PILLAR
AI Tools For Focus
I don’t believe the answer to feeling overwhelmed is another app. I tried that for years — installing, abandoning, installing again — and all it gave me was a graveyard of logins I never used.
So this section isn’t a list of every AI tool that exists. It’s the smaller, more honest version: the ones I actually open, the ones I’ve cut, and the way I think about whether a tool earns its place at all.
I only write about tools I’ve used myself — and when I haven’t used something long enough to have a real opinion, I’ll tell you that plainly. Some of the tools here I earn a commission on; many I don’t (the two I use most, I don’t earn a cent from). It never changes what I’d tell a friend.
Here’s what I’ve been writing about:
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I Kept Forgetting Everything I Watched. A Video Summarizer Fixed the Wrong Thing First.
A while back I caught myself doing something that should have bothered me more than it did. I’d spent the better part of an evening — maybe two hours — working through a series of talks I’d been meaning to watch. Good ones. The kind I’d deliberately saved. And the next morning, when a colleague…
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I Tried a Dozen AI Tools. My Real Stack Is Embarrassingly Small.
What I actually open every day — and the one I’m probably about to cut. Last week I pasted a news article about a company’s founder into Claude and asked it to break down the business. A few minutes later I had the whole thing laid out in front of me: the flagship product, how…
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I Stopped Trying to Be Productive. Here’s What Actually Changed.
Last year I spent six months paying for an app I wasn’t using. It was a social media scheduling tool — $9.50 a month. Not a lot on its own. But six months of not using something you’re still paying for has a way of adding up, and not just financially. I set it up…
Want the short version?
See the three things I’m actually using right now — one for thinking, one for reading, one for the space I work in.