Hey,

Are you feeling Tool-Paralysis?

You’re not alone if you’re struggling with analysis paralysis!

Right now, there’s a sea of choice when it comes to picking the right tools and systems to help you elevate your productivity, learning and business.

Today, I want to share the tools I personally use for productivity, learning and working with clients. 

And how these tools serve as part of a bigger system so I can win the day without burnout.

There’s even an unexpected tool I’ve added to the toolkit in 2025.

Get comfortable, this is a deep dive.

But first…

Are you stuck in Digital Tool-Paralysis?

Get unstuck and stop wasting time in tool-paralysis or tool-hopping.

My guide on how to pick your “perfect” tool might be just what you’ve been looking for (worksheet included).

Get your copy of the Tool Finder Guide today.

Common Mistakes People Make Building Their “Perfect” Toolkit

1. Spending hours trying find the “perfect” tool for managing your tasks, storing ideas, tracking your client projects etc. 

   Every tool has flaws.

   Aim for 80/20.

   Find tools that meet 80% of your needs and where the 20% of flaws you can live with so you stock chasing the “perfect too”

2. On the flip side, chasing shiny object syndrome and using tools without a clear purpose or problem it solves

   There is a real monetary, mental and time cost to constantly tool hopping.

   It feels like you’re being productive, but it’s simply productive procrastination

3. Not asking for help to speed up the process for adopting the tool in the right way into your life and business. 

   Every tool has a time-sucking learning curve (some more than others).

   It might feel productive and fun to DIY the learning.

   But it can end up wasting a lot of time that would have been better spent in your zone of genius—working with your clients to in the best way you know.

Digital Minimalism in Your Quest for Focus

Digital tools can even become a distraction rather than a help.

That's where Cal Newport’s digital minimalism comes in.

It has helped me tackle the problems above and pin point the purposeful tools to bring into my life and business.

Aligning your tools with how you want to spend your time and make progress on your goals is key to becoming productive without burnout, distraction and overwhelm.

Here’s what my toolkit looks like in 2025.

Tools for Productivity

1. Notion

This comes as no surprise.

The top tool in my toolkit is Notion.

I use my Notion workspace for managing life and business, creating and collaborating.

It’s the one tool that connects different areas of my life without the need to constantly tool-switch (which I found highly distracting when I was using a haphazard set of tools before Notion).

Here’s a short list of my use cases in Notion:

• Meal Planning.

• Travel Planning.

• Content creation.

• Knowledge Management.

• Points and miles "hacking" and tracking.

• Managing Notion Consulting Client projects.

• Task & project management (for life and business).

• Client Hub to track leads, current clients and client projects.

• Multi-scale planning and review cycles (Managing my daily plans all the way through to my yearly review).

There are truly endless ways you can use Notion as a consultant, coach or solopreneur.

And you don’t even need to pay for 99% of the features.

If you want to take Notion to the next level, it even has built-in features like AI, database automation and ability to create simple forms to gather data easily into a database.

It’s slowly but surely becoming more and more of an all-in-one tool.

2. Morgen

This is a calendar and time blocking app I’ve been using for a while now that integrates with Notion and Google Tasks.

You can effectively turn your Notion database of tasks into time-blocks on your calendar!

And you can see your scheduled calendar events from across multiple calendars all in the one tool.

This has made juggling my personal and business commitments easy, in in one place.

(If you’re looking for a free alternative for time blocking your Notion tasks onto a calendar, try out Notion Calendar).

3. Toggl

A time tracker.

Doing focused deep work without distraction is hard.

For the last 6 months, I’ve started to track my works sessions in Toggl.

I’ve found this ticking timer helpful in keeping me focused on the task at hand. Whether it’s doing deep work, or getting through admin tasks.

It’s the constant reminder I need that tells me once the time I gone, I can’t get it back.

Recently, I upgraded my Toggl experience by creating 2 simple reports in Toggl: A weekly and a monthly report that I look at during my weekly review and planning session on Sundays

This tell me how much time I’ve devoted to different areas of my work life.

In particular, I want to know my doing vs. learning time.

A 2025 goal for me is to skew my time more towards doing than learning. Using Toggl is helping me to objectively analyse how I’m going with this.

4. Gmail

I keep emails simple. I’ve always been a fan of Google’s native Gmail app.

