipe, and even the supposed pastry chef “Anna Kelly” behind it, appear to be AI inventions, part of a wave of spammy food sites churning out computer‑generated recipes and images for ad revenue.
The report points out that these AI recipe blogs are great at mimicking the structure and style of real recipes, but they do not actually understand baking physics, like how a flat Nutter Butter is never going to magically become a rounded acorn.
The takeaway: AI can be a sous-chef for brainstorming ideas or cleaning up your writing, but for anything that depends on real‑world chemistry (like tempering chocolate or proofing dough), you still want a human‑tested recipe.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll look at how to get leads for your business – yes, no PowerPoint.
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