But in the last few months, I’ve been testing out Notion’s new mail tool (currently in beta for Notion Ambassadors).

I’ve really been enjoying the Notion-esq experience for managing my emails. Notion Mail allows me to create custom views of my emails using the sort and filter function (similar to Notion database).

I’m really excited to see how Notion continues to improve Notion Mail.

5. Insight Timer

This is my favourite free meditation app.

I’ve been practicing the art of daily meditation on and off for the past decade.

When I’ve been consistent with my 10 minutes of daily meditation, I experience more mental clarity, focus and calm in my daily life.

So this is an essential tool in my toolkit for productivity without burnout.

This 10 minute meditation ritual is part of my work Shut Down Routine to unwind from my working hours, and prepare my mind for enter family time.

To help me stay on track with my habit goal of doing a meditation session 5 out of 7 days a week in 2025, I track this in Notion.

During my weekly Sunday planning and review ritual, I review my meditation (and other habit metrics) to see how I’m progressing.

Using Notion to help you stay accountable to your habits is a powerful way to use Notion!

(I’m starting to offer private coaching to readers who want to start using Notion for productivity and gaining peace of mind—Just reply and I’m happy to give you some details on how we can get started.)

6. Save to Notion

My favourite (and free) webclipper tool that allows you to quickly and easily save information you find on the web into specific Notion databases.

You can use it to save articles and webpages into Notion.

But here’s an unconventional example of how I’ve use this tool to capture the post feed and profiles of LinkedIn users I want to follow into Notion to reduce distraction and save time when using LinkedIn.

Tools for Learning

1. Readwise

Subscribing to Readwise has been game-changing for my Personal Knowledge Management and learning.

It’s a tool for collecting highlights and annotations from different sources (e.g. articles, library books, youtube videos, podcast episodes), which can then be exported to other tools like Notion.

It’s made curating content and capturing useful notes into my Knowledge Hub in Notion seamless.

Making content creation, learning new skills and connecting ideas a breeze.

2. Readwise Reader

A read it later app created by Readwise.

I use Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds, blogs and newsletters.

The Reader app along with my Knowledge hub in Notion serves as my library of learning.

Here are the two ways I use Readwise Reader:

1. Actively pull out resources to consume when I’m in knowledge or skill building mode for a particular topic.

2. Read through my curated feed of blogs and newsletters during my dedicated 30 minute news reading window in the morning.

3. GoodReads

A tool to track what I’m reading, book recommendations and it serves as an archive of books I’ve read.

To be honest, it’s a bit of an archaic and unaesthetic tool, but it gets the job done.

This is where the 80/20 rule for Tool-Picking comes into play.

I’ve thought of moving this to another tool many times or figuring out how to link it to my Notion.

But it’s not really a productive use of time.

I do like that it has a huge user base, so the book reviews and star ratings are very handy to see if a book is worth picking up.

(If you have any book tracking tools you like using, please let me know!)

4. Libby

It’s the library app that lets you borrow and enjoy millions of eBooks and Audiobooks for free (with a library card).

You can even store and manage multiple “library cards” onto the one app.

Borrowing books from the library is the $0 hack that helped me read 47 books in 2024.

How?

By leveraging the auto-return deadline and making sure I always have a book in my pocket no matter where I am in the world.

Book highlights and annotations made in the Libby reading app are automatically sent to Readwise… which is then sent to Notion.

(see this is why I think Readwise is such a powerful tool!)

5. Google Play Books / Kindle

I’m rather ambivalent to where I purchase my ebooks. I’ve got ebooks in both Google’s Play Books app and Amazon’s Kindle app.

And if you didn’t know you can even share the books you’ve bought in a “family group” in both apps.

Again, book highlights and annotations are automatically sent to Readwise and then Notion.

Tools for Business

In addition to the Productivity and Learning tools above that are also used for business to varying degrees, these are business specific digital tools that I use to run my solo business.

1. Beehiiv

Right now I’m publishing my newsletters through Beehiiv, but have been toying with the idea of changing over to Kit so that my newsletter and the landing pages for my free resources are all in one spot.

There’s some resistance to this.

The effort it would take to move my 50+ archive of newsletters over to Kit seems like a poor use of time.

I could just transition over to Kit and link to previous posts in Beehiiv. Doesn’t feel like an elegant solution.

(If you’ve done something similar, reply the email, would love to know about your experience)

2. Kit

Easy to use tool to create landing pages for my free resources like my 5-Day Clutter Clarity in Notion email course and my ultimate guide to creating your own Writing System in Notion.

3. X and LinkedIn

Social media tools can be tools for distraction.

Or it can be a tool for learning, growth, connection and serendipity.

I aim to use these tools to:

• Learn from thought leaders.

• Find people who I can help.

• Get to know interesting peers.

I would be lying if I say I don’t fall down the rabbit hole of social media.

But having intentional systems like this in Notion has dramatically reduced the time I’ve wasted on social media.

4. Cal

A simple and powerful calendar booking and scheduling tool.

Completely free.

I use it to create different booking forms and link it to Zoom and Google Calendar.

There are a ton of customisations you can build into your form to make the scheduling process easy for the client and yourself.

I’ve even connected Cal to Notion using Relay, a third party automation tool, to automatically create a new contact in my Notion CRM when someone schedules a call.

5. Relay

A simple automation app and connector between apps.

I’m a fan of keeping systems simple and reducing the tools I use.

But sometimes, an automation helper tools just streamlines and saves you so much time that it’s a no-brainer to use.

What I love about Relay is that it’s simple to use and build automation systems and workflows that talk to each other.

As long as you understand processes and workflows, you don’t need to know complex coding to get automation workflows set up in Relay.

6. Zoom

Video conferencing tool that’s connected to Cal scheduling tool.

7. Fathom AI

AI notetaker and recording tool that’s connected to Zoom so it automatically transcribes and summarises calls with clients and peers.

8. Senja / Testimonial . io

I’ve tried a few testimonial tools like Senja and testimonial.io.

They all do a good job, but if I had to pick, I prefer Senja for being more user friendly.

9. Notion Forms / Tally

Notion launched their own forms tool in 2024, making it super easy to:

• Turn existing databases into a form to capture information directly into the database.

• Create new forms in Notion by creating a new database.

Notion form makes it easy to do surveys, gather data or input data.

The downside is that it’s still a new feature in Notion, so that are limited features to create more complex surveys.

If you want a more powerful (and free) form tool, Tally is my go-to.

You can create unlimited forms for free, export data directly into a Notion database and build forms with conditional logic very easily and simply.

10. Lemon Squeezy

A digital store front.

I don’t sell a lot of products or services, but what I do sell I list it on Lemon Squeezy because they’ve made listing your offers clean, simple and easy.

The Surprise Addition to the Toolkit in 2025

4 years ago, I stumbled upon the Zettelkasten method for Personal Knowledge Management.

I’ve tried implementing it on my own in Notion a couple of times.

But nothing ever stuck.

So when my good friend King, Zettelkasten guru, kicked off another series of Super Zettel workshops in January this year, I joined in.

That’s led me to using a new tool that I never thought I would…

Obsidian.

The workshops has now ended. I’ve gotten greater appreciation of how the Zettelkasten system really works. I can see how a bottom up tool like Obsidian is primed for Zettelkasten (unlike Notion).

Readwise has also made it effortless to send my highlights and notes to both Notion and Obsidian.

So no extra work on my part!

I might be a Notion ambassador and consultant…

But I’m first a believer in using the right tools for the right job. And Notion is not the right tool for everything (as much as people might make it out to be).

I’m excited to test out the Zettelkaten method for exploration, while using Notion as my main knowledge bank for everything.

4 Simplified Steps for When Tool-Finding

Still feeling stuck in digital tool paralysis?

Try these 4 steps to simplify the tool-finding process:

1. Spot your (recurring) problem

2. Figure out your “thinking” type to find a tool that matches it

3. Decide your “must have” features for a tool

4. Master the one tool

Or check out my free Tool-Finder Guide (Worksheet include), especially useful if you’re trying to find the right tool for managing your life and business.

That’s it for today!

Do you have a favourite tool you use in your life or business? — hit reply, I would love to hear about it

See you next week,

Janice CK

(p.s. I’m starting to offer private coaching to readers who want to start using Notion for productivity, organisation and gaining peace of mind—Just reply and I’m happy to give you some details on how we can get started.)

